Purified (PS Vita)

 

 This game apparently came out a while ago, though I only learned of it last week (and, to be fair, it does still call itself Ver 0.9, so I guess it's still not totally complete). Most PS Vita homebrew so far has been either ports of PC and Android games, or various utilities, with a few fairly small-scale games here and there, too. I don't want to diminish any of those things, they all contribute to making the Vita a fun console to own. But Purified has really blown me away. This could easily have been a full commercial release!

 

It's a third person shooter, with a very turn-of-the-century edgy mallgoth look to it, in which you play as a beefy space-catholic cyborg tasked with killing the endless hordes of demonic cyborgs and their possessed victims that are beseiging the last human city. This war takes the form of three survival skirmish stages, which can be played in any order. You pick one, and you fight against increasingly difficult waves of enemies and sometimes bosses. They aren't endless, as one of the stats tracked is how many times you've won each stage (though my total for all three is still currently zero), and I suspect there might be a secret fourth stage, based on some of the in-game text?

 

Which brings me onto the subject of what an amazingly complete package this game is! As well as the game's three main stages, there's also an optional tutorial stage, which is its own complete map with unique models and textures and stuff. There's a sound test, which lets you listen to the game's soundtrack (obviously), while looking at a rotating 3D model of a soundtrack CD case. There's even an ingame encyclopedia, with pictures and lore for every character, location, weapon, item, and concept in the game! And like you can tell from the screenshots, this looks like an actual game put out by a big company (maybe a game that was put out twenty-five years ago, but a big company game nonetheless). 

 

Is the game actually good, though? Yes! It didn't click with me at first, and a few aspects felt a little clunky, like how you can't just shoot, you have to hole L to aim, then press R to shoot, and you have to press a seperate reload button to reload, rather than the fire button doing it when you're empty. But after a few plays, the game's vision really became clear: you're this big heavy man-monster, you have to consider every action because the actions are weighty. This weight, of course, makes the actions all the more satisfying, and there's some great smaller design decisions that have been made that play into that. For example, the first few enemies in a stage will typically be these skinless people who are much shorter than you and not much threat at all, and those few seconds you get to spend casually walking around, thoughtlessly slicing them up with your melee attack are a very fun warm for what's to come.

 

I definitely recommend this game, I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I think it'll remain a mainstay on my Vita for a long time to come. An interesting thing about its distribution is that while you can get it for free from VitaDB, you can also pay what you want on itch, which I think makes it the only PS Vita game you can digitally buy in 2025! The only really negative thing I have to say about it is that one time I had to exit a stage via the pause menu because something went wrong, and no enemies were spawning!

Kitchen Panic (Game Boy)

 I'm going to start by telling you upfront the most interesting thing about Kitchen Panic. Partially because I don't want to forget about it, and partially because it's something that you could easily miss, being a very skippable intro in a Game Boy game. The plot of this game, as I've interpreted from the imagery in the intro, is that a kid prays to god to ask for help in cleaning his mum's kitchen, and god answers his prayers by shrinking him down and making him sometimes have magic powers. God also turns up to dish out items before each bossfight, too, in case you had any question regarding the almighty's commitment to insecticide.

 

So the form the game takes is something close to a Bubble Bobble-style platformer in which the aim of each stage is to kill all of the enemies and get out. It's got a few minor idiosyncracies, though. The stages do scroll after the first one, for a start, though they're never more than a couple of screens big, and still feel like small, enclosed areas. Furthermore, the stage doesn't automatically end when the enemies are all dead. In fact, it's not possible to kill all the enemies, they keep spawning indefinitely. Instead, you've got a kill quota on each stage, and the exit appears once you've met the quota. Maybe the real position of this game isn't "kitchens should be insect-free", but "kitchens are a complex eco system, and the number of insects in a kitchen needs to be carefully managed through regular culls"? I have to say, I prefer the first approach.

 

There's no skill-based scoring system centred around killing multiple enemies at a time like you usually see, either. Instead, there is a scoring system, but it unfortunately relies heavily upon randomness. Sometimes, when an enemy dies, it leaves behind a block, that might bear the image of a sun, a moon, or a star. You can kick these blocks around, and they'll kill any enemies that they hit while in motion (which is satisfying, admittedly), and if three of them touch, they'll disappear and you'll get a lot more points than you do for just killing enemies. You get even more points if all three disappearing blocks are the same. This also represents the game's main power-up system, as I noticed that upon getting a trio of sun blocks together, I was also bestowed with temporary invincibility. Unfortunately, this is the only matching set I've managed to make, since, as previously mentioned: the appearance of blocks is completely random. (And since the amount of points from blocks is so much higher than from anything else, that means that playing Kitchen Panic for score is a fool's errand.)

 

Kitchen Panic is an incredibly okay game. It's obviously got some problems, and it's never particularly exciting, but it's not like it's painful to play, and I have kept going back to it now and then since finding it, relatively dread-free, compared to some of the poorer games I've had to force myself to play for critical purposes. I'd also like to mention how nice it looks. The main character doesn't have much to him, but the background elements and enemies are all really well-drawn and more detailed than you might expect. I don't really recommend going out of your way to play it, but should you find the cartridge in a bargain bin somewhere, you probably won't regret paying a couple of pounds for it.

Code Name S.T.E.A.M (3DS)

 It seems slightly incongruous for there to be a first party Nintendo game here, but it's one that doesn't even seem like it's been forgotten in the decade since its release, but rather no-one took any notice of it at all. They did try to build hype for it, and I definitely remember downloading the demo at the time, too. But no-one cared. If people were buying and playing it in 2015, then they weren't talking about it, and with it being a decade old now and with the 3DS having a minor renaissance in 2025 (thanks to the combination of broke nostalgic young people and the high price of new consoles - exactly how "retro gaming" should be!), I still don't see anyone talking about it.

 

Code Name S.T.E.A.M is a turn-based strategy game, with some mild action elements. You control a squad of very toyetic soldiers, with steam-powered armour and weapons. Moving a space uses up one unit of steam, different weapons use different amounts to fire, usually between two and four. Each of your soldiers generates eight steam per turn, and can store up to ten (though these numbers will change slightly as you unlock more equipment). So if you leave a couple of steam units at the end of a turn, they'll carry over into the next turn. Furthermore, when you fire weapons, you don't just select your target and pick "fire" from a menu: you've got to aim and fire yourself, either using a joystick on the touchscreen, or the right analogue stick if you're playing on a New 3DS.

 

I've played about ten stages so far, and all of them have had the goal of getting at least one of your soldiers (or in one case, an escorted non-combatant) to a goal area on the other side of the battlefield. After a few turns, more enemies will start generating on the map, so if you have infinite patience, you could theoretically keep killing them forever. But the battles also tend to be pretty tight, with my guys often just barely crawling over the finish line to end a lot of the battles. I think this whole semi-turn-based approach might be taken from SEGA's Valkyria Chronicles series, but I'm not very familiar with them, so I can't completely confirm this. 

 

As well as the toyetic protagonists, the game as a whole has a distinct aesthetic to it, too. The tech is all steam=powered, and your homebase is a blimp, but a lot of the fashion and such looks more inspired by 1930s and 40s military uniforms, and the world in general is a mixture of lots of brss and polished wood, with American and British flags draped everywhere. It kind of brings to mind a theoretical Fallout cartoon, made for an audience of kids in 1994. (I'll take this opportunity to make clear that I don't consider a work to be "steampunk" unless it's explicitly anti-imperialist, and since the aforementioned non-combatant you have to escort is Queen Victoria, this game definitely isn't that.)

 

This is a decent enough game, I guess. Playing through a stage is a decent enough way to pass twenty minutes or so, and there is some satisfaction to be derived from the active aiming, plus some of the sillier weapons are a lot of fun too, like the Lion Launcher (wielded by a lion-man named Lion, it makes him bounce on top of enemies for big damage), and the healing gun. Plus, if you play it, you can put it on your list of "3DS hidden gems" for internet clout, since I haven't seen anyone do that so far. Also uncharacteristically for a first party Nintendo game, you can pick up an actual copy for a pittance, if you are a cartridge-accumulating little freak.

Saikyou! Takada Nobuhiko (SNES)

 The early-mid nineties were a time of great experimentation in the world of professional wrestling, both in terms of presentational style and in terms of the actual way wrestling was done. I think to most western fans, the most famous part of this experimentation is from the hardcore style as seen in ECW, FMW and Big Japan, that would eventually go on to be copied (in a watered-down form) by WWE for their massively popular attitude era. But there were other innovations taking place at that time, including in a Japanese promotion called UWFi, where an almost opposite approach was being taken.

 

UWFi took note of the rising popularity of kickboxing, mixed martial arts, and other legitimate combat sports, and sought to create a wrestling style that emulated them, and it's this style upon which Saikyou: Takada Nobuhiko is based. (It also takes the very early nineties approach of only featuring one real wrestler, fighting renamed unlicensed versions of other wrestlers.) Thie results in a game that plays very differently to any other, not least because the UWFi used a completely different ruleset than that seen in mainstream wrestling promotions. Furthermore, the action takes place on a single plane, like a contemporaneous fighting game (but in keeping with the shoot style, there's no jumping and not really any special moves).

 

There are a few rulesets in the game, but the main (and most interesting) one is the main ruleset used by UWFi. Matches have a thirty minute time limit, and wrestlers also start each match with fifteen points each. One point is lost when a wrestler is suplexed, or when they escape a submission hold by grabbing the ropes. Three points are lost if a wrestler is down on the floor long enough for the referee to start the ten count. If a wrestler submits to a hold, fails to answer a ten count, or if they're reduced to zero points, they lose the match. In game terms, the wrestlers have two health bars in addition to the fifteen points. 

 

One of the bars regenerates quickly, and when it's depleted, the wrestler goes down and loses three points, while the player has to hammer their controller buttons to try and get back up before the referee counts to ten. The other bar regenerates very slowly, but it only goes down while a wrestler is in a submission hold. When it runs out, they tap and immediately lose the match. Also, while in a submission hold, both wrestlers' players can use the shoulder buttons to edge closer to the ropes or to the centre of the ring.

 

I wouldn't say this is a fun game exactly, and I'm pretty sure I won't be going back to it after this review. But I am always interested in videogames that have people fighting or engaging in combat sports with rules and win conditions that aren't just the typical fighting game knockouts or standard pro-wrestling rules. So I do recommend playing it at least a couple of times to experience that, and maybe it'll click better for you than it did for me. But that's my opinion on it really: not a game I loved, but a game that's interesting and worthy of attention. Also, I hope I wasn't embarassingly incorrect on all the wrestling history back at the start of the review, this kind of shoot style-stuff is a little outside my normal circle of interest. (A little extra note: though I don't often reply to comments on this blog, I do read and appreciate them all.)

Guardians (Arcade)

Also known as Denjin Makai II, this is a game that I'm not totally sure about including. It's very well known among arcade fans, but conversely, it's almost totally unknown to everyone else. There's some reasons for this, like it being a beat em up that came out just a year or two after that genre's original heyday was on the wane. Plus it's in at that level of technology where it was way too advanced for a port to the Mega Drive or SNES (in fact, the game to which it's a sequel got a SNES port for which a lot of compromises had to made, so this one had no chance), but a lot of people would have ignorantly stuck their noses up in the air at a port to Saturn or Playstation.

 

It's a massive shame too, as it might well be the best beat em up from before the recent genre renaissance. You constantly have a whole bunch of attack options, and it offers superior solutions to some long-standing problems the genre had back then. There's a whole bunch of characters to choose from, all of whom are wildly different in design: there's a ninja and a kung fu guy, a big triceratops-man, a very Shiar Empire-looking bird-girl, a muscle-bound soldier, and more. Though the controls are the same for all of them, they all feel very different to play as. Not only do they have different attacks, and different speed/damage/etc. stats, but there's little things, too, like how they utilise weapons, or how much meter their different specials consume.

 

Because this is a game that has both special moves and meter. There's three action buttons in the game: melee, jump, and projectile. Like pretty much any other beat em up, you can repeatedly press melee for combos, and you can also press it with a direction while you're jumping for a few different air attacks. None of that uses up meter, of course, but you have several different options that do. There's the traditional all-around emergency attack, and it did feel pretty liberating once I realised it uses meter rather than health, and there's the projectile attack, which is very useful and uses the most meter for most characters. Finally, each character has a couple of special moves, performed by holding the melee button and either moving the stick side-to-side or up-and-down. That might be a slightly awkward-sounding input method, and in a fighting game, I think it would be (it brings to mind Primal Rage and the SNES Ranma 1/2 fighting games), but in a beat em up it works really well. You can quickly learn to hold the button at the end of a combo and immediately go into a special.

 

As well as mechanically, there's lots to love in the game's theme and aesthetics, too. The setting is some kind of futuristic dystopia, though not one that's suffered environmental collapse, as locations include various kinds of big cities, a theme park, a moving train, a forest, a military base in the desert, and more. They all look amazing, with lots of super-detailed pixel art. The enemies are very varied, too, with futuristic soldiers (including what appears to be some kind of penal regiment with their wrists in pillories), a few different superhero-like characters, and weirder things like big-eyed humanoid crocodile monsters. The one weak point I can think of in this area is the boss music, which sounds more like it should be on the options screen of a sports game.

 

Obviously I recommend playing Guardians, it's excellent. It works fine in both MAME and Final Burn Neo, and since Hamster have put out a few Banpresto games already, it'll hopefully turn up in the Arcade Archives series someday. How nice it'll be to finally play a legal version of this game on a home console, a mere thirty years late!

Hataraku Chocobo (Wonderswan Color)

 So, this has been unplayed in my Wonderswan folder for quite a while. The main thing I knew about it was that it's a board game, and most board game videogames follow a very time consuming roll-and-move money accumulation format, presumably due to the populatiry of Game of Life in Japan. So I was putting off playing it. But it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool this whole time, because against my expectations, it's a pretty fast-paced Euro-style worker placement game! Which is doubly surprising, as it came out in 2000, and that wasn't a particularly common or well-known genre in actual board games back then, let alone in videogame board games!

 

The premise is a little unsavoury: humans have "discovered" a continent inhabited by chocobo, who, while they can't talk, they are capable of using tools and following instructions, so can be considered sapient. Of course, the humans (including you) set about enslaving the indigenous population and stripping the land of resources. So, you start each map with three chocobo in your employ, and you assign them a job (there are four jobs, each of them gathering a different resource), and take them to the part of the map (there are eight such locations to a map, with your homebase in the centre square) where you want them to do that job. Each space has a different yield of each resource, and each turn there's a weather effect that will also affect these yields, usually increasing one of them. You can also find wild chocobo roaming the map, that you can capture to increase your stock of workers.

 

The four resources are greens, logs, water, and ore. The more chocobos you have, the more greens you need at the end of each turn: if you don't have enough, there's a chance that one of your chocobos will run away. Water determines how many things you can do in a turn. Walking around is free, but most actual actions (capturing a chocobo, distracting chocobo belonging to one of your rivals, assigning a chocobo to a task or location) will use some of your water. Logs and ore are also consumed when assigning tasks to chocobo. So you have to use these resources to actually get anything done, but you're also given coins for how many you have left over at the end of each turn. The player with the most coins at the end of the game wins!

 

Between turns, there's also two additional things to deal with: auctions and trading. Auctions are the part where you can really make some big profits if you're lucky, as you can often trade one resources for multiples of another. Since they're all worth one coin (I'm pretty sure), you can really bolster your takings here. Trading is more of an act of desperation. If you really need a particular resource, you can trade two of another resource for one of the one you want. Interestingly, the bank with which you trade also has a limited supply of each resource, so you might sometimes have to hope that someone else trades in the one you want or else you'll just have to go without.

 

Interestingly, winning isn't particularly important. Obviously, it's more satisfying to win, and it unlocks new stages quicker, but really, all you have to do is ensure that the total score of all the players is above a certain amount fo the game to be considered a success. This kind of "communal competition" kind of brings to mind the 2019 board game Red Outpost, though I doubt that the designers of that game ever played this one to be influenced by it. Turn order in both the game itself and the between-turn economic sections is affected by your current ranking, too (the highest-ranked player goes last, and so on), so you might want to hold back early in the game, so you're able to go first and place your chocobo in the best locations before they fill up.

 

Hataraku Chocobo is a really fun game! It's pretty unique as far as videogames go, too, so it's a shame that it's never been ported to anything else besides the Wonderswan, and that it only exists in English thanks to a fan translation. Hopefully someday Square will remember they made it and put a new version on Switch, maybe with multiplayer and maybe also a new, less uncomfortable storyline! Until then, it's definitely worth your time to emulate!

War Games: Defcon 1 (Playstation)

 Two of the first things you'll be confronted with regarding this game are anachronisms. Firstly, it's a tie-in to a movie released fifteen years earlier, and secondly, despite being released in 1998, this game has no save option, and if you want to keep your progress, you have to do so via a password system! But what is the game? It's one that has very little in common with the movie whose name it bears, being a 3D shooting game that plays kind of like an inferior spin-off from the Strike series of games. No hacking or global tension here at all!

 

So, you can play as either NORAD (humans in tanks and jeeps and such) or WOPR (various different robot things), and you're  given a series of worldwide missions, which mainly involve going to part of a map, killing all the enemies there, then going to a different part of the map and killing everyone there. It's all kind of arbitrary, especially if you accidentally wander to the wrong part of the map and kill the enemies there, at which point you'll fail the mission, literally being told you did things in the wrong order and ruined everything. Compare to the aforementioned Strike games, in which you could mostly take on a stage's objectives in any order, and sometimes there might be a tactical advantage to be gained from taking things in a certain order.

 

There's other problems, too. The biggest being the controls. Though there's lots of vehicles to control in the game, they all control the same, and they all use the "swivel and accelerate" system (or "tank controls," if you prefer), with no capacity for strafing. Furthermore, you can only shoot directly in front of you in all of them. So combat against other units means you and one enemy staying still and shooting at each other until one of you explodes. If the enemy explodes , you move on and do the same thing to the next one. If you explode, either you start back at your base with the next vehicle in your allocation for the current stage, or if you were already on the final one, you fail the mission. 

 

Aesthetically, it's fine I guess. It's got a similar look to other western-developed Playstation games that take place on battlefields, the one that keeps coming to mind in particular being Populous: The Beginning, despite the wildly different themes and settings between the two games. But there's nice terrain, cute little buildings decorating the place, and so on. I even really like the models for some of the NORAD vehicles! Something I have to address, though, is that the game does suffer from "the western mecha problem": all of the mecha are just ugly grey boxes plopped on top of a pair of chicken legs like a mechanical version of Baba Yaga's hut. The more powerful the mecha, the bigger the grey box, and not a single arm or hint of aesthetic flair among them.

 

Despite all the bad things I've had to say about War Games Defcon 1, I actually don't hate this game. It's okay. I think if you were to pick it up, you'd probably play a couple of stages, think to yourself "that was alright, I'll have to get back to it some time", and then you'll never play or think about it ever again. But you probably won't hate it!

Solitary Fighter (Arcade)

 Solitary Fighter is the sequel to a much better-known game, Violence Fight. Though its more of an expanded rerelease, since it has exactly the same plot, and it mostly plays in the same way, with the main (but not only) difference being the addition of a few more playable characters. This is probably a contributing factor into why it's so forgotten, but the biggest factor is definitely the circumstances of its release: it has the misfortune of being a pre-Street Fighter II-style fighting game released in 1991, the same year as Street Fighter II. So no matter what, it would have looked like a weird, awkward throwback.

 

But here in 2025, it's that weird awkwardness that makes it interesting: it's a fighting game, but not following the formula that SFI codified. So, it's set in 1950s America, and all of the characters are fighting for cash prizes in warehouses and other such places. Most of the stages are in a beat em up-style forced perspective arrangement, whereby you can walk in eight directions, as well as jumping. Though some stages only let you walk on a single plane (I wonder if this was an attempt at making the game look at least partially like SFII, since apparently, major changes were made to a 1992 Taito game, Dino Rex, for the same reason).

 

You have three buttons: punch, kick, and jump. Pressing punch and kick together makes your character crouch, and pressing either of the attack buttons together with jump does a special  move of wildly varying usefulness. One of the characters, a balding fat idiot dressed in stars and stripes has headbutts instead of kicks. While you're fighting in the beat em up-style stages, sometimes armed audience members will invade the fight, but the thing is, they're just interested in violence, they don't seem to care where it goes. They'll start out attacking one fighter, then change their mind and attack the other, until they take enough hits themselves that they decide it's no longer worth the effort and give up.

 

Maybe the weirdest element of the game is the health bar. It goes down in inconsistent, seemingly random amounts in response to characters taking attacks, and also it'll often start going back up again immediately afterwards. And getting a character's health bar to zero isn't enough to knock them out, you've got to hit them again after that (and if it goes back up, you'll have to deplete it again). Plus, it seems like you can't win with a throw? It makes for a game that feels very imprecise and unpredictable in a way that removes any satisfaction from victory.

 

Solitary Fighter isn't a completely terrible game. I do really like the setting and how the game looks in general, and I am always on the lookout for games that offer takes on fighting that feel different to typical fighting games. But none of this is enough to make it good. I think the absolute best you might hope for is having one or (at most) two fights with a friend, as a little comic relief between better games.

Burger Kitchen (Game Gear)

 

 This is the first game I've played from Habit Soft, who've physically released a bunch of newly developed games for a variety of old consoles! With the exceptiong of a URL on the title screen, it really looks, sounds and feels like it could have come from the Game Gear's actual heyday (in contrast to something like M2's GG Aleste 3 from 2020, that pushes the hardware to its absolute limit, making a game that would have seemed impossible on the home consoles of the early nineties, let alone the humble Game Gear). Even the cutified burger restaurant theming calls to mind the fascination Japanese pop culture had with McDonalds (and similar chains) for a couple of years, as seen in things like Project A-ko 3 and Space Fantasy Zone.

 

How it works is that you've got a playfield that's four spaces high and eight spaces tall. Into the field will fall horizontal pairs of burger layers, being the burgers themselves, the top or bottom halves of the breadcake, or slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, bacon (that looks more like salami), and that weird egg slab that only exists in burger restaurants. You lose when all the pieces pile up to cover the top space of either of the two middle columns. If two identical pieces are placed atop each other, they disappear, but you score no points.

 

To actually score points, you've got to construct burgers according to various recipes. There's got to be bottom bread on the bottom, a certain collection of ingredients in the middle, and a top bread on top. Then the whole thing will disappear, and you'll score the "price" of that particular recipe, or half the price if the ingredients were right, but in the wrong order. You'll have a quota of certain specific recipes to make a few times to clear each stage, but you still get points for non-quota burgers you make.

 

There's two game modes, the first of which being mission, where, upon completing a stage's quota, you go onto the next stage with a shiny new empty playing field, and which ends after five stages. The other is endless, where filling a quota will immediately start the next one, but since you can make any burgers for points, you really just need to have remembered all of the recipes and make what you can, when you can. Endless mode never clears out your playing field, and once you get to its equivalent of stage five, the quota has an infinity symbol, and the game just continues until you get a game over.

 

The game's cute and it's decently fun, and I do keep going back to it. But there is a frustrating little problem. Every recipe has to have a bottom bread on the bottom to be valid, and it's pretty often the case that there'll be no bottom bread pieces in the first few pairs that drop. Now, you can hold one for later, like in most modern Tetris games, but it's still frustrating that you can't even start putting things together for the first few drops. I'm ot sure exactly how I'd fix this, except for maybe eliminating the bottom bread piece and having a permanent layer of them beneath the playing field? It's not a massive problem, but it does bother me a little, especially since it's there every time you play,pretty much.

 

Burger Kitchen is a game that's cute, but very flawed, but also one to which I keep returning despite those flaws. It's really difficult to decide whether or not it gets my recomendation! I guess I'll say: it's fine? Play it if you want?

Ganso Jajamaru-kun (Wonderswan)

 

 The original Ninja Jajamaru-kun was a fairly early Famicom release, and is typical of such, being made up of very similar stages that gradually increase in difficulty, and through which the player progresses by killing all of the enemies, rather than by reaching a goal. Also typical of many games of the time, there's various little semi-secret methods for scoring extra points (and by extension, gaining more lives). Wikipedia says that Ganso Jajamaru-kun is a remake of that original game, but I'd say it's really a sequel that happens to skew closer to the original than the earlier sequels did (as they tended to follow the trends in the platform genre in the late 80s and early 90s).

At first glance, it is very very similar to the original game: each stage has eight enemies roaming around a stage with four floors. Parts of the floors can be destroyed from underneath, and some of these destroyed floor panels will reveal power ups. There's also the secret power up that will only appear after you've already had three different power ups, that summons a giant frog for you to ride around. But there's some new stuff. Like the sakura petals the princess drops aren't just optional items to get more points and access to the bonus stage. In this game, if you don't collect a petal on a stage, you'll have to go back and do the stage again before you're allowed to fight that area's boss. (Boss fights being another new element that wasn't present in the original).

 

There's some other eccentricities I've noticed regarding this petal business. When you finish a stage, if you didn't lose a life, you'll get a time bonus. It's pretty easy to zoom through the stages quickly and get a big time bonus, but the clock starts at 120 seconds, and the princess won't drop the petal until it reaches ninety seconds (I word it like this because if you collect the watch item that adds seconds to the clock, she still waits for it to say ninety, rather than when you've been in the stage for thirty seconds). So you might want to repeat stages for more points. Except! That after every boss you beat, the amount of points-per-second awarded for time bonuses increases by ten. So while you'll get more points in the short term by repeating stages, this means your score won't be increasing as quickly as it would if you just progressed through the game normally (plus the repetition is a hassle).

 

There's some improvements over the original that really stem from the fourteen years between the two games' releases. Like, the controls and Jajamaru's movement just feel smoother, more responsive, and generally a lot better in this game. Furthermore, it looks great. It's obviously all rendered in eight shades of grey, but the backgrounds are beautifully drawn, and there's even the occasional full screen piel art cutscene. Though it's a game that was old-fashioned on its original release a quarter of a entury ago, Ganso Jajamaru-kun is still a game that I think is a lot of fun, and definitely worth your time (though like almost all Wonderswan action games, it fetches a completely obscene price on the secondhand market in 2025, so definitely just emulate it).