Gachapin Challenge DS (DS)

 Gachapin is a character from Japanese children's TV. Portrayed by someone in a green monster costume, I guess he goes around participating in various sports and activities? That's what I gather from the premise of this game, as well as the gallery contained therein of actual photos of him doing these things. Wikipedia also tells me that he's able to do all this stuff because of seven energy balls on his wrists, that provide him with carbohydrates. Oh. 

 

This game has you playing as Gachapin, as he takes part in various sporting activities. I think the plot has something to do with TV ratings and trying to take a regional show national, but of course, I can't read any of the dialogue, and can only go by what I see happening. There's a lot of these activities, and most of them play completely differently from each other, while all of the racing ones play slightly differently from each other. Even better, all of them are played in that beautiful style of 3D particular to the DS.

 

There's minibike, go-kart, and quad racing, as well as motorcross and hovercraft time trials. Two fooball games see you triyng to score goals past a bunch of slowly-moving targets or playing keepy-uppy on your own, a trampolining game combines timing button presses to bounce higher with quickly tapping dirrectional inputs to do tricks, and a kung fu game has you quickly reacting to button prompts to fight off attackers. None of them are particularly mind-blowing, but nor are any of them terrible. 

 

In the game's main mode, the racing games will have an opponent for you to defeat, while all of the others have a score or time limit for you to beat. The difficulty of all of these is pretty perfectly set, too: some of them might take a few attempts to beat, but none of them are going to be frustrating to get through, nor will they force you to replay a particularly difficult game to the point of fostering resentment. Having said that, a couple are way too easy, the goal-scoring game in particular feels like it's near-impossible to fail at.

 

I did eventually get to a point where even though I'd met the clear conditions for every game that was available to me, the story wouldn't proceed, and as a result, there's three games that I haven't been able to play, and don't even know what they are! But I do have more to talk about, as this game was devloped by Hudson Soft, and for some reason, they included a Bomberman mode. And by "mode", I mean that it's more fully featured than some entire Bomberman games that sold for full price on home consoles (yes, I am talking about Bomberman Act Zero, here).

 

This mode, called Gachabon, features all-new sprites of Gachapin wearing different-coloured Bomberman costumes as the player characters. It's got five different stages to choose from, and can be played against CPU opponents, or with up to four human players (so it doesn't make the DS Bomberman games obsolete, at least, since they went up to eight players). You play until one player has won a certain amount of matches, all the power-ups are in there, and it is just a fairly complete battle mode from a Bomberman game, included as an extra in this licensed game, completely unrelated to Bomberman beyond sharing a developer. Bizarre, but welcome, I guess? If there's just one group of mid-00s Japanese kids out there who spent hours playing this mode together, having never heard of Bomberman otherwise, then it was all worth it.

 

Gachapin Challenge DS probably doesn't have a lot to offer to anyone who isn't a small Japanese child in the 00s. But it does look really good, it's got a lot of charm, and it's inexplicably also got a Bomberman game in it. And some photos of a weird green thing doing a bunch of sports in real life.

The Wild Rings (X Box)

 This is a game I've been wanting to play and review for over a decade, but haven't had the means to do so until now, which is kind of exciting. Japan-only games on the X Box and 360 are inherently interesting, I think, since they were kind of doomed from the start, because those consoles had such small userbases there. This one is also interesting in its own right, being as it is a kind of game that represents a specific time and space in wrestling that, as far as I know, doesn't have a lot of videogame representation. It's a wrestling game that seems to have been inspired by the Inoki-ism philosophy, that as I understand it posits the wrestling ring to be the pinnacle of all combat sports, and the natural gathering place for practitioners of all martial arts to meet and compete.

 

As a result, the roster is split into various arts, including Japanese, American, and Mexican wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, MMA, Sumo, and more. As well as fighting in their respective styles, the left trigger on the controller also has a different action, specific to each art. MMA guys have an alternative grapple there, boxers can dodge with their upper body, luchadors can do a dodge roll, and so on. Oddly, American wrestlers get an extra taunt, which makes for some of them. You can have combatants from any style fight each other freely, obviously, since that's the whole point of the game. You can also have tag and trios matches, and an eight-man battle royale, though the game's clearly not really designed around the battle royale, and it's a bit too chaotic and not very fun.

 

The single, tag, and trio matches do work perfectly fine, though, and there's a few interesting quirks, too. Like how boxers can't grapple or grond attack, or any such stuff, so if you set up a singles match between two boxers, it essentially becomes a boxing match played with the controls of a wrestling game, complete with the referee counting whenever one of the two goes down. The game generally plays kind of like a slower version of Yukes' wrestling games, with an attempt at a Fire Pro-inspired timing-based system for grappling and performing throws. This takes the form of a sliding meter at the bottom of the screen, with areas for weak, medium, and strong moves for the attacker (as well as a button assigned to each), and countering for the defender. Ther problem is that unlike Fire Pro, you don't get just one attempt to hit the timing right, so you can just hammer the button as soon as the meter starts, so you'll likely be the the one pressing it when it goes over the appropriate line.

 

Possibly as a way of balancing the game so that practitioners of arts that don't allow for a lot of different attack options, each fighter only has a few moves, which makes playing through a bunch of consecutive matches as the same guy (like in the championship mode, for example) really repetitive. It might be a little unfair to compare any wrestling game to the absolute pinnacle of the genre, Fire Pro World, but that game also allows you to create fighters from different sports, and the catalogue of moves available includes various strikes and such that can come out of grapples, so there's no need for a boxer or karateka to have the main meat of the game closed off to them, as in The Wild Rings.

 

There is a character creation mode in this game, too, and you can make guys (and only guys! No girls allowed!) for all of the arts, which is good, since sumo and boxing in particular only have two representatives each on the default roster. However, inkeeping with the game's very serious Inoki-inspired premise, the options for doing so are somewhat limited: essentially, you can only really make guys who look like real combat sport participants, with the lucha libre masks being the only concession towards the fantastical. In times of old, I might have considered this a massive downside, and admittedly, I didn't really find much of interest to catch my imagination in there. However, I think it's actually a good thing that this game was made with a specific identity and aesthetic in mind, and that the developers had the confidence in that to stick with it, and to limit the player to creating characters that fit into it. I appreciate the sincerity and vision, there.

 

Like I said at the start of the review, this is a game that acts as a time capsule of a specific wrestling scene in Japan around the turn of the century, and while that might limit its appeal in the eyes of a more mainstream audience, I think that's what makes it still interesting to play and look at, all these years later, where a wrestling game aimed at general audiences might have just been a generic also-ran that could safely be left buried by history. If you're interested in that era of wrestling, or in combat sports, or in deliberately constrained game design, you should definitely give The Wild Rings a look. It won't ever become your go-to wrestling game, but I think it'll at least make you think about what a wrestling game can be.

Deep Shinonome Yin Yang Maiden (Switch)

 

 Upon seeing the screenshots of this game, and apparently not bothering to read the description, I bought it assuming it was a more horror-themed Kikikaikai-style shooting game. Other than each starring a young female exorcist, however, the two games have almost nothing in common! What Deep Shinonome: Yin Yang Maiden (which is the name it's given in the Switch's UI, while Shinonome Abyss: The Maiden Exorcist is what's on the title screen)actually is is a stage-based survival horror game, centered largely around your character's physical vulnerability, and the management of extremely tightly limited resources.

 

Each stage is a building, represented by a grid of (mostly) square rooms connected by doors. Some rooms will have torches or firepits, some will be traps: a spike pit surrounded by only a thin ledge, for example, some will have nothing, not even a light source. And of course, there's items to pick up in some of them. Sound is just as important as vision, though, as you can hear monsters in adjacent rooms, and can make noise yourself to attract their attention.

 

This is essential, since though you have a gun, ammunition is incredibly scarce, and really, it's only effective against the weakest monsters. But the monsters aren't particularly intelligent, and you can lure the corporeal ones into firepits and other traps to destroy themselves, and the spiritual ones through sealed doors or into shrines for similar effects. There's other, single-use weapons found lying around, too, like shurikens that can kill most monsters in a single hit, and grenades, that can clear out entire adjacent rooms.

 

 

Though you're an exorcist, your aim in each stage is only to enter through the front door, and eventually exit through the back. You don't have to destroy every monster lurking therein, though if you don't you'll be spending a lot of time avoiding them, and as well as weak and fragile, you're also pretty slow, so that's a difficult act to keep up for an extended period. So the meat of the game is surveying the situation very carefully, figuring out which monsters are where, and also where the resources needed to destroy them are. 

Of course, this means that it's heavily structured around playing stages repeatedly. Not only so you can get the lay of the land enough to actually complete them, but there's also a strong emphasis on scoring, with a complex rundown at the end of each stage, showing the points you scored for item use, destroying monsters, and finishing quickly. That doesn't mean they've skimped on the size of the game, though: there's a ton of stages, starting out moderately difficult, and judging by the star scale used on the selection screen, gradually moving up to inconceivable difficulty for superhuman genius players.

 

I like this game! It's compellingly addictive, to the point where I don't want to leave a stage I've started unfinished, trying over and over until I figure it out (and successfully eecute that solution), then often foolishly starting the next stage straight away and getting drawn in for another series of failed runs. It also definitely works as a piece of horror, being atmospheric and gruesome with relatively simple graphics and sound, and tying the horror into the mechanical design of the game itself, rather than just being a macabre skin draped over a generic action game. Definitely recommended. (Note: a lot of places online seem to have the game listed as a roguelike, but that's just an optional sidemode, the main game is a series of specifically designed and balanced stages).

Gunnm: Martian Memory (Playstation)

 Gunnm (under its English title Battle Angel Alita) is one of my all-time favourite manga, so it's a mystery why it's taken me so long to get around to playing this adaptation of it, when the fantranslation has been out a few years already at this point. Though I also haven't read the second sequel series, Mars Chronicle, so maybe I have some subconscious aversion to stuff with Mars in the title? Anyway, none of the sequels were out yet when this game was made, but it does apparently adapt the entire original series, with all its tragedy and misery and a severely toned down version of its violence.

 

In case you don't know, the manga details the life of a cyborg girl named Alita or Gally (depending on the version), who is revived by a doctor in a post-apocalyptic world after literally wasting away on a scrapheap unconscious for an unknown, but presumably very long amount of time. The world in which the series takes place is an incredibly horrible one, of constant violence, suffering, and all-new levels of inequality made possible by the mass adoption of artificial bodies capable of replacing almost the entire human body (except for the brain and spinal cord). Even one's own bodily autonomy is subject to sale or theft, and the threat of losing everything to debt or crime is ever-present. Furthermore, everything seems to be filthy and rotting on Earth, while some unseen class with absolute power live in presumed luxury in a city in the sky. It is, essentially, the world in which conservatives want the rest of us to live.

 

Anyway, in this world, you play as Alita/Gally, and you find out that you've got deeply buried memories of being a master of Panzer Kunst, a powerful martial art created on Mars. So you become a bounty hunter, a participant in violent future sport, and more, in search of your place in the world, and hoping you'll find the secrets of your past and where they might lead you in the future. I've played about five hours of the game, which got me through the first couple of arcs, with Makaku's killing spree and Hugo's tragic obsession, and then a little way into the Motorball arc of the manga. The game's got a semi-open world structure, though it is a very small world compared to ones that would come later, and pretty much all the NPCs you meet will only ever say things related to where you need to go next.

 

The first couple of hours will mostly be spent wandering the backstreets and wastelands killing minor bounties to get the upgrades and items that'll let you beat the first few bosses. It's fine, the combat is pretty fun, and these enemies go down quick enough that the grind never feels too heavy. Something cool that happens here and there is that at certain points in the story, you get new bodies, which tend to look cooler than those before them, as well as being big upgrades statistically. Eventually, all this street combat is replaced (presumably temporarily) by Motorball matches, short beat em up-like stages with an all-new control scheme in which you smash a whole bunch of jobbers until the boss player turns up for you to fight. Structurally and mechanically, it's a pretty simple game, but there's just something about it that's very gripping, and while most of my sessions have been about an hour long each, that time flies by.

 

I think a lot of that can be attributed to the game's presentation. It looks incredible, with the Playstation's low-poly models and those dirty low resolution textures used to amazing effect at realising the grimy, horrible world of the Scrapyard. There's also some nice use of lighting, too, as each location can be lit for daylight, dusk, or night time (though these change dependent on the story, not on your actions or the passage of time), adding a whole bunch more atmosphere. Something that carries over from the manga is also the unspoken horror of the world: there are no monsters, mutants, or aliens here. Not even any autonomous robots. Every weird creature you fight, all those semi-sentient deckmen you meet who exist only to provide basic, specific services, every giant freak, or pathetic wretch put together from spare parts is someone that was once human, and still is a human brain who has found themselves, through some kind of circumstance, in the bodies you see there.

 

If you're a fan of the manga, this game is definitely worth playing, it follows the story very closely, and though the NPCs are incredibly vapid, it still does an amazing job of creating a very atmospheric theme park version of the scrapyard to explore and fight weirdos in. It is a shame how much the violence is toned down, too. Obviously, it could never have been as violent as the manga is, but this game is almost completely bloodless! Still, the flaws are relatively small compared to how fun, atmospheric, and engrossing the game as a whole is, and I definitely recommend giving it a try. Such a shame it never got an official translation at the time, too! Especially since the manga and its animated adaptation both did. 

Spriggan Mark 2 Re:Terraform Project (PC Engine)

When this game recently got a translation patch, and having playe the SNES Spriggan game, which is a high-quality, but conceptually pretty standards shooting game, I assumed this was one of those cases where a team practices by translating and patching a puzzle or shooting game with little text of little importance. However, it turns out that I was Booboo the Fool in this assumption, because Spriggan Mark 2 is actually an insanely ambitious game to have been released on an eight bit console in 1992.

 

When it comes to console shooting games in 1992, I always think of the PC Engine's Soldier Blade. It's an excellent game, and very impressive for the hardware, but when you compare it to the likes of Advanced Busterhawk Gleylancer and Thunder Force IV being released on the Mega Drive in the same year, it makes NEC's console look like it was being left behind. Spriggan Mark 2 flies in the face of that, being years ahead of its time in design terms, if not technological. It does appear to be an attempt at making an interactive anime in the form of a shooting game.

 

There's a ton of cutscenes, many with that "big pixel art" style that was so popular at the time, especially on PC Engine CD, and even more impressively, there's also a lot of voice acting to go with them! They tell a very Gundam-like story of stolen prototype weapons, colonists on Mars breaking away from Earth's control, and all that kind of thing. It doesn't skimp on the action, though, as while there's a minute or two of dialogue happening between each stage, and sometimes boss fights will also have a little chat-break preceding them, there's still full shooting stages, sometimes with dialogue and Sonic 3 & Knuckles-style visual storytelling happening while they play out, in a pretty seamless manner.

 

The actual shooting is pretty standard for the era: you have a standard machine gun with infinite ammo, and you can also press select to cycle through a bunch of more exciting weapons with limited uses, like homing missiles and a beam saber (you'd think that would be of infinite use, but it does a ton of damage, and I guess the developers sided with balance over logic here). Flying around firing off homing missles while dodging enemy fire and experiencing your comrades playing out their dramas feels great! There's some really amazing moments of ludonarrative cohesion to be found in this game.

 

Another aspect that feels very much ahead of its time is your health bar: it's a lot longer than you would expect from a shooting game of this vintage, and not only that, it slowly regenerates over time! My original theory was that this was because the developers had gone to a lot of effort to tell a story, and they wanted to ensure that the player will easily live to see it through, but to be honest: the game is still pretty difficult. In a few days' play, I've been able to get as far as the third stage. I don't know how many stages there are, but just judging by what's happening, it feels like the story's still in the early parts of playing out. Technologically, there's also what appears to be little moments of sprite scaling and rotation. It could also be a really good job of faking those effects, but either way, it's impressive.

 

Obviously, this is a game worthy of anyone's notice, especially now that it's been translated into English, so the story can be enjoyed by the JP-illiterate. People (rightly) talk a lot about Ginga Fukei Densetsu Sapphire when it comes to impressive PC Engine games, but Spriggan Mark 2 should definitely be in that conversation, too. And it does all the stuff it does without use of the Arcade Card, too! 

Hammerlock Wrestling (SNES)

 Also known as Tenryu Genichiro no Puroresu Revolution (which was also a tie-in with the excellently named 90s promotion WAR: Wrestle And Romance), Hammerlock Wrestling is a game I vaguely remember trying out back in the ancient days of DreamSNES. Something about it just caused me to bounce off of it (something I've identified and will get into later), but its unusual and very effective presentation did stick with me, so I went back to it decades later.

 

The thing that really stands out about Hammerlock when you start playing a match is that the screen is split into three horizontal areas: the middle shows the arena, and the little sprites of the wrestlers and referee inhabiting it, and the top and bottom areas showing big close-ups of each wrestlers. As the action gets underway and the actual match gets going, the middle part will sometimes be moved to the top or bottom, to allow for a big version of a move that's taking place in-ring, filling two thirds of the entire screen. It's a display of spectacle befitting pro wrestling! 

 

Even more impressive is that while you might expect the individual wrestlers to be represented in the larger scale animations by generic pugilists, but no: the entire roster of twelve wrestlers each has unique sprites at both sizes! Very impressive for a cartridge game released in 1994! In fact, this is generally a game that could only have been released at this time: eight-bit consoles would have a hard time with the three-way split-screen, never mind the huge animations, while this whole approach would have been pointless on more powerful consoles that could push polygons, and with them, offer moving cameras.

 

What's also interesting about the roster is that while it's mostly made up of the regular faces you expect from Japanese wrestling games of this era: copyright-friendly versions of Hulk Hogan, Big Van Vader, The Great Muta, and so on, a lot of them have been changed more than they usually are. Hogan's stand-in Sam Warhammer, for example, looks more like a red-bearded viking than an orange-skinned surfer guy. Also, it's a little unusual that there's no fake Jushin Liger in there, but there is a fake Lex Luger. And only one fake Road Warrior.

 

So, that thing that turned me away from the game in my teenage years? Well, like a lot of the better wrestling games, it attempts a Fire Pro-like timing-based system, but the problem is that it's not really clear exactly when you're supposed to make the input to successfully perform moves when going into a lock-up. I've somehow mangaed to win a few matches, though I can't do it consistently, and it seems like when I think I've figured out the timing, the next match begins and I'm getting it wrong every time once again. I'm not sure if it's a flaw in the design, its implementation, or (most likely) my playing, but it's frustrating.

 

Hammerlock Wrestling (or Genichiro Tenryu no Puroresu Revolution) is obviously a high-quality game, and I really wish I could figure out what it is that's stopping me from consistently pulling off moves successfully. As it is, though, I definitely think it's worth a try, at least, just to see a game with such an ambitious presentation. It really feels like that even though it was developed as a tie-in to an independent promotion, the developers wanted to make a game that stood out, looking bigger and more spectacular than the games put out by the likes of New Japan and WWF.

Robo Pit 2 (Playstation)

The original Robo Pit was a game that I rented multiple times back during the Playstation's heyday. Not alone, of course: Royal Video, the local video shop let you rent one game for two pounds, or two games for three pounds, so Robo Pit was usually the undercard to whatever game was the main event: Soul Blade or Klonoa or whatever it might have been. It was a very basic game in which you built a robot and had it fight against other robots (all built from the same pool of parts to which you had access) in arena battles to gradually make your way up the ranks.

 

It was the robot building that kept me coming back: the idea of character creation was so exciting to me back then that something even vaguely close to that got my interest (I was, of course, very disappointed when the creation feature that had been made so much of in magazine previews of Rival Schools wasn't included in the European version of that game. Furthermore, WWF Warzone's inclusion of a creation mode was so effective that it made a lifelong wrestling fan out of me!). Robo Pit 2 keeps that customisation, but has an all-new structure, and an actual plot!

 

The plot is that the arena from the first game has been taken over by evil robots, and you have to liberate it by fighting them all. But you do so by selecting a path through a semi-linear map instead of a list of ranked opponents, so it's a little different. There's also occasional cutscenes set in a moody prerendered techno-dystopia world slightly reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII or Galerians. Slightly. These maps are made up of concentric circles, with the opponents getting more difficult towards the centre, where lies a boss. At least, I know the first one does, and I assume later ones are the same.

 

The problem is that the first boss represents a massive step up in difficulty compared to everything that came before: its standard weapons are more powerful than any you've faced up to that point, plus it can perform wrestling moves on you, which is something of which the game has made no prior mention. These wrerstling moves are, of course, devastating (wrestling is the strongest fighting style, as we all know). He even tells you in his victory quote to train and come back to fight him again. The audacity of an action game explicitly telling you to grind! Anyway, I spent almost an hour after reaching him grinding (which means fighting the exact same few opponrnts over and over) and gaining two levels. He still annihilated my robot without breaking a robo-sweat.

 

If the actual game itself was fun enough, or if the way it looked was a little more charming (while the low-poly robot models look really cool and toyetic when the camera focusses on them for their win poses, in battle they just kind of look like indistinct brightly-coloured blobs), I might have given Robo Pit 2 a bit more of a chance, maybe ground another level or two to see if I could get any further. But it doesn't. It's a somewhat silly-looking game that's very repetitive to play, and the designers, in an effort to squeeze more runtime out of it, have given it a structure that only serves to exacerbate that repetition. There's still something about this game and its forebear that make me want to root for them, but unfortunately, I do have to be honest and say that Robo Pit 2 isn't worth your time, and worse than that, it won't respect your time.

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi (Switch)

 Though like any normal person, I prefer my shooting games to strictly follow arcade-style rules: no meta-progression, continues optional (and preferably punished), and scoring being based as much on skill (and as little on either luck or grinding) as possible. I will concede, however, that there is room for games to be experimental, and try different things within the framework of shooting games as a genre. Any such game, even if it's a good game, couldn't be considered a good shooting game. That makes sense, right? You're all on board with what I'm saying, right?

 

Harpoon Shooter Nozomi is such a game as I've just described. It's got a whole bunch of unlocking of weapons, unlocking of stages, various things like that, that mean that even in the "arcade" mode, scoring isn't completely skill-based, since the weapons you unlock in quest mode also get unlocked in arcade, and they tend to be a lot better than the ones available when you first start playing the game. There's also a heavy luck element, with each stage containing a pachinko minigame. You collect balls as you make your way through the stage, then use them in the minigame to secure materials used for unlocking weapons in quest mode, or points in arcade mode.

 

So, it's not a good shooting game. But is it a good game? Yes. There's two big factors that sway my opinion in its favour. The first is that that it's a game that's overflowing with charm. The graphics are all really cute pixel art, drawn with very bright colours and a very endearing, slightly messy style. There's lots of little references to other shooting games like Twinbee and Fantasy Zone. Nozomi makes little comments in the top corner of the screen based on what's currently happening in-game. When you're in the shop, you can see a bunch of little easter egg items from elswhere inthe game on the shelves in the background, and these even change from stage to stage! 

 

The second, more important factor is that this is a game with an overwhelming surplus of ideas, to the extent that I feel like that's worthy of respect on its own. As well as the aforementioned pachinko minigame and weapon shop/development system, I still haven't mentioned the game's eponymous gimmick! You shoot your normal weapon by just holding down the fire button, but when you press it, you shoot out a giant harpoon! There's various things the harpoon can hook onto, the main use being pulling apart larger enemies and bosses: pull the heads off of birds, the shells from snails, the rooves from buildings, and so on. There's some bosses where you have to pull away the boss' armour with your harpoon, then let go, and before it snaps back, shoot the harpoon to pull out the vulnerable cockpit! On top of that, there's a system of Dynamite Headdy-style secret bonuses, including hidden items, as well as secret little tasks, like pulling part of an enemy away from it, then while it's hooked, flying round it in a circle.

 

This is a fun and charming little game, and definitely worth your time, as long as you can disconnect the part of your brain that expects a certain kind of purity from shooting games. I recommend it, with that caveat. I'd also like to know if anyone has any information on the developer, Wandering Wonder. I haven't been able to find anything myself, and I'd like to know what else they've done!

Gegege no Kitaro: Youkai Daigekisen (DS)

 Gegege no Kitaro is one of those series I think everyone's aware of through its influence, but it's not widely seen or read by English-speaking audiences. This game was apparently released to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Gegege TV anime, though to be honest, there's been a pretty steady stream of Gegege games (Gegegames?) coming out since at least the Famicom. Those games have manifest in a few genres, and in this case, it's a platformer.

 

I think the big draw for the game is the graphics: on the surface level, they're made up of beautifully-drawn pixel art, but what I really loved is what that art depicts. The game is set in a modern Japan that's just a little grimier, a little darker, and a little spookier than real life. It's not the kind of over-the-top grime and dirt seen in a lot of 2010s American horror movies, it's just presenting slightly murkier spaces than the average suburbanite might be comfortable inhabiting, and even within that specific setting, there's still a lot of variety in the backgrounds. I think it looks beautiful! All the characters and monsters are full of character and charm, too, and all fit perfectly into the world depicted.

 

The game itself is surprisingly simple for a platformer of this vintage. You can jump and double jump, you can shoot your hair straight forward, and you can kick your sandals at your foes for a slightly more powerful attack. You can also have Kitaro use his stripey waistcoat thing as a shield or a parachute, the latter use being a big part of navigating later stages. And it is an actual platformer with actual platofrming, too! A lot of the challenge actually comes from testing the player's skill in navigating big stages, with combat actually being pretty simple. Having said that, though, another highlight of the game, both mechanically and aesthetically, are the gigantic bosses that appear at the ends of the stages, including one of the coolest and most impressive gashadokuro I've ever seen in a videogame!

 

For all of the praise I've given it, I do have a pretty big problem with this game: the difficulty. The first few stages are moderate: they don't feel like a cakewalk, but they're not particularly challenging. Then stage five is a massive step up in difficulty. Throughout the game, there are glowing orb things to collect, and once you've got a hundred of them, you get a short period of invincibility. They re-appear if you leave an area and re-enter it. There was a point in stage five where it seemed like the only way to progress was to keep going in and out of the area until you can use invincibility to get through. Then on stage six, there was another area that felt the same way, but that's where my patience with the game ran out and I stopped playing.

 

There is a possibility that this dramatic uptick in difficulty is a deliberate decision, though, as after stage five, there's and ending and the credits roll. So maybe the final four stages are intended to be a kind of optional "for super players" type thing? That makes it a little more forgivable, but it also means the actual game is only about forty minutes long. I dunno. That doesn't really matter nowadays, though, since you're likely to be playing via emulation of a flash cart anyway. (I did look up the game on Suruga-ya, and it's listed for about the same price as it would have been brand new, which is a lot more reasonable than most older Gegege games (gegegames).)