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).

Fighting Road (NES)

 Something that really interests me in regards to game design is iteration and evolution: adding new ideas to existing concepts, as well as early experimental steps towards what would later become popular genres. Fighting Road represents an attempt to add more complicated storytelling to an early Yie Ar Kung Fu-style fighting game. It feels like such an ecolutionary step towards the style for which SNK would later become known that I even went to check that Takashi Nishiyama wasn't involved in its creation (as far as I can tell, he wasn't).

 

The story told in Fighting Road would fit right into a 1970s kung fu movie: the protagonist goes looking for his brother, fighting various other martial artists along the way, as well as learning that his brother has joined an evil gang. It's told via some great-looking cutscenes that make use of blocks of text and still pixel art. Technological limitations do kind of dampen the excitement in that in the first six stages, you fight three different opponents, as well as recoloured versions of those same opponents meant to represent different characters. To be fair, the characters are big and well-animated for a NES game in 1988, so they probably did take up a lot of space on the cartridge, meaning that a completely new opponent for every stage would have been an expensive prospect, and may even have forced compromises in regards to the cutscene art, which seems like it was probably a big selling point for the game.

 

To make matters worse, as well as repeated opponents, each stage consists of two fights against that stage's foe, which a cutscene in the middle. Clearly, a problem with the game was that the designers had a very specific concept for it, and they were desperately trying to juggle their intentions regarding storytelling, keeping the cost of production down, and ensuring that the game wasn't so short and easy that players finishd it the same day they bought it. But thirty-seven years later, shorn of that context, what you've got in Fighting Road is a conceptually interesting game that's turned out to be more than a little bit boring in practice. 

 

Another problem is that it doesn't really feel good to play. I mentioned before that the animation was surprisingly good, but it's unfortunately too good. There's too many frames for every action you might take, meaning that there's a bit too much of a delay between you pressing the button and your character executing the action. You've also got a pretty big repetiore of moves at your disposal, and most of them are easy enough to figure out, but you've got a power meter that theoretically allows you to fire a projectile attack once it starts flashing. However, even after looking up the command for this attack online, I've not been able to successfully pull it off even once.

 

I really wish I liked Fighting Road more than I do. It's an interesting game that's a few years ahead of its time, but unfortunately those few years do make a difference, and the technology and the concepts in game design just weren't there yet to support the kind of game that it wants to be. I'd say it's worth a look out of curiosity, but not really much more than that.