Remember the Super NES game Legend of the Mystical Ninja? Probably not, but just play along and we’ll get through this article. Mystical Ninja was the Super NES debut of Ganbare Goemon, a silly action series by Konami that both celebrated and parodied life in ancient Japan. The games didn’t attract much of an audience in America, with just four brought to these shores and a fifth unreleased title contributing to the bankruptcy of groundbreaking publisher Working Designs. However, in Japan, Ganbare Goemon was a powerhouse franchise, with over two dozen titles on every Nintendo and Sony console you can imagine. Konami even gave the series a modern day makeover with Goemon: New Age, an apparent response to Capcom’s sleek Mega Man X games.
One unwritten rule of the 1980s and early 1990s was that when you had a hit video game on your hands, you’d put it in your
customers’ hands by licensing it to Tiger Electronics. (You'd also make
a cheesy cartoon, but that's really more Nadia's department...) Tiger made handheld games based on everything from arcade oldies like Star Castle to modern classics including Super Street Fighter II and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (How would Symphony of the Night work on one of these primitive gadgets? Not very well, I’d suspect!) However, since Konami had its own line of LCD games in 1990, it eliminated the middle man and made its own pocket-sized port of Goemon exclusively for Japan.
Some of Konami’s LCD games actually
were released in the United States, including ports of their NES hits along with a few oddities like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Basketball and, uh… wow, seriously?
Bull’s Eye Barbecue Sauce? Well, if Handheld Museum says it exists, I guess I have to believe them!
Anyway, many of Konami’s games, including Ganbare Goemon, have a distinctive tapered shape that’s reasonably comfortable and leaves plenty of room for the player's hands at the bottom of the unit. At the top, there’s a 2¼” screen and a row of tiny rubber option keys. Resting in the center are two large circular buttons, with the left acting as a directional pad and the right functioning as one or more action keys. It’s not as stylish as Nintendo’s Game & Watch series, or as compact as Tiger’s line of handhelds, but it gets the job done.
If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you’ll remember that handheld manufacturers like Tomy and Bandai had a hell of a time trying to squeeze the action of twitch arcade games into a pocket-sized package. You can only imagine how much harder it is to compress Ganbare Goemon, a considerably more advanced action title with RPG elements, into the same tight space. While Nintendo did an admirable job of reproducing the depth of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda in its later Game & Watch titles, Konami kept things simple for its own LCD adaptation. As Goemon, the chubby ninja with a purple mane of hair, you’ll use a pipe to swat away flying monkeys and scuttling crabs on the top half of the screen. Once you’ve killed your weight in wildlife, you’ll then hop into a well, swimming past a waterwheel and an electrical field to collect a key. Finally, you’ll free your friend and possible love interest Ebisumaru (seriously,
what's with this guy?) from his shackles, bringing the game to a sudden, jarring end. Wait, that’s it?
Well, not quite. There are three difficulty settings in Goemon. The first keeps the action laid back and the objectives simple. The second traps Ebisumaru in a pagoda, forcing Goemon to blow it apart with a series of lit bombs. The bombs are all hidden inside the well, and our husky hero has just ten seconds to retrieve them before he drowns… a nearly impossible task thanks to the furiously spinning waterwheel. Even after you’ve destroyed the pagoda, you’ll still have to take one more dip in the well for the key, then solve a cryptic puzzle before you can come back up for air. I don’t even want to talk about the third difficulty setting, which has all the annoyances of the second coupled with lightning-fast animals. (Oh crap, I
did just talk about it! Curses, foiled again!)
This handheld was a swing and a miss, but there are other ways to get some Goemon on the go, if you’ve got deep pockets and the number of a good import game seller. There’s Ganbare Goemon 1+2 for the GameBoy Advance, a collection featuring the first two Super NES/Famicom games, and Goemon: Toukai Douchuu, a completely original, touchscreen-enhanced Goemon adventure for the Nintendo DS. If you’d prefer to kick it oldschool, you could always hunt down a copy of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, which was released for the original GameBoy at the end of that system’s life. It’s the only game of the three with an English translation, so it’s worth a shot unless you have a deathly fear of grayscale graphics.
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