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Famicom's Thirtieth

Hey folks. If you frequent any retro-gaming sites, you'd know that the Famicom - the Japanese equivalent of the NES - turned 30 this week. While its American 30th birthday is a couple years off, it's still an important milestone in this great medium of ours. I don't need to tell you that the NES more or less resurrected the console gaming industry after the big crash of '83, and it all began 30 years ago.

As such, I've been wracking my brain on how to do a proper NES-based list for this red-letter day. I mean, beyond putting 30 items on it. I figured that much out at least. So I've elected to highlight thirty Famicom games that are so obscure that I actually had to add them to the wiki myself, and have included a little bit of history for each of these esoteric little beauties. It's worth remembering that while there were around 700 NES games, there were more than a thousand for the Famicom and nearly 200 more for the Famicom Disk System, so that's almost double the releases all told. A lot of weird shit exists beyond that language barrier.

Final Note: I can't stress enough how great Chrontendo is as a documentary on old Nintendo tapes and the era of gaming surrounding that console. It's why I managed to fill out so many Famicom pages, after all. That might sound vaguely plagiaristic, actually, so I think I'd be better off keeping that quiet. None of you read this paragraph, all right?

List items

  • Start this list off right. Koneko Monogatari is a Famicom Disk System game - which means it was sold on a two-sided disk that would be read by a peripheral that you could buy and attach to the Famicom - that is a rather inoffensive but dull platformer starring a cat. This cat just so happens to be Milo, of Milo and Otis fame. A video game based on that adorable movie. Curiously, you could summon Otis to help you, but he would instantly kill you if you touched him. Best friends forever, my kitten caboose.

  • Cleopatra no Mahou is an odd cross of an adventure game and a turn-based RPG akin to something like Final Fantasy. In fact, funny I should mention that series of angst and belts, because this was one of the pre-FF Squaresoft projects. That is, back when they were a struggling company of developers that included Uematsu and Sakaguchi, who both worked on this game. The game itself is nothing to write home about, but it's a neat "before they were famous" curio.

  • You might recognize several items on this list from the Japanese TV show GameCenter CX, busily being translated into English by talented subbers the 'net over. Paris-Dakar is a remarkable game for how absurdly weird it all is. It actually begins like an adventure game where you have to figure out how to get a rally car and be sponsored for the race, and every subsequent stage is different. Track that episode down - it's a good one.

  • Talking of weirdness, this banal space shooter was actually funded by the Japanese equivalent of the IRS and given away to schoolchildren. Every so often it pauses the action to give you multiple-choice trivia questions which may or may not have anything to do with the Japanese economy. Your final score is calculated on an accounts report sheet. So odd.

  • Shadow Land (or Youkai Douchuuki) is a side-scrolling platformer we in the west only saw in the Arcades. In Japan, it was available for a few home consoles and was a bit grittier besides. Vaguely similar to the eccentric Monster Party, it features a young boy that is trapped in Hell and fighting to get out. It's another game that was featured on GameCenter CX and has some of the grimmest endings you'll ever see in a kiddie game.

  • A sentient tomato with a pair of sneakers which he uses to move and attack. Not even the weirdest part. The weirdest part is that you control these feet independently and need to simulate walking with the gamepad in order to get anywhere. So a bit like QWOP, then, only with a sentient tomato.

  • Super Monkey Daibouken is so infamous I was surprised we didn't already have a page for it. Often lauded (if that's the right word) as the absolute worst Famicom game of all time, it had a legendary run on GameCenter CX as part of a recurring feature where Arino rang up regular Japanese citizens to help him make sense of the game. They were rarely any help whatsoever.

  • Another GCCX episode and an early Konami game. It's based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, the "godfather of manga" and creator of Astro Boy. It's actually not too bad, either, if a bit easy and convoluted at times. The way your character could build little bridges with blocks made it kind of interesting.

  • Just throwing another odd duck in here for color. Hikari Genji was a Japanese boy band who often used roller skates as part of their act. One or more of them were also probably molested by their manager, who got embroiled in a scandal similar in scope and nature to that of the UK's Jimmy Saville. It's one of those wish fulfillment dating games like No*Ri*Ko and several other idol-starring adventures. You score a date by bringing them back their roller skates. I dunno, after a while this all starts to sound normal to me.

  • This is an adventure game which is basically impossible to play without knowing Japanese, since you're challenged by your tutor with trivia questions whenever you try to leave an area. I mention it because it appeared in that Mailbag where Ryan got all those Famicom games, and paused briefly to discuss this mysterious "girl and her dog" cart (full disclosure: That's not a girl, but rather Little Lord Fauntleroy. This is in fact a game based on a serial anime based on that 1885 book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Yep.)

  • The Japanese were very fond of 3D mazes at this point in time: Those first-person dungeons where you'd get yourself lost by going left and right down too many passages. They made a Windows screensaver based on the experience, so I believe it's a universal thing. Anyway, not too many of them were based on lasertag games. Oddly, this is one gun-based game (for a license that was inherently American, as I understand) that never saw a US release. With a subtitle like that, how did it not cross over?

  • Another GCCX episode and one of Arino's beloved little puzzle games. If you remember the ep, a little elf guy had to pick up staircase pieces and drop them in a way that he could walk up several of them to reach the exit. It gets very difficult very quickly.

  • This game is just weird. I've tried to puzzle it out, but essentially you're a monk that can only get around by hopping from one tile in a grid to the next. Enemies all do the same, so you need to outwit and outhop them. No concept was ever too strange for Konami back then.

  • I believe I've added more than one Famicom Eggerland game, perhaps all three, but this one stands out because it was only available through a limited service that wrote games on blank disks to save the user some cash. Eggerland is, of course, the precursor and basis of the Adventures of Lolo games, the first of which borrowed an arrangement of mazes from this game and earlier Eggerland titles.

  • I wanted to avoid the sheer number of really quite dull Mahjong and Shogi games I've needed to add to the database to fill a few holes in our library, but this one is kind of an odd man out. Because it uses a version of Shogi that is known as "military shogi" (presumably due to a few strategy tweaks), it has this whole "conquerors and armies" theme to it. Playable characters include Adolf Hitler, a possessed pumpkin ghost and a gangster werewolf that I've tentatively dubbed Al-satian Cabone.

  • Another GCCX ep, Mito Koumon is based on a really long-running Japanese TV show in which an elderly statesman wanders around medieval Japan with his bodyguards solving crime mysteries like a samurai Columbo. The game adaptation was known at the time for its copious amounts of scratchy voice samples and played a lot like Ganbare Goemon/Legend of Mystical Ninja.

  • Another game I remember appearing in that Famicom bundle of Ryan's. There were a few Ninja-kun games based on a very simple Arcade platformer. After a while Jaleco decided they wanted more games from this series and didn't care to wait for the Arcade game's developers to get around to making them, so they started this "Jajamaru" spin-off series featuring the main character's identical-looking little brother. This one is an RPG for some odd reason. We almost saw an American version, but it was cancelled at the last second with much of the artwork and script changes already complete.

  • You'd think after that disastrous first NES Transformers game Bandai would learn their lesson. Nope. You might not be aware, but Bandai were basically the Ocean Software/LJN of anime licenses back then. They pumped out anime-inspired dreck by the cartload. Pick any anime from the 1980s and it probably has a Famicom-only adaptation from Bandai that is abjectly terrible.

  • Oddly enough, this isn't the NES Airwolf game you might be familiar with. It's a slightly earlier Japan-only take on everyone's favorite super-helicopter. I couldn't tell you if it was better or worse than the Activision one we got. It couldn't be much worse though.

  • A joke only people who followed the Famicom scene back then (or have watched enough Chrontendo) would get, "Pro Yakyuu" and "Satsujin Jiken" (which are Japanese for Pro Baseball and Murder Case respectively) were the two phrases most often seen in titles for Famicom games in the late 80s. As baseball and murder mysteries were incredibly common, this comedic adventure game took the observation and satirized it by somehow combining the two and adding a lot of dumb jokes besides.

  • I've added three - count 'em, three - Famicom fortune-telling games. In fact, I'd hesitate to even call them "games". They're clearly meant to be taken seriously by some gullible people as informational tools. Like the notorious Taboo: The Sixth Sense, these games tend to use a mix of tarot reading and astrology to predict your future for the following year. "Tarot" and "'89 Dennou Kyuusei Uranai" are the other two. Best/Worst of all, VGK is blogging his experiences with these horrible things. I fear I've unleashed a monster.

  • Just like how Taboo was a one-off NES aberration from a weird genre that was way more popular in Japan, so is Wall Street Kid the singular American/European stock market simulation game - a genre bizarrely well-represented on the Famicom. The Money Game is but one of several, and they're all also life sims where your financial success directly correlates to getting married, moving to a bigger house and getting a dog. It's a very weird, very 80s attitude where one's worth as a human being is defined by how much of a fortune they make on the stock exchange. This is what American Psycho was getting at, everyone. Just saying.

  • If there's one thing that raises a skeptic's hackles more than astrology, it's psychics. Mindseeker was headlined by a popular Japanese TV spoon-bender and purported to unlock the player's latent psychic abilities. That meant puzzles you could only solve by thinking at them really hard. To be honest, there were a few Sierra games from back in the day that felt a bit like that too.

  • All right, this is kinda funny and/or kinda par for the course for this industry. You might all recognize a little game called Nobunaga's Ambition. It was a very dense war strategy game that made Koei the powerhouse it is today. Oda Nobunaga was actually one of many daimyos (war lords) of a particularly conflict-heavy period of Japanese history called the Sengoku era. Since there were many daimyo, including the eponymous Takeda Shingen of this game, a lot of developers decided they wanted a piece of this turn-based strategy pie and made a whole bunch of Nobunaga's Ambition imitators, each taking a separate daimyo from the era as their game's protagonist and namesake. What you were left with were a whole mess of these games competing with each other for territory, each under a different daimyo's banner. Sort of like the Sengoku era itself, in fact.

  • Something else the Famicom saw a lot of but the NES not so much: Music creation programs. Stretching the definition of "game" I realise, but Doremiko was one of a few games that tried to make music creation easier (and fun) for little ones. There's a reason it's called the Family Computer over there: Nintendo originally intended it to be a child-friendly computer as well as a system that could play their arcade games. A bridge between the Atari consoles of old and the Japanese home computers that were popular then. They did drop the whole computer pretension eventually, though.

  • Adventure Island has a convoluted history, to say the least. The fact that it began as a Wonder Boy knock-off featuring a Hudson employee in a grass skirt is fairly well known at this point. Less well known is this spin-off, featuring Takahashi Meijin (Master Higgins to you and I) and his bee girlfriend Bugutte Honey from the Adventure Island anime adaptation's canon (a real thing). The idea is you run/fly around a stage looking for hidden eggs and once you find one you're taken to an Arkanoid mini-game that you must complete for part of a password. It's nothing like the usual Adventure Island experience, that's for sure. It's also godawful.

  • I added a hell of a lot of Bandai Power Pad games to the wiki. The US saw about half of them overall, but missed out on the game where you control a baby hopping vampire (the jiang shi, stars of that one Halloween-themed Sleeping Dogs DLC), the one where you jog around Tokyo's Imperial Palace, the one where you get horribly lost in 3D mazes, and a pair of games based on Takeshi's Castle: That Wipeout precursor starring everyone's favorite ornery Japanese comedian/movie star "Beat" Takeshi Kitano. This is another game that Arino challenged in GCCX, and it almost killed him. That Power Pad wasn't for wusses.

  • Pachinko is horribly popular in Japan, due in part to it being the only vaguely legal way to gamble. It's a very dull game when there's no money to win, though, so the Famicom games based on the phenomenon were not quite as popular. At least, that's what I'd like to report. In fact, there were so goddamn many of these Pachio-kun games - based on a sapient pachinko ball that had the odd and creepy compulsion to collect as many of its inanimate brethren as possible - that I wouldn't be surprised to hear the announcement of a new one for the Switch.

  • I was playing Arika's Everblue 2 when I added this one and was struck by the similarity of this salvaging sim. For whatever reason you play as a buxom, scantily-clad salvage diver exploring the Titanic's wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean at the behest of mysterious sponsors who pay for each excursion. As you all know, a bathing suit is perfectly adequate for the mild and tepid waters of the north Atlantic, and the lack of pressure at its lowest depths means you can get away with just an oxygen tank and some snorkeling gear. I'm not saying Cameron's movie necessarily made any more sense, but...

  • Nazoler Land was a series of "puzzle magazine" disks from SunSoft featuring various mini-games and other odd mis... all right, so you're all more interested in that super racially-sensitive box art. I don't know what to even tell you. As far as I know, that guy doesn't even appear in any of the mini-games on this second compilation. I was actually a little apprehensive about adding this to the wiki, even. The things I've done to ensure we have a full library of Famicom Disk System games...