All-New Saturday Summaries 2017-04-22

Hey peeps, we all made it to the weekend again. Hooray for us. The video gaming internet's been buzzing about the advent of an upcoming "SNES Mini" and the games they'd like to see on it (or fully expect will be on it), and as this site's resident SNES expert I've been ratiocinating on what my own take should look like. I realize, though, that I probably write about the SNES and Super Famicom far too much already, considering the last time was just a couple of weeks ago with that SNES 1996 round-up. Between the various "Super '9X" wiki project reports and this alphabetical list of remarkable SNES games from a while back, I'd probably be repeating myself more than is healthy.

Hello, old friend. Weird to see you in the news so much of late.

However, I would like to suggest a few games in particular that presently sit behind the Japanese language barrier that Nintendo could, in a perfect world, use the SNES Mini as an excuse to finally localize. A large proportion of worthwhile SFC games have been fan translated by now, many by Aeon Genesis, but I'd like Nintendo itself to take a more proactive stance on localizing the games that never made it across the Pacific Ocean and give those deliberating the purchase of a SNES Mini (which will be a harder sell after the artificial scarcity nonsense they pulled with the NES Classic) a few games they won't have seen before to sweeten the pot. That way, they'd be netting more than just the nostalgic 30-somethings looking to play Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart with their kids - if they dropped an exclusive (or timed exclusive, with a Switch/3DS Virtual Console port to come later) first localization of a legendary SFC game? That'd be huge for the more collector savvy market.

Here's just ten possible candidates for this treatment. Keep in mind that I absolutely don't expect any of these games to find their way onto the North American/European SNES Mini, just that they would be that much more of a value add than getting the same SNES favorites we've seen on Virtual Console for several console generations now.

I hear that a looooot of people like this series.

1. Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu: An easy first pick. Nintendo's subsidiary Intelligent Systems has been making Fire Emblem games since the NES era, but it's only with Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken (a.k.a. The Blazing Blade, the second GBA Fire Emblem) that they started localizing them worldwide. Now that it's a huge hit for Nintendo, I could see them surreptitiously adding Seisen no Keifu (a.k.a. Genealogy of the Holy War) onto the SNES Mini for FE fans. Seisen no Keifu is where the series originated the generational time skip that people loved so much in FE: Awakening, making it the clear choice of the three SFC Fire Emblem games. (Monshou no Nazo, the other big SFC contender, saw a DS remaster semi-recently that Nintendo might be better off bringing across directly somehow.)
2. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima: This adventure game was directed by Eiji Aonuma, the project lead for many recent Zelda games, and is to some extent based on A Link to the Past with regards to its iconic top-down look and emphasis on environmental puzzles. However, it's less the action game that Zelda is; instead, you're using a trio of Boy Scouts to solve various puzzles together or independently. It was an inventive game put out by Nintendo itself that could use a new lease of life, especially given Aonuma's high profile these days. Dude was everywhere when Breath of the Wild was getting promoted.
3. Sutte Hakkun: Sutte Hakkun's a breezy puzzle game that stars a translucent drinking bird toy that can draw out and redistribute fluids to make itself or objects in the environment more substantial. It's a game that Nintendo themselves developed and published late in the SFC's lifespan, and the sort of easy-to-pick-up, tricky-to-master puzzle game that would make a good fit for a portable miniature SNES. Think of it as occupying a similar slot as HAL's popular BOXBOY! or Pushmo series: a Nintendo homegrown puzzle game oozing with charm and clever ideas.
4. Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun McGuinness: Konami's The Legend of Mystical Ninja is one of the SNES's unspoken champions. However, it was merely the first of five Goemon games to be released on Nintendo's 16-bit platform. The second makes some significant introductions to the series: Impact, the enormous robot with his own theme song that - for us - made an incredible debut in the N64 game Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon and the promotion of Sasuke, the robotic ninja boss from the first game, to the role of third protagonist. Konami's not the easiest company to work with these days, and Goemon's a hard series to localize at the best of times given its basis in Japanese historical folklore and a distinctly Japanese sense of humor, but there's no harm hoping for more Goemon. I can imagine the surprised reactions if they bundle this with the first game on the SNES Mini.
5. Seiken Densetsu 3: I'll be good and limit myself to just one JRPG from Squaresoft's massive library of unlocalized 16-bit games. Seiken Densetsu 3 would be a natural accompaniment to Secret of Mana should the latter be included, and while it looks similar enough it actually feels completely different due to a selectable protagonist system that changes the game's story depending on who you pick. In addition, it's one of the best looking games on the system and a perfect showcase of what the SNES could do at its peak.
6. Shin Megami Tensei: If Nintendo's looking to attract an audience of Atlus fans with this console, and I'm sure that's at least the fifth or sixth biggest audience that they have in mind, then they might try convincing Atlus to drop one of the Shin Megami Tensei games on the SNES Mini. The series began a little earlier on home computers, but Shin Megami Tensei is where the series really took off in a big way and now every successive game has "Shin Megami Tensei" somewhere in its title. With both Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 and the expanded Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse hitting the US fairly recently, it'd be a great time to show recent MegaTen converts how it all started.
7. Clock Tower: The status of Human Entertainment's IPs are something of a mystery to me: the company folded with its members scattering to the four winds, rather than merging with any other major developer. Of their many innovative SNES games, which included the likes of the Super Fire Pro Wrestling series, the shipwreck survival game SOS/Septentrion and the better-than-it-sounds action firefighter top-down action game The Firemen, the most historically important of the bunch is Clock Tower: thought to be the first survival horror game as we understand the genre (Sweet Home, War of the Dead and Laplace no Ma are other candidates, but they're more horror-themed RPGs). As the protagonist Jennifer, who looks uncannily like Jennifer Connelly from the 1985 movie Phenomena, you cannot hope to out-fight the disfigured murderer on your tail, but you can outrun and hide from them. It set the mold for the Clock Tower games to come, as well as an inestimable number of imitators.
8. Jaki Crush: Jaki Crush is sort of the "lost" game in Compile's highly regarded Crush/Crash pinball series, having been a Super Famicom exclusive. It'd be a great excuse to introduce not only a game that is a missing chapter in a well-loved series, but can be part of this hypothetical SNES Mini's range of "pick up and play" style games that would be ideal for smaller sessions. The SNES Mini might well live or die on how many accessible, shorter games are on the device for those looking for more disposable nostalgia.
9. Mario no Super Picross: The SFC Mario Picross game would be another perfect casual game for the audience that wants something a little more approachable than the many more time- or concentration-demanding games from the 16-bit age. As an evergreen puzzle game format, you really can't go wrong offering folk more picross to play, especially if it's Nintendo focused. Nintendo wouldn't even have to do much here: the game was professionally localized for Virtual Console a few years back, though this version only seemed to come out in Europe. They might also considering translating some of the "episodes" of the digitally-distributed Picross NP series, each of which was based around a major Nintendo property.
10. Tetris Battle Gaiden: I guess this goes without saying on this site, huh? C'mon Nintendo. Give the people the competitive Tetris game they really want.

All right, I've done my due diligence in getting unreasonably excited for the SNES Mini with some pie-in-the-sky prognostications. Time to come back down to Earth with this week's blogging content:

Another PS2 game I've neglected to get around to. Dang ol' Top Shelf, giving me all this wonderful homework.

• The Top Shelf reminded me of a number of games I've been meaning to revisit for a long while, including the horrifically difficult Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer's Call (fair to say that series has been on my mind a lot recently) and the thoroughly strange Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. I wasn't planning on revisiting many JRPGs when I start on the second round of this feature in the Summer because I didn't think I could spare them the time and still complete the feature before 2017 ends, but I suppose I could always play them for a few hours for the sake of a write up and then keep on trucking through them in secret. This week also reminded me that I should probably track down a copy of that Wii version of Project Zero 2. Like I don't have enough of a backlog already.
• Speaking of backlogs, I've one fewer Indie game on there thanks to Indie Game of the Week, which this time saw us take a walk down dismembery lane with DrinkBox's Severed. My expectations weren't high after the flawed Guacamelee!, but I gotta say that Severed really impressed me. Being as touch-control focused as it is, it probably didn't get the recognition that it deserved as a Vita exclusive until relatively recently. Then again, the Vita or 3DS is easily the best home for the type of game it is. Worth looking into if you own a system that supports it.

NB: Since I was "between games" this week, polishing off the likes of Yooka-Laylee and No Man's Sky so I could cleanse the palette for something new this weekend, there's no game-specific segment for this edition of Saturday Summaries. No worries, as this temporary content deficiency will be rectified by the usual blogging insanity of May. More on what that whole business will involve in next week's Saturday Summaries. Thanks for stopping by!