Supertember: Week 3

We're back again with the third week of SNES highlights, including some pretty esoteric stuff from such obscure wallflowers as, uh, Capcom, Konami, and Hudson Soft. My original intent with this series—which you can learn more about by perusing the first and second parts by clicking where the text went all orange for a sec—was to fill in a few more blanks in my 16-bit Nintendo consciouSNESs but also to make this eventual Top 100 one that felt far more all-encompassing than those that primarily stick to what was available in North America and Europe, only... you know... absent any sports or racing games because I don't really care for those. Fully comprehensive, that's what we're aiming for here.

By pulling out all the stops I was able to play through four games this time, rather than the duos we've been seeing so far, and I had a great time with this batch due to some known quantities and welcome surprises alike. As I probably should have been saying all along, my thanks go out to the tireless fan translators working to bring every Super Famicom game of note from out behind the language barrier, as well as the RetroAchievements crowd for enhancing these playthroughs (mostly) and for giving me a little direction here and there when it was sorely needed. But enough talk about my little direction, we've got SNES games to deep dive into:

Mega Man X (Capcom, 1993)

It's one of the most beloved games on the platform and even found an honored position in the SNES Classic Mini line-up and yet I somehow never found my way to the first Mega Man X game until this month. I couldn't give you any concrete reasons why, as someone who had already played at least eight of the "core" series and several spin-offs (Mega Man Legends Legacy Collection doko?), but I've heard one Jeff "Forever a Threat" Gerstmann talk about how the vibes of the new narrative canon always put him off, like they were a little too tryhard with the cool and edgy tone (I am paraphrasing quite considerably here, please note) and I suspect I felt something similar at the time. In some ways I get what they're going for here: instead of riffing on the shounen anime of the '50s/'60s such as Astro Boy, inarguably the biggest influence on Mega Man's creation, where every episode had the hero swoop in and save the day and send the same group of villains packing as they swear to have their vengeance by this time next week, '90s shounen stories tended to involve more anti-hero characters, morally gray scenarios, more in the way of serial narratives, bigger stakes, more emotional depth, and a certain stylized coolness, usually by way of pointy hair and unnecessary fashion statements. Maybe Capcom felt Mega Man required some sort of makeover for his SNES debut with the later Mega Man 7 being something of a Final Fantasy IX-esque throwback for long-time fans, creating a Classic Coke and New Coke type of dynamic. At any rate, my only exposure to the X canon is through a PS2 RPG called Command Mission, so I was already vaguely aware about Zero and Reploids and Mavericks, though it's been enlightening to get in the ground floor here where it all started.

The biggest change to Mega Man X on a mechanical level is X's ability to wall-jump. Not only does this add some welcome QoL aspects to the platforming, like falling into a pit but quickly jumping back out before you hit the spikes at the bottom, but it also factors heavily into many of the game's boss fights, for as cowardly as it may seem to immediately retreat to the top corner of a room like a trapped moth until you have a handle on the current boss's patterns. X has also retained his predecessor's charge shot but appears to have lost his slide, at least for now. The boss weapon system returns as does the core gameplay conceit of being able to choose whichever stage and boss order you like (or, more likely, so you can switch targets if one proves too much that you can come back to defeat later once you've obtained their weakness from some other guy) but MMX also has a slight exploraction affectation in how you can acquire upgrades that in turn open the way to others found in different stages, returning to these boss-free areas to grab some extra firepower once you're finally able to do so. The E-Tank system has also been reworked slightly where they become permanently part of your inventory upon collection but you still have to "feed" them health pick-ups to recharge them between uses (health pick-ups only count towards these sub-tanks when your health is full, otherwise they'll just heal you). It obviates the need to go around farming E-Tanks while still needing some amount of farming to refill them again, which at least can be done passively as you playing, but I think I prefer this system since grabbing nine E-Tanks before entering the next boss door did tend to make the earlier games a bit easier.

As for the story, we get some exposition by way of an opening crawl about how Dr. Light's final invention, the upgraded Mega Man X, required some time in the cooler because his advanced AI was a potential threat to the world if it was allowed to be corrupted, causing X to spend three decades underground until he emerged into a world of similarly sapient robots named Reploids with their own intelligence and free will. Though underpowered after 30 years of being left on the shelf, X still has his predecessor's modular upgrade ability and can improve himself with boss technology and nodes left behind by Dr. Light that are scattered around the world. The in-game story doesn't quite get into how he ended up joining a fellow advanced model, Zero, in fighting evil Reploids named Mavericks led by a former mentor, Sigma, though we quickly catch up with the basic outline during the game's introductory mission where X falls afoul of a powerful enemy named Vile.

Anyway, Mega Man X is pretty great. The wall-jumping and an eventual dash move you can pick up makes the game feel contemporary to play, like a modern exploraction game after finding a few upgrades, and the music is absolutely stellar. I guess the soundtrack has been talked about to death, as I'm sure OCR has an entire library dedicated to MMX remixes just next door to the one they have for Donkey Kong Country, but the music in Armored Armadillo's stage and Spark Mandrill's stage is fantastic stuff. The original Mega Man series had great music too, of course, which is why it was important that it remained a factor here as well—it'd be like an Ys game coming out with a subpar score, perish the thought—but I've already mentioned that as a little side-project I've been tracking the best SNES OSTs and this absolutely deserves to be on there. Whether I'll get to the other X games on SNES and see what their music is like is another matter, though (I've a lot on my slate here).

I did take a brief gander at its achievement set but... well, as you might imagine given the series, it's a pretty intense bunch of goals for the pretty intense type of person looking to master the most famous "Nintendo Hard" series. The big ones are for completing the game without dying (yeah, right), completing the game without any of the health or optional suit upgrades, completing it without switching weapons from the default X-Buster, and individual achievements for defeating each boss without getting hit. Now, the last of those could be done with enough practice but it would mean a lot of playing through their stages over and over: you can farm lives on a specific stage but that still leaves you with a firm limit of chances where you have to pray that some stray bullet doesn't wing you while fighting in those claustrophobic arenas so you don't have to navigate their whole zone again. I didn't really have the patience for any of that but I did eventually beat the game normally after taking down the exhausting three-phase final boss gauntlet so I figure that's enough of an achievement for now. Sometimes I think RA was explicitly set up for the sake of MM and DKC fans willing to torture themselves with the most physically and mentally (and psychologically) taxing assignments.

Does It Make the List? Yes. Not quite top 20 but very close.

Ihatovo Monogatari (Hect, 1993)

This is a game I'd had my eye on for a while, as far back as when I was working on the Super Famicom library's many wiki pages, but it was only while researching for this series that I realized someone had finally created a translation patch for it. Ihatovo Monogatari, or Stories of Ihatovo, is a top-down adventure game—notice I didn't say "action-adventure", like A Link to the Past or Illusion of Gaia or Marvelous—that has a nameless itinerant arrive in the titular rural city as the latest stop on an aimless train journey. This traveler decides to stick around to meet the famous local poet and storyteller Kenji Miyazawa, who frequently works in the town's farming association center, but when it's revealed that the author is on a long journey the protagonist instead decides to collect the seven missing journals of this renowned scholar as a means of passing the time in Ihatovo while awaiting his return.

It might not surprise you to learn that Kenji Miyazawa is a real person (or was; he died in 1933 of pnemuonia at the very young age of 37) who created a lot of stories that tended to involve animal characters and morals at their conclusion, not dissimilar to Aesop's fables. Ihatovo itself is his own creation, a quiet yet semi-magical place of endless potential based roughly on his pastoral home prefecture of Iwate, and the events you encounter while scrounging up these journals are based on his own stories. In effect, this is the biopic equivalent of a video game; something I could totally see Japanese schoolchildren being required to play as a means of engaging with the subject in a more agreeable medium than poring over poetry books. Several publications of his, summarized in this game, include Night on the Galactic Railroad, Gauche the Cellist, and The Life of Budori Gusuko (Bud Gusko): all of which have also been adapted into anime movies.

Ihatovo Monogatari is really an exception among exceptions. The SNES did not see a whole lot of what I'd call "pure" Japanese adventure games, beyond some up-rezzed ports of Famicom Tantei Club and Metal Slader Glory, and fewer still of those went as far as creating an entire urban environment to freely walk around in where you could talk to various NPCs in their homes and on the streets for the latest gossip. The game has a bunch of recurring characters that might lend a useful hint as to where to go or what to do next, including a network of cat information brokers, the well-connected local Town Hall rep Leo Nochst, Miyazawa's gifted associates at the farming society building, a poet living in the south end of the town who is familiar with the folklore of the region, and the eccentric scientist Dr. Budoh of the local agricultural school. There's also a couple of sapient signal posts right next to the train station where you start the game, Signalou and Signalette, and their love story is one that slowly and painstakingly develops as the game progresses (he's too timid to strike up a conversation and she's too self-effacing to think she has a chance, due to being an earlier model—it reminded me a bit of the mannequins from Dandadan). You can keep revisiting these characters as the game moves from chapter to chapter—you're locked out of any location if it's not part of the current chapter, but Ihatovo itself is always open—and it's sort of like how the Trails series of RPGs keeps giving its townspeople NPCs new dialogue after every major event to make them seem more real, as they respond dynamically to the latest news. For as low-key as this game is—and I have to reiterate that there's no challenge or combat or much in the way of puzzles at all, beyond figuring out who to talk to next and some light inventory stuff—there are some impressive, before-its-time ideas being implemented upon here.

Visually the game resembles Illusion of Gaia, or perhaps the first two Suikoden games, in that despite the Zelda-style angled perspective the characters are all rendered with realistic proportions. It's far less cartoony than others on the system, and its muted colors reflect the idyllic landscape and the fashions of the Taisho era (the 1910s and 1920s, roughly) while still having vivid splashes here and there for the game's more surreal characters, like the vengeful God of the Earth, the sly kitsune, or the industrious elephants. The music's great too: it's some very subdued orchestral stuff, fitting for the subject matter in that it nails the sort of bittersweet, nostalgic feeling that became associated with Miyazawa's works. There's some wild narrative logic here and there perhaps owing to the era and to how a lot of classic children's literature tend to have some grim severity attached to them: there's a fox that gets itself murdered for being pretentious and faking how worldly he is, and the story kinda implies he had it coming for lying so often; there's a rich guy who tries to profit from essentially enslaving a friendly elephant, causing his elephant friends to destroy his house and trample him to death in what feels like a disproportionate punishment (the elephant was almost worked to an early demise, though); a scientist decides to throw explosives in a volcano to release a whole bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere as a last-ditch attempt to increase the regional temperature before another famine occurs; and so on. These stories were always interesting though; not so much in the sense that they're twisty and unpredictable but in the nature of the messages they intended to convey.

I will say Ihatovo Monogatari requires a degree of patience from its player because it is a very slow-moving game both figuratively and literally speaking. There's no fast travel and the protagonist's default walking speed can only be described as leisurely (he's always carrying his briefcase around too, which probably slows him down) so it usually takes a few minutes to do the rounds across Ihatovo whenever a new chapter starts and you need to find the starting point of whatever new thread has emerged: for each chapter you'll typically be allowed to explore Ihatovo and a secondary location, the latter only accessible once you've talked to the NPC that tells you how to get there. At that point, you have just those two locations to explore to find the narrative breadcrumb trail and follow it to its conclusion to wrap up that chapter of the game. The smaller amount of real estate to scour does mean that you won't be lost for long in most cases, and even the unnamed NPCs in Ihatovo might have some surprisingly revealing information for you if you ask around, but like I said this is all a pretty slow process and it's not like you're going to be doing much else. Ihatovo's developers Hect are primarily known for their exceptionally dry mahjong, go, shogi, and horseracing sims so this feels both like a wild departure for them and something entirely in their no-frills wheelhouse. Ultimately, I found this game pretty charming and distinctive but it's certainly not going to be for everyone.

Does It Make the List? For sure. Probably somewhere in the middle.

Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokubei no Karakuri Manjigatame (Konami, 1994)

You know that annoying thing prequel movies do where they have to give every little thing a backstory? Like a thing can't just exist without some history behind it? Well, that's not quite how I'm experiencing Konami's largely unlocalized Ganbare Goemon series by going back to all the SFC games we were denied—these are preceding games, not prequels, an important distinction—but I am getting that vague sense that the N64 Mystical Ninja game, which was such a revelation at the time due to its cask-strength Japanese absurdism, actually has a pretty well-defined throughline between it and the very first SNES Mystical Ninja (i.e., the only one we westerners got to see). When I played Ganbare Goemon 2 a few months back for this year's May feature focusing on fan translations I understood how Sasuke became a playable character and what the whole deal was with Impact, Goemon's castle-sized mecha doppelganger. What few questions remained about how we got from SNES Mystical Ninja to N64 Mystical Ninja include the following: When did Yae become playable? Why does she turn into a mermaid? When did Ebisumaru learn how to shrink? And when exactly did this series start taking after The Legend of Zelda in a big way, complete with an interconnected overworld and dungeons with their own map and compass equivalents? Well, that's all answered here in GG3.

Shishi Juurokubei no Karakuri Manjigatame, which apparently translates to "The Mecha Leg-Hold of Juurokubei Shishi", sees Goemon and pals traveling to the future after the genius inventor known only as the Old Man creates a time machine for... well, I guess boiled down to its essence it's because future women are the only ones left that don't have restraining orders out on him. He gets captured by a distant descendant of Ebisumaru, a French nun called Sister Bismaru who otherwise looks identical, and is forced to create a robot army with which she intends to conquer the past, present, and future. It's only once you've dealt with her invading vanguard that you're able to use Impact to travel forward in time to Neo Oedo to foil her plans at their root, along with those of her mysterious red-maned benefactor Juurokubei Shishi. Beyond that it's a familiar batch of anachronistic jokes, bizarre side-characters, and that trademark mix of top-down adventure gaming and side-scrolling action levels.

What's remarkable about Ganbare Goemon 3 is that they've really leaned into a Zelda style approach when you finally reach the future. It comes as a shock since the first act of the game is fairly typical Goemon, moving from town to town with action stages in-between, but once you're in Neo Oedo there's a wide open world that you unlock piece by piece through acquiring upgrades for Goemon and his team, typically leading to a series of dungeons you must conquer for a set of engraved tablets that open the way to Juurokubei's HQ. The Mode 7 overworld map is a dead giveaway as to where their aspirations lie. Likewise, the dungeons have an item that gives you the layout of the place you're in (usually handed out early on so you don't get too lost) along with an item that points you in the direction of the boss. All the future dungeons have keycards too, similar to how in Ocarina of Time it's only the Adult Link dungeons that have keys to worry about, and the map helpfully shows you where they are. Perhaps most flagrant are the maneki neko figures that give you exactly one quarter of a new heart on your health gauge, allowing you to upgrade from the starting five to an eventual 20.

Zelda's not the only stylistic parodies this game is peddling in though: the game introduces mecha walkers that you can roam around in, capable of breaking down certain barriers that otherwise impede progress, and can be upgraded later on with new hot/cold weaponry and thus new avenues to unlock. These mecha also have a not entirely subtle resemblance to the Magitek armor from Final Fantasy VI (released a few months prior, in April, and probably on everyone's minds when they were developing this) and it even does the iconic "marching along the Z-Axis" shot, only instead you're running in the opposite direction as a giant enemy mech tries to stomp you. Naturally, our buddy Impact also makes a return here, along with some prototypical Impact action stages followed by the usual first-person cockpit view boss fights. It's a very mech-friendly edition of Ganbare Goemon, I'm only guessing because the devs had a lot of fun with the Impact fights in the previous game and wanted to expand on that genre style a bit more.

The game's quirkiness also extends to its game mechanics and level design, and not always necessarily in a positive way. For one, the boss challenge curve is completely screwed up; the first few are painfully easy if you just use your charged up coin tosses, and then you get to a tricky daruma-looking dude who plays red light/green light with you a little while that requires some real dexterous evasion to avoid his bouncing around. The Impact fights were far less of an issue this time than they were in the second game, barring perhaps the final boss, and while health drops are pretty rare having the full twenty hearts gives you plenty of room for error: almost every enemy attack in the game will only cost you half a heart in damage. Fighting in the ridepod mechs can be a pain because they're slow and their secondary attacks have quite the gap between where it fires and where you're standing that smaller foes can easily slip into. Last, the dungeon design is kind of all over the place: the third, fifth and seventh dungeons are all quite long and convoluted, though easier to navigate once you've found Mr. Elephant (i.e. the map), while the sixth and eighth are just a handful of rooms with a boss at the end. The game seems to give up at one point in the way it hands over the last three of the tablets you're meant to find by having all of them be the reward for one of those NPC item trading quests that Zelda started trucking with around this time.

Many of these anticlimactic moments could be attributed to the game's subversive humor, of course, but it feels more like this game turned out to be far more ambitious a project than Konami was prepared for and they were forced to cut a few corners here and there. Either way, it's not a huge detriment and, really, I think it's pretty impressive to take a Goemon game and then bolt half an entire Zelda game onto it. That's not even taking into account the number of different game modes they're juggling here: top-down action-adventure, 2D platformer, first-person shooter/boxer (or whatever Impact Mode is), and some Mode 7 sequences (sadly, there's no Konami arcade shoot 'em up moonlighting as a vendor mini-game this time). Less said about the RA set the better, though they do serve a helpful "what can I unlock now?" hint system role. Just... man, if I encounter a set without any of those egregious "no-damage boss" clear types it's a red letter day; there's a fight against a floating treasure ship that's absolutely diabolical to do damageless. All that said, this game is an amazing lost gem for the system and if you enjoyed the Zeldalike structure of Goemon's N64 debut (which actually preceded Ocarina of Time) this is worth playing to see the origin of that theft homage no, wait, theft should be fine to say; that's kind of Goemon's whole deal after all.

Does It Make the List? Absolutely. Top 20 for sure, I just have to figure out if it beats its two antecedents.

Undake30 Same Game Daisakusen: Mario Version (Hudson Soft, 1995)

Not much to report here, I noticed that there was an official Mario puzzle game on the system that wasn't Dr. Mario or Yoshi's Cookie and thought I'd give it a look. Hudson apparently worked with Nintendo to make this limited edition version of a puzzle game they'd go on to release a little later, with more features and less Mario accoutrements. If you're not familiar with SameGame it's been called other things, like Chain Shot and Clickomania, and basically entails removing an entire grid of icons by clicking on groupings of two or more to eliminate them. The goal is to clear the field: that means not leaving behind any solo-dolos as you're not allowed to remove those and they'll be counted against your final score once you've run out of legal moves to make. The temptation is always to group as many of the same type of icon—for this game that includes super mushrooms, fire flowers, coins, Yoshi eggs, and Mario's face—together as possible for a higher score, but it really requires you to focus and try to predict the cause and effect of your actions several steps ahead so you don't mess up and get stuck with stragglers. It's deceptively difficult to do well, and harder still to completely wipe the grid clean.

In other words, it's not the kind of puzzle game I'm going to have the patience or foresight to hack away at for more than an hour before I get too annoyed by it. To its credit, it does let you undo your last move as often as you want in case you feel like the current level is solvable (like with several Solitaire variants, I don't think there are any guarantees) and want to take another crack at it from a different branching point, and though it has that general cheap feel that a lot of third-party Mario spin-offs had around this time it's still a competent product for what it is. Hudson and Nintendo would of course collaborate many more times in the future, particularly with the Mario Party series, so I guess you could consider this some manner of equally frustrating and arbitrary predecessor to Giant Bomb's favorite multiplayer series. It ain't terrible but it's probably on the lower end of the scale if you were scrounging together every game that featured the world's most famous Brooklynite in order to rank them. (And, since I know someone who has actually done that, I can just about confirm that Dan Ryckert did not include Undake30 Same Game Daisakusen: Mario Version on his list. It is now null and void. Sorry, I don't make the rules.)

Does It Make the List? Nah.

Current List Status: 88 Entries (+10 Emergency Reserves)