Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

Goemon is clinging onto that 1997 release date for dear life: it gets plenty of points just for implementing a serviceable 3D Zelda template before Ocarina of Time dropped. Even extending the timeline out to the end of the fifth generation, it’s rare to see games on these consoles attempt a relatively explorable world. Of course, what qualifies as a “vast” depiction of feudal Japan here (lovingly depicted by the map screen) ends up being extremely large, box-y rooms peppered with weak enemies and occasional flora. Konami’s design here fluctuates between purely functional point-A-to-point-B shuffling and attempts to capture the essence of grand vistas, if not its contents. Where the barren mountainsides and fields lack character, the towns make up for it, featuring denser landmarks and humorous NPCs. This works in Goemon’s favor as well, as the relaxed pace and silliness, punctuated by compressed canned laughter, keep the landscapes from having to summon wonder when they’re unable to do so; it’s merely a bonus when they add substance to the gaps in the humor. Some of these arise from unlikely places: at the end of the Festival Temple Castle, a pole of massive koinobori – fish-shaped windsocks – sits in front of a waterfall, dwarfing Goemon and his friends by multiple orders of magnitude. The experience of climbing up the koinobori, rotating stiffly around the pole, looms large with its vertical scale, making one feel minuscule in the face of it.

The other dungeons hesitate to play with this; the final dungeon, ostensibly located in outer space, scarcely looks different than the first couple, restricted to ornate wooden rooms littered with traps. The early game stumbles like many other Zelda copycats by laying out the challenges scarcely more than room-by-room, locking the player in a tight area and making them find the key to progress to the next one. When you obtain the compass-style item, which indicates the boss’s location on your map, it begs the question of who could possibly miss a big door at the end of a giant winding hallway. The middle dungeons give much more leeway to the designers to move beyond these half-hearted layouts. The third – the aforementioned Festival Temple Castle – is actually three separate temples connected by outer courtyards. Some locks bar completely free progression here, but the temples densely wrap inside themselves, often inviting the player to traverse them in multiple distinct ways and discover completely optional character upgrades and weapons. The fourth, the Gourmet Submarine, is just that: a giant submarine filled with foodstuff platforms. Multiple layers, shown in escalating fashion through a transparent elevator at the start, intertwine in an oval-grid hybrid layout, with no particular critical path once you stumble upon a few keys.¹ Unconcerned with the reflexive item discovery/upgrade loop from Link’s Awakening, these dungeons instead opt for free exploration and frequent one-off obstacles or minigames.

There’s actually a reasonable amount of backtracking between dungeons, with overworld events evolving the further you progress through the game. Luckily, there’s a fortune teller known as Plasma Man to keep you on-track, accompanied by garbled screams of his name. [src]

Focusing on the latter helps smooth out serviceable platforming gameplay, another place where Goemon desperately wants to remind the player of its 1997 release date. The fact that Goemon plays at all like a normal modern platformer, sans adjustable camera, is impressive, especially given the size of the areas and the inclusion of obstacles that dynamically rotate, contract, and expand. Basically no game other than Mario 64 had accomplished this by mid-1997, a few months before the release of both Croc and Crash 2. Unlike Mario 64, however, Goemon has nothing to lean on besides a single jump action. Goemon and his friends (who the player can freely switch between) have abilities that do little other than solve particular challenges, whether it be Ebisumaru shrinking to squeeze through gaps or Yae’s mermaid transformation for swimming. Late in the game Goemon gains his “Sudden Impact” ability (which gives him super saiyan-esque yellow spiked hair), but it exists only to push nondescript metal blocks, perhaps missing the point of such an upgrade.² His hookshot, however, has more life to it, but only in the sense that it seemingly deals as much damage as any other weapon while also working from range. The other characters each take up at least one weapon slot on a basic melee weapon, and their other options lack this panache. Ebisumaru has a camera with a flash on a timer, opening up a brief opportunity for a proto-Luigi’s Mansion ghost discovery setpiece before degrading to a mere Lens of Truth for a handful of other rooms (with its necessity made explicit to the player, no less). Only Sasuke, the robot ninja, gets a high-jump rocket launch ability late in the adventure, but the game loudly buzzes if you attempt to use it in any context outside of standing idle.