Re-release this: Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Jūrokubē's Mechanical Manji Hold

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES was a hybrid 2D platformer and free-roaming beat ‘em up, overflowing with personality and weirdness. Not “weird” because wow look how Japanese this is, as some critics used to get about this series, but “weird” as in you’re rescuing a princess because a clan of cat ninjas failed to protect her, and you use a pipe as a weapon. And not the kind of pipe used in plumbing, either. It’s one of the best games on the SNES, but despite what Konami’s international release schedule indicated, it wasn’t the lone Mystical Ninja game on the console.

Well, it was the lone SNES release, but in Japan the system was known as the Super Famicom, and Mystical Ninja was Goemon. A sequel arrived in 1993 — five years before the first N64 sequel to Mystical Ninja came out in North America — known as Ganbare Goemon 2: Very Strange General McGuinness. This ditched the hybrid gameplay of the first for a different kind of hybrid play: now instead of having the free-roaming beat ‘em up sections, it opted for more of the platformer stages, introduced a world map to choose levels from, and oh yeah, now you have a mech. The mech battles were fought from a first-person perspective and utilized the system’s Mode 7 tech for faux 3D, and the aforementioned “weird” ramped up. Like, way up.

As I wrote about when covering that game:

Whereas the villages were full of enemies in the original Mystical Ninja, in its sequel, they are safe havens you visit to stock up on items, rest, and learn more about the world. Which is being brought up here because in the sequel to that game, Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Jūrokubē's Mechanical Manji Hold, Konami changes things up again. The villages are safe havens once more, but they’re part of a larger open-world — gone is the world map that lets you select levels from Ganbare Goemon 2, and gone are the idea of explicit stages, replaced instead by locations within a world you must traverse on foot. There are specific stages within this larger area — like an enemy stronghold you must invade — but you get to it like you would in, say, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and its exterior is part of the larger world rather than some separate entity. Golvellius is another comparison point here, as far as action-adventure games go, especially given that Konami doubled down on doing things differently.

The mech battles with Goemon Impact are still here, and there are other new segments, as well, such as one where you ride on mechanical walkers as a team, and have to control both the unit as a whole and individual walkers in order to avoid attacks coming at you from behind in chase sequences. There are isometric RPG sequences, one-on-one fights… classic Konami loved building games that utilized specific strengths and capabilities of the console they were on, and Goemon was no exception to this.

Some of the traits of the Goemon games you were used to are gone here: taking damage no longer shrinks your weapon’s power and range, so you don’t have to concern yourself with finding a ton of weapon upgrades, and shopping is now for single-use protective items rather than an entire stack of armors and such to better protect said weapon upgrades in addition to your health, while you can buy just the one recovery item at a time. All of this deemphasizes combat in comparison to the previous two games, but it’s not as if Konami just left it at that. There’s more focus here on exploration and environmental puzzle-solving, on platforming and secrets, and that’s all accomplished by way of having you choose not just one character to play as, but instead, an entire team of four at once. You can swap between characters at any time, and each has a skill that will make them the only choice for specific sections of the game or puzzles, in addition to having different movement speeds.

Goemon can charge up a coin throw so that the projectile goes through force fields and walls, which lets you reach switches on the other side, and his magic power is basically a rage-boost to his attack power, though it makes him susceptible to additional damage. Ebisumaru’s powered up secondary attack is a shuriken that bounces off of walls, and his magic power lets him shrink to fit into spaces he normally could not. Clockwork ninja Sasuke has returned, and he can throw fireworks that serve as bombs that allow for environmental destruction, opening up some paths you can’t otherwise access, while his magic attack fires off eight fireballs. Then there’s Yae, who, like Sasuke, moves fast and has a bazooka as a secondary attack. That has no special power, but it is a bazooka. Her magic power allows her to turn into a mermaid when underwater, which in the overworld means an ability to swim under bridges in the way and access new areas, and in-stage allows for fast movement and swimming underwater that none of the other characters can do.

In addition, Ganbare Goemon 3 still has multiplayer, with a "mimicry” ability that lets you play as two of the same character instead of everyone fighting over who gets to be Yae or Sasuke when you don’t specifically need Goemon or Ebisumaru’s powers. And don’t worry, Goemon 3 added some weirdness specific to it, while retaining the same kind of offbeat, oddball nature of its predecessor: there’s a laugh track during the cutscenes, for some reason, and the premise of the game is that the Old Man inventor — the guy the walkers and Goemon Impact mech came from — came up with a time machine, tried to use it to go pick up some women, and instead ended up in the future kidnapped by a French nun who looks like Ebisumaru and realized she could force this guy to invent a bunch of weapons for her, which she would then use as an assault force in ancient Edo to conquer it. Don’t worry, you can get yourself to the future — to Neo Edo — by way of Goemon Impact, which is also a time machine, because why wouldn’t it be?

You can’t just ignore NPCs in towns, as they are more than just a source of some additional dialogue or humor. They exist to give you hints as to what’s going on in their neck of the woods, or to point you toward your next goal. There are fortune tellers, too, and they aren’t subtle, but they do cost you some cash. Between this style of village, the various forms of gameplay, and the full cast of distinct characters being available to use, Ganbare Goemon 3 is the one that starts to feel the most like the future Goemon games that would get international releases on the N64. One went so far as to go 3D instead of 2.5D with its gameplay, but, like with Zelda, that switch is easy to see in retrospect as an easy fit for the series.

If there’s a significant problem with Ganbare Goemon 3, it’s that it still, to this day, does not have an official release outside of Japan. Like with Ganbare Goemon 2 — and Ganbare Goemon 4, which is known as Ganbare Goemon The Glittering Journey: The Reason I Became a Dancer rather than Ganbare Goemon 4 and then a subtitle — it remains exclusive to the Super Famicom. Which is a serious problem given the above about not being able to ignore NPCs in towns: you need to know where to go next here, given this is an open-world you’re traversing, and not a stage-by-stage setup where you pick the next destination on a map because it’s next. You also miss out on all the humor — and there is lots of it — and personality that Ganbare Goemon 3 is stuffed with, which is a shame. The gameplay is great of course, but it’s all the rest of the package that makes Goemon Goemon; missing out on it because of a language barrier drops things down in quality by a not-insignificant degree. Untranslated Goemon is still a fine experience because Konami was on one with level design and gameplay, but it will feel less like Goemon. And we should have more things that feel like Goemon out there to experience. (Thanks, Bakeru.)

There are unofficial translations of Ganbare Goemon 3 out there — in English, Dutch, and Spanish — out there at least, but you have to be 1) the kind of person who would emulate games and 2) the kind of person who would emulate games you have to patch with translation mods to either know that or bother to experience it. And there are more people out there who would do both of those things than just me, of course, but Ganbare Goemon 3 deserves a larger audience. One that, say, just owns a Switch or Playstation 4 or 5 or has a Steam account, and can play the newly translated game as part of a collection of classic Goemon titles on any of those platforms in the present.

Given this is Konami we’re talking about, though, the likelihood of this happening is practically nonexistent, and that’s probably giving them too much credit, even. Which is a real shame, since more people out there will simply read about Ganbare Goemon 3 in English rather than get to experience the game itself in that language because of Konami’s tendency to just… not. Sure, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja was a sales failure abroad, and while the two N64 games in the series were relative successes, very little of that had to do with the international market. But still, enough time has passed — and enough people have learned of Goemon games now — that you would think that Konami would have a change of heart and get this out there like they have with other series like Castlevania and Gradius — it’s not as if Gradius was ever an international sensation, and all, and yet those games have come out again and again in this era of games. Alas, that’s not the case for Goemon, so we’re forced to let unofficial translations do what they do best, which is to fill in the gaps that even corporate “preservation” will not.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.