Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

It's quite sad the Mystical Ninja franchise did not get as much traction in the west, but I guess it was to be expected when you consider it's heavily based around its country of origin. This insanely quirky Japanese franchise only had a handful of releases in North America, the first being "The Legend of the Mystical Ninja", a 2D action platformer on the Super Nintendo. Despite having its niche fanbase, none of the other various sequels would see release on the Super Nintendo, so it was quite a surprise to see this N64 entry make it over seas, although I would imagine Nintendo was itching to have anything published considering the N64's low output of titles around this time compared to the Playstation. The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is unapologetically Japanese in presentation and that is the main attraction of this title. The game, despite its low graphical fidelity, is held up very well by its art direction. Characters and locales are very colorful and stand out amongst other titles of the era, even if detail is particularly lacking. Tons of references to Japanese pop culture, history, and various other Japanese media is prevalent in the franchise with tons of quirky humor to make the experience all the more unique and enjoyable. Although the localization, while a bit more faithful than the Super Nintendo's entry which not only changed the names of the main protagonists but also edited various foods in the game to western themed fast food such as pizza and hamburgers, a lot of jokes that would have worked in Japanese have a tendency of falling completely flat to westerners; this may or may not be a determining factor if the awkwardness of the localizations make the overall experience better or worse, I happen to find it endearing. This series, particularly the N64 entries, has some of the best video game music I've had the pleasure of hearing out of my television, especially when you consider the limitations of the N64 audio hardware, I'd argue these games had some of the best music on the console, period. All in all, the overall presentation for this game is great, but unfortunately I now have to talk about the gameplay. It's not bad per se, but definitely not really exciting either. 'Serviceable' would be a good word for it. It mixes in Super Mario 64 collect-a-thon progression and platforming with Zelda open world and dungeon level design and it....kinda works? My biggest issue is aside from a sometimes annoying camera (typical of the era), the game never really does the mario platforming or the zelda like gameplay design particularly well. Level design more often than not is a complete bore had it not been for the very colorful world and the characters and enemies that reside in it. The game also tries to expand gameplay further with the addition of extra characters to switch between with various upgrades to find and even mech boss battles to partake in, but it only manages to help break the mundanity of the level design ever so slightly. For what it's worth, The Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is a decent game that deserves credit where it's due, but it's definitely a flawed experience only carried by the quirkiness of world and presentation, otherwise you'd have a pretty boring action platformer under the hood here.

An ambitious, quirky and very Japanese adventure. It's Zelda-like, yet predates Ocarina of Time. The pacing and level design feels a little haphazard after the midpoint.