May no Monogatari: Part One (SFC)

It's May again. Right after April, as expected. So what are we doing for the usual May Mayrathon this year? Besides maybe never using "Mayrathon" again? Well, last year (2024) it was May Mightiness: a series wherein I could transparently show off my newish mid-range PC's chops with a bunch of expensive Indies and mid-tier budget games I had zero hope of running on my previous system without it resembling a slideshow of my own vivid slow-motion demise. Prior to that (2023) we had May Magnanimity: this one involved a bunch of Itch.io games I'd picked up in charity bundles I was looking for an excuse to check out (and very nearly brought back again this year after the recent California Wildfire bundle).

This year I'm changing tracks to taking on a few fan-translations I've been meaning to delve into for the longest time. Mostly inspired by some hoopla on my Bluesky timeline about the recently translated Sakura Taisen 2, which I won't be playing (I still have that legal digital copy of the recent reboot to check out first), I've curated a small group of games here that may well have official localized remasters before too long but are, as of writing, brought to us occidental types by talented and motivated fandoms working in unison to ensure more eyes and hands reach their favorite games. Since each entry will focus on a different console, I've also included an addendum section that talks briefly about the translation scene for that system and a few other choices that could've taken that slot.

For referral's sake, here's the full slate for this month:

Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun McGuinness (Konami, 1993)

The first of these is Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun McGuinness or, as its fan translation would have it, Go for It Goemon! 2: The Strange General McGuinness (though it probably would've been localized officially as The Legend of the Mystical Ninja 2). The Mystical Ninja/Ganbare Goemon series is one deeply entrenched in Japanese culture of the late Sengoku era (around 1580)—given it parodies the historical figure Ishikawa Goemon from the same period—as well as a very Japanese sense of humor; as such, it didn't see too many localizations despite being a popular series both for its fans and for Konami as pretty much their mascot platformer equivalent of Mario or Sonic. The first two we did see were 1991's The Legend of the Mystical Ninja / Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyuushutsu Emaki for SNES and 1997's Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon / Ganbare Goemon: Neo Momoyama Bakufu no Odori for N64. However, these were only the fifth and eleventh mainline games in the series: there's plenty that went on in-between including the introduction of Sasuke the robotic ninja as a playable character (he was a boss in the first game) and that of the mighty Goemon Impact, the clockwork mecha that resembles Goemon but for his enormous fixed grin. Both of those introductions happened here, in the second SFC game, so it's been one I've wanted to check out as a fan of the two games that bracket it.

The story is a little similar to the N64 game's, in that a mysterious westerner has appeared to terrorize Japan (the titular McGuinness) and sets anonymous bunny henchmen after Goemon and Ebisumaru after they realize their vacation to Okinawa was a ruse to keep them distracted for a while. Joined by Sasuke, who delivered the message of what McGuinness was up to, the trio chase after the path of destruction left in the General's airship's wake. Curiously, rather than changing all the Japanese architecture to European castles like in the N64 game, everything seems... even more Japanese? There's a castle transformed to celebrate washoku (Japanese cuisine) and another full of Japanese toys like kendama or kokeshi dolls—it becomes evident that McGuinness is a Japanese culture otaku who is maybe taking things a little too far, but taps into the concerns Japanese people had at the time of a powerful foreign nation like the US or UK overwriting all their nation's treasured customs after taking over. Of course, I'm mostly going off what little I remember about Japanese history of this period from video games and the TV show Shogun, both set some several hundred years later, but I suspect the same was true back then as well. There's probably a reason they insisted on an isolation policy for almost 250 years, after all—what this game presupposes is that maybe it's because western anime fans are just that annoying.

The two localized Goemon games I mentioned went for a sort of action-adventure focus where you'd spend just as much time going around towns looking for clues and key items to progress the story as you did platforming around their action levels—GG2, however, leans much more towards the action side with a stage-based overworld format closer to the second N64 game, Goemon's Great Adventure. You can still stop off in towns along the way which offer amenities like saving the game, restoring health, buying armor (preserves your health and weapon level if you get hit) and onigiri (automatically saves you from death, provided it's not a pitfall) at stores, and playing mini-games for extra cash. Occasionally you might need to intuit a secret way out of town via some hidden passage: the game has a few alternative branches you might explore, which could mean giving you a reprieve from a tough stage by providing a detour or simply having more content to enjoy. Otherwise most of the game involves fairly short but tough platforming challenges with your choice of Goemon (all-rounder), Ebisumaru (better offense, weaker jumping), and Sasuke (weaker offense, better jumping) with a significant amount of creativity in the level design. One stage, for instance, has you evading a giant snowball chasing you down a mountain and then riding that same snowball across a lake as it slowly melts and shrinks. Another might have you navigating a wooden bridge that enemies are actively trying to saw apart unless you can stop them in time. Each world concludes with a boss fight and, in the case of the three odd-numbered worlds, a mecha fight with a colossal enemy. These first-person mecha fights play out pretty much the same way as the Impact battles do in the N64 game, complete with a preceding "bonus stage" of rolling over buildings and enemies as Impact to build up extra energy reserves for the boss.

If you've played the original Mystical Ninja you'll probably know how excellently these games control. Each character can jump, crawl, and use both a melee and ranged attack. The ranged attack typically draws from your cash reserves and enemies defeated with it won't drop money, so you are to some extent encouraged to get in close, but the ranged option does make for a compelling alternative especially in boss fights where the boss might decide to hover out of reach for a while. Same's true for the Impact battles as well, in which tossing money is a good way of softening up enemies at a distance and potentially knocking them out of attacks (though the third and last has a nasty habit of reflecting them back at you). While the game is fond of its traps, that Konami visual splendor does help identify problematic parts of the screen by ensuring nothing really blends into the background too much. The fan translation does a fine job retaining as much of the esoteric humor as possible, between fortune tellers who are really phoning it in (nothing like the deeply passionate Plasmaman of the N64 game) to the silly interstitial cutscenes between worlds to the various cameo appearances by other Konami characters like Sparkster, Gillian Seed, a Belmont (he doesn't specify), Winbee (but not Twinbee), and the cast of God Medicine: Fantasy Sekai no Tanjou for Game Boy. Yeah, those guys.

I should just emphasize the game's difficulty. Some of that is due to the large sprites for Goemon and crew, which can lead to taking hits that might seem unavoidable, plus the game's propensity for surprises could have you falling afoul of sudden pitfalls and other traps frequently. That's particularly true of auto-scroller levels that rely on some degree of memorization, like one where you're riding a giant dragon that keeps dipping below the screen (which will kill you if you follow it down) or another where you're stuck on a wooden minecart passing through an underground sawmill. GG2 compensates for this difficulty by offering infinite continues, allowing you to even resume from a mid-stage checkpoint after continuing: the only thing you lose is half the cash you had on you and any health upgrades (provided by golden maneki-nekos) you picked up. I would say the hardest parts of the game were the Impact battles: you need some real accurate timing to deflect those attacks, especially those that charge right at you with their visually ambiguous Mode 7, and you have a limited amount of room for error given your health is constantly ticking down whether you're getting hit or not (Impact doesn't have the most efficient batteries, turns out). Those endless continues therefore make it one of the more palatable games to revisit from this period, since there's very little it forces you to repeat over and over in the manner many of those older games did. And, hey, it remains the only place (as far as I know) where you can play Xexex outside of arcades or the Arcade Archives collection: just know going into that mini-game that the reduced screen real-estate (not just from the SNES's limited resolution but the fact you're playing a game within a game, including a big TV sprite around it) makes it perhaps the hardest version of an already brutal quarter-muncher shoot 'em up.

Anyway, I had a great time with Ganbare Goemon 2 and will be spending the resulting days figuring out where it ranks among all the other fantastic SNES games I've played, but for my next playthrough I might look for something a bit... well, less intense perhaps. I've a few more fan translated beauties picked out for the rest of May, so look forward to hearing about those in short order.

Tsuzuku

If we're talking the fan translation scene on SNES, well, there's a lot out there and has been for quite a while. I sort of suspect for most of us that the first fan translation we ever booted up was for a SFC game: maybe the missing link that was Final Fantasy V before it received some official localizations of its own on PlayStation and GBA; maybe Live a Live or Seiken Densetsu III before they too saw some sterling remakes of late, no doubt partly prompted by the fan translations' popularity (or, at least, the decision to localize them overseas); maybe you were just a big anime otaku and wanted to see a translated version of Ranma ½: Chougi Ranbu Hen, a.k.a. "the good Ranma ½".

The SFC library is vast and rich, especially for JRPG fans, so if I had to narrow it down to just three games I've yet to complete on there (and aren't available elsewhere in some form, like those mentioned above):

• Bahamut Lagoon (Squaresoft, 1996): I always have a bit of a block when it comes to strategy RPGs these days, especially if there's a monster-raising aspect, but it is so far the only SFC Squaresoft RPG I've yet to put any serious time into (besides the SaGa games; no thanks). Bahamut Lagoon has you creating your own army of dragon-riders across a picturesque world of floating islands: SRPG types swear by this one, suggesting it stacks up against the likes of Front Mission and Nintendo's own Fire Emblem.
• Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Koudou (Wolf Team, 1993): An action-RPG with a more streamlined Zelda/Ys aspect to its design, where despite the awkward name Neugier ("Curiosity" in German) it's one that's frequently in the back of my mind whenever I'm selecting another localized SNES game to try out partly because it came from Wolf Team (they behind the prolific "Tales of" games) but mostly because it seems like a short and sweet experience—too often, I get a bit cagey about how long a full SNES RPG playthrough might set me back. (I wonder when it was that time became a more important consideration than price? Oh, probably the point where I realized I was running out of it.)
• Chou Genjin 2 (Red Entertainment, 1995): A pure action game, this would've likely been localized as Super Bonk 2 had it been released overseas. Though prehistoric platformers were a dino-a-dozen back in the 16-bit era, the Bonk games have always managed to balance a certain compellingly inscrutable sense of humor with some well-crafted levels and mechanics, in particular the way its titular protagonist could effectively glide through the air through the centrifugal force generated by swinging his enormous cranium. It's a surreal series that sees a peak here, years after abandoning the aging TurboGrafx platform (where it was meant to be the homegrown star attraction).

Before we're done here, I would be remiss in not plugging my own shit again reminding folks of my SNES-focused "The SNES Classic Mini Mk. II" series written back in 2018 wherein I tried to fantasy-book a hypothetical second mini console's library, largely as an excuse to gab about some of my obscure SNES favorites (well, "obscure" in the sense they didn't make it onto the first mini console) and play some long-standing backlog items. That feature also included reviews for the following fan translations:

• DoReMi Fantasy: Milon no DokiDoki Adventure (Hudson Soft, 1996)
• Gunple: Gunman's Proof (Lenar, 1997)
• Hameln no Violin Hiki (Daft, 1995)
• Holy Umbrella: Dondera no Mubo (Naxat Soft, 1995)
• Magical Pop'n (Polestar, 1995)
• Majyuuou (Nihon Soft, 1995)
• Mario's Super Picross (Jupiter, 1995)
• Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (Nintendo, 1996)
• Monstania (Bits Lab, 1996)
• Sanrio World Smash Ball! (Tomcat System, 1993)
• Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun: Kunio-tachi no Banka [a.k.a. River City Girls 0] (Almanic, 1994)
• Super Back to the Future Part II (Daft, 1993)
• Super Gussun Oyoyo 2 (Kan's, 1996)
• Sutte Hakkun (indies zero, 1996)
• Tetris Battle Gaiden (BPS, 1993)
• Umihara Kawase (Atelier Double / TNN, 1994)
• Ys V: Ushinawareta Suna no Miyako Kefin (Nihon Falcom, 1995)