RetroPiece Theater: Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Douchuu: Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Wake

Rolling out a new blog series this year that merges my recurring RetroAchievements rundowns with a retro game review format. I'm going to try and publish two of these a month, one exploring an old favorite while the other examines a game that's new to me.

Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Douchuu: Boku ga Dancer ni Natta Wake (Konami, 1995)

It's come to this. The fourth and final SFC Goemon game (well, besides a puzzle spin-off I don't feel like playing). I checked out both Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shogun McGuiness and Ganbare Goemon 3: Shishi Juurokube no Karakuri Manjigatame last year across two separate features—May no Monogatari, which spent May looking at fan translations, and Supertember, which had me blitzing through SNES/SFC games to have enough material for a "Top 100" list (excuse the current lack of screenshots for both; hopefully that gets fixed soon)—and one of my goals with RetroPiece in 2026 was to see out the full run. Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Douchuu ("Twinkling Journey"), which riffs on the title of the first Famicom game Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu ("Tricky Travels"), is a sort of "back to basics" reset launched late in the SFC's lifespan possibly as a stopgap between the ambitious third SFC Goemon and the equally ambitious 3D N64 debut, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (JP title: Ganbare Goemon: Neo Momoyama Bakufu no Odori).

For those uninitiated in the ways of the mystical ninja, Ganbare Goemon is a comedic platformer series produced by Konami that has them reinvent the folklore hero Ishikawa Goemon, the Japanese Edo period (1603-1867) equivalent of Robin Hood, as an adventurer with noble intentions but not always a great deal of competency. His efforts are often undermined by his otherwise helpful companion Ebisumaru, the ninja robot Sasuke, and the actually talented if a little standoffish kunoichi Yae: the first, second, and third SFC games saw each debut as playable characters respectively (at least for the SFC games). Typically, a Goemon game will have "adventure" sequences where you explore a town and often solve some sort of puzzle, like finding one of the legal passes needed to move between areas, while also stocking up on items like armor (absorbs a set number of hits) and onigiri (activates on death for some healing, like Zelda's fairies) and possibly playing a mini-game or two for extra cash. These are followed by "action" stages that have you completing tough 2D platforming sequences and possibly fighting a boss or two. With Goemon 3, the adventure half expanded to be more of an open overworld sort of affair—the Link to the Past similarity was pretty strong, and that's even before you factor in the Mode 7 map—but Kirakira looks to have reversed course back to a more stage-based format.

This game introduces, among several others, Ebisumaru's own personal Wario, Obisumaru. He's a little tubbier but certainly no more weird.

Can't have a '90s Konami game without a surfing sequence. Cowabunga!

Ganbare Goemon Kirakira Douchuu sees Impact, the colossal mecha that Goemon and friends used to defeat their enemies in the previous two games, suddenly reveal that he's been sapient all along and, more to the point, is actually a space alien that needs to quickly return to his home planet, Poochie-style. With the gang joining him in his interstellar flight back to Planet Impact, it's revealed that a team of sports-obsessed villains have trapped his homeworld beneath a forcefield barrier generated by machines on four surrounding planets: Impact drops each member of Goemon's team on a different planet to sort out each generator. What this means in gameplay terms is that each character has their own smaller version of a Goemon game to complete before they can all unite on Planet Impact for the last gauntlet of levels where they're free to work together. Each character also brings over their unique power-ups from previous games that double as traversal facilitators: Ebisumaru can perform a ballet twirl that destroys blocks, for example, and Yae's mermaid transformation means she's the only one capable of going underwater. Each of these four scenarios can be completed in any order and at any time (at least, when you're between levels) you can switch to a different character and play as them for a while. In fact, it's best you learn about this sooner rather than later: Goemon himself, which the game starts with by default, will have the hardest time of things with his set of levels and so completing the easier ones might afford a better on-ramp for the game's difficulty. Another unique feature of this entry is that the final boss of each zone, including the final boss of the whole game, is a mini-game of the "track and field" variety; Konami also being well known for their Olympics sports games at the time. These are typically of the button-mashy type: there's a footrace, one where you force a pair of doors open to see an item whizz past which you then have to identify, and one where you need to catch a falling katana strike and then quickly snap the blade—in each case, at least one action requires quickly alternating two face buttons in a manner that probably wore out more than a couple of SFC controllers.

What's also notable is that the gameplay itself feels off in ways the previous games didn't. You could almost imagine that the Goemon "A-team" were busy at work making the N64 Goemon and that they left the work here to the B-team, leaving behind the graphics and music people (Kirakira Douchuu is still fantastic in the presentation department, at least) and perhaps subbing in a few of the sports games devs while they were in the gap between putting out their 1994 Winter Olympics game and their eventual 1996 Summer Olympics one. The most glaring issue is with the level design: there's a lot of blind leaps, platforms that move too quickly that you essentially have to jump for them before they appear on screen because if you wait until you can see them it'll already be too late to reach them, enemies and projectiles that move quickly enough that they can ping you from off-screen and have wild hitboxes, and so on. This is most evident with Goemon's levels, given they're the hardest, so it really doesn't leave much of a positive first impression. Second is with some odd choices governing the movement; you can run in this game but you have to be in Ebisumaru's scenario before you find a NPC who will tell you about it. What the run button does is gradually have you building up speed, which extends both the horizontal and vertical distance your jumps will reach; however, given the acceleration aspect, it's unintuitive how much further you can move when you're just building up speed compared to when you reach the max. This has the effect of throwing off jumps made in short distances where a run up is less viable, such as while on a small platform or leaping from the water's surface. The mini-games themselves are frequently obnoxious button-mashers, as tacitly implied earlier, with the sole exception being a clone of Konami's Puyo Puyo competitor Taisen Puzzle-Dama (which also had a single standalone SFC game, albeit one inexplicably married to a slice-of-life anime license) that despite the variety involved will still present an irksome challenge to any platformer fan suddenly finding themselves getting T-boned (T-spun?) by having to complete a competitive slime-stacker before they're allowed to move on. That's a whole other skillset to quickly adapt to, though perhaps not as punishing.

I appreciate any and all isometric world maps. Reminds me of Ogre Battle a little bit.

Oh god, Planet Impact is even more horrifying than I'd dared to believe.

When these faults are added together, and especially when compared to the superlative trio of games it follows, Kirakira Douchuu falls to the wayside as the weakest of the four main entries on the system, which retroactively has its lack of a numeral make more sense. It wouldn't be the last gasp for this "classic" style of Goemon since the second N64 game, Goemon's Great Adventure, also opted for a 2D side-scrolling, stage-based format and while I've yet to dig into them I imagine the same is true for the many portable games to come out of this series (well, at least the ones that aren't top-down RPGs after Pokémon changed everything for Game Boy developers). Since I'm familiar enough with the two main N64 games (the third is, like the fifth SFC game, a non-standard spin-off) that only leaves the PlayStation games to investigate; that also includes two attempts to reboot the series with new visual styles and a more somber tone, which I'm sure went over great since the series stalled out shortly afterwards. Well, all right, I lie: there's a 2005 DS game that was sort of the last hurrah for classic style Goemon—Ganbare Goemon: Tokaidochu Oedo Tengurikaeshi no Maki—which is also something I might want to look at as well. Man, good to know I have so much Goemon remaining in the wings for a rainy day. Here's hoping Konami finds it in their heart to localize that newly announced compilation too.

(Since we like to have fun with videos around these parts, I clipped myself taking on a version of Kirakira Douchuu's final boss fight, one of its more conceptually amusing mini-games, which hopefully demonstrates the sort of vision this particular Ganbare Goemon had in mind. Appreciate that each one of these mini-games has multiplayer options with full pages of instructions beforehand so no-one would be left out, a welcome accessibility feature used to great effect with the then-upcoming Mario Party series.)

RA Challenges

A member of the RA achievement development team did their best but given they were unfamiliar with the game and took suggestions by a wandering psychopath instead it made this one of the least pleasant Goemon RA sets in a manner perhaps germane to the black sheep status of the game itself. As such, you have a mix of obnoxious no-damage boss attempts, getting high-scores on all the mini-games with thumb-blistering results, and getting a near-perfect score on the post-level tanuki bonus (harder than it sounds). The only "challenge" achievement of any particular note is the following:

ImpAction! - "Beat the game without using a continue in one session"

As you might surmise, this one's a pain in the ass but perhaps not for the reasons you may think. You use a continue whenever you lose all your lives, naturally, but like in a great many Mario games you're presented with various methods to farm as many lives as you might need from earlier stages and then start+selecting out of there once you'd had your fill. Ebisumaru's chapter in particular has two great spots for this, so if you complete his levels first without hitting a game over you can drop back into his scenario whenever you need a top up. The PitA aspect is that the game is somewhere between 6 to 8 hours long and possibly longer if you're having to drop everything to go farm 1-Ups frequently and that's a lot to ask for a single session: RetroArch doesn't yet have a "suspend play" option that wouldn't void this achievement so either you dedicate a whole day to gunning for this single achievement or leave your shit running overnight. Not an ideal situation either way, though I suppose I'd take this over trying to beat a Final Fantasy game in one session (even Mystic Quest is going to be ten hours plus).

It's fine, I didn't need to use my thumbs this week. Not a whole lot in the news to give a thumbs up to right now, am I right? (Man, how do I always keep up to date like that.)

RA Discoveries

The whole game involves discovering weird shit, true to the Ganbare Goemon brand, but if I had to single out a particular curiosity it's a set of five achievements based on the game's reward for 100% completion: a revamped version of the Konami arcade shoot 'em up Time Pilot, originally released in 1982. This 1995 remix, which added Impact as a boss for its fifth level in addition to new graphics, was for a while exclusive to this game in this unlockable bonus form until it was eventually isolated by Konami and rereleased in a few of their arcade compilations from the PS1 era onward. It's a very tough game if you're not cracked at shoot 'em ups—it plays a bit like Asteroids, so it's not the type of shmup where you can memorize where the enemy waves will show up or anything like that—but since most Goemon games have some manner of unlockable Konami arcade shooter in them as well I can't really begrudge its inclusion in this set too.

Next time, on RetroPiece Theater: Well, I missed the little green guy's 40th birthday (though I can assure you, people that old have long ago stopped caring about celebrating age milestones) but I can make up for it by checking out the RA set for a certain high seas adventure of his. Sploooosh! Kabooooom!