PixlBit

(Nintendo 64, 4-16-1998, Konami)

The Nintendo 64 was my first fifth-generation console, bought after a great experience with the SNES. While it didn't quite pan out the way I'd hoped it would, it still had some great games on it, and a lot of these games would have gotten lost in the shuffle if the N64 had the same breadth of games as the PlayStation. One of these gems was Konami's Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon.

At a time when Japanese developers and publishers reigned supreme, Konami was the only Japanese third-party publisher/developer that supported the N64 in any meaningful way, and they did create some of the better third-party offerings for the console, including MNSG. Known as Ganbare Goemon 5 in Japan (literally translated, "Hang In There! Goemon"), it was the fifth in the popular-in-Japan Goemon series, and the second in the series to come to the US, following The Legend of The Mystical Ninja for the SNES.

On a console starved for anything resembling an RPG, Mystical Ninja immediately attracted attention. While previous games had been mostly side-scrolling adventures, MNSG was a 3-D action-adventure with platforming. Basically, it did 3-D Zelda-style adventure gaming on the Nintendo 64 before Ocarina of Time did, featuring a 3-D world with numerous towns, mountains, forests, and dungeons to explore, and a variety of treasures to find. Goemon could even find a "chain pipe" that worked like OoT's Hookshot. The game naturally lacked the high level of polish that OoT and Majora's Mask featured, but it was one of the more colorful N64 titles.

MNSG is set in an extremely surreal version of feudal Japan and concerns the attempt of the Peach Mountain Shoguns, led by Spring Breeze Dancin' to turn Japan into one big Western-style musical theater. You'll journey through locations like Mt. Fuji, a submarine loaded with stolen food, and a number of Japanese towns, some of which have been turned into Western-style storybook castles. As with its predecessors, the game is loaded with a lot of bizarre Japanese humor that unfortunately didn't translate well into English - this would have been a perfect game for off-beat localization house Working Designs, (which would attribute its shuttering in 2005 to Sony's rejection of a US version of the PS2 Goemon game).  The game plays very much like Ocarina of Time with minor platforming thrown in, and there are plenty of side-quests and minigames, which was a welcome relief from the racing games that glutted the N64 at the time.

MNSG features four main protagonists who can be switched out with the down-C button once you acquire them, and who have different abilities. The main hero is the titular Goemon, a short ninja with a pineapple-like hairstyle based loosely on Goemon Ishikawa, a Robin Hood-like figure from Japanese history and folklore, who fights using a kiseru tobacco pipe, and whose first mission is to acquire a hookshot-like chain pipe. Also playable from the beginning is Goemon's partner Ebisumaru, a fat, lazy mallet-wielding ninja who gains the ability to shrink himself later in the game. They are lated joined by Yae, a female member of the Secret Investigational Ninjas who wields a katana, a bazooka, and can transform into a mermaid, and a robotic ninja named Sasuke. At various periods, the crew will also control a giant battle robot named Impact against a number of bizarre tokusatsu-style enemies.

One notable aspect of MNSG was the music. One of the more glaring weaknesses of the N64 was its audio. The N64 lacked a dedicated sound chip, with sound duties having to be shared between the CPU and the GPU, and the N64's cartridge format further hamstrung the console's sound capabilities. However, Konami managed to do some impressive tricks with the N64's limited sound capabilities with its games. MNSG featured a 128-megabit cartridge (16 MB), which was the largest size of N64 cartridge available until Ocarina of Time's 32 MB cartridge, and they used this to improve Goemon's sound capabilities. Notably, MNSG contains three musical numbers with vocals: the intro theme that plays at startup, the Goemon Impact theme, and "Gorgeous My Stage", a duet between Spring Breeze Dancin' and Kitty Lily.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is one of the rarer N64 games, but it can still be found for around $30 on Amazon or eBay, and it's well worth the price. Sadly, it wasn't released on the Wii Virtual Console, although its SNES predecessor was. The game successful enough in the US that Konami released two more Goemon games over here, a Game Boy game also titled Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, and Goemon's Great Adventure, a 2.5D sidescroller. If you're looking for an off-the-wall, high-quality N64 adventure game not made by Nintendo or Rare, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon fits the bill nicely.