We've Rebooted Everything Else, Why Not 'Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon'?
Goemon should come back to save the world, one pipe at a time. Dash dash dash!
If it’s a vaguely recognizable intellectual property in gaming, someone is probably trying to reboot it. The past few years have seen a record number of reboots, remakes, and simple graphical upgrades re-released to nostalgic gamers. There’s a new remastered Bioshock collection coming out — upgrading games only a few years old — while those same games are also getting ported to mobile devices. They’re being upgraded and downgraded simultaneously.
So with everything in the world getting a remake, why not Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon? For those unfamiliar:
Goemon (ゴエモン Goemon) -The star protagonist of the series. A hot-blooded man of Edo, he has a strong sense of justice and will right whatever wrong there is in front of him. (Renamed “Kid Ying” in the North American release of “Legend Of The Mystical Ninja” for the SNES. In the North American releases of Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon and Goemon’s Great Adventure, his name is correctly translated to Goemon.) He primarily uses a variety of smoking pipes as his weapon of choice. Also in the future his descendant is referred to by the same name.
It’s basically a game about an angry dude who hits robots in feudal Japan with various lengths of pipe and buys food from local shops. It’s a Nintendo 64 era mix of Mario and Zelda with a cute style and some simple RPG elements. What’s not to love?
There are also impact battles where players take a different viewpoint to have larger scale battles, and a lot of surrealist Japanese humor about a peach spaceship with a laser trying to take over the world by making the entire world a stage, which is quite dramatic.
Why isn’t there more to this series that also had comics and a TV show? Well, there is, but we just didn’t get them in America. There are a few other outings, including a next generation game made for PS2 but it was never translated into English.
So why not reboot something fun like Goemon? Wouldn’t you rather have another quirky platformer with a different sensibility than yet another Call of Duty clone?
