Heisei Shin Onigashima (1997)

NOTE: this covers both playthroughs of Zenpen and Kouhen. Also, unlike the description this game is NOT a remaster of the original title.

Heisei Shin Onigashima is a remarkable sequel of a game, filling in backstories and making side characters feel important enough to contribute to one heckuva remade finale battle.

This game takes the original format of Shin Onigashima, with selectable options and plenty of text descriptions and visual novel style story segments. Sometimes an action segment will take place (sometimes awkwardly implemented - falling down a rock cliff at the last second is frustrating but the RPG-style battle segments are particularly novel) so the player has to keep their eyes peeled later in the game.

As for the story, the animal companions that help Donbe and Hikari have stories of their own to tell - Ringo, Matsunosuke, and Ohana. After that the final battle is recontextualized by each of their backstories and has some extra flavor to make it truly worth replaying. Some segments are more fun/exciting than others, and some have some frustrating moments (forget pixel hunting, try blindly clicking behind a cloud of smoke) but there's a lot of love and creativity put into how this adventure game format is pushed into some innovative areas.

The presentation is the high point of this game - the SNES portraits (even remade from the BS Satellaview version of this game) are incredibly gorgeous, with cute and well-animated graphics (well, save for that monkey face) and vaguely folk Japanese tunes that are appropriately catchy. Expect to hear them a lot when scrolling text, but that's not a problem since they're all pleasant to listen to.

Heisei Shin Onigashima covers two whole cartridges and is a whole lotta game. For those who don't understand Japanese (or haven't utilized machine language translation) this might still be an unapproachable game but for those who can translate that text a solid adventure game is waiting!