Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (1997)

My experiences with games are very dependent on context. I have different games that I particularly like to play during different seasons. Summer, for me, is the perfect time to play games from the Goemon series. Last year I completed my second 100% run through of Goemon's Great Adventure in August. I have plans to play the fan translated SFC Goemon 2 before the warm weather is over as well. The goofy but great soundtrack, art style, and gameplay, for one reason or another, just scream "summer" to me.

What I'm trying to say is, I've been planning on my third playthrough of Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon for almost a year now. I really expected to thoroughly enjoy myself. What I found instead was an decently charming, but ultimately unpolished and kind of underwhelming experience, especially relative to my memories of playing it both 6 and 8 years ago to the season.

Exploring new areas felt unrewarding, fighting enemies felt a little janky, even the Impact boss fights felt uninspired compared to GGA. I was still having fun, don't get me wrong, but something just wasn't clicking for me on this playthrough that did on my previous two.

Nostalgia goggles? Probably, to an extent. Even if I wasn't a child when I first played this game, I was definitely a very different person in a very different stage of my life. I'm usually able to avoid that rose-tinted trap, either by finding new aspects of a game to appreciate or by tempering expectations. I realize now that I probably set the bar too high for the mystical ninja himself.

(I also remembered far too late in the game that I actually CAN control the camera)

MNSG isn't one of those games where you get out of it what you put into it. It is only able to offer you a decent to good N64 3D platforming experience every. For some, that won't be enough. For others, that will be enough reason to go through this relatively short adventure. For me, well, I'll probably play this game again in some month of July in the coming years, but I'll keep my expectations a bit lower.

Really pretty and silly 3d platformer/ adventure game. Kind of a mix between Mario 64 and Zelda ocarina of time. It's very japanese and I often got lost in the towns, but you can get tips from the fortune teller which helps.

Definitely not as good as Mario or Zelda but a solid and technically impressive N64 game.

I think we got this with our first batch of n64 games so I had this game forever but never got past the first mech battle.

Out of the blue, in the middle of the summer, my Mom randomly bought a Nintendo 64 for us kids. It still makes me scratch my head, because my Mom hated video games, "they'll rot your brain out" she said. But she still bought us an NES, SNES, SEGA Genesis, Gameboy, and a Gameboy Color. Anyway, The N64 she bought didn't come packed with a game, so Mom bought Mystical Ninja. I had never heard of it, and thought it looked lame, but hey, we had an N64 now.

It didn't take me long to warm up to the game as I started playing it. That first robot battle was so epic! Also, this is the only video game I have ever played with it's own laugh track. This was my first introduction to the legendary kappa yokai, as well as other tastes of Japanese culture. The music is totally jammin', and the game over screen always had me in stitches!

Overall, this is a great N64 hidden gem. If you see it cheap, buy it!

This game is weird as hell, but I love it. From the great theme song (and the hilariously campy theme for the giant robot), to the bad English translation (which actually makes the game better because, as I understand it, the jokes are timed wrong in comparison to the Japanese, and so the laugh track happens at the wrong time, but it actually just fits so well with the overall silly, dumb theme of the game that it makes it even funnier).

The N64 was a great era for gaming, but this is a truly underrated, and awesome game.