This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

We are in the midst of the Great Console History Reorganization, as I go back to fill in games I missed in the haphazard early days of the series. If I’d had my timeline in order, the earliest game would have been The Legend of Zelda, followed by our first (and most recent) Reorganization post, The Mysterious Murasame Castle. Next would have been Dragon Quest, followed by Miracle Warriors: Seal of the Dark Lord. Then we would arrive at our current entry, Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu, which was released by Konami on July 30, 1986 for Nintendo’s Famicom. It was later ported to the MSX2 home computer system, and much later to the Game Boy Advance and several of Nintendo’s virtual console marketplaces, but it was never localized outside of Japan. Fortunately, there’s a fan translation for the Famicom version from Spinner 8 (who also provided a translation for The Mysterious Murasame Castle), Xeur, and Dirk Grundy that let me play it in English. I’m glad I got the chance, because Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu (the title is a reference to mechanized puppets from 17th-19th century Japan, I think?) combines disparate design elements into an unusual whole. It also spawned a larger series that ran for nearly 20 years, and a few titles even came to the West under the name Mystical Ninja.

It’s actually not the first game in the series. That honor belongs to Mr. Goemon, an arcade platformer released in May 1986. But Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu was the first to be released for home systems, and the first to introduce action-adventure elements. The game’s titular protagonist is based on Ishikawa Goemon, a bandit leader in 16th century Japan who became known as an outlaw hero who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Players control Goemon as he travels through a feudal Japanese province on his way to confront its greedy lord. He’ll need to collect three passes in each stage in order to travel to the next, while fending off all manner of fishmongers, ninjas, swordsmen, bandits, or even (gasp) foreigners.

When I first fired up the game, it brought to mind belt scrolling beat ’em ups like Double Dragon, in which characters can not only move left and right in the side-scrolling stages, but also into the foreground or background, due to the angled camera perspective. But Double Dragon hadn’t been released yet. Its predecessor, Renegade, was the first ever game with belt scrolling, and it appeared in arcades in May 1986, a mere two months before Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu. Was that enough time for Konami to borrow the idea? I’m not sure, but the stages Goemon explores have that classic belt scrolling design. Except, Goemon doesn’t move like characters in a beat ’em up. He walks around in four directions like Link from The Legend of Zelda, and attacks enemies with his long pipe much like Link does with his sword. The belt scrolling areas even have exits in the foreground or background that lead to other areas, kind of like the doors in one of Zelda’s dungeons.

But unlike Link, Goemon can jump. Some later games that have graced Console History also added jumping to Zelda-style action, like Rygar and The Magic of Scheherazade, but Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu may have been the first. Goemon’s leaps are not only useful for clearing obstacles like bushes, but for finding items. Stages have pots and boxes scattered around, which reveal their contents if Goemon jumps over them. Coins, speed-increasing sandals (Goemon can collect up to three of these, making him very fast) and a slingshot that grants a ranged attack are often discovered this way. As are the hidden stairways into the underground.

Every stage has several of these hidden entrances, leading to subterranean areas containing treasure and often some of the passes that Goemon seeks. They’re navigated much like the outdoor areas — complete with rubble for Goemon to leap over — and often have multiple entrances, acting as shortcuts to different parts of the stage above. That makes exploration a bit haphazard. I would start tracing a few paths through the stage, until one of my jumps revealed a secret stairway leading below. Heading underground, I’d find another exit and emerge somewhere new, with no idea how it related to the rest of the stage. Eventually, after enough wandering, I’d get my bearings and start to understand the stage layout.

The treasures found underground are helpful, because most stages are littered with shops selling a range of useful items. Food will restore health, armor or helmets can block some damage, herbs can replenish Goemon’s health when he’s badly hurt, a charm will prevent the enemy taxi couriers from returning Goemon to the start of the stage when they hit him. Shops can even have passes for sale, although it’s often a better idea to try to find them through careful exploration, since they’re expensive. And I soon learned to save my money, because one of the shops in each stage offers access to the secret passage for a fee.

The secret passage offers an entirely different game mode: a first-person, grid-based labyrinth, in the style of early Wizardry games (or, to use an example I’ve written about on this blog, Might and Magic). Such games were popular in Japan, and indeed some other Console History entries feature similar design, like Getsu Fuuma Den, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, Phantasy Star, and Out Live. But those all released after Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu. Is Goemon’s adventure the first time such grid-based first-person areas appeared on the Famicom? I’m not sure, but it’s possible. Having said that, the secret passages Goemon explores are much simpler than the dungeons in the other games I listed. There are no enemies, just a small map to explore, full of treasures and always containing one of the passes he seeks.

The secret passages add even more variety to a game already bursting with inspirations. And there’s more variety still, as Goemon explores the various locales of the province. Villages offer rustic scenery, with friendly homes to visit where hosts offer food at reasonable prices. Towns and cities are more bustling, and feature an array of shops selling all sorts of wares. Reach a mountain stage, however, and these traces of civilization fade, as Goemon must brave bandits and falling boulders. Each of these is a template for a different type of stage, and Goemon will cross through several of each on his journey towards the lord’s castle. This makes Goemon’s adventure really feel like a journey, which I love. But the different types of stages hide the game’s biggest flaw: sudden difficulty spikes. I speak of the dreaded ocean stages.

You see, most of the enemies Goemon encounters aren’t too threatening. They’re caricatures, stereotypes of feudal Japanese residents, exaggerated for comic effect (perhaps this is what the puppet reference in the title refers to?). Impatient farmers or self-important swordsmen shout and posture as they close in on Goemon, but they’re easily dispatched with a single swipe of his pipe, or — even easier — a coin fired from his slingshot (coins fired in such a way do not deplete Goemon’s cash reserves, thankfully). Even if Goemon does take a few hits, he has a generous health bar, and can purchase protective equipment and food for healing. That keeps the emphasis on easygoing exploration, with a greater threat from the stage’s timer than anything else (although more time can also be purchased in shops).

Until the ocean stages. In these, Goemon must jump between patches of land as he crosses the water, with a missed jump meaning instant death. I experienced unpleasant flashbacks of trying to make jumps in the Double Dragon games. While Goemon’s jumps are more forgiving, it’s still really hard to tell where the platform edges actually are from the belt scrolling camera perspective, and I watched Goemon plummet into the ocean far more often than I would have liked. His death is extremely punishing, too: while he respawns near to where he died, he loses his slingshot and all of his speed-boosting sandals, making his movement agonizingly slow. Facing the tricky jumps without sandals is even harder, so it’s easy to fall into a failure spiral and lose all of Goemon’s lives. And once that happens, that’s it. There are no continues. No way to save the game at all, in fact. Players were expected to finish Goemon’s adventure in a single sitting.

This design hearkens back to arcade games, where players would attempt to best a game, from the beginning, over and over. But it’s not very satisfying to play Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu this way, because the early stages are so easy. Repeating all that — including the secret passage areas, which have no threat whatsoever but require players’ time to thoroughly cleanse of treasure — just to instantly die due to tricky jumps again would be maddening. I quickly resorted to using save states to continue Goemon’s adventure instead, and would not have finished the game without them.

It’s possible that I would have had more patience for Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu as a kid, if an English version had been available. With so many fewer games to play back then, the challenge may have kept me occupied, and I might have played and replayed it so much that I could get through the early stages with my eyes closed. But the deathtraps of the ocean stages don’t make for the kind of challenge I relish. The Mysterious Murasame Castle is harder than Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu, but it is so much more satisfying to practice and master, because its challenge is better paced and more fair. And because it supports saved games, so hard-won progress is kept, rather than thrown away in an instant.

That’s a shame, because I liked a lot of things about Goemon’s adventure. When it leans more towards exploration — typically in its town and city stages — it’s a lot of fun, and exploring fields and mountains in between is a nice change of pace. The final castle area is cool too, as Goemon wanders the streets of the surrounding city first, before venturing into its halls, where the enemies finally pose a real threat. I did find later stages a bit too sprawling, however, taking even longer to make sense of than before. After countless attempts to find the lord in his castle at the end of the game, I finally turned to the internet for a map. Finding the lord without it would have required more perseverance than I could muster after braving all of the previous stages.

But overall, Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu is a promising start to the Ganbare Goemon series. I’ve heard good things about the later games, which apparently lean more into humor and have earned many fans. I’ll be sure to check them out when our timeline reaches them. If you’re interested to try Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu yourself, I used the Retroarch frontend and Mesen emulation core to play, as usual for Famicom games. Be sure to grab the fan translation patch as well.

Next, we’ll jump past Metroid, to a game that released at the tail end of 1986. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!