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Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijou

Osomatsu-kun: Hachamecha Gekijo (“Nonsense Theater) is probably the Mega Drive’s most obscure first-party title. The first platformer for the system (in Japan), it was based on a popular ’60s comedy manga that had recently been revived for a new anime adaptation.

Tobu Tobu Girl

Your first impression of Tangram Games’ Tobu Tobu Girl, their homebrew Game Boy title from 2017, might be something along the lines of: “Hey, that looks like Nintendo’s Balloon Kid flipped 90 degrees!” Although Lukas Erritsø Hansen and Simon Larsen, the two guys who make up Tangram Games and who made (with some musical assistance from an artist named potato-tan) Tobu Tobu Girl, swear they didn’t know of Balloon Kid’s existence until after their title was released, the two titles share a number of similarities nonetheless. Both star plucky girls. Both begin with loved ones – a brother in Balloon Kid, a cat in Tobu Tobu Girl – carried away by balloons. Both feature gameplay that regularly makes you feel like you’re a pinball ricocheting around the screen.

Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious

When Konami released Knightmare II: The Maze of Galious for the MSX on April 18, 1987, they were right in the middle of a ten-month, seven-game blitz of action-adventure titles. At this point, both the Famicom and the MSX were over three years old, and Japanese gamers were hungry for “deeper” gameplay. One year prior, in 1986, Japan got its hands on The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Dragon Quest, which guide the player with verbal and visual clues. But 1986 also gave Japanese gamers stuff like Sunsoft’s infamous Atlantis no Nazo, in which the primary challenge was finding someone else who could tell you where to find the next invisible key.

Galious is somewhere in between, an uncomfortable marriage of Zelda’s RPG aspects, Metroid’s stage design, and Tower of Druaga’s inscrutable puzzles.

Legend of Makai

In 1987, British developer Rare developed Wizards & Warriors, a fantasy action game starring a knight who ventured through forests and caves to save his kingdom. It was a success in North America and was then licensed to Jaleco for release in Japan the next year under the name Densetsu no Kishi Elrond. The game requires some changes to make it more suitable for that market, so programming was outsourced to NMK, a company that worked closely with Jaleco on a number of titles. It’s hard to definitively say if this Famicom version was successful, but given that the Wizard & Warriors series saw two more NES games (and one Game Boy spinoff) and none of them were released in Japan, it’s safe to say it probably wasn’t successful. However, someone in either Jaleco or NMK must’ve found some value in it, because it acted as the inspiration for their 1988 arcade game, Legend of Makai.

Trojan

In 1984, Irem developed Kung Fu Master, the arcade game that more or less established the “walk forward and beat up dudes” trend that influenced so many games after it. While the company continued the formula with a few follow-ups like Vigilante, the original designer, Takashi Nishiyama, had left for Capcom, where he took the basic concept and evolved it into the game Trojan.

Sonic the Hedgehog Triple Trouble

After a relative lull in games, Sonic returned to the gaming scene in a big way in 1994. The main series returned to the Mega Drive with Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, while SEGA’s 8-bit systems got THREE games. Two of them were spin-offs, but the third was another original platformer that turned out to be pretty notable.

Express Raider

Video games where a character walks across the screen beating up anyone that gets in their way are nothing new, beat-em-ups are among the most prolific types of game one can find. But in the years before the massive popularity of Technos’ Double Dragon and Capcom’s Final Fight would codify the “rules” and structure of the genre for the next decade, Data East had a few breakthroughs of their own. Soon after effectively creating the fighting game genre with Karate Champ in 1984, we would also see them take a major stride into beat-em-up territory with Express Raider.

Rabi-Ribi

Hey, you got Touhou Project in my Metroidvania! Hey, you got free 2D exploration in my bullet hell! And who gave that bunny girl Amy Rose’s hammer!? What’s fun about doujin game development is that it is rife with all sorts of nonsense if you know where to look, and Rabi-Ribi is of the highest class among that crowded category. Made by Taiwanese developer Yue Gema and localized alongside Sekai Project, Rabi-Ribi is a blend of various familiar genres, and it manages to be something fresh through those combinations. It is also aggressively anime in every way imaginable, but in a good way.

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