A friend of mine played this game very briefly as a part of a variety stream he did sometime last year, and the weird way the protagonist attacks by sticking out his tongue was just so funny that it spawned a meme that our community still uses all the time. Once I got my Famicom, I made sure to ask him what that game was so I could try and actually play the game properly, and I was even more excited when this proved to be quite a common and cheap game. I streamed it myself for roughly two thirds of it, and it ultimately took me around 4.5 hours to beat the game on real hardware.

Magical Taruruuto Kun is a manga very much like Doraemon, where a somewhat loser protagonist one day gets a magical and mischievous friend to help him out when he gets in trouble. It's honestly so much like Doraemon that it's a bit shameless, and it's also a property I know genuinely nothing about other than what's in this game. The game's eight worlds encompass eight different small and largely unconnected stories about Taruruuto Kun helping out his human best friend. It's lighthearted but also makes for some interesting setups for the different worlds you go to.

You play as the titular character as he tries to help out your best friend Honmaru with his various problems, and no matter what the problem is, it always seems to take the form of going through action platforming stages. The game itself has world maps very much like Mario 3. This game came out in 1991, so it's quite pretty, but the world map and cute pastel art style make it pretty clear where the game's inspirations lie. There are even special powerups you can activate before levels to give you an extra advantage during the levels, although the way you get this stuff is a bit different than Mario 3. Quite predictably, however unfortunately, this game is also nowhere near the quality level of Mario 3, even though it's surprisingly okay for a licensed JUMP game on Famicom.

The stages are probably the most underwhelming part of the whole thing, as they are almost entirely constructed of the same copy-and-pasted pieces just realigned and with different enemies put in. It makes for an entertaining enough experience, and those enemy placements get REALLY mean later on in the game, but it definitely makes the game feel pretty uninteresting a lot of the time outside of when it's frustrating you because the stage design is too mean.

Though boring, the game does have some interesting points, such as this game's stand-in for Mario's coins: takoyaki (fried octopus balls). Takoyaki occupy the triple job of money, platforms, and question-mark blocks. Taruruuto Kun attacks enemies by extending his tongue at them, and you collect takoyaki the same way by licking them up into your mouth. Sometimes these takoyaki hold powerups such as extra lives or many more takoyaki (like a Russian doll of takoyaki), but for the most part the game itself doesn't have powerups like Mario has his fireflowers and whatnot. Instead, you collect special items on the world map, and then you can use an expendable item mid-stage to call on that item to help you out temporarily, and that can be anything from a ranged weapon to a rain cloud to put out fires (an extremely useful tool that's all but essential to get through the last few worlds).

There are also powerups you can activate on the world map screen, and these are both bought from the store you go to after you complete a stage (which you spend takoyaki at (just don't think about it)), and won from the scratchcards you get for buying stuff. The game is SUPER forgiving with extra lives, as they're pretty cheap and the game hurls them at you constantly. A lot of the powerups themselves have pretty questionable uses outside of the P-wing equivalent of bat wings you can get from scratchcards, and overall I really would've just loved a Mario mushroom-style thing to just give Taruruuto Kun a little more survivability beyond his "one hit and you're dead" nonsense XP. The game overall has a pretty significant problem with difficulty spikes randomly in a world, where one stage will take you a dozen tries to do yet you did every other stage in just one try, although at least the bosses are generally not too hard.

The presentation of the game is fine and about what you'd expect on the Famicom in '91. It's got the aforementioned cute art style and color palette that's very reminiscent of Mario 3, but the aesthetics feel so arbitrary that it's hard to really grasp onto much and really make it memorable (outside of the game's most terrifying enemies like the falling stars, who are memorable for a different reason than their design XP). Taruruuto Kun himself is quite well animated though, and his tongue attacks are hilarious. The music is very forgettable and nothing special, but it's not actively annoying at least.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is an exceptionally "fine" game on the Famicom, but not exactly one worth playing. It's quite unpolished and clearly quite cheaply designed, if not cheaply made, with how repetitive the level design is. You probably won't dislike it if you play it, but this is another case where your time can probably just be better spent playing something else.