Overall I liked this game. It's a decent Zelda-style game. Though it doesn't really have the whole "get new item to progress". The weapon system of learning how to use a gun and then it appearing as a drop is weird. I do think the pacing was a bit fast. You just kinda go from dungeon to dungeon pretty fast.

I liked the ghost town dungeon though, a very unique dungeon.

Not a fan that you can miss certain skills in this game if you try to get them too late. It wasn't required, so it wasn't a huge deal, but not great.

RG35XX

Proof of what? The most charming, accessible yet busted, facile and creatively compromised Link to the Past ROM-hack you've ever imagined? That's Gunple and then some. If there's ever an iceberg meme for "seemingly innocuous but critically bizarre video games", this will rest near the bottom.

There's more angles to analyzing this bemusing ride of a Zelda-meets-Commando experiment than you'd think. (I also see the Zombies Ate My Neighbors! resemblance, but this calls to mind more arcade-y faire.) We've got, what, around 5 hours of fast-paced action adventuring with standout themes, politics, odd designs, and rehashed yonkoma comedy? The latter's all the handiwork of Gunple's key artist, Isami Nakagawa, a mangaka specializing in four-panel gag comics since the turn of the 1990s. His success with Kuma no Putaro, serialized in Big Comic Spirits from '89 to '95, is likely why Lenar worked with him on Gunple. The game's story is rich with recycled tropes, meta-humor, and a general irreverence the artist is familiar with. And it's that slightness, that refuge in audacity at its own expense, that both saves and curtails this game.

Everything starts out quite innocuous. You've got a meteor crash landing on a small frontier island, somehow not absolutely destroying it given the speed and size of impact. None of the villagers care. Then an alien outlaw emerges, transforming the local fauna, flora, and lore-a into monsters of his own design. Now the Western-style colonists are shook, unable to fight back. How the turn tables! Except you play from the viewpoint of a boy-turned-deputy, tasked with stopping this big bad by the same space sheriff that body-snatches him. Oooooooooooookay, that's just a little off-putting. But it's also a convenient framing device on Lenar's part, allowing them to spare the kid any real trauma or growth while you get to cosplay as a murderhobo in cowboy's clothing.

The game loop is simple but effective for what it's trying to do. You stock up on key items and skills in town, get a basic progress hint from the sheriff, explore the overworld until you find the right dungeon, beat it, and return home to claim your bounty. Rinse and repeat until endgame. Character advancement's just as predictable, with static weapon upgrades in dungeons and health boosts either tucked away on the overworld or rewarded for beating bosses a la Zelda. Anyone hoping this has the same amount of elegant, varied progression you find in LTTP should lower their expectations. Repetition sets in rather quickly. It's an early sign of the game's rushed production colliding with clearly larger ambitions from a developer known most charitably for contract game production. (The less we talk about Bird Week or Deadly Towers, the better.)

Gunple's overworld itself isn't on par with a detailed Zelda or Metroidvania, not that I'd necessarily want that. Navigation is quite painless, as is finding the few secrets off the beaten path. The game's nice enough to hand you a very detailed world map right at the start, too, with only one required location sneakily hidden behind the "Map" label itself. Lenar managed to tuck some areas and items behind skill-locked blockers, like deep water zones you can only traverse with a late-game snorkel. But you're also blatantly denied entry to the northeast by a self-described Blocking Ghost, only passable once you buy a crucifix in town. Exploring this frontier island may not bring much, yet I think it's got a joie de vivre the game would otherwise sorely miss.

You do get a larger roster of skills as the game progresses, from boulder-breaking punches to rapid-fire gun spam. No alien powers, though. Space Sheriff Zero may have all the skill and know-how of our nemesis Demi, but he's strictly playing to the lone-ranger playbook with this boy. And only one villager ever learns that this isn't the boy suddenly whupping Demiseed ass, but a visitor from beyond. Finally, there's an interesting lives system, where treasures chests and high scores at the ends of dungeons will give you a second chance. That's all on top of infinite continues. Did I mention this Zelda clone has a scoring system?!

It's wild to me because this feels much less like a score attack experience and more like a speedrunning one. Because completing each dungeon triggers a summary where you're awarded a higher rank (and score) based on how fast you cleared that part of the game, it makes sense to play quick. But collecting dungeon treasures while preserving your healthbar adds to that, and you get extra 1ups in turn. It's far from complex, but a somewhat clever way to reward swift play. Much of Gunple's fun comes from the strong pacing this structure allows, alongside good controls via shoulder strafing and 8-way ranged attacks. Hopping between town and dungeon rarely feels tedious due to the well-designed aboveground map, and there's always that "one more room!" feeling once you're actually underground.

Of course, when lives are abundant and fail states so rare, the economy hardly means much. Maxing out that 9999 rupee pou—sorry, dollar pouch also only factors into one mid-game dungeon that doesn't make a huge dent in it with paywalls. And since your main gun's ammo never runs out (so you never have to pay for more), why bother with all these optional power-up weapons you learn to use across the playthrough? A big problem with Gunple's combat is that you always want to strafe—after all, that's the best way to avoid enemy fire. (Ducking's also an option, but enemy hitboxes are jank enough to make it too risky should they glomp you while prone.) Most of the extra weapons keep you stationary while firing, making the flamethrower supreme among them. And even that armament fails to keep up with the fully upgraded pistol you get soon after. It doesn't help that you middling kinaesthetic feedback during fights, especially during boss battles where wimpy animations and sound effects make it seem like you aren't hitting a weak point or doing any damage.

Shoutouts to Robaton, this game's equivalent of Epona. It's nice to play an LTTP-like where you actually have a cool, relevant mount that even plays a story role. As another alien trapped in an earthling's form—this time a goofy, highly expressive horse—Robaton's the beating heart of this game's comedy. He goes from a trapped buffoon of a space sheriff to your only rescue at Demi's lair, after all. And he's the fastest way to get around the overworld…when you can rent his services. Enemies drop carrots which, upon pick-up, summons him to the screen. He's not just speedy, but a way to one-hit-KO any enemy, at least until the equine power-up wears off and you're back to walking. I certainly didn't have much trouble one-shotting enemies by late-game, yet this power-up felt most useful of them all whenever I got stuck in the dungeon-crawling doldrums.

Couple all this with competent but uninspired enemy variety and you've got a pleasant but overly easy and tiresome few hours of C-rate Smash TV. Dungeons themselves lack any notable puzzles, except in the form of dodging puzzles involving bats or unkillable entities. Drops like health hearts and power-ups come from every other enemy you down, and treasure chests couldn't be more obvious everywhere you go. I think Gunple would be a legit great choice for anyone new to 2D Zelda-like action adventures, but it's much less satisfying if you know even a few of those games' tropes. Only a couple of boss fights have patterns I'd consider threatening or simply interesting; the hitboxes on many attacks are a bit jank and misshapen, too. Most of the time I'm just barreling through copy-paste rooms and corridors with nary a fight, having some fun zipping by. I suppose your kid's fast jog and overpowered arsenal remedies things.

What can't be remedied, or easily explained, is this game's wildly vacillating tone and presentation. It goes from super-deformed frolicking among green hills and dusty canyons to your own dad abusing you up because you want to leave home and defeat the evil. We have these wild-west aliens running the plot, from the space sheriff possessing the protagonist to Demi corrupting this island's indigenous everything into your opposition. Though many of the NPCs have enough dialogue across the game to give me a sensible chuckle or two, it never gets that cute or amusing like EarthBound before it. As other reviews point out, there's a shallowness to the trope use, slapstick, and stereotyping used here which gets under your skin after an hour or two. It's hard to shake the feeling that Gunple's just action-packed Mother 2 fastened onto a Link to the Past weaving pattern.

Hardest to shake off would be the golliwogs. These foes, the first bandit baddies you meet and defeat, look so much like ye olde Mr. Popo or a classic minstrel doll that it leaves a strong first impression. Not a good one, might I add. You also fight tomahawk-throwing, Indigenous American-looking soldiers very late in the game, yet I'm torn on what that's actually suggesting. The wrench this game's story throws in its importation of White America-borne racial pejoratives is that Demi, the villain, is outright said to be creating, brainwashing, or working with everyone you fight. As such, it's left to interpretation whether the golliwog cowboys are, in fact, just some kind of life or matter he's morphed into a form familiar and threatening enough to the Western villagers he's encroaching on. Same goes with the tomahawk guys, who resemble the idols and statuary in their ancient abandoned tower on the edge of this world.

You see this kind of design and narrative which feels offensive at first, but then just frustratingly ambiguous all over the game. Another example: the martial artist monkeys in the northwestern tower, matching the dungeon's bosses in theme but also prompting other questions. Where these simians a fully-fledged society of their own before Demi and his Demiseed gang arrived? Did they make the tower to begin with? Have they always had these skills and smarts, or was that just the antagonist's own invention, using his tech wizardry to fashion monkeys into sentient apes? I ask all this because the game tries to go for a sort of environmental lore at one key junction in the plot: the ghost town.

This once-inhabited colony, clearly resembling your own village in scope and culture, now houses an army of the undead. Given their hostility towards you and their bosses' allegiance to Demi, I'd wager the evil alien awoke the spirits of the deceased (who all died on the surface, as if from an acute plague) to harness their disquiet. So, in the process of defeating Demi and his posse, you're inevitably returning the island to a peaceful, sustainable status quo, both for your village and the larger ecosystem. Gunple suggests that these distorted stereotypes of native things you're fighting are going to be better off once your quest's over. I don't think I'm stretching with this interpretation so much as the game simply cannot decide whether or not it's going to be clever with its lore, and how that plays into the story's themes.

Rather than actively pushing a white man's burden at the expense of all those outside the white village's purview, Gunple just seems to make a mockery of it all. If there's any critique or praise of imperialism happening in the background, it's mostly coming from the Demiseeds' transformation of this island into a colorful wasteland. And if doing a little tomb raiding for 1UPs helps you save the village from destruction, what's to say that isn't a better alternative? Sure, it's all way too frivolous to mean much of anything, but I disagree with interpretations of this as subliminal Manifest Destiny apologia.

(Except the whole Lara Croft-style looting of archaeological artifacts from dungeons, namely the aforementioned towers. They only end up as score points, but for whom? The space police keeping track of all this? Not like the villagers care—they're just happy to inflate your wallet for clearing a bounty on each boss.)

The child-beating and damsel-in-distress moments are more damning to me, especially since they happen at key turns in the game's plot. Gunple paints your hero's journey as a test of manhood, a lightly patriarchal "man's gotta do what he must" story echoing the classic western media that artist Nakagawa was familiar with in the manga sphere. And for all the spoofs and cast's laughing at you, the most amusing thing is how easy this game portrays your rite of passage. Hell, it pokes fun at itself, with most of the village slack-jawed in awe at this kid mercilessly gunning down a whole range of bosses and bestiary. Only the obligatory childhood sweetheart realizes and learns to her dismay who's really behind the heroics. This makes for a cute happy ending after all the chaos, but the aftertaste is foul.

Despite all my prior critique, I managed to have fun playing Gunman's Proof in one go. A lot of that comes down to generally excellent audiovisuals, from the lavishly animated main characters to richly illustrated landscapes. Sure, many of the dungeons are basically copying Link to the Past's presentation, but they also try different types of decoration and art stylings than Lenar's inspiration. At the very least, having such a nice backdrop makes traveling the world pleasing despite other hang-ups. Many bosses and enemies also have appealing, fantastical designs and animations, specifically guys like Ghost Suzuki (who you fight twice) and Baron Alps (whose hubris contrasts with him losing his pants) wielding their bevy of gizmos and secret weapons. The art budget here exceeds what time and resources the team had for making a more coherent game elsewhere.

Same goes for the music, which is surprisingly great! I really wish Gunple had any credits screen at all so I could learn who wrote and/or programmed the soundtrack. Plenty of tracks evoke the island's history and surroundings, while others create moods of adventure or sheer menace. In this Strange World, the dulcet tones of home mix well with a galloping hoedown across the land.

For as chaotically mid as the game is, Gunple: Gunman's Proof is, well, proof that the whole can exceed its parts. Definitely approach this one with a grain of salt, but if you find the game loop enjoyable, don't hesitate to surrender to its whims for a while. I think it's decent enough for the 5-hour runtime, even if I'll very likely never replay it. This gave me such a wickedly up-and-down ride that I can't recommend it in good conscience, but maybe you'll get a kick out of this. Others have pointed out worse ways to spend a few hours than an inconsistent Zelda-clone turned run 'n' gun. At least there's some cool tokusatsu-style villain interactions, and fun easter eggs like the developers apologizing to you when trying to open a chest upon Robato.

But above all, I believe this game would be perfect ROM-hack material for any intrepid 6502 coders out there! It hints at such a better game that I can't help but wonder what we'd get from its assets and mechanics today. A remake could turn this from an entertaining but misguided story of heroics into a more complex Western reckoning with the frontier's past and future. Dungeons could get new, simple puzzles and other set-pieces for variety, plus a tangible use for that scoring system beyond 1UPs. The late-game difficulty sorely needs a boost, as do your power-up weapons and moveset in general. And removing the golliwogs + other problematic content in favor of appropriate but less offensive material would help so much. I'd give a yeehaw for any of that!

And so another game nearly too simple to deserve my ravings races off into the sunset. Here's to the next highly questionable but fascinating game of its, uh, caliber.

Completed for the Backloggd Discord server’s Game of the Week club, Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023

     ‘And therefore we must defeat the Demiseeds... Pops.'

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (Jan. 31 – Feb. 6, 2023).

One of Lenar's earliest titles, Mashō (1986), was directly inspired by The Legend of Zelda (1986), and the studio would seem to have carried on this trend in the multiple games they have then developed. While these are mostly of little historical significance, they illustrate the profusion of studios trying to follow in the footsteps of other games, whose success was undeniable. Mashō's circumstances appeared to have been replicated with Gunple: Gunman's Proof, which immediately strikes as a clone of A Link to the Past (1991). A late-life game for the Super Famicom, the title also draws inspiration from more recent entries, Mother 2 (1994) among them.

The player assumes the role of a young boy, in the American West of the 1880s, where several meteorites have crashed. With them came an alien named Demi, who decided to settle in the area and extend their influence over humans by mentally controlling them and mutating hordes of insects. When an alien ship crash lands on Earth with Zero and Garo on board, Zero asks the boy if he will lend them his body to fight the Demiseeds – the name given to Demi's officers – and capture the renegade alien. The adventure then begins and consists of a succession of dungeons, interspersed with some minor exploration phases in the overworld.

     A straying game design

While everything about the game's layout is reminiscent of A Link to the Past, Gunple features a radically different gameplay. Instead of a sword, the hero fights with a gun and occasionally his fists: effectively, the enemies are more numerous and more nimble than in a Zelda game, requiring a relatively cautious approach and a quick familiarisation of the L and R buttons to strafe. Emphasis is given to the action nature of the title, completely stripping away the puzzles that made Nintendo's franchise so successful. There is no mistaking it: dungeons always feature a scoring screen, tracking the number of treasures found and the amount of time the player has taken. This surprising insistence on scoring may be amusing, but it also reveals Gunple's shortcomings. Indeed, the title always balances between different approaches. On the one hand, it encourages a speedrun-like approach, but does not stop the timer outside of the dungeons and compels one to collect the treasures in the dungeons, leading to unorganic detours. The very structure of the dungeons is overly linear – City of the Dead being the only exception – and is quite tedious to explore, as the player tries to find all the items. In fact, the later dungeons seem much more enjoyable, only because they completely assume their linearity, instead of opting for a horribly labyrinthine and abstruse level design.

This bastard combination is also reflected in the combat system. Building the gameplay around the use of firearms is interesting in the context of an A Link to the Past clone, but the game struggles to find a way to improve on this basic concept. Throughout the adventure the player unlocks new weapons to loot from enemies, but the challenges are never designed to diversify the repertoire. The flamethrower is by far the best weapon, the others being objectively inferior or only useful in very circumscribed contexts. The design of the bosses underlines this issue, as the player is more likely to look for a safe spot to shoot undisturbed by incoming projectiles, rather than making deliberate movements. The lack of places to duck and cover in a shooter is therefore puzzling. The other upgrades the player gets as they progress are also little used, as they are less effective than simply shooting directly at an enemy. The charged shot is too slow for intense gunfights, while the other special attacks force the player to stand still, one of the worst things they can do in this game. Most of the time, anyway, one is better off avoiding all enemies, rather than fighting them. Lenar was surely aware of their inability to create interesting challenges: some dungeon rooms indeed require the player to get rid of all enemies, but these are rather few in number.

     How to portray the United States after the Mother series

What is also striking is the degree to which Gunple attempts to emulate the atmosphere that Mother 2 successfully created. ThruLidlessEye had correctly identified some elements of similarity, but I would like to take the analysis a step further. I would like to demonstrate that Gunple takes the opposite direction to Mother 2 and completely misdirects the relevance of a representation of the United States in favour of a traditional and conservative rhetoric. If Gunple can charm with its very expressive animations – which must be credited to Isami Nakagawa, a yonkoma mangaka – and a very shimmering colour palette, the game multiplies the socially backward scenes, without ever questioning them. From the very beginning of the game, the player is struck by a very archaic representation of the domestic unit, with the father not hesitating to hit his child and raise his voice at his wife, under the guise of slapstick humour. These occurrences continue in the enemy design, an array of bandits, foul-smelling insects, Natives and golliwogs. ThruLidlessEye pointed out how the hero acts like a colonial figure and I concur. However, I consider that the 'return to the original state', ante-alien, is also just as reactionary.

In Mother 2, some of the characters are also controlled or manipulated by an external entity, which drives them to commit more or less immoral acts. Nevertheless, the subversive strength of Mother 2 lies in the fact that this manipulation only exacerbates characteristic features of American society. The most vivid example of this is the visit to Moonside, a slightly horrific representation of capitalist hell, in that it is merely the underside of the urban progress of Fourside. In other words, possession in Mother 2 serves to illustrate structural issues. In Gunple, possession is treated as a deviation from the social contract of the new American West, that of a white patriarchy. The return to normalcy of the various characters is – like the death of the characters of colour – a defence of a traditional and violent order. Despite the humorous veneer, the game constantly promotes violence as a way of proving one's masculinity. If the player talks to the nun, she explains that she cannot completely condone the violence the hero exhibits, but that it is ultimately the only way to survive here. The representation of Asian characters follows the same logic and can be analysed through the prism of the 'cinethetic racism' that Matthew W. Hughey identified in in American cinema, through the figure of the 'Magical Negro'. He writes: 'The challenges posed to white supremacy by these films draw from, and are situated within, a popular culture permeated by white normative ideologies and the pervasive, strategic rhetoric supporting it. [...] The racial ideologies of cinethetic racism are always produced and rearticulated in relation to material circumstances. Although these films can be incredibly entertaining, these media products do important ideological work and are "meaning in the service of power" (Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 2003) that rationalize systems of inequality and relations of domination.' [1]

Gunple rehashes all the rhetorical tropes of the Western tradition [2] and completely negates the critical charge that Mother 2 may have had. What remains is a game that builds on its humour and tries to mix it with an action approach, borrowed from A Link to the Past. In all honesty, the result is not unpleasant, on the contrary. But this is precisely where the problem lies: the game participates in the elaboration of a conservative discourse, highlighting a violent masculinity and promoting an all-White region. The arcade nature and the jokes can help distracting the player. They will only be concerned with avoiding projectiles and shooting enemies, whose colour they no longer even notice.

__________
[1] Matthew W. Hughey, ‘Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in "Magical Negro" Films’, in Social Problems, vol. 56, no. 3-1, 2009, p. 569.
[2] For a brief presentation of oppression in Western cinema, see Nic Yeager, ‘The Western’s long glorification of oppression’, in Texas Observer, May 26, 2021, consulted on February 2, 2023.

Second GOTM finished for June 2022. I'm kinda surprised by how much I enjoyed this game. It wears its desire to be Zelda on it's chest, much less its sleeve, but I still found it really charming. The music is pretty catchy, and while it can sometimes look like a flash game the graphics were fun and bright enough to keep my attention. The game got easier as you played, due to various weapons and power ups, but the speed and difficulty of some of the enemies early on can be a little frustrating. Regardless, I enjoyed my time with this little game. Crayon Shin-Chan in Western Zelda!

It's Strange World: Gunman's Proof is a cowboys and aliens themed Legend of Zelda clone with Smash TV combat, Contra weapon power-ups, and a treasure collecting score system straight out Kirby Super Star's The Great Cave Offensive.

The game is extremely easy, not only because of how frequently it doles out new abilities and permanent upgrades to your base equipment, but also because almost none of the enemies can shoot diagonally. The few enemies that do shoot diagonally can't really aim, they just fire in random directions (or all directions at once). The player, on the other hand, can shoot diagonally while moving, and pretty much nothing in the game really knows how to react to this. From start to finish, this is the winning technique. Though I will say, even if the game is consistently not much of a challenge, it is also consistently quite fun.

The soundtrack is fantastic. The village theme (which will greet you at the start of each play session) is chill, whistling elevator music. The overworld themes serve as excellent background for galloping across the landscape, and the theme that plays while you ride your donkey is joyful without being overly bombastic. The dramatic theme that plays during certain cutscenes carries all the weight of more classic themes from the game's contemporaries.

The game's characters, in terms of animation and dialogue, are charming in a way similar to Earthbound. The main character is basically the town failson until he's possessed by an alien at the start of the game, becoming the only fighter in town competent enough to face the Demiseeds. By around the halfway mark of the game, some of the townspeople start to wonder if something's the matter with you, while your dad (who kicks you out of the house at the start of the game) claims to have always known you were destined for greatness. The main character is extremely well animated, with smooth animations for 8-direction walking, shooting, crawling, punching, not to mention all of the little poses he does when finding treasure or interacting with other characters.

I'm gonna talk about the racism.

So, a lot of the enemies in Gunman's Proof are typical video game fare, giant bugs, slime monsters, etc. But a common enemy, probably the first one that the player will see, is basically a cowboy golliwog. Now, in this wild west themed island setting, the heroes are obviously colonial settlers. The enemies are the native people and wildlife of this "new" land, and killing them is justified by the fact that they are all possessed by a space alien. Yet, in order to defeat them, the hero too must carry this same otherworldly spirit.

The townspeople are obviously an invading force, but they project their alien nature onto those who were there before them. It's a strange world, but it can be made normal. In the end, with the alien defeated, so too can the alien be expelled from our hero's body, and everything will retvrn to the way it ought to be.

When you defeat an insect in this game, you don't kill it. It just turns back into a normal insect.

When you defeat a late-game boss consisting of two twin sisters, they don't die, they regain consciousness and remark on how exotic their attire is.

When you defeat a wild west Mr. Popo, nothing remains.

It sucks. It's a pretty substantial blemish on an otherwise really charming game.

Gunman's Proof is a fairly short game, if you want it to be. You can beat it in a couple hours or so. I would recommend taking it slow, play one or two dungeons each session. Talk to all the NPCs, they usually have something new to say. Explore around and find any health upgrades or new moves you might have missed.

It's speculated that the reason this game is as short as it is, is because it wasn't really finished. It was the last game developed by Lenar, and it doesn't even have an end credits sequence, nor could I find that information online. If you try to open a chest while riding your donkey, you get a text box that specifically says

"You can't open chests while riding Robaton. We're real sorry, honest."

Edit: 3/16/24

I do think perhaps as others have pointed out that the racist aspects of the game are sort of blown out of of proportion in discussion of it, and I want to make it clear that in accusing the game of having racist imagery or colonialist themes that I don't think the game is truly worth condemning or erasing. This review was originally written as a sort of companion piece to a review of Resident Evil 5 that I never finished because I never finished playing the game either, because that game isn't very good. The point though, was that Resident Evil 5 is, perhaps on accident, a very valuable work of fiction in the same way that something like those WWII era cartoons. It shows the exact kind of post-9/11 hysteria that was going on in the minds of most of the first world at the time, and the virus and bioweapons serve as an effective symbol of how wartime propaganda is used to paint civilians as equivalent to combatants. In the same way, I think a game that makes the undertones of games that encourage the player to plunder and conquer a space in the name of ousting an outsider more literal and surface level is interesting. Plus, even if we assume that those pixels on the screen aren't meant to have a golliwog-esque appearance, it's not like such images were unheard of in Japanese games from this time, and it's not unreasonable to assume that's what your looking at.

Game Review - originally written by Spinner 8

Imagine Link to the Past, with all the puzzles taken out, and instead you’re given a bow with infinite arrows. Oh, and all the enemies shoot at you. Now you have Gunman’s Proof. You’re a boy in the Old West who willingly becomes possessed by an alien sheriff with the intention of capturing the evil Demi, another alien who probably did some unspeakable atrocities. You live in the only town, in the center of the island, and go through a bunch of sequential dungeons before going through the last dungeon and, I assume, taking Demi down. Pow! There’s some nice additions to the gameplay, like being able to duck under the bullets that are being shot at you, and, uh, shooting diagonally and stuff. Okay, maybe, just maybe this game kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Either that or I got pissed cause I can’t beat the first dungeon boss. I suck so much.

…Anyways, this is, like everyone else will tell you, a Zelda game with a heavy emphasis on action and almost nothing to speak of concerning puzzles or thinking. And the music totally kicks ass.
(editor's note: sorry to all gamers who were hoping to play a game about a gunman doing math, there's no proofs in this game, no theorems, not even a single axiom)

Here's an oddity on the Super Famicom. I can't really say when I heard of this game for the first time. But it was on my backlog so I must have heard it from somewhere. This one was done by Lenar, I didn't really know the name but I saw they made some Famicom stuff like Bird Week, that unique experience where you take care of birds as a mother bird and Mashou (Deadly Towers in the States) a very poorly received action adventure game. This was their very last game they ever worked on and well I'll just talk about it now.

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, this is very similar to The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Some of the gameplay and the way it looks in some areas just shows the inspiration. That's not a bad thing though as LTTP is one of the few Zelda games I actually enjoy. In this game you shoot with a gun and can punch as well going through 8 dungeons to defeat bosses.

Your character can get a variety of weapons through pickups like a machine gun, flamethrower, spread shot and some more. They do have limited ammo so be careful and sadly they become useless in my opinion by late game. There's also firecrackers that will do instantly defeat enemies and there's even a stronger variant that covers the screen. You can also crawl to dodge bullets and strafe using the triggers.

Sadly combat doesn't evolve past that as you don't get any permanent combat items outside of upgrades making combat the same situation each time. This is also the case for dungeons. There are no puzzles or really any thought put into these. You just go into rooms fighting enemies until you find the boss to defeat it. You can collect treasures for...more points but otherwise they all just blend together though I did like the Ghost town.

The bosses are just ehh for me, they can be annoying but some are just way too easy and sometimes just take too many hits. I don't know if it's just me but I also feel like there's no good feedback if you're doing the right thing which kind of annoyed me.

The game's high point has to be the charm it has. Sure it may have black face enemies (still not as bad as Square Tom Sawyer Famicom RPG) but it's also got a lot of good writing. I did play the fan translation so maybe it changed stuff to make it more appealing but it's good stuff even if some of the text feels repetitive and uninteresting. Also I see you Lenar, letting the horse you ride sometimes coming in dressed as Sailor Moon, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME RAISE THE SCORE JUST FOR THAT!!

The game looks nice though for 1997 it was probably nothing amazing. The voices outside of like the title screen song are pretty bad. The sprites are weird like they got different artists for the various humans you'll see. I would check the credits to see but guess what there are none! Still it's got charm here and there but nothing outstanding. The music is quite nice and it's got some good ones here and there but screw the boss theme, it's so boring and you hear it so much.

I think Gunman's Proof is a decent game that didn't really impress me but it's got heart. It feels like the team didn't get to do everything they want but it's got the humor and it's got a good base but it just isn't enough for me personally. If this was expanded then I could see a good game here but what is here is still fun if flawed. Just no more black face please! Bad Japan. Still I'm glad I tried it and at least Lenar didn't end on a bad note. It's got fans and in the end that's what maybe matters.

Gunple is a LTTP clone set in the wild west with guns, yes, but Gunple is also a LTTP with weird racial caricatures in the vein of Jynx and Mr. Popo. I am not a big fan of that sort of thing, though I do admittedly get a kind of sick amusement out of it. Shit's weird man, Japan gets away with a whole bunch of nonsense. Seems like every manga has at least one Black character that is just grotesquely portrayed. I suppose this game had some other stuff going on, but the real stand out thing was the racism. So it goes.