It's fun but also it sucks.
It's a shame this is the only SNES Goemon that was released in the West because the later ones are great. And you can see hints of that greatness here. The platforming sections are often fun and challenging. But several factors work to make it ultimately not good.
The first is that localisation. I get the reasoning behind it - this game is very Japanese and that was a hard sell at the time, harder even than just a few years later. But it's so Japanese that the localisation changes here feel futile. Changing rice cakes for pizza, for instance just feels utterly incongruous and wrong. This is isn't helped by a really poor script that doesn't seem to properly engage with the original and feels like you're just getting bare scraps of context and information a lot of the time.
But the core systems of the game really don't help. It's so incredibly grindy, which is bizarre for an action platformer. Progress is frequently gated by money, which you have to earn by mainly farming civilians and creatures in the "Warlock Stages". But as you get deeper into the game that becomes more difficult, requiring you to continually buy health boosts, armour and, most annoying, sandals to boost your movement speed, all of which you lose every time you get hit. Yet if you buy too many of these, the price is ratcheted up, leaving you potentially stuck in a position where you can't make any progress because you can't ever comfortably earn more than your living expenses and I thought this was meant to be an escapist action platformer not a cost of living sim.
And then there's the password system. I'm not totally opposed to password systems - they do have some benefits over save files - but this one is incredibly clunky and laborious to use.
Ultimately this feels like a rough, scrappy first draft before the much more refined sequel and so it's a real shame we in the West only got this and not that.
It's a shame this is the only SNES Goemon that was released in the West because the later ones are great. And you can see hints of that greatness here. The platforming sections are often fun and challenging. But several factors work to make it ultimately not good.
The first is that localisation. I get the reasoning behind it - this game is very Japanese and that was a hard sell at the time, harder even than just a few years later. But it's so Japanese that the localisation changes here feel futile. Changing rice cakes for pizza, for instance just feels utterly incongruous and wrong. This is isn't helped by a really poor script that doesn't seem to properly engage with the original and feels like you're just getting bare scraps of context and information a lot of the time.
But the core systems of the game really don't help. It's so incredibly grindy, which is bizarre for an action platformer. Progress is frequently gated by money, which you have to earn by mainly farming civilians and creatures in the "Warlock Stages". But as you get deeper into the game that becomes more difficult, requiring you to continually buy health boosts, armour and, most annoying, sandals to boost your movement speed, all of which you lose every time you get hit. Yet if you buy too many of these, the price is ratcheted up, leaving you potentially stuck in a position where you can't make any progress because you can't ever comfortably earn more than your living expenses and I thought this was meant to be an escapist action platformer not a cost of living sim.
And then there's the password system. I'm not totally opposed to password systems - they do have some benefits over save files - but this one is incredibly clunky and laborious to use.
Ultimately this feels like a rough, scrappy first draft before the much more refined sequel and so it's a real shame we in the West only got this and not that.