Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

Recently, while waiting for a late-night bus after a day out with friends, we talked about old animes and games we played or watched as kids. Sharing these memories is always interesting. As a kid, I didn’t watch as many animes as I do now, apart from the obligatory Dragon Ball. So, I shared my memories of a niche Nintendo 64 game: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon.

Mentioning this game reminded me of my childhood. I have no idea where I got it or how I found it, but I have vivid memories of the colourful worlds and weird characters.
I am pretty sure I even had a physical copy of this game, maybe found somewhere on a flea market or whatever. The Nintendo 64 was my main console back in the day, and I was, might I say, pretty addicted. I collected weird games and even remember the day I got the console, it was very dramatic for a young teenage boy.
I’m pretty sure I played this game more than once, an honour reserved for only a few games. Its shortness probably helped, but also how memorable it is. The characters are wonderfully weird and colourful, and the dialogue is quirky with humour that can probably only be appreciated in its contemporary time or with extensive knowledge of Japanese sub-culture.
So, after being reminded of it, I wanted to check if I still had the game or could play it somehow. Luckily, thanks to the amazing Steam Deck, emulation is easy to set up. However, this game specifically runs rather poorly with a decreased frame rate and unmapped controls. Fortunately, fans never disappoint, and someone smarter than me made a so-called “recompiled” version of the game, as has been done for other famous retro games. This means it’s not emulated but running entirely natively on modern systems with heavily improved performance and controls. It also helped that everything looked sharper and more like the romanticised version of the game in my memory. I am aware that we always romanticise our nostalgic memories, so a graphical improvement like this helps keep it closer to how we remember it.
With this increased convenience, I replayed this game from my childhood after oh-so-many years. Unfortunately, I soon realised it’s not as good as my nostalgia made me believe.
A few things stood out negatively, mainly the movement and camera mechanics. Jumping, for one, was surprisingly bad for a 3D jump-n-run and rather “floaty”. The jump itself would often be somewhat delayed, causing you to fall off platforms instead of jumping to the next one.
In the context of its time, this was the birth of 3D platformers, and most developers still had to figure this new genre out. Super Mario 64 came out a little more than a year before this game.
But in contrast to Super Mario 64, camera controls were simply horrible because they were non-existent. I assume the developers meant to simplify the sometimes tedious controls of similar games like Super Mario 64 by having the camera just always follow behind the player character with a delay. But this also meant having absolutely zero control over the camera for the player, so I would often plainly not be able to see where I was jumping or walking. Especially in smaller rooms of the games “dungeons,” the camera would just get stuck on walls or simply not rotate at all.
Particularly frustrating were moments where it was impossible to see ahead of a jump or even see enemies because you just had no control over the camera. Also, sometimes specific jumps required a lot of precision to align the jump straight ahead, which was impossible due to the same problem. Fighting some of the enemies would often be equally tricky because you would either not see the enemy or have a hard time aligning your attacks.
The game has some wonderfully weird songs and dialogue, which are weird but funny, at least when viewed in its contemporary context, it being the late 90s Japan. In my perception, Japan has a weird humour at the best of times, and outright “unintelligible” humour at the worst of times. This games manages to straddle the fine line between “funny odd” and “plain weird” with its dialogues.
My favourite parts are the wonderfully weird fortuneteller you can visit to get hints what to do next and who loudly shouts “PLASMA!” every time you talk to them. And the cheesy but catchy theme song of the giant robot you get to control for three major boss fights. These fights are short, weird scenes with entirely new and unexplained mechanics, which surely doesn’t fit well with modern expectations for most games, but are fun nonetheless and not too long.

Outdated mechanics and weirdness aside, I have enjoyed replaying this game a lot. I have always been a “nostalgic person”, looking back at things with rose-tinted glasses. And as with most things in life, this can have a good and a bad side to it, but at least for video games there’s nothing too harmful about indulging in nostalgia purely for the sake of feeling young again.
But even with that, I had to realise that memories are always tainted, and we can never come back to an old experience the same as we were before. I felt happiness reliving old memories, but also the realisation that nothing is forever, even my enjoyment of old games.
Nostalgia might have influenced my perception in some way because, even though the game was technically not as good as I remembered, I still enjoyed bringing back the memories and music of the game.
Perhaps Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon isn’t the flawless game my nostalgia led me to believe. The clunky controls and frustrating camera are hard to ignore. Yet, the game’s quirky humor, memorable characters, and unique charm still resonate. It’s a potent reminder that the value of a game often lies not just in its objective quality, but in the memories and emotions it evokes. Despite its flaws, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon remains a cherished piece of my gaming history, a vibrant echo of a time when blocky graphics and bizarre storylines held endless fascination.