After Decades, Mystical Ninja Goemon Zero

In almost every sense, essays here are just "for me" but there are always degrees. Sometimes I'm trying to bring across a point I care about, or to try to better understand historical context. This time this is just for me to sort out my feelings on something that has been in my head for the majority of my life at this stage. Mystical Ninja Goemon Zero as it's now known has been literally floating around in my brain as something I wanted to at least try since I first read about it nearly 21 years ago. It is only recently that I've had the chance to really sample it, to come to grips with what it is as a product rather than what it meant to me as a fan.

A bit of context: Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon was one of my favorite Nintendo 64 games as a child. It's a very 1997 game, a mix of Mario-esque platforming and Legend of Zelda-esque puzzle solving and dungeon exploration. It has a goofy sense of humor whose most ignorant and hateful aspects were sanded down by a somewhat poor localization. In the late 90s this kind of game where I could explore a goofy non-threatening other world was everything I craved. I could be away from the things in life that hurt and the things that confused me could be better solved. At the time this kind of game was still fairly experimental. The PS1, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 were just tantalizingly powerful enough to make developers experiment with 3D games but not really powerful enough to do detailed 3D environments without tremendous sacrifices. Goemon went with large and undetailed, and that scope would remain relatively novel. Even in its own series, this was not a very common design ethos, I would come to find out as I found and played the few other localized titles. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon would go on to be a cult classic, fondly remembered by children who primarily played on N64 where the general selection of games outside the main Nintendo and Rareware staples were pretty scant.

Over time I'd end up relatively platform agnostic. Me and my brother had a PS1 to also play games on and we got a PS2 as soon as we could manage, perhaps too soon as the PS2 Fossil Record essays indicate. Around 2000 I got very into video game magazines. The first we subscribed to, around that time, was the Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine. It was a relatively easy sell to our parents because it came with demos so plenty of entertainment whether we read it as much as we wanted to or not. I tended to read and reread these though, noting nearly everything that showed up in the preview section. I'll probably be able to recall tiny, three sentence previews of games like Atelier Lilie or Super Galdelic Hour long after some form of dementia has utterly overtaken what's left of the rest of my brain. Scattered among these was a screenshot or two of a sequel to my beloved Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. It looked like the actual sequel, a game that took the gameplay style of that game and moved it forward on the PS2. I was immediately hopeful that it would one day be localized. I wasn't really in a position to import the game, so I just had to wait and hope. Over the next year it became clear we probably weren't going to be seeing the game in the U.S. Konami had released or announced a number of titles between its release in Japan in December of 2000 and around January 2002 when I'd basically given up hope.

Then Working Designs announced its intended slate of PS2 games going forward in mid 2002. Growlanser 2, Growlanser 3, and Bouken Jidai Katsugeki Goemon had all been licensed for Western release. As was ever the case with Working Designs, all were intended to receive as premium a release as possible. For Goemon this meant trying to fix some of the problems that had been noted to plague its original release—aliasing and combing artifacts in the graphics and shaky combat that lacked a lock-on. Knowing Working Designs’ slow release schedules, I knew I was in for a long wait yet, but the thought that I'd one day be able to own and play this game made me happy. I'd waited what felt like forever for games before, I'd wait however long it took for a new Goemon game.

Two and a half years later, Growlanser 2 and 3 snuck out. Clearly, as was tradition, Working Designs had run into some manner of issue getting them approved for Western release. The games had been gussied up however they intended to, and all set to manufacture whatever they intended to manufacture them with. Curiously, they had also become a single release at that point. As it turned out, essentially every title they'd announced in 2002 had been a battle to get released, and Goemon was still giving them issues. The persistent unsourced rumor was that the game was largely finished but that Sony's American branch had balked at how old it looked and felt it would reflect badly on the console if it released in the U.S. in 2005. I have no insider knowledge to say if this is true but I can say it tracks with some of the weirder issues that seem to have come up during the mid ‘00s from Sony Computer Entertainment America's concept approval process. Undeterred, Working Designs seems to have continued soldiering away trying to polish the game up for potential release at least through late 2005.

Then Working Designs shut down. In December of 2005 the company shuttered, with supposedly a near-final build of Goemon that they could just never convince Sony to let them release. The sting hit, but by this point it had been five years since I'd first read about the game. Going from ten to fifteen's a big gap for a child, so while I was disappointed I was no longer holding my breath for that game to see release stateside. The dream was dead, but I'd let it go without even realizing it over the years. That final prototype remained tantalizing though. It clearly existed somewhere and there always remained the dim and distant hope that someone would find and release it. It would be a last memorial to a franchise that had died in the interim, a last rite for easily the most controversial localization company to ever make its bones publishing niche Japanese games in the U.S.

For well over a decade that was all there was, the hope that one day it might leak before the DVD-R it likely existed on was eaten away by disc rot. In 2021, years since I'd last thought about it, it finally did. The lovely people at hiddenpalace.org managed to lay hands on two builds of the game, one dated from June of 2005 and another from August of 2005. If you want a much more thorough and knowledgeable breakdown of the history of this game and Working Designs, you should check their breakdown of it here: https://hiddenpalace.org/News/Go_Go_Goemon!_Mystical_Ninja_Goemon_Zero

Finally, out of nowhere the game was around, and thanks to a kind soul who made a fork specifically to make sure it was playable on PCSX2. Many thanks to @Sazpaimon on twitter for helping to dispel a ghost that had haunted me for decades. So I finally played it.

This is not a PS2 Fossil Record, this is not an Oddities. I'm not done playing enough of this to feel comfortable evaluating it, but I want to give an impression with this so that it isn't entirely bloviating personal history. This game is... not especially impressive. The combat really does tank it and the lock-on system in these builds simply isn't enough to fix it. It's clear that Konami was trying to make a game that would hit the 12 year old demographic in a more earnest, shonen action anime sort of way. If you forced me to guess I'd say that their concern at this point was that Goemon's audience hadn't changed from the NES days, it wasn't picking up new players, just the same old hands. The goofy sense of humor of prior games is largely absent despite the continued odd existence of aliens. Still, it's an interesting artifact and one I intend to dig into more.

Sometimes though, it isn't about the product itself. Sometimes it's about the sense of closure. This game has haunted me for over two decades and to finally have experienced it in English does mean something even if the product on its own merits would likely have disappointed me at the time. I'm looking forward to giving it a more real evaluation because now it's not just "a game I wanted to play," it's a fascinating mark of where games were in 2000, where they were in 2005, and how this kind of game was dying out as quickly as it came into being. It's an object out of time, brimming with history. It has aged out of being one of my obsessions and aged into being a completely different one. In some sense, it's a shard of another childhood I could have had. It's impossible to recommend for any of these reasons, they're personal and individual as the fingers typing this, but they're no less real. These are the reasons a game seen from the outside as so profoundly mediocre can kind of make me want to cry just experiencing it.