#action side-scroller

Banishing Racer

The Game Boy had no shortage of platformers, even in its earliest years. From classics like Super Mario Land to creative experiments like Gargoyle’s Quest, there were always worthwhile ones to play. While most efforts never quite matched the gold standard set by Nintendo, many of them at least did something interesting, and Banishing Racer, developed by Jaleco exclusively for Japan in 1991, is no exception.  Banishing Racer features a car as its protagonist and uses this decision to its advantage by incorporating both mechanics and level design that encourage speed and momentum in order to create a unique experience. 

Sumo Fighter

Games about sumo aren’t exactly common, and when they do get made, they’re typically one-on-one fighting games that attempt to simulate the sport. As early as 1991 in Japan (1993 in North America), the developer Kindle Imagine Develop (KID) decided to take sumo in an entirely different direction with Sumo Fighter: Toukaidou Basho (Sumo Fighter in North America) by creating a platformer starring a sumo wrestler rather than a fighting game. 

Batten Tanuki no Daibouken (Japanese Video Game Obscurity)

This article is part of our Japanese Obscurities feature. We put out a whole book about them, which is available as both a full color hardcover and a Kindle ebook from Amazon! If you’d like to see more of these features, please check out the book and if you enjoyed it, leave a five star review so we can convince the publisher to do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

The cover of Technosoft’s Batten Tanuki no Daibouken (“Batten Tanuki’s Great Adventure” – “batten” is a conjunctive word unique to the Kyushu dialect that means something like “however”) has a photograph of an adorable raccoon dog just hanging out. It’s cute, but it greatly undersells the kind of insane, frustrating action within.

The Addams Family (16-bit, Game Boy)

As it was common to most video games based on franchises in the early Nineties, the Addams Family video game is a platformer with loads of stuff to pick up and hundreds of enemies to jump on. It was developed by Ocean, the software house responsible of several other film-to-game adaptations of pretty low quality. In this case however, the result is a decent Euro-style platformer, which is at least playable if unoriginal and really difficult. 

Space Hunter

Space Hunter is a science fiction action-adventure game from Kemco, starring a female cyborg named Altiana. The evil Dr. De Gaulle has rebelled against the governorship of Earth and has hidden himself and his subordinates among seven maze-like asteroids outside of Earth’s orbit. Your goal is to explore each one, find various power-ups and weapons, defeat the boss, and then blow it up. Once you’ve beaten the first six, then the final area is opened. 

GunForce

While most fans of run-and-gun video games know Metal Slug, they might not be aware that its lineage can be traced all the way back to 1991’s GunForce, an arcade game published by Irem in North America and Japan. Upon playing the game, the reasons for its obscurity become clear – this is a decidedly wonky start to the series that is best left as a curio. 

Avenging Spirit

Jaleco is a company that has had its fair share of good games, though a sizable amount of their library would either never leave Japan (Ninja JaJaMaru-kun), be released in the west but have a lot lost in localization (Rushing Beat), or be released in the west to not much fanfare at all. Their arcade line-up does have a few notable titles, namely City Connection, Exerion, and Formation-Z, but as the arcade scene waned in the west, their output on the platform would quickly fade into obscurity. One of these titles is Avenging Spirit, known in Japan as Phantasm, an otherwise standard platformer that stands out from the crowd with its unique core mechanic – the ability to possess enemies and harness their unique abilities. Before Nintendo would expand on this concept a whole twenty-six years later with Super Mario Odyssey and turn into a 3D collect-a-thon, Avenging Spirit would lay the foundation and take a slightly less child-friendly approach. Tokuhiro Takemori was the main planner, and had previously done work on Amagon, The Astyanax, and RoboWarrior. 

Blasphemous

While there’s nothing inherently negative about the terms ‘Souls-like’ or ‘Metroidvania’, you could hardly say that the indie scene had experienced a shortage of either of these genres at any point in the last five years. One could happily play a hundred games that tried to do ‘Dark Souls but 2D’ with a bit of Symphony of the Night thrown in – which is fortunate for me, because that’s approximately how many are released each week – but in such a competitive market, the developer would have to nail absolutely everything in order to stand out; a cast, setting and plot with thematic consistency of tragedy, but not hopelessness. A satisfying and extremely replayable gameplay loop that’s reliably difficult, but not irritatingly so. And a world so beautifully broken that it manages to be awful and awe-inspiring at the same time. Enter Blasphemous.