Changeable Guardian Estique

Cat Hui Trading’s 2024 NES/Famicom game Changeable Guardian Estique stars a transforming mecha from another planet, fighting through six levels to save Earth from invading space pirates. You can use one of two weapons – a wide Wave shot focusing on offense, and a weaker Bit shot that includes two satellites that rotate around your ship for added defense. Though you only have a single life, you can take a few hits thanks to your rechargable shield. Power-ups regularly fly out that let you switch between these two types, plus they add an extra super attack charge.

Night Striker Gear

Taito’s 1989 rail shooter Night Striker took heavily after Sega super scaler games like Space Harrier, but gave its own twist with its slick futuristic cyberpunk setting. More than 35 years later, M2 brings it back to the 21st century with Night Striker Gear. It was directed by Hiroshi Iuchi, the former Treasure developer who helmed the legendary shoot-em-ups Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga, bringing some design expertise to update the classic rail shooter formula. The game basically works the same – you control the flying Inter Gray through a futuristic city, and beating a little allows you to pick from two branching paths, leading to several different endings.

Aura Battler Dunbine

Aura Battler Dunbine is a 1983 anime directed by Yoshiyuko Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam), taking place in an alternate fantasy world called Byston Well filled with European-style castles and mecha that looks like insects. It was incredibly influential, with later 1990s shows like Magic Knight Rayearth and The Vision of Escaflowne featuring similar premises, as well as predating the isekai craze of 2010s anime. It first received video game adaptations as a pair of strategy games for the MSX2 and PC98 computers in 1991, and also lived on through the Super Robot Wars games, eventually receiving a PlayStation strategy-RPG in 2000.

SD Gundam Over Galaxian

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 do a follow up with even more interesting, offbeat, or historically important Japanese games!

SD Gundam Over Galaxian takes Namco’s arcade classic and combines it with visuals and ideas from the SD Gundam subsection of that franchise, creating a strange experiment of a revival. Rather than being developed by Namco, this game was developed by Lay-Up, a company that specializes in producing and selling toys based on popular Japanese media like Ultraman and Saint Seiya. SD Gundam was their earliest success, so they’ve revisited it over the years via additional toy lines and smaller contributions like package design for SD Gundam: G Century.

Gundam 0079: The War for Earth

Mobile Suit Gundam is one of the most influential anime series ever created, establishing many of the conventions of the mecha subgenre. In the forty-plus years of its existence, there have been dozens of series and spinoffs, but they generally boil down to political drama involving Earth and its space colonies, featuring a super powerful giant robot called a Gundam. Among the many, many video game tie-ins, one of the most unusual is this CD-ROM FMV title, a co-production between Japanese studio Bandai and American developer Presto Studios, the team behind The Journeyman Project titles. It was originally developed for the short-lived Apple Pippin platform, which Bandai was an ardent supporter of, but was also ported to Windows and Macintosh platforms, as well as the Japanese PlayStation.

Power Dolls

Little is known in the West about the POWER DoLLS series, apart from it being an obscure turn-based tactical strategy game developed and published in Japan mainly by Kogado Software Products, currently the internal development branch of Kogado Studio (whose original foundation traces back to 1916 when it was named Design and Prints Tani Kogado and then re-established as Kogado Studio in 1960, mainly focusing on graphic design). The company, currently led by the President and CEO Ippei Tani, started researching about video games around 1982 after having witnessed major hits like Nintendo Game & Watch or similar works done by Tomy or Bandai. In the following year they published their first video game ever, the PC-88 game Slot Crazy (thus becoming one of the few companies at that time who were PC developers, alongside Nihon Falcom and Koei), and then continued until today in producing software, mainly visual novels like Symphonic Rain or Tristia of the Deep-Blue Sea but also RPGs like the Sequence Palladium series or strategy games like our POWER DoLLS. 

Super Robot Wars 30

If you’ve been reading HG101 for awhile, you may be wondering what happened to that Super Robot Wars series. Long story short: There are over 90 (!!!) official releases in the series and almost all of them are Japanese only outside some rough translations done for obscure, limited releases, and region locked Steam ports. Until now. Super Robot Wars 30 was not only released on PS4 and Steam in English and for English speaking territories (unlike the VXT trilogy), it was translated by the team who translated Recettear. It’s also great timing because this release marks the game’s 30th anniversary celebration, a combination of everything the series has tried with one of the most bonkers series lists.