Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon for N64 is some premium jank

destructoid.com:

It’s a great injustice that we never got to see more of Goemon in the West. While you can count the number of games we got over here on enough fingers if you have them, it was one of Konami’s flagship properties for over a decade in Japan. Part of the reason why we didn’t get more over here is that they’re just so Japanese. It takes place in Feudal Japan and ties in more local pop-culture references than you can shake a pipe at.

Despite this, I was enamored by 1991’s Legend of the Mystical Ninja when I was a kid. It was fun to just mess around and explore in. So, when Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon wound up being localized, I was all over it, and it was one of the most fascinatingly confusing moments of my young life.

I feel pretty reasonably well-versed in Japanese culture and history as a foreigner who only visited there once. But that’s now. In 1998, when Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon launched, there were very few avenues to learn about Japan. The internet wasn’t really as widespread and diverse as it is now, and any media that we got from the country was often heavily filtered and painted over to make it more palatable to Westerners.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon opens with a parody theme song with subtitled vocals. The closest I had ever seen to anything like it was some old Godzilla movies. Subtitled anime wasn’t super common in my part of the world just yet, so the vibe was completely lost on my younger self.

Beyond the culture shock, though, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon proceeds like you already know a bunch of these characters when none of them were in Legend of the Mystical Ninja. Yae, Sasuke, the Wise Old Man; at best, they only had brief appearances in the SNES title. The most bizarre addition was the