Konami Put 13 Goemon Games in One Collection, and It’s Staying in Japan

Here is the good news and the bad news in one sentence. Konami and M2 have released Ganbare Goemon Daishuugo!, a 40th-anniversary collection of 13 Goemon games spanning the Famicom, Super Famicom, and Game Boy, and it is Japan only, with no English and no announced Western release.

Start with the good, because it is very good. M2 is the studio you want handling this. When they do a classic collection, the emulation is careful, the extras are thoughtful, and the games are treated like the artifacts they are. Thirteen entries is a real span of the series, and by one count the set even digs up a Konami shoot ’em up that has never been ported or re-released anywhere before. For a franchise that has spent decades as a Japan-first curiosity in the West, this is the definitive way to sit with it.

Now the part that stings. Of those thirteen games, exactly two ever came out in English: Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES and the Game Boy entry that reached us as Mystical Ninja starring Goemon. Everything else assumes you read Japanese, and a lot of Goemon is text. So the best preservation this series has ever gotten is also, for most people reading this, the least accessible. You can import it and you can play it, but you will be playing around the language, not through it. I would love to be wrong later with a localization announcement. For now, it is a gorgeous wall.