The Best Game You Were Never Supposed to Play Ganbare Goemon 2

General McGuinness and the Rabbit Problem

Ganbare Goemon 2: Kiteretsu Shōgun McGuinness opens like a game trying to see how much nonsense it can smuggle past you before you notice that it is, underneath, absurdly well made. The villain is a Western general called McGuinness, complete with an army of anthropomorphic rabbits and a plan to improve feudal Japan by force. One town will sell you a cruise liner as casually as another game might offer a bicycle. Another hides a fully playable slice of an obscure Konami shooter. The climax involves piloting Goemon’s giant robot lookalike in a first-person brawl against a flying saucer while the mech struggles through what appears to be a fairly unpleasant cold. None of this is accidental. None of it is throwaway. The miracle of Goemon 2 is that all this lunacy is under excellent management.

That is what makes the game special. Plenty of old action games are odd. Plenty are energetic. Plenty have one or two ideas you remember years later. Goemon 2 feels different because its strangeness is not a garnish. It is the delivery system for one of the most generous, tightly paced, and cheerfully overstuffed action games on the Super Famicom. It keeps changing masks, costumes, and comic registers, but the hand guiding it never slips. Beneath the rabbits, robots, festivals, and roadside idiocy is a game that knows exactly where it is taking you.

A Package Holiday Through Absolute Nonsense

Part of the pleasure is how easily readable it all is. Goemon 2 is structured as a journey across Japan, with each region broken into towns, diversions, platforming stages, castles, and an Impact sequence at the end. The overworld map gives the whole thing the clarity of a grand day out. You are not being thrown through disconnected levels so much as sent on a very silly national tour. Village follows village, castle follows castle, and the route always feels legible even when the details become gloriously deranged.

That sense of travel matters. It gives the game a holiday mood: not restful, exactly, but festive. You are always arriving somewhere new, and the new place usually has some fresh bit of business to show off. A strange local attraction. A weird shop. A detour that feels half like a joke and half like a reward. The result is a game that rarely feels like it is repeating itself. It keeps the road moving beneath your feet.

What makes that impressive is how little confusion it creates. This is a busy game. A greedy game, in the best sense. It keeps stuffing extra bits into its own pockets. But it never loses sight of the basic rule that variety only feels good if the player can still read the journey. Goemon 2 understands that instinctively. It gives you direction, then fills the road with comic trouble.

Too Japanese? Rubbish

For years, the usual line was that the Goemon games were too specifically Japanese to travel. There is some truth in the premise. This is a series drenched in Edo-period iconography, folklore, broad local caricature, and a comic sensibility that is unmistakably domestic. But the old conclusion never really survives contact with the controller. So much of what makes Goemon 2 delightful is not trapped in text. It is in the pacing, the staging, the visual gags, and the sheer confidence with which the game throws one idea after another across the screen.

You do not need a cultural briefing to understand the joke of a giant mechanical fish turning up as a level, or a sunset road gradually dimming into evening, or a castle that looks as though it was designed by someone with access to too much food and too little restraint. The game gets its point across the old-fashioned way: by making everything immediately funny, legible, and satisfying to play. Its Japanese identity gives it flavour, but the pleasure is mechanical. The comedy is in the timing. The surprise is in the construction.

That is why the game never feels like a curio. It is not something to admire from behind glass while someone explains the context. It is a game that makes itself understood at speed. What once looked like an export problem turns out to be one of its strengths. The setting is specific. The joy is not.

Choose Your Chaos Gremlin

The playable cast helps. Goemon is the balanced option, the one most players will settle into first: quick enough, sturdy enough, and reliably good at whatever the game asks next. Ebisumaru, by contrast, moves like a man who has mistaken lunch for a combat style. He is broader, clumsier-looking, and faintly ridiculous, but the joke hides a proper bruiser. Then there is Sasuke, the clockwork ninja, who is all speed and precision and gives the whole game a sharper edge.

The clever part is that these choices are not just there to pad the back of the box. A run with Sasuke does not feel like the same experience wearing a different hat. The flow changes. The tempo changes. Certain stretches feel cleaner, quicker, more evasive. Ebisumaru turns other moments into a sort of waddling assault. The game bends just enough around each character to make the choice matter without ever making one of them feel like the joke option.

Even the animation gets in on the act. Characters idle with little bits of personality. Enemies do not merely disappear when you hit them; they react, flop, or fly off with a comic flourish. It gives ordinary movement and combat an extra layer of showmanship. Goemon 2 does not just want to play well. It wants to put on a performance while it does it.

This Game Refuses to Sit Down

Then there are the stages. This is where the game really starts showing off. One level gives you a giant snowball to manage. Another starts fooling around with laser grids. Another straps you to the back of a mechanical fish because apparently that seemed like a perfectly sensible use of an afternoon. Elsewhere the game shifts directions, fiddles with scale, throws moving hazards into the mix, or simply changes its mood so abruptly that the only sensible response is to laugh and keep going.

The key is that it never hangs around too long. Lesser games cling to a decent gimmick until the life has been squeezed out of it. Goemon 2 has the instincts of a good variety show. It sends an idea on, lets it do its turn, gets the applause, and ushers it smartly off before anyone starts glancing at the clock. That is why the game feels rich rather than frantic. The novelty is disciplined. Every stage has a hook, but very few are allowed to overstay.

Visually, that discipline is everywhere. The background art is not just decorative wallpaper; it is constantly helping to sell the joke, the place, or the mood. Roads darken toward evening. Villages feel bustling and theatrical. Castles become visual punchlines in their own right, sometimes looking less like fortresses than themed attractions built by eccentrics. The game is full of kitsch, but it is carefully staged kitsch. It knows exactly how loud to be.

This is also why the game still feels so good to play now. A lot of retro platformers survive on goodwill and historical respect. You admire them, certainly, but there is also some quiet bargain in place: you will forgive the stiffness if they forgive your impatience. Goemon 2 asks for much less charity than that. It is brisk, readable, and unusually willing to entertain. It keeps topping itself up before the tank runs dry.

The Sound of a Game Grinning

The music deserves a share of the credit too. It does not just sit underneath the action doing useful 16-bit wallpaper work. It helps shape the whole tone of the journey. There is a playful, almost impish energy to much of the soundtrack, but it is not one-note comedy music. It shifts with the road. One stretch feels breezy and mischievous, another bright and theatrical, another unexpectedly heroic as the adventure starts winding itself tighter toward the end.

That variety matters because it keeps the game’s travelogue structure feeling alive. Each new stop sounds like a new stop. The soundtrack helps sell the sense that you are crossing a country full of odd little performances, each with its own local colour. Even when the game is being ridiculous, the music gives it momentum rather than merely underlining the gag. It is another reason the whole thing feels so carefully arranged. The game is not random. It is orchestrated.

The Generosity Is the Point

That generosity spills everywhere. Towns are not just pauses between action sections; they are places to breathe, browse, poke around, and enjoy the atmosphere before the game shoves you back into motion. Shops are funny. Side attractions are funny. Hidden material is funny. Even the game’s secrets feel less like dusty relics and more like a developer leaning in and saying, go on, have another one.

That includes the post-game rewards, the hidden detours, the bonus amusements, and the sense that the whole thing has been made by people who were deeply unwilling to stop at “enough.” Goemon 2 overdelivers as a matter of principle. It does not feel parsimonious for a second. It feels festive, almost lavish, like a game determined to send the player away smiling rather than merely impressed.

That matters because it gives the whole experience a warmth that many technically brilliant action games lack. This is not just a machine for challenge. It is a machine for delight.

Meanwhile, a Giant Robot Sneezes

And then, just as a normal game might be settling into a groove, along comes Impact. These sequences are the sort of idea that ought to feel stapled on from another project entirely: a giant Goemon-faced robot charging across the landscape, followed by first-person boss fights that play like some unholy meeting of giant-robot melodrama and arcade punch-up. In a lesser game they would be the awkward novelty chapter. Here they arrive like the evening entertainment and steal the show.

More importantly, they arrive at exactly the right moments. They punctuate each region with a different scale of spectacle and stop the platforming from ever becoming too comfortable. Goemon 2 knows when to interrupt itself. It knows when the player needs escalation, when the rhythm wants widening, when the best possible next move is to have a giant mechanical hero barrel onto the screen and start punching a monster in the face.

They also double as a technical flex, though the game is far too showy to brag about it in a dry way. The scaling effects and first-person presentation make the battles feel like an event, not just a boss fight with a different skin. Cockpit gags, dramatic transitions, the sense of the whole machine lurching into some larger and sillier register: all of it helps sell Impact as a payoff rather than a gimmick. Even the famous sneezing gag works because the game refuses to act embarrassed by it. It plays the absurdity straight, and that confidence lets the joke land cleanly.

Joy, Properly Imported

What remains impressive, all these years later, is just how effortlessly the game travels. Not because its cultural specificity was overblown — it was not — but because the design is doing so much of the heavy lifting. Clarity travels. Momentum travels. Comic surprise travels. A game this well paced, this visually expressive, this musically spry, and this determined to keep entertaining does not need to apologise for where it comes from.

That is the real case for Ganbare Goemon 2. It is not great because it is strange. Strange is easy. It is great because it knows exactly what to do with its strangeness. Every rabbit soldier, every absurd machine, every theatrical castle, every giant-robot interruption serves a game that is carefully shaped, joyfully excessive, and almost aggressively unwilling to become dull. It is not a curio, not a footnote, not a charming oddity for specialists. It is one of the most exuberantly controlled action games on the Super Famicom, and it still feels like opening a toy box that somehow keeps producing another toy.