Sunsoft is Back! Retro Game Selection
Genre: Compilation
Players: 1-2 (Local Alternating)
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Review:
Sunsoft is Back!, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, is a Compilation of three games, all previously unreleased outside of Japan, and all originally released on the Famicom console in 1986 and 1988.
Here is what I thought of each of the games in this collection:
| Game | Genre | # of Players | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Wing of Madoola | Action-Platformer | 1 | D |
tl;drThis Action-Platformer has dull level design, constantly-spawning enemies, and those enemies start out the game as huge damage sponges. This is a slog of a game at best. | |||
| Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido | Action-Platformer | 1-2 (Local Alternating) | C- |
tl;drThis Action-Platformer has you trying to get to the end of each stage while avoiding or tossing bombs at enemies. The gameplay here is slow and plodding, and the challenge mainly comes from your lack of maneuverability, the tricky-to-use bomb throw, and enemies that jump around making themselves more difficult targets. While not an absolute terrible game, it’s far from a great one. | |||
| Ripple Island | First-Person Graphic Adventure | 1 | C- |
tl;drThis is a cute entry in the genre that isn’t especially memorable but is mostly inoffensive. The one major issue here is the untranslated instruction manual, making you guess at what each of the “buttons” do. You might want to play this with a walkthrough handy just in case. | |||
In short, none of these games is especially great, and The Wing of Madoola is particularly bad. I may have graded Ripple Island a bit higher if players were provided a translated instruction manual.
In addition to the games themselves, this collection includes galleries of concept art and advertising art, as well as scans of the Japanese-language instruction manuals (odd that there are no English translations, since the games themselves have been localized here). The games all have button config settings, screen settings, a rewind feature, and save states.
In the end, this simply is not a very good trio of games, and while it’s nice to have access to them in English for the first time ever, that doesn’t make them worthwhile to anyone other than collectors of oddities and completionists. For everyone else, it’s best to steer clear of these.
tl;dr – Sunsoft is Back! is a Compilation of three Famicom games previously never released outside of Japan: The Wing of Madoola, Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido, and Ripple Island. None of these games is very good, and while the games themselves are localized to English here, none of the instruction manuals are. Overall, this trio of games won’t be of interest to anyone other than fervent collectors. Everyone else should skip it.
Grade: D+
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