The Ganbare Goemon games were a twenty-year time capsule of sorts of Konami's history during that period. I finally decided to start a sort of game diary this year, but, after playing through the first 30-plus-year-old Famicom games, I realized that there was something bigger here. I encountered the Goemon games first when I played Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES (the first Ganbare Goemon game localized internationally), and I'd always been curious about what I had missed.
Created and produced by Konami, starting on the Famicom (the NES in Japan) in 1986 and ending on the Nintendo DS in 2005.Īt first, this wasn't supposed to be such an expansive project. What are the Ganbare Goemon games? It's difficult to pin them down to one genre, but roughly speaking the games follow Goemon, a Robin Hood-esque folk hero and his group of friends on a variety of adventures across a surprising amount of genres and play styles. A few months ago, I made it my goal to play through all the games in the Ganbare Goemon series in chronological order.
