Wow, the graphics in this are certainly a step up from the previous game... Wait a sec, these characters are completely different!
Except for Sasuke, these are all entirely new characters who have replaced the main cast. This game takes place in the future, and these are the new versions of the Mystical Ninja cast. Goemon 3 also took place in the future due to time travel, but I think that was a lot farther in the future than this is. The opening cutscene actually older classic Goemon, with a broken arm and his face partly obscured by shadow, talking to the newer Goemon... So I guess what's happening here is people are asking older Goemon to help fight the new villains that have invaded Japan, but Goemon is now old and past his prime, so Goemon Jr. is now taking his place, using the pipe passed down from his grandfather... I dunno I'm just making this up.
The kid who took Ebisumaru's place is a little girl named Ebisu. Yae is replaced by a blue haired girl named Yui... and I assume Sasuke is still the same Sasuke, or maybe this is a different one made by the wise man's ancestor, who knows.
The gameplay is the same old formula of 2D platforming stages with the map style of Goemon 2... but there's a lot of differences. For one, obviously it takes place in the modern era, so the whole fuedal Japan aesthetic is gone. Inns are now large hotels, shops now have a cash register, etc.. Almost all of the iconic themed stuff like fortune dolls and tanooki statues have been replaced by stuff that looks like it's from a Megaman game.
Goemon Jr's chain pipe is electrified for some reason, but serves the exact same purpose. He has a coin shooting gun that functions the same as Goemon's ryo throw ability, and he also has a laser cannon as a 2nd subweapon. Ebisu has a hammer that is needed to break certain blocks, and her 2 subweapons are a firecracker bomb and a bunch of them at once. Yui has the same katana and bazooka and mermaid power as Yae, and can also throw her katana like a boomerang. Sasuke has the same kunai weapons, a jetpack for gliding in the air, and a rocket launcher as his subweapon.
Subweapons now cost MP instead of ryo. You can switch between characters on the fly, and each character has their own separate MP bar and attack power, but they all share the same health. Since there's so many opportunities to restore health/MP throughout the levels, it's almost never an issue.The platforming in this game pretty solid, with the same sort of level gimmicks that you'd find in all the other 2D Goemon games, it gets decently challenging but not too much. I'm pretty sure no level ever took me more than 2 attempts. The boss battles in this are a bit tougher and more fast paced, but they're all easily beatable if you go in with full rice balls and armor.
Also the police stations in towns have wanted posters, I guess these are optional sidequests where you hunt down a specific enemy somewhere in a stage. I'm not sure how this works, I never came across any of the enemies in the wanted list. You also get medals for stages that you clear without taking damage.
Then there's the Impact battles, these are fucking HARD. This game probably has the hardest Impact battles of all the Goemon games I've played... It works the same as usual, but it's not the same Impact. The redesigned Impact you use in this game looks like some generic Power Rangers thing. And for some reason this Impact is a lot more sluggish to control than the older one. If you punch and don't hit anything, you become immobile for like 1-2 seconds after punching. Meanwhile the enemy Impact robots are fucking fast and agile, they teleport all over the place and charge at you from weird angles, their projectiles spread out across practically the whole field, and when they lose about half their health their patterns get a lot faster. Near the end of the battle they won't even wait long enough for you to destroy all their projectiles before starting their next attack. Also the combos seem harder to pull off in this than in previous games. I can barely ever land the mouth laser attack unless I get lucky.
The 2nd Impact boss is the worst.. It's a "heavy" robot which means your normal punches don't knock it back. You have to time a super punch or some other combo whenever he charges toward you otherwise you take massive damage.. and I can't even figure out how not get hit by some of his projectiles. I just have to block some of them, or try to do a laser and hope it hits so that the cutscene nullifies any damage taken from it.
The futuristic setting isn't all that bad. It's still very Japanese, and there are some neat environments like a bamboo forest, an old Japanese styled castle, etc... The level design is pretty good all around, at least up to par with the SNES games (but not as good as for or GGA). There's this one stage where you have to keep lowering then raising the water level in order to get through, because of blocks that have to be destroyed by Ebisu, and parts where you need to swim to get past the spikes. It doubles as a swimming stage and a platforming stage.
The last few stages after this have rising/falling lava, a vertical shooting section, and some decently challenging autoscroll platforming... The last boss is this giant bee monster thing with lava/fire based attacks and then has a 2nd phase where he's some kind of fire spirit who summons various other spirits/demons... compared to the 3 Impact battles though this last boss was a cakewalk.
The story seems to take a lot of weird twists.. all of the bosses became human after we defeated them, and some of those characters became good guys and had some large part to play in the story. When the last boss is defeated, she transforms back into some little girl who seems to have no idea what's going on... then she starts flirting with Goemon Jr. and he runs away. The end...
That was a really fun game. it would've been a bit too much on the easy side if not for the intense Impact battles. I was expecting this game to be a lot worse because of how it looks nothing like a proper Mystical Ninja game.. but aside from its visuals, it still the same core gameplay as the classic games.
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