YMMV / Ganbare Goemon

Game-Related Tropes

• Audience-Alienating Era: The "New Age" series.
• Awesome Music:
  • The soundtrack of Neo Momoyama Bakufu no Odori/Mystical Ninja is overall very good, given its use of Variable Mix. But the track from the final part of Gorgeous Musical Castle, "Goe Goe Spark", takes the cake. It sounds like "Electric Eye" - and when you're comparing something to Judas Priest, you know it's awesome.
  • Ryugu Castle theme from Goemon's Great Adventure.
  • The soundtrack of Kuro Fune-tō no Nazo/Starring Goemon is agreed upon by many fans to be this.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome/Character Tiers: Generally, Goemon and Sasuke are regarded as better than Yae and Ebisumaru in every way, due to having skills sets designed for platforming compared to the other two's more situational ones.
• Demonic Spiders: The masked carpenters in Ryukyu castle and the town preceding it in Legend of the Mystical Ninja that throw hammers that home in on the player. The hammers can't be destroyed, and they don't disappear after they hit the player, meaning they can easily hit multiple times and ravage your life meter.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Among the playable characters, Sasuke and Yae are the clear favorites, to the point where people have come to expect them to be playable in every new game in the series, and go up in arms when they aren't.
  • Among NPC's, Plasma Man tends to stand out, though perhaps not for the greatest reasons.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The fandom tends to cringe at the very mention of the "New Age" games.
• Goddamned Bats: The lantern and coin-throwing enemies in Legend of the Mystical Ninja that appear in towns. The former's projectile can be knocked aside, but it's surprisingly hard to do so, and the latter moves much faster, jumps before attacking (meaning you have to jump to hit him as well), and hurls a whole bunch of projectiles downward, meaning you're screwed if you're below him. It doesn't help that later levels are utterly clogged with them, to the point that grinding for money in town can actually be harder than the dungeon that comes after it.
  • There's also pickpockets who move faster if you're aligned horizontally with them, jump over obstacles, and steal your money if they collide with you.
  • The deer. They hurt you just like any other enemy, but you get penalized $100 if you attack them like with the bonus NPCs. They're even included in a really assholish trap where, if you visit a certain fortune teller and fork over $100 to get your fortune told, he simply tells you that he sees bad things in your future. After you walk outside, you're suddenly surrounded by deer, and either have to take a hit or lose another $100 getting out.
• Nintendo Hard: Legend of the Mystical Ninja is certainly hard, but much of its difficulty comes from how unrelenting the game is, with the player not even able to take a break in towns due to Everything Trying to Kill You (as well as the fact that Continuing is Painful).
• Replacement Scrappy: Shin Sedai Shuumei! and New Age Shutsudō weren't really bad games, per se - they just annoyed a lot of fans by thrusting an entirely new cast into the spotlight with nary a hint as to what became of the old favorites.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The Mountain Pass and Phrase Book requirements in the first SNES game. Each requires you to shell out a large chunk of change for an item that does nothing except lets you move on to the next area. This usually requires a huge amount of money-grinding, especially if the player has been spending all their cash up to that point, which does nothing except completely destroy the pacing of the game.
  • The Goemon Impact boss fights in Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon for the N64 would not let you pause the game during said boss fight. Exceptionally annoying if you needed to do so for whatever reason. Thankfully this was fixed for Goemon's Great Adventure.
  • The castle stages in Goemon's Great Adventure are gruelling Marathon Levels that are for longer and more demanding than regular stages. You have to do the castle and it's boss in one run; getting a game over at any point - including at the boss - means starting the entire castle again. Thankfully, beating the boss nets you a reprieve, as getting a game over in the subsequent Impact boss fight doesn't require you to do the full castle to get back to it (you simply return to the castle and it trigger the Impact boss fight).
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The difficulty levels of the first three Super Famicom games are all roughly the same; the fourth suddenly turns things up to near Nintendo Hard levels at points.
• Sequel Displacement: The Ganbare Goemon series originally began with a Japan-only arcade game called Mr. Goemon, from which the original Famicom game Ganbare Goemon was loosely based on as well. Some gamers even assume that the first SNES game in the series, the one that came out in America as Legend of the Mystical Ninja, was actually the first game in the series, period. It doesn't help that the Goemon sequels for the Super Famicom in Japan are numbered in a way that they ignore the early Famicom games.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The amusement park on Awaji island in Legend of the Mystical Ninja, and that's just the tip of the iceberg...
• That One Boss: Owing to some unforgiving camera angles, Tsurami in Mystical Ninja: Starring Goemon can be brutal. If you really get unlucky you can die fast.
  • The Devil Death God in Goemon's Great Adventure is by far the most difficult Impact boss fight and can be very challenging even when knowing the boss's very cheap move set. Notably, the boss is very good at locking you out of switching between Impact and Ms. Impact - a very important strategy in the game's 2-person Impact fights - and forcing you to face his attacks rather than negate or avoid them. Not only that, but if you lose the following fight with Dochuki - which is not an incredibly difficult fight by comparison, but still not a pushover - you have to face the Devil Death God again to get back to him. This is the only instance of an unavoidable Boss Rush in the game^note Every other region has you fight the castle boss before the Impact boss. While losing to the boss means doing the entire castle again, if you do defeat the boss but die in the proceeding Impact fight, returning to the castle means you only have to do the Impact fight again.
• That One Level: Castle Ryukyu in Legend of the Mystical Ninja. The town itself is aggravating enough, mostly populated with projectile throwing enemies, but you can't even get into the final dungeon without shilling out almost $1000 on a phrasebook, meaning that unless you have that much money to throw around, you'll be spending even more time in town than you'll need to be. And then you get to the level itself and find a section where you have to fight the same hammer-throwing carpenters from before, only located in places where you either have to hit them with bombs or jump and pray that they don't hit you with a hammer and cause you to fall into a Bottomless Pit before you can get down to their level and hit them. And then after that is a series of very quickly moving platforms over more bottomless pits. The final level that comes after it is actually easier in comparison despite being a constant assault of Goddamned Bats, because at least there's no bottomless pits around and you can actually hit your enemies without jumping through hoops.
  • Dream Castle in Goemon's Great Adventure is an extremely difficult Marathon Level that takes elements of the previous four castles and cranks them up to Nintendo Hard levels. Notably are the Edo Castle and Underworld Castle sections; the first and last sections respectively. The Edo Castle segment is a borderline Platform Hell exercise where the majority of it is made up of small falling platforms, requiring precision jumps and leaving no room to get hit by enemies. The Underworld Castle segment repeats the club-wielding giant that knocks down the platforms your standing on...only this time, the water has been replaced with instant-kill lava, preventing you from cheesing the section by hiding in the water, and punishing you more severely for jumping into it. This is particularly frustrating as it is the final section before the Impact boss fight that acts as a permanent checkpoint for getting a game over.

Manga-Related Tropes

• Best Known for the Fanservice: Yae's main purpose in the manga was to demonstrate that "sex sells," which definitely helped her become the series' second-most popular character.

Anime-Related Tropes

• Toy Ship: Tsukasa Ishikawa and Asuka Tsuchiya in Anime.

Multi-Media Tropes

• Die for Our Ship: Omitsu is the favored punching bag for bitter shippers, as she is the sole love interest of the main series - a matter exacerbated by her lack of screen time outside of kidnapping plots, leading her to be denounced as a useless cuckoldress or simply ignored as a result. To rub more salt into the wound, Konami has been making Goemon and Omitsu's romance more overt in recent times, and even threw in a couple of moments just to sink the more popular GoeYae couple. (The fans of the aforementioned couple have the manga and Bouken Jidai Katsugeki to go on, but they're Alternate Continuity so they "don't count.")
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Harakiri Seppukumaru, and the Four Tsujigiri by association.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Goemon/Yae and Goemon/Sasuke are the most prevalent.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Naturally, given how nearly all of the characters have Japanese names.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Sasuke gets kicked around a lot, especially in the manga. Such is the price of being the most popular in the series.
• Values Dissonance: The Goemon franchise revels in immature humor, sexual jokes, and the occasional off-color commentary or crude NPC dialogue that might not gel with today's audiences, especially as the series grew Denser and Wackier. Heck, Ebisumaru is a Camp kind of guy who would try to strip to get a deal off at a local store, and several crossdressers and transvestites exist for comedic value, two of which are kooky villains. Some of it comes down to the time most of the games were made in, and the rest of it being Japan's particularly different cultural standards even as the series shifted into the Shōnen comedy style. This is also likely one of the contributors to only three main games, two handheld titles, and eventually the TV anime ever making it overseas - you know, besides Konami's lack of interest.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: The crossdressing Sister Bismaru is mistaken for a woman thanks to a typo in the Goemon's Great Adventure manual. There's also Sasuke, to a lesser extent.