>the second Kinnikuman game on Famicom, published by Japan's version of US Gold>is a mediocre side scroller not a lot better than M.U.S.C.L.E. was with a lot of questionable and annoying design decisions>it was still a beloved game in Japan just because of the license
>>12549657It seems to me that Japanese are a lot more forgiving of licensed shovelware if it has their favorite characters in it.
>>12549657God, those are some shit character designs;I don't know how unappealing shit like this and One Piece got so popular with hylics.
>>12549665the manga series was huge in Japan and absolutely nobody outside Japan ever cared about it
Brocken Junior. does not appear in this one. Also they didn't include him in the M.U.S.C.L.E. toy line for the US market because they couldn't be bothered to change the mold to get rid of a problematic symbol he wears on his arm.
The mechanics in this game are bullshit. The bosses have massive health bars and are extremely tedious to fight. Also every two minutes you get attacked by this flying head thing that cannot be killed so you just have to dodge its attacks for 30 seconds until it disappears. If you beat the mini-bosses then Kinnikuman fights a wrestling match with the main boss, but there's no screenshots or gameplay footage of that online that I've ever seen.
>>12549681it looks a lot like Hokuto no Ken 2 but that game was released only a few weeks before Kinniku Ookurai Soudatsusen so couldn't have stolen anything from there
>>12549657It works like a worse version of TMNT.>you have a party of three characters and you can select which order they appear in>in one section you can go to a hidden area and get a fourth guy>if your character's health runs low you can switch to the next party member but unlike TMNT you can't switch back, the character you swapped out can't be used again for the rest of that stage>once a character is killed he's also dead for the rest of the game, you can't get him back like you can in TMNT>there are also no health recovery items, your health bar is all you get for the entire stage and it is not refilled until you finish the stage
>>12549668For what it's worth, I was actually on one of the scanlation teams that translated the original 80s manga. The series DOES have a following in the west. /a/ gets threads about it pretty regularly.>>12549674He's not in this game because it's based on the last arc of the series, which was a big tournament between teams of 5. The six playable characters are all ones who were on Kinnikuman's team at different points in the arc (someone died and got swapped out for Neptuneman in the last round. I forget who. Probably Warsman. I swear to god that guy died at least once per arc).
>>12549657Human Entertainment were a capable developer most of the time, but not when they had to work under Bandai's conditions as that Kamen Rider FDS game they had to finish in six weeks proved.
>>12549674i think at some point along the way they changed him to just look like a police officer and he's no longer a Nazi
>>12549787>Probably WarsmanI think it was Geronimo. Somehow, a more useless character than Warsman (at least Warsman is cool)
>>12549838in the NES release of M.U.S.C.L.E. they swapped out Brocken Junior for Geronimo because he was considered problematic
>>12549668Chile and Venezuela got a dub so there are some fans from there.
>>12549848In the 80s that wasn't just some SJW joke, it was a different time and millions of people walking around very much had experienced Nazism firsthand so that would have definitely caused some butthurt if they included a Nazi-themed character whose special move is a poison gas attack.
>>12549735>you have a party of three characters and you can select which order they appear inThis part has a little Japanese scroll graphic thing so there's some language dependency and could get a translation patch. The rest of the game doesn't require you to read anything.
A lot of this slop especially on FDS was stuff that in the West would have been home computer shovelware.
>>12549657Woah! Is that fucking blackface, dude!?
>>12550054I wish they killed that guy, but the series ended before that. Holy shit I hated him so much.
>>12549735There are two secret guys. You get another one if you win the Kinnikuman Soldier fight in stage 3, you'll unlock Neptuneman. But he only shows up if the rest of your party dies, as a final life.
>>12549663It seems like this mindset has become more common among late millennials and zoomers, since I feel like I see a lot of nostalgia for stuff like 2000s-era licensed Nickelodeon games, namely SpongeBob. To be fair, though, maybe some of that licensed stuff is better than I give it credit for, since even in the 80s and early 90s there were licensed titles which would appear to be shovelware on the surface, but were actually quite good.
>>12549663>>12549657oh yeah, also M.U.S.C.L.E. sold like gangbusters in Japan. Bandai were absolute Yakuza-compromised crooks who knew they could sell any low effort trash and they'd buy it anyway because of the license.
>>12550202Not in America though, game hardly sold anything here.
>>12550054No, this ishttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtRowFIcTEU
>>12549657A kusoge beloved by the Japanese, but widely regarded as garbage. The only mediocre game that baffles me because it is popular with the Japanese is Dragon Quest. But this game also adapts the final arc, in which Brockemen had died early on.
Somehow, I'm suddenly convinced and I stopped liking the NES.Now I like the Spectrum.
