Thanks to Red Art Games for the review code

Title: Sunsoft is Back! Retro Game Selection
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $9.99
Release Date: 09/06/2024

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Prelude

In this set of three early Sunsoft titles, you get to deal with a long trek as a fireworks man, explore a mysterious island to overthrow a king, and search for the Wing of Madoola! 2/3 of these were during the 1986 period of the Famicom, when Sunsoft was in its early days, but Ripple Island just so happens to be the game that would kickstart their more famous era of gaming…

Presentation

The collection kicks off with a very pleasant looking Famicom themed menu, using the color scheme of the system. On the game select screen, you have each cartridge rendered in a very cool 3D model, even showing the back label, and then the choice between newly made English or Japanese versions before jumping into the game. You also have the option to peek at a museum mode for each game, which shows a few bits of scanned material related to the game before jumping in.

A lot of it is just cool looking concept art, but you even get the manuals scanned to read, albeit in their original Japanese form only, if you pause during a game and select that option. For the first time Sunsoft has done their own compilation on modern consoles, this is a darn impressive list of bonuses to have on offer, and puts some other recent companies doing retro reissues to shame with their menu presentation.

As for the games themselves, they all have very typical screen and filter options. The filter option is a pretty ugly CRT filter, so don’t bother with it, but once you pick a screen and border you like, you’re pretty much off to the game! The borders do carry over between games though, but otherwise the games look razor sharp and sound just as they should, with well done NES emulation! It should also be noted that the translations offered here aren’t overlaid text, but actual hacks to the ROMs, done in a way that makes them fit in nicely with the original Japanese font style.

My only real complaint with how the games were handled here is that for whatever reason, loading a save state during an active sound effect or sound channel change will lead to the loaded game sounding incredibly weird for a few seconds until the audio returns to normal. I noticed this quirk the most while playing Wing of Madoola, and sometimes loading straight from the title screen into a save state at the start of a level would just make things sound bizarre. Likewise if I used my sword attack and then loaded a save state, I could hear my sword during whatever moment I loaded into.

While I looked up the credits to see who made it, I was surprised to learn our old friends at Nami Tentou made the NES emulator here! Yes, the porting team behind some pretty basic NES ports like Orebody and Skate Cat, managed to work on the emulation here and did a pretty decent job! Definitely nice to see an indie dev I’ve respected for a while accomplish something big, and accomplish it mostly well, besides the save state weirdness. Thankfully the rest of the games themselves sound and look as they should, only being weird upon that state loading like I mentioned.

Gameplay

Having mentioned most of the extra presentational aspects already, we might as well get into the main games! Each has a rewind feature done by hitting X on the controller, although the timer is really, really short, which is pretty unusual all things considered. That’s why it’s also helpful to see each game having three save state slots to take advantage of at any time, which really comes in handy in the cases of Madoola and especially Tokaido. And of course, there are the english language versions made for this reissue.

With all that background explained, time to jump into these three gems!

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53 Stations of the Tokaido – In this game, you have to get through the many stations of the Tokaido to see your lover. How easy is that? Not easy at all, as everything is out to get you. Random people, masked enemies, and lots of bottomless pits will all kill you. This is a very old school game and when played raw, you probably won’t make it past the first few stages since everything is a one hit death and there doesn’t seem to be an easy continue feature.

Your only defense is the ability to throw or plant bombs, or collect certain items to pay tolls to ward off people or create platforms. But even with those items, this game is absurdly difficult to a degree that makes the game miserable. Thankfully, the rewind and save state features make things a lot more manageable and thus you’ll be more likely to beat by just persisting long enough, but this really is a relic from Sunsoft’s super early days. All the brutality, all the jank, and all the frustration. Still as a historical piece, I’m glad it’s here and got a translation to boot. Not much else to add.

Wing of Madoola – A game that appears to be yet another typical action platformer at first, but with a very early metroidvania twist! In this action game you take control of a heroine, out on a quest to get the titular Wing and defeat an evil monster in the process. You have a simple jump and sword attack to use, and at first it just seems like a go right to the exit kind of game. But you’ll quickly realize that you won’t be able to just leave the stage if you go for the exit, and that’s where the light metroidvania elements come into play!

See, while each stage has an exit door, it requires a crystal gem to open, and these are usually hidden behind entrances to dungeon areas, usually requiring you take out a boss before you can get past them to nab whatever item they’re guarding. Sometimes it’ll be a gem, or sometimes it’ll be one of many upgrades, including different weapons for you to use! These use up MP, and a lot of them can be pretty darn useful in said boss fights, or dealing with the relentless amount of enemies in general. There are also plenty of upgrades to her jumping abilities too, and if you get too rash, you might miss something vital and be unable to beat a stage!

Thankfully, the continue cheat in this game (yes, there is a cheat, and even with states, you’ll have to use it to backtrack if you forget needed upgrades) lets you go back to prior stages, which can be used to recollect the items in that level. A minor frustration, but at least you don’t have to fully redo the game from scratch. Still, this game has a lot of annoyances, as while it manages to be rather fun to figure out and find the items, the enemy swarms can get outright ridiculous, with infinitely spawning foes that just won’t leave you alone in some situations. There’s also parts where if you use up all your MP, you cannot beat the stage, and even the final level of the game will pull this on you in a very cruel fashion.

Nevertheless, Wing of Madoola is a very early exploratory game that has a fun forumla, and the rewind/save state features here really mitigate the frustration. It also helps that even without those, this is a darn fun challenge, and I don’t even think there was much Japanese text here to translate to begin with, so you can just jump in and play without issue. Unfortunately, one minor gripe I have here is noting that this game did get an elusive Arcade release in the form of VS Wing of Madoola, and while that was recently preserved by Sunsoft themselves, that doesn’t seem to be in this collection at all, not even a flyer of the Arcade release. It’s not important enough to consider a major ommission, but I feel that this set would have been the best place to hide a cool extra like that, so it’s a bummer to not even see it mentioned anywhere. Would have been neat to be able to play and compare the differences.

Ripple Island – This game came out on my birthday, ten years exactly before I was born. I’d like to joke how that is a sign of a clear winner before I even hit the start button, but in all seriousness, Ripple Island is beloved in Japan for good reason; it manages to be a wonderful adventure game without a lot of the frustration stemming from early examples of the genre, while telling a wonderfully cute story with lots of charming moments to it.

But yes, the biggest draw here for Ripple Island is the new English version created for the game. This isn’t just like Tokaido and Madoola where they only had to translate minor UI text or the occasional line here or there, but rather a huge darn script, one so big and well translated I’m convinced they had to expand the game’s ROM size to fit all this text in. Being an adventure game with tons of words to deal with, I’m very glad the script here was dealt justice, and that easily makes Ripple Island the highlight of the package.

This game is also noteworthy for being the first game under Sunsoft’s famous “Tokai Engineering” label, which was really just a name they made to publish more famicom games than they were normally supposed to, but fittingly enough kicked off right at the start of their golden age, before they got into critical hits like Blaster Master, Journey to Silius, and Ufouria, among many others. Ripple Island may not have the heavy and complex bass in its audio that those later games got, but it still packs a pretty charming soundtrack and a very well polished game, while also benefiting from being an adventure game without most of the frustrating nonsense that plagued early era point and click titles.

See, your main goal is to guide the main hero Kyle throughout several chapters, where he and a girl go around the island to help various creatures and people in need while trying to figure out a way to defeat the evil king that has taken over the wildlife. You have your display for examining stuff on screen or pulling out an item, but a lot of these aspects are simplified from most other games in the genre, and don’t really require you to randomly click on insignificant pixels to find out what to do next. The game is broken up into chapters, which helps contain each area of the world in a small section, meaning you don’t have any backtracking frustrations to deal with, and every screen in a chapter is pretty easy to find; it’s how you solve those screens that lead to the fun in figuring things out.

You can still get stuck, and you probably will plenty of times, but at least in the times I got stuck, it wasn’t enough to throw me off too much and when I found the solution out, it was something very doable with enough logic. That being said, Chapter 3 has a seemingly random event that actually impacts the ending of the game, so watch out for that one exception. Still, this game is just a delight to play, and the translation is very well done. They even redid the password system completely, so you’ll have to write down the passwords or just use the handy save states to keep on playing once you’re done, as Japanese passwords won’t work. Be sure to copy down Chapter 3’s password, you might need to go back there. All in all, an excellent gem from Sunsoft and the ultimate highlight of the package.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Sunsoft is Back is done just as well as you could do a compilation of these three earlier gems. They translated all the Japanese materials to english, (sans manual scans) including the huge task of Ripple Island, they offer handy rewind and save state features, and they play really well with no noticeable input lag that I could tell.

Yes, these games aren’t from the later era of Sunsoft where the music was all crazy and ambitious. Yes, you probably haven’t heard of any of them. Yes, Tokaido was on Game Center CX for good reason and will likely annoy you. But all in all, I found each game to be really darn fun to play, with Madoola and Ripple Island standing out as the best of the bunch. Even Tokaido wasn’t that bad, just really, really, really annoying to deal with, but a fun challenge to take on if you’re daring to.

Really when the only complaints I have about this set are that the rewind timer is a bit short, the audio gets briefly weird when loading a save state and that I wish it had something related to the VS version of Wing of Madoola in here, this is just a great set of three fun gems worth discovering for the first time ever. While the platformers may be rather rough compared to stuff like Blaster Master or Gimmick, Ripple Island is a magnificent adventure game that I’m just thrilled to see get an official english version, and one done with loving care at that.

If anything, Ripple Island is the one game to buy this entire set over, but really, all three games are worth a play to appreciate early Sunsoft history done right.

I give Sunsoft is Back! Retro Game Selection a 8 out of 10.