Hello again! I’ve been swamped this month due to IRL business and minor stressors going on, so I’m making this as a backup piece to throw on a Friday to give myself some grace to queue up more reviews. This is something I wanted to get back to for a good while now! Being an opinion article, that means it’s time for a gentle reminder that you can support SFG via Ko-Fi if you so choose. Ask for a similar list via a donation, and I’ll try to do it if I can!
So yeah, It’s been a looooooong time since I wrote up one of these countdown/hope and dream articles about retro reissues, but Hamster’s Console Archives series gave me a pretty good excuse to do so again! I have put this lineup on Bingo cards over and over again since the trademark got filed in 2021, but pretty much gave up on this line ever happening with Arcade Archives 2 being announced. Was quite pleased to see it come to reality this year though, and I say the first few releases and the ones announced as to come later are pretty damn great obscurities.
So, being that Hamster has sorta done this thing before via PSN on PS Vita (pulling the most obscure/wacky games imaginable and giving them to Americans no matter how much Japanese text was within), I figured for this first edition of a Console Archives Wishlist, I’d put up five games I want for Console Archives with my personal reasoning and guesses on if it’s viable or not. (ie; Terranigma I could have put here, despite that being a 100% legal rights impossibility nobody will solve)
Currently the platforms are NES and Playstation, so I stuck to those two platforms and will likely think of more games when more platforms get added. All box scans I throw into this article are sourced from Gamefaqs.
So without further ado…
Magical Drop F: This is technically considered Magical Drop IV in retrospect, since V and VI exist and this came between III and V. It’s a pretty good followup to MDIII! More of the same super fast paced gameplay, more of the same great puzzling action, the works. This got reissued in the US via Vic Ireland’s clunky Monkeypaw Games on PS3, and it was a fairly good pick for an import game. The JP text isn’t much of a bother and there’s even a complete story mode! …That you can’t save in at all.
Console Archives would help fix that though with the save states, and I think it’d be pretty cool to see this one as a means of giving Switch Owners MDII-IV in one place! Because of prior reissuing on PSN, I’m guessing this as a very likely chance of showing up.
Dragon Seeds– Jaleco’s weird oddball PS1 RPG. Their later era stuff became a lot more tricky to know who owned what, since sometimes they just published other people’s stuff, something Jaleco USA would do their own thing, and more and more they backed off using their own, older IP, thus leading to the modern City Connection crew no longer owning much of it anymore.
I wasn’t exactly sure if Dragon Seeds would count under this, but the Jaleco Logo in the Japanese version of the game indicates they do own it, and very recently the Polymega (The former Scam Console turned to surprisingly decent Retro Reissue machine) got the US PS1 Version released as an extra alongside some random shooters. This means that City Connection indeeds fully owns the game, and it did get reissued once in Japan on the PSN, so I give this a maybe for it coming along. The Jalecolle stuff slowed down to a halt lately, they barely show up on ACA, so I don’t see them doing much with Hamster on console work, but hey, maybe they’ll surprise us. At least we can be assured to get the US version here as well, since the same company owns both.
Sword Master: A ludicrously expensive NES game in the US, that’s a sequel of sorts to the NES version of Castle of Dragon. Activision published this in the US, but it’s very blatant that Athena owns the game itself based on the Japanese release, and Hamster in turn fully owns the Athena catalog now. We already got Dezaemon outta Athena’s NES output, and there’s not that much left so I would not be at all surprised to see this almost certainly make it to the Console Archives.
Now is it worth the effort, and will the US version likely tag along? I’d not be surprised if they just edit the US ver to remove activision references, but the JP version is more than doable by itself and wouldn’t be a tragedy if we just exclusively got that one. We’ll likely get the NES Castle of Dragon too since we got the janky Arcade version, but having wanted to play Sword Master for a long long time, I’d be more than thrilled for this to be my chance to do so, and CA is the best way to do so.
Cosmo Police: Galivan: No, that’s not Gavan, and no, this isn’t the Arcade version. The Famicom Galivan is actually a fully unique game that’s more like a metroidvania, and considering how the arcade original is a very mediocre frustrating headache, the NES version is much, much better as a result. A fun little genre shift to a genre that only got some traction near the end of the NES’s life, and one I’d be more than curious to try out. We already got 3 Nichibutsu NES games locked in for Console Archives, so I’m giving this a 100% certainty of showing up at some point. I’d be stunned if we don’t see it by the end of 2027.
As for an english version? Well, we don’t have any. None exists, and as proven with Dezaemon Hamster will just use the JP version if needed. I don’t think it’d be a huge detriment though and Hamster could mess with the manual just enough to give people some help with the weirder parts of this metroidvania. Maybe if they do SNES games we’ll get the sequel, too?
Radia Senki: Reimeihen (Tower of Radia): Finally, here’s the big one I’m hoping for in terms of NES weirdo obscurities. Tower of Radia is a pretty ambitious Action RPG for the NES that came out very late in the Famicom era. It didn’t do so hot, and any future ideas they had for more games stopped. That didn’t stop the key writer from writing a very similar story with Klonoa on Playstation, however.
While Tecmo has reissued a good amount of their NES games on VC and NSO and whatnot, there have been some which have remained mostly off limits for the longest time. Ninja Gaiden II/III never hit any Japanese store and it wasn’t until NSO that NGII had that issue fixed, which also was in the Console Archives version. (which Hamster noted wasn’t intentional, they picked NGII over NGI because NGII wasn’t on NSO when they started the work) Some of the Koei games only had their SNES versions on NSO, with their NES games being outright ignored, yet we’re already set to have two of em.
This means Tecmo/Koei is clearly more lax on letting Hamster use more of their non NSO library, and Hamster likes obscurities, so I’d not be surprised to see this as a pick because it’s not based off a licensed anime or the NFL like some of their other NES games. I’d give this a 50/50 chance of showing up on Console Archives, In Japanese form.
See, the weird part about Tower of Radia is well, that was the US name for a canceled translation of the game. It was sorta done! A translated version leaked onto the internet! But it hasn’t been referenced by Tecmo ever since, and the translation that did leak is a bit shaky and not as good as a Ninja Gaiden quality localization would have been. I’m pretty much positive we will not get the US version included here for that reason since I don’t even know if it A: passed lotcheck for Nintendo to obtain a final copy of and B: if Nintendo would loan out that version for a reissue that would also hit PS5.
I’m still enough of a fan to play it in Japanese at least, but god wouldn’t it be great if prototype/unreleased versions of JP games showed up in this service? I doubt that’ll be the case though, since Ninja Kun II had a US version finished completely as Ninja Taro, and the release of Ninja Kun II for Console Archives has no trace of the Ninja Taro version. Maybe Hamster will surprise us one day with a phantom game, at least.
So there you have it. Sorry for a filler article this week, but IRL stuff takes precedence! Maybe I’ll squeeze out an evercade review tonight if an opening shows, but otherwise I hope you enjoyed this fun little countdown thing; I missed doing these wishlist type posts!
Until next time…