212. Wagan Land (Now Production, Famicom, 1989)

Wagan Land is a platformer where you control a small mechanical dinosaur who attacks enemies with its words. Specifically, you can shoot out little katakana symbols that stun enemies so that you can jump on / around them without getting hurt. The jump is one of the better jumps in a famicom platformer, though the walk speed is pretty slow.

When fully powered up you start to flash rainbow and destroy any enemy you touch. Even better, your walking speed also about doubles, so this turns invincibility into a fun speedrunning mechanic where you can try to get as far a possible before the invincibility & speed run out. There are also real sweet secret bonus areas where you have a small level and one invincibility timer to kill as many enemies as possible before your invincibility runs out. While the graphical design is simple, it's also very cute. Most enemies are only 2 colors, but the colors used are nice and bold, and the designs are all easy to recognize, which could be a challenge on an 8-bit system.

Instead of a standard platfomer boss battle, this is one of those Famicom games (like game #163 Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru or game #202 Parasol Henbee) that likes to get clever and implement a minigame. In Wagan Land, the minigame of choice is shiritori, which is a Japanese word game where you have to say a word starting with the last syllable of the previously spoken word. Wagan land presents the words as just pictures, so knowledge of Japanese is required, but thankfully this is also a game marketed at children, so I knew about a third of the words based on the pictures, and it felt great to be able to instantly counter the boss with my language skills, though I was not able to beat the boss on the first try. Boss battles alternate between shiritori and a memory match game, which was not quite as exciting or challenging.

One hit kills and some decently demanding platforming later in Wagan Land harsh the fun a bit, but it's not a huge detraction from the action. Towards the end of the game you meet another Wagan who gives you the "Waganizer", a powerful beam attack that kills any enemy in one hit, turning the game into more of a classic run and gun, which is a fun mixup, as the platforming starts to get a little samey after a handful of levels. One early standout level has you sliding around on these huge pink slides and there's some hard-to-grasp momentum and physics at work that I found really interesting for a Famicom game.

4/5, a cute platfomer with a great jump and a good amount of variety