A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1993 platformer for the NES, Mr. Gimmick.
This video is of the Scandinavian PAL version of the game, and in the playthrough I collect all of the secret items needed to unlock the final stage and the true ending.
Mr. Gimmick ("Gimmick!" in Japan) is a physics-focused platformer starring an adorable saucer-eyed yokai named Yumetaro. A man mistakes Yumetaro for a stuffed toy and buys the creature as a birthday gift for his daughter. (That sounds awfully similar to Gremlins' setup, doesn’t it?) Yumetaro quickly becomes the girl's favorite toy, but in a fit of jealously, her old toys band together and kidnap her. It's your job, as Yumetaro, to give chase and save her.
The quality of Sunsoft's work in the latter half of the 8-bit era was consistently outstanding, and Mr. Gimmick is a technical and artistic tour de force and a testament to the skill of a legendary development team at its peak.
The gameplay is deeper and more nuanced than you'll find in most NES games owing to its finely tuned physics simulation. The way Yumetaro and his star interact with one another and with the environment provide a lot of leeway in letting you decide how you want to tackle each obstacle. The straightforward approach is a reliable one if you want to keep things simple, but the game's robust mechanics encourage and reward creativity and experimentation.
Mr. Gimmick can feel daunting at first, but once you've become accustomed to the way everything works, the difficulty level evens out nicely. It's not nearly as difficult a game as people make it out to be - at least, it's not if you've taken the time to learn it properly.
In many ways, I feel like Mr. Gimmick's gameplay is to platformers what Solar Jetman's is to shooters, albeit with a much gentler learning curve.
Then there's the presentation to consider, and it's just as obscenely detail-oriented and polished as the mechanics. Every scene is packed with little visual flourishes that breathe life into the world in ways that defy expectation. The fluidity of the animation cycles rivals what was seen in Little Samson, and the sheer number of single-use incidental animations would've impressed in a 16-bit game, let alone being packed into a three megabit NES cart. The pastel color palette choices also do a fantastic job of downplaying the NES hardware's limitations - the warm, bright visuals remind me of Kirby's Adventure, though I'd argue that Mr. Gimmick's visuals are a step ahead of Kirby's in terms of artistry and attention to detail. But to be fair, Mr. Gimmick has seven stages and can be beaten in 25-30 minutes, while Kirby's Adventure has forty-one stages and takes about two hours to play through. This level of detail would've been far harder to pull off in a game of Kirby's scale.
The excellent soundtrack also does more than its fair share of the heavy lifting. Masashi Kageyama and Nao Hirota offer up an eclectic selection of tracks that stand equal to Kodaka and Hara's best efforts, and Sunsoft's signature DPCM bass still thumps as hard as ever. The Japanese version of the game ( • Gimmick! (Famicom) Pla... ) used a custom Sunsoft mapper chip that expanded the Famicom's audio capabilities with three additional sound channels (like Konami's VRC6 used in Akumajou Densetsu), and it sounds awesome. The PAL version lacks the extra audio hardware, unfortunately, so the music had to be pared back to play on the base NES hardware. The instrumentation is a bit thinner and harsher, but it all still sounds quite similar to the original Japanese version's music, and the digital samples still hit just as hard.
If you're a fan of Sunsoft games - or good games in general - I highly recommend checking out Mr. Gimmick. It's a must-play.
Has anyone tried the recently released Gimmick! Special Edition? I gave it a hard pass after seeing that it doesn't have an option to play at the proper 4:3 aspect ratio, but I'm curious to hear what people think about the rest of the package.
And did anyone else notice how part of stage three (8:48) is essentially a recreation of an entire scene from Nausicaa? Or how the ending cutscene mirrors the ending of Laputa? Or how the army of little black fuzzy guys look like the spirits in Totoro?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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18 сен 2024
