Something I had started writing a while back, but never finished until I suddenly got the urge to tonight.
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★★★★★
Released in 1992 for the Famicom, Gimmick! is an incredibly inventive and technically brilliant platformer from Sunsoft, a company which during its heyday produced some of the best games on the system. Their earlier platformers (Hebereke, Rough World, Batman) had already been marked with a consistent charm, quality, and technical mastery, but here their levels of creativity and polish reached new heights; Gimmick! is more complex, challenging, and detailed than any of their other side-scrolling efforts.
The most obvious difference between Gimmick! and many other Famicom platformers (including Sunsoft's earlier Batman and Rough World) is its protagonist Yumetaro's unconventional means of attack. Instead of punching, jumping, or just firing projectiles straight ahead, he primarily fights by throwing flashing orange stars which damage any enemies they hit. Similarly to the star powerups in the 2D Mario games, these bounce along the ground for a bit before coming to a stop, but there's an ingenious twist: Yumetaro's star also serves as a moving platform itself that you can hop on and ride. This is one of Gimmick!'s defining features. You can throw your star at a wall, jump on top of it as it bounces back to you and ride it for a bit, then jump again at the peak of its vertical trajectory to reach platforms you couldn't with just a regular jump. Or you can aim it so it hits a wall at a low angle, then use its forward momentum as it bounces back to ride through spike pits and other obstacles.
Complementing this mechanic is one of the most advanced physics engine of any Famicom platformer (Super Mario Bros. 3's is the only other one that compares). Gimmick!'s stages feature tons of slopes angled at various degrees, with appropriate inertia and momentum that affect objects walking (or bouncing) on them. You can also push and manipulate various objects (e.g. springs, mini-cannonball launchers), which also obey the game's laws of physics, as well as ride various enemies as they walk or fly (and damage them with your star while doing so, if you time it right). The game even features a simple subweapon system; Yumetaro can equip various items he picks up inside levels, including bombs, fireballs, and health potions.
All of these various subtleties are combined to fantastic effect within Gimmick!'s challenging and often brutal levels. Consider the two following areas, just off the top of my head (and both within the game's third level): 1) an ominous pre-boss cavern where you have to jump across slowly descending flying platforms while also throwing stars to hit jumping ground enemies below (all the while taking into account slope physics so your projectiles bounce to the right places), and 2) a wooden forested area where you have to fire your star into a wall at a precise height and angle in order to gain enough momentum to ride unscathed through a series of unforgiving arrow and cannonball traps, eventually ending up on a small ledge with a cannon, which you have to quickly push into a bed of spikes to disable it before it fires at you. Or consider that, if you're skilled and perceptive enough, you can use the star to build up enough momentum to navigate to special secret areas containing extends — or even skip an entire boss fight (going through the stage so fast that you catch him still sleeping next to his alarm clock, haha!) And all of these examples so far are contained within the first half of the game; later areas get even crazier, employing conveyor belts, rotating gears, minecarts, pushable springs, homing missile launchers, and more. The game has some of the coolest design of any Famicom platformer, and certainly some of the most complex and intricate (beating out all of Sunsoft's other titles in the genre hands down).
Another key aspect that helps the game work is the sheer number of unique enemies and interactive objects within each stage (some are only ever used once or twice); the only other FC platformers which come close to it in this regard are the last two Rockman titles, and those were released even later in the system's lifecycle. Gimmick!'s enemies are incredibly smart compared to the simple walk-then-shoot patterns of your average Famicom platformer; they react to your actions, jumping and moving around to follow you. They even sometimes purposely fake you out, moving away from you (in order to make you start walking towards them) then coming forwards again to catch you off guard! And the bosses are great as well. The third one is particularly memorable; the fight takes place on a steep icy slope where you have to aim your star so it bounces exactly and hits the boss as he rises up from the water, all the while jumping to dodge his projectiles and trying not to slide down the slope into the water yourself! Awesome stuff throughout.
And I still haven't even mentioned that visually, Gimmick! is gorgeous! It stands alongside Kirby's Adventure and Rockman VI as having one of the best "cartoony" styles (meaning it doesn't use black as its principal color or rely heavily on dithering, like Batman or Shatterhand for example did) ever executed on the system. Sunsoft clearly learned a lot from their preceding game, Dynamite Batman (which, while borderline unplayable, looked amazing also) — Gimmick!'s world is vivid and alive to an extent that few other Famicom titles can match. Practically every screen has some sort of background animation (spinning gears, waterfalls, etc.), and the environments are jam-packed with cool tiny details, such as the flying packs of birds in stage 2 or the aquarium area with the little swimming fishes in the first stage. They're things which seem almost "unnecessary" but make the game's world feel that much more organic and believable. Sprites are fully and smoothly animated as well, which is no small feat considering Famicom limitations and the game's high number of unique enemy types. If there's one complaint I have it's that the bonus areas are a bit graphically below par compared to the rest of the game (which is the opposite of what you'd expect given how they're, well, secret bonus areas), but given how high that "par" is and given how they still look better than tons of other NES/FC stuff, I'm willing to let it slide.
Then there's the soundtrack, probably my favorite of any 8-bit console game; it's rivalled only by Akumajou Densetsu. Similarly to Densetsu, Gimmick! uses an expansion chip to add three extra square wave channels, which are utilized to create rich melodies and chords that would have been impossible with a regular cartridge. And, like some of Sunsoft's earlier games (starting with Rough World), the soundtrack also uses pitched bass samples played through the audio chip's DPCM channel, which help add even more polyphony to the songs. This was the company's signature musical trick, and it would later be mimicked extensively within the NES/FC chiptune community. There are a variety of musical styles on display here as well; from the calming intro music to the exciting jazzy stage 6 theme, Gimmick! creates a memorable soundscape from start to finish.
All in all, Gimmick! was a design and technical achievement, building off all of its developers' previous accomplishments. Unfortunately, Sunsoft never made another good platformer to follow up on it; in fact, aside from a line of fighters I'm not familiar with, during the 16-bit era the company basically stopped making good games entirely. It's a real shame, since if its developers had been able to persist, I can only imagine what kinds of masterpieces they could have given us.
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And here's a banner for the review page that I made out of a bunch of different art files I found (there doesn't seem to be much out there for this game):