Sunsoft announced yesterday that it will be bringing Ikki Unite — its revival of the infamous 1985 arcade and Nintendo Famicom game Ikki — to Nintendo Switch on April 18th.
So if you missed it last year when it was originally released on Steam, or just fancy playing it on a Nintendo console, now seems like the perfect opportunity for you to dive straight in.
Ikki, in case you've never heard of it, is a cooperative game that focused on a farmer's revolt and is probably most well-known for inspiring the Japanese essayist Jun Miura to coin the term "Kusoge" (or "Crap Game"). This is a phrase that is still in fairly regular use today online and typically refers to unenjoyable, broken, or poorly made games.
Following its original release, Sunsoft later reissued Ikki in Japan across a bunch of compilations in the early 2000s and has even gone to the effort to produce a few different updated versions of the game, with Ikki Unite being the most recent example of this.
Instead of the four players of the original, Ikki Unite introduces the ability to play online with up to 16 players, with the goal being to complete missions and defeat a series of mighty bosses like wild animals and an evil magistrate. Players will be able to select from one of four classes, including explorers, attackers, enhancers, and healers, with cooperation and strategy being the key to survival.
You can watch the latest trailer for the game below, to see whether you fancy giving it a try:
Comments 3
It's weird discovering years after the fact the original had a bad reputation. I only found it was considered kusoge by some when they started doing the updated versions a few years back.
Growing up with a Famicom this was a personal favourite of mine and my brother. Since it never had a Western NES release we never, ever saw talk of it in magazines. So it was one of our earliest obscure gems.
It was one of a tiny selection of simultaneous 2 player games on the system (Contra, Battle City, and TMNT III were other examples we owned). And in 2P it worked well as you had to cover each other to avoid the quick spawning enemies.
Even in single player, it was not too long or too difficult. You could rinse it in 20 minutes easily.
The music was funky.
Every stage was filled with weird diversity. One-off items that only appeared in one spot - which is impressive, given how early NES games would re-use assets to make a game longer. To have an item that filled only a few second of gameplay, was wasteful but enjoyable.
The controls were great. Top down view, fast movement, responsive, and your projectile weapons had a slight homing effect, so you didn't have to aim too precisely.
It featured extremely smooth multi-direction scrolling in the four cardinal directions! Not even Super Mario Bros did that (it scrolling in one direction only). Zelda didn't do that. Metroid didn't do that (again, two directional only). It did stuff on a technical level that some beloved classics didn't even do. Mario 3 and Snake Rattle n Roll had multi-directional scrolling, but they came out much later.
The invincibility items allowed you to wreak carnage.
Each of the... four levels? five levels? Were totally different. In terms of colour, graphics, and mechanics. The graveyard maze which restricted movement. The open fields with water that slowed you. The vertical level with the paper walls. The bonus level! Each felt different.
Once we got bigger and better games like Mario 3 and TMNT III, we didn't play it too much, but due to its short length we'd sometimes load it for a quick completion as a warm up before another better game. A very literal "B Game" that precedes the main feature.
I genuinely don't know why it has a poor reputation. Its simplicity? Short length? Easiness?
At first I was like "It looks like Ikke Vampire Survivors..." then I was like "Hey, it looks like Ikke Vampire Survivors "
Never heard of this game, but as a huge Vampire Survivors lover, this seems right up my alley. Gonna wishlist this one and keep an eye on revieuws!
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