Goemon (series)/YMMV

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Game-Related Tropes

  • Awesome Music: The soundtrack of Neo Momoyama Bakufu no Odori/Mystical Ninja is overall very good, given its use of Variable Mix. But the track from the final part of Gorgeous Music Castle takes the cake. It sounds like "Electric Eye" - and when you're comparing something to Judas Priest, you know it's So Cool It's Awesome.
  • Dork Age: The "New Age" series.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The fandom tends to cringe at the very mention of the "New Age" games.
  • Replacement Scrappy: Shin Sedai Shuumei! and New Age Shutsudō weren't really bad games, per se - they just annoyed a lot of fans by thrusting an entirely new cast into the spotlight with nary a hint as to what became of the old favorites.
  • Sequel Displacement: The Ganbare Goemon series originally began with a Japan-only arcade game called Mr. Goemon, from which the original Famicom game Ganbare Goemon was loosely based on as well. Some gamers even assume that the first SNES game in the series, the one that came out in America as Legend of the Mystical Ninja, was actually the first game in the series period. It doesn't help that the Goemon sequels for the Super Famicom in Japan are numbered in a way that they ignore the early Famicom games.
  • Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: The amusement park on Awaji island in Legend of the Mystical Ninja, and that's just the tip of the iceberg...


Manga-Related Tropes

  • Everybody Remembers the Stripper: Yae's main purpose in the manga was to demonstrate that "sex sells," which definitely helped her become the series' second-most popular character.
  • Purity Sue: The manga version of Yae is one, which comes as a shock to those who were more accustomed to her no-nonsense personality from the games and anime. The only people who openly dislike her are Omitsu and later Ebisumaru, because they're jealous of her.


Anime-Related Tropes

  • Toy Ship: Tsukasa Ishikawa and Asuka Tsuchiya in Anime.
  • Villain Decay: In the second OVA, Seppukumaru - who was originally strong enough to stand against Impact on his own - faces a humiliating defeat at the hands of a group of ordinary children.


Multi-Media Tropes

  • Die for Our Ship: Omitsu is the favored punching bag for bitter shippers, as she is the sole love interest of the main series - a matter exacerbated by her lack of screen time outside of kidnapping plots, leading her to be denounced as a useless cuckoldress or simply ignored as a result. To rub more salt into the wound, Konami has been making Goemon and Omitsu's romance more overt in recent times, and even threw in a couple of moments to sink the more popular GoeYae couple. (The fans of the aforementioned couple have the manga and Bouken Jidai Katsugeki to go on, but they're Alternate Continuity so they "don't count.")
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Harakiri Seppukumaru, and the Four Tsujigiri by association.
  • Fan Dumb: Yae has a vocal sect of Mad Grooms in Japan who take their Fan Service very seriously, to the point where they raged over Omitsu and Princess Yuki's attempts at audience appeal in Pachislot and demanded that Konami remove them from the series entirely to eliminate any competition over the title of "heroine."
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Goemon/Yae and Goemon/Sasuke are the most prevalent.
  • Portmanteau Couple Name: Naturally, given how nearly all of the characters have Japanese names.
  • Unfortunate Implications: The series' tendency to peg foreigners as villains could come across as racist and xenophobic. This was subverted in the DS game, where the antagonist Peruri (obviously based on Commodore Matthew C. Perry) merely wanted to get some trades going with Japan, but was manipulated into evil by Touyama Kinemon, a native.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Sasuke gets kicked around a lot, especially in the manga. Such is the price of being the most popular in the series.
  • Viewer Gender Confusion: The crossdressing Sister Bismaru is mistaken for a woman thanks to a typo in the Goemon's Great Adventure manual. There's also Sasuke, to a lesser extent.