For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to TerraEsperZ's Gimmick! (J) (NES) maps.
Yumetaro, a small green yokai, has been given as a birthday gift to a young girl. One night, her toys (also alive, apparently) kidnap her and take her into another world. It's up to Yumetaro to rescue her! Using his power to create a bouncing star, used as a weapon or platform to ride or jump from, he will traverse seven colourful levels of late-era NES platforming!
It's a short game, but pretty solid. The music is particularly top-notch, especially in the original Japanese Famicom release. As one of the last 8-bit games from Sunsoft, it's not to be missed, so it's great that TerraEsperZ has mapped this out for us to appreciate!
TerraEsperZ also mapped Trip World for the Game Boy, another cute Sunsoft platformer that originally didn't get an official release in the Americas, as we saw when it was honoured here two years ago, also in September.
As of last year, Gimmick! is more accessible worldwide, as it was released for the Evercade as part of the "Sunsoft Collection 1" cartridge (under its original Scandinavian name, "Mr. Gimmick!"), and a rerelease, "Gimmick!: Special Edition", also came out in 2023, for the Switch, PS4, Xbox One, and on Steam. And this month sees the release of a long-overdue sequel, Gimmick! 2, more than three decades later. There's definitely lots of love for Gimmick! now!
So to recognize the effort put into mapping this once-obscure platformer, TerraEsperZ's Gimmick! (J) (NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for September 2024.
