In 1985, Sunsoft put out a Famicom game called Ikki, a top-down peasant-revolt action title so punishing that it’s credited with giving Japanese gaming a whole new word. Kusoge, roughly “crap game”. The term is said to trace back to writer Jun Miura’s 2002 Famitsu column, looking back at his miserable time with the game, though the exact origin has been argued over for years. The reputation stuck regardless. Ikki is now the headline act in Sunsoft’s second retro compilation, Sunsoft Is Back! Retro Game Selection 2, due out on PS5, Switch and PC on 17 December.
The other three are less notorious. Arguably, they’re more interesting. Super Arabian was Sunsoft’s first home release, a 1985 Famicom port of its own 1983 arcade game Arabian, and it marks the point the company stopped being purely an arcade outfit. The Mystery of Atlantis (1986) is a side-scrolling platformer that never made it west in any form. Then there’s Maharaja. Released in 1989, it’s an RPG obscure enough that it barely has an English-language footprint at all, and the closing line of Time Extension’s own coverage put it bluntly: don’t expect a translation this time either.
Rewind and save, but the language barrier stays
Sunsoft’s pitch for the collection is the same one every retro compilation makes now: save states and rewind, so you can finally finish the games you couldn’t as a kid, plus a gallery of concept art and promotional flyers. It isn’t promising English text for Maharaja. That leaves the one RPG in a four-game, Western-facing set unreadable to most of the audience it’s aimed at. Physical editions, including a collector’s box, are Japan-only for PS5 and Switch; everyone else gets digital.
It’s a fair question why a company would build a nostalgia product around its own most infamous flop rather than around whichever games actually sold well in 1985. The honest answer is probably reputation. Ikki’s bad name is worth more as a hook now than a good game’s quiet competence ever was, and Sunsoft clearly knows it. Whether Ikki still earns its infamy forty years on, or turns out to be merely dated rather than actually cursed, is exactly what this collection now lets anyone find out for themselves.
