The Mysterious Murasame Castle 1986

Is it still worth playing?

Nintendo's 1986 action adventure, released at first only in Japan for the Famicom Disk System as its second original game and made available worldwide on the Virtual Console in 2014. You control Takamaru, a samurai who travels through four castles, collects the four gems from their lords and reaches the Murasame Castle to defeat the alien entity inside. The view is top down, with movement in every direction and no side scrolling. Each level has two parts, the path to the castle and the castle itself, both of considerable size, with enemies drawn from Japanese culture such as samurai, ninja and hannya. Your only weapons are a katana, for close range, and shurikens, and shuriken upgrades are lost whenever Takamaru dies. Even now, power ups are few, so you rely on your own action skills more than anything else.