Anyway, did you know that in the English dub of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, Bryan Cranston did the voice of Fei Long? I learned that recently and I don’t know how to process that information. That burden is now yours to share.
4. BS Zelda no Densetsu
Yeah, I probably could have talked about the CD-i Zelda games here, but those have garnered The Room level of notoriety and are no longer as forgotten as they should be. Instead, I’m going to cherry-pick from the outright bizarre experiment that was the Satellaview.
On the surface, BS Zelda No Densetsu is a 16-bit remake of the original Legend of Zelda done in the style of a “third quest.” That’s actually a great idea for a rerelease, but you’d expect something like that to be a bit more well-known, even if it was a Japanese-only product.
Then again, the Satellaview was one of those ideas that was undeniably creative and ambitious, but fundamentally did not work. The device essentially “broadcasted” games like this to its users and only allowed those users to access them during scheduled broadcast times. Subsequent broadcasts would open up more of the map, but once BS Zelda no Densetsu was done, that was it. There was no cartridge or downloaded game file left on the hard drive. It’s just a piece of lost media that lives on as one of the stranger experiments in video game history.
3. Wily & Right no Rockboard: That’s Paradise
By the early ’90s, Capcom was cranking out Mega Man games one after another. Mega Man 5 was just released, and the company was less than a year away from dropping Mega Man 6 and Mega Man X. They even had Mega Man Soccer on the horizon, with its face-meltingly awesome theme song for the Dr. Wily Field. In Japan, Capcom decided to tap into the virtual board game market with Wily & Right no Rockboard: That’s Paradise.
This game is basically Monopoly with 8-bit Mega Man graphics. For some reason or another, you can’t play as Mega Man himself, though, and are instead forced to choose between Dr. Light/Right, Dr. Wily, Roll, and Mega Man 4 characters, Dr. Cossack and Kalinka. There are even various different boards that come with chill remixes of classic Mega Man boss themes. While it isn’t the most exciting game in the franchise, this oddity of the Mega Man series does have a fan-made English translation out there for anyone interested in exploring the depths of that franchise.