Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is a platform action-adventure video game released by Konami for the Nintendo 64 on August 7, 1997 in Japan, April 16, 1998 in North America, and 18 April 1998 in Europe as the fifth entry in the Ganbare Goemon series. The second Goemon game released in North America and Europe, it follows The Legend of the Mystical Ninja and features hybrid elements of platform games and action-adventure games. The story follows Goemon's struggles to prevent the Peach Mountain Shoguns gang from turning Japan into a Westernized fine arts theater. The plot calls for three cinematic musical features and battles between giant robots; like other Ganbare Goemon games, it is peppered with surrealist humor and anachronisms. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon sold nearly 200,000 copies worldwide. Reviewers praised its graphics, gameplay, and humorous plot, while criticizing its virtual camera and questioning how accessible its references and jokes would be to Western audiences. Gameplay Players navigate Goemon through forests, fields, dungeons, and other three-dimensional models of feudal Japanese places. Goemon and his friends can walk or run, jump, attack, and use special abilities to cross terrain, pick up money, and defeat enemies. Players control only one of the four characters at a time but can cycle through them with the press of a button. Hearts at the bottom of the screen show a character's health. If damage is taken, a character loses a heart. Some items and acts replenish health, and a Maneki-neko (Luck Cat) adds a heart to the overall health. If all hearts are lost, the player restarts at the entrance to the field map they died in and the player's number of lives declines by one. If the player loses all lives, the game restarts at the last point saved or at the beginning of the game if a Controller Pak is not used. Traveling through Japan, players visit towns and coffeehouses safe from enemies, where they can eat in restaurants or sleep in inns to refill health and buy armor or riceballs (a self-acting item that refills health by itself). Many interactive non-player characters populate cities and talk with other characters to uncover plot devices or idle gossip. Players save their progress in towns with a Controller Pak at the inns or at the entrance to some dungeons. Some places are impassable prohibiting the use of special abilities unlocked by completing minigames. For example, Ebisumaru