Destructoid’s guide to collecting for Famicom

21.09.2023 - 20:11 / destructoid.com

The Nintendo Family Computer (more commonly known as the Famicom) launched in 1983 in Japan, a full two years before its Western analog, the NES, debuted in North America. This was right as the video game market underwent a temporary implosion in other parts of the world and was strangely the best time possible for Nintendo to break into the home market. 

Collecting for a Japanese console can cause some hesitation for an Anglophone. The fear is that the best games will remain in their native language, and you’ll be left with piles of RPGs where you can’t even navigate the menus. That can certainly be a problem as you get into later generations of consoles, but with the Famicom, there are a lot of great games that don’t require much reading comprehension.

To make things more tantalizing, the Famicom is a relatively cheap console to collect for. While the price of NES games have been climbing to upsetting levels over the past few years, the Japanese collector’s market hasn’t really moved much. Most titles in the system’s library don’t exceed $50, and many of them have a higher price tag because they’re regional variations of expensive NES titles.

Because of its accessibility and affordability, the Famicom has remained my favorite console to import for, so I’m going to share some of that knowledge with you.

The Famicom is a lot more than just the Japanese NES. While you can get nearly identical versions of popular titles like Super Mario Bros. and the Legend of Zelda on both platforms, the Famicom offers a whole world beyond that. If you love the NES but feel you’ve plumbed the depths of its library for all the gems it has to offer, then the Famicom is where you should go next.

When I started out with the Famicom, I mostly targeted three main groups: Nintendo, Kunio-Kun, and Konami.

There are very few Nintendo games that stayed exclusively in Japan. Of these, most are on the Famicom Disk System and are visual novel titles that are impossible to play unless you speak the language. But two of them stand out: Joy Mecha Fight and Devil’s World. The former is a fighting game in the vein of Street Fighter II, while the latter is a weird maze game (like Pac-Man) designed by Shigeru Miyamoto.

A great deal of the Kunio-Kun/Nekketsu/Downtown games stayed in Japan. You might know these games better as one of their localized titles: River City Ransom or Crash ‘N’ the Boys. Since they’re all part of one series, you might expect that there would only be a small number of titles, but there’s actually just short of a dozen. My personal favorites are Ike! Ike! Nekketsu Hockey-bu and Nekketsu Street Basket: Ganbare Dunk Heroes. Note that you can now get all of these titles as part of the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro