Gangan Gan‐chan (SNES Super Famicom) - RetroAchievements/RANews GitHub Wiki

Game {% ragamepic 23149, 076431, Gangan Gan-chan %}{% ragame 23149, Gangan Gan-chan %}
Console SNES / Super Famicom https://retroachievements.org/system/3-snes-super-famicom/games
Genre Arcade https://retroachievements.org/hub/3357, Maze Chase https://retroachievements.org/hub/7704
Set by {% rauserpic Aaamdacuaga %} {% rauser Aaamdacuaga %}
Write-up by {% rauserpic chumph %} {% rauser chumph %}

Gangan Gan-chan is an isometric maze chaser starring a constantly-moving upright cat with shoes & a smile but no torso.
Your job is to bring 4 Puyos (blobs) of 4 different colors back to your spawn so you can then collect a key for each color and bring those back too. You can gather up to 8 blobs at a time in a line behind you and even earn a power-up for each 4 combo of the same color, but the 2 or 3 enemies in each stage will chase you down to steal them, scatter them around, or even spit them back at you. Gan-chan can't take a single run-in with an enemy, but he can zing blobs to stun them & oftentimes himself. He is able to turn into stone like Kirby to parry encounters, though each use will eat at his stamina bar and sometimes disrupt the order of your blob chain if done too late. At the end of each world he gets his own fixed shoot-em-up segment.

The sound, the style, everything is cute but not cloying. Visually there are a tremendous amount of background details in each world that are as busy as the gameplay. There are skyscrapers by the sea in Tokyo, rows of street markets in China, and cattle skulls that clatter around in Egypt to name a few. I tried to tell a sunbathing babe on a Hawaii beach about cheevos but I got chomped by a shark.

Gangan's set asks you for roughly 7 playthroughs on Normal mode with different caveats, such as completing without using your stone ability, blob-zinging, or even running. Each run is ideally around half an hour long, you have a reasonable amount of lives, and you can combine a few of these conditions into the same run. The set squeezes a lot out of an already very difficult game; don't be fooled by the low scores for many of the achievements. I wanted this game to overstay its welcome, so it's welcome.

Hard mode however....
The very menacing enemy AI does not change between modes, and you're given a few more seconds in most levels after the first world at least. Blobs are now at possibly 3x speed and actively avoid you, and I believe they spawn at a much lower frequency & overall maximum amount on the map. The "Hard" is justified by the balance between depositing fewer blobs & not running out of stamina or time. Mastery, or just survival, also depends on your ability to manipulate both the blobs' & the enemies' movements to deviate to your advantage, and keeping track of the giant enemy-indicating arrows along the sides of the screen that I'm grateful were still in Hard mode. Peripheral vision & perseverance are the names of the game, whose name is Gangan Gan-chan.

I put this game down in June after an hour or two; it was overwhelming and required a lot of focus I did not think I had, but was fun enough that it was in the back of my mind throughout the summer. It's an arduous & addicting game in a genre I have very little experience in (outside of restaurant cabinet Pac-Man, who - especially when factoring in his World 2 - sucks).
A large part of the enjoyment I've gotten out of RA has been scrolling through its hubs; there are many titles I would have never heard of had I not been curious about games a few search pages deep with tragically low player counts and even lower completions. Your next favorite game is just sitting in a page for a publisher that made maybe two others total, like Gangan Gan-chan's.... unless they don't even get a page, like Gangan Gan-chan's.

At press time I'm the only player since the set dropped over 2 years ago to have simply Beaten the game (finish all 4 worlds on Normal without getting a Game Over; "simply" is an understatement), though there have only been 16 people who have tried. You, reader, could be the 17th!