The Definitive Top 100: Best Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Games Never Released in America
The first-ever list of its kind, this RETRO ranking is a consensus of 120+ experts and media outlets on the best NES games released in Europe or Japan but not America. And now you can play them all!
{Note: This article uses the term “NES” to denote both the Japanese Family Computer, or FamiCom, and the Nintendo Entertainment System as it was released in the PAL A and PAL B regions of what is now the European Union.}
Introduction
There were nearly 700 licensed NES games released in the United States, almost all of which were first published as games for the Japanese FamiCom. And yet the FamiCom had a much larger library of licensed games—a whopping 1,054 titles—which means that American gamers got shortchanged by well over 300 licensed video games (not to mention many more unlicensed games), some of which likely would have been instant classics had they been localized and released stateside. There are even a bevy of games which European gamers got—in English translation, no less—but that still skipped the American market.
The range of these never-seen-on-these-shores games is as stunning as their volume.
A lost Star Wars game? A lost Transformers game? A lost Beauty and the Beast game from Disney? Lost Garfield and Smurfs games? Check, check, check, check, check.
The long-whispered-of first Goonies NES game? It’s here. The second Gradius game? The fourth Adventure Island? A sequel to Arkanoid? A sequel to cult classic shooter Stinger? You’ll find all of these below as well.
Games never played by American gamers but considered among the best of the third generation of video game consoles, like Mr. Gimmick, Ufouria, Over Horizon, Crisis Force, Just Breed, Mother, Rainbow Island, Recca, and Sweet Home? They’re all here.
Games so compellingly titled you’ve just got to play them? The list below has those in spades, from Kid Dracula (a Castlevania spinoff game) to Ninja Cat, from Samurai Pizza Cats to Penguin Wars, from Hello Kitty World to Magical Fantastic World.
Did you know the Fire Emblem, Splatterhouse, and Megami Tensei series (the last of which is best known by U.S. gamers through its most recent entry, the PlayStation 4 game Persona 5) all started on the NES? They did! Did you know the first video game appearance of the figures who would later be known as The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was in the FamiCom game Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger? It was!
As a bit of a further surprise, we’ve got two great “archival finds” below, too—games that were supposed to be put out for American gamers in the 1980s or 1990s but never were, only to be discovered decades later by video game historians, reduced to “ROM” (digital read-only memory) game format, and made available to gamers worldwide via the magic of NES emulators. In this particularly exciting category of unreleased NES video games you’ll find the impressive titles Bio Force Ape and Time Diver: Eon Man.
And none of this counts the games with names that sound odd (or eerily reminiscent of a famous Derek & the Dominoes song), like Layla, Jesus, Chester Field, Armadillo, and Booby Kids. {Note: The use of the word “booby” here apparently refers to the notion of a “booby trap.”}
There are video game journalists and veteran retro gamers who will earnestly say that Chronicles of the Radia War is better than Legend of Zelda or that Devil World is as addictive as Pac-Man, or who’ll note that Sweet Home may be the first-ever horror-RPG—and was produced by the man who’d ultimately produce a little game called Resident Evil—or that the super-obscure Elite may be one of the deepest NES games you’ll ever play.
And here’s the best part: you now can play virtually all of these incredible NES games.
Once upon a time you couldn’t, but now, with an emulator, you can—and you should.
{Note: If you’ve never used a NES emulator before, it’s as easy as you could possibly imagine. RETRO recommends EmulatorGames.net for downloading your ROMs and the NES.emu emulator—which you can find at the Google Play store and download to your Android phone in seconds—for playing them. If you get really into retro gaming, you’ll soon find that there are countless emulators for every retro video game console, and that everyone has their own favorite emulator-and-console combination. Moreover, there are even physical consoles you can buy that are designed to play retro games, or, for that matter, licensed consoles like the NES Classic Edition or SNES Classic Edition. And any ROM you can’t find at Emulator Games you can probably find at RomHustler online, instead.}
An Important Note About RETRO Video Game Rankings
The reason I create lists like the one below is because I know how much games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda meant to many people my age, and I know, too, how unhappy most of us are these days—with the pandemic, domestic political turmoil, supply-chain issues, and so on. So I figure that if I can point RETRO readers toward games every bit as good as the games they played as kids, but which they’ve never played before, shouldn’t I do so on the off chance it will make even a few of them as happy as these games have been making me? Think about it: you could be playing the incredible games below (in English translation) in under two minutes, as all you need to do is to download NES.emu to your phone and then download a ROM from the sites listed above. It’s a 10-second download—literally—and before you know it, you’re playing a game as good as Super Mario Bros. for free on your cell phone.
What could be better than that? And the list below features many games that good.
Some Gameplay Samples
ABOVE: Mr. Gimmick—sometimes called simply Gimmick!—is considered far and away the best NES game that was never released in the United States. Among much else, it is known for its incredible music.
ABOVE: Along with Bio Force Ape, Recca is almost certainly the fastest game ever released for the NES. It’s also often said to have pushed the NES to its absolute limits, hardware-wise.
ABOVE: Holy Diver, which shares its name with a heavy metal song by the band Dio—and has many references to heavy metal in it—is often referred to as the most difficult NES game ever. Gameplay-wise, many consider it reminiscent of the better-known Castlevania series.
ABOVE: Kaiketsu Yanchamaru 3: Taiketsu! Souringen (in U.S. terms, Kid Niki 3) is a game by Irem—known for such incredible NES games as Metal Storm—that you can download as a ROM for your NES.emu Android emulator (with an English translation) at RomHustler.net. As with many of the games in the ranking below, this game is every bit as amazing as it looks. You’ll find enormous similarities between this game and games from the Mega Man series.
Methodology
This list is an offshoot of an even longer and more involved RETRO ranking, an entry in the Definitive Top 100 Series entitled “The Definitive Top 100: Underrated Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) Games.” You can read the introduction to that ranking to get more information on how this one was devised (as the rankings’ methodology, and many of the experts and industry outlets it cites, are the same).
The one note I’d add here is that this ranking does not consider re-skins to be new games. So, for instance, Probotector (PAL) is treated as being Contra (NTSC), Doki Doki Panic (JP) as Super Mario Bros. 2 (NTSC), and Donald Duck (JP) as Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular (NTSC). Also not considered is a game like VS. Excitebike, which is simply the multiplayer version of the NTSC-released NES game Excitebike.
At the very bottom of this article, you’ll find RETRO’s picks for the best NES games that were never released in America.
The Top 25 Best NES Games Never Released in America
{with votes from 120+ industry experts and outlets in parentheses}