Ganbare! Daiku no Gen-san (SNES) Playthrough [English] - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Irem's 1993 action-platformer for the Super Famicom, Ganbare! Daiku no Gen-san (がんばれ!大工の源さん).

The game was only ever released in Japanese, so I've translated the game's text and superimposed it over top of the video.

Ganbare! Daiku no Gen-san is part of the Hammerin' Harry series that began in arcades back in the late eighties, though most of the games never received any sort of official release in English.

Leading up to this was the original arcade game and its PAL-only English version on NES: (   • Hammerin' Harry (NES) Playthrough - N...   ), a Famicom-exclusive sequel, a Game Boy platformer (   • Hammerin' Harry: Ghost Building Compa...   ) and quiz game, and Ganbare! was the fifth.

This SNES platformer once again puts you in the role of "Hammerin' Harry," otherwise known as 'Gen The Carpenter'. In each game he fights the Kuromokugumi (Rusty Nail Corp. in the English version of the first game), and this time, they have blown up a house that he had just finished building for a couple, and as expected, they also abscond with Gen's lady-friend, Kanna-chan.

Infuriated, Gen responds by smashing everything he comes across with a giant mallet... because he's a construction worker, I guess? The game begins in Teyandee Town and ultimately ends up in the future (by way of a giant taiko drum/alarm clock with a face on it) where Gen takes out the proverbial trash.

It's classic 80s arcade-style platforming dolled up with some sharp, hyper-cutesy 16-bit graphics, and it plays quite well despite how insanely easy it is. (Remember, this is Irem we're talking about here!)

I don't know if the games are particularly well-known anymore - the last one came out nearly fifteen years ago on the PSP - but I thought that you guys might enjoy looking at this fun little Japanese eccentricity.

A note about the translation: the Gen-san games are loaded with amusing puns and Japanese colloquialisms that don't translate into English. I didn't attempt to shoehorn any English equivalents in here, but in case you're interested:

Though they're set in the modern day, the games use an old-fashioned dialect known as "Edokko" (Child of Edo), used to refer to people who grew up in Edo in the years leading up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Gen's character is meant to represent the type of personality people usually associate with the dialect: he's good natured, high spirited, and charming despite being a bit rough around the edges.

A lot of the words in the game directly reference this, like "Teyandee," a stylized contraction of "Naniittendayo" (What are you talking about?), and "Beranme", which refers to an old-school, brash way of speaking used by blue collar workers in the late Edo period.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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