The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Wonder Momo
Get ready to experience this wonderfully bizarre beat ‘em up where you perform an Ultraman-style stunt show for an adoring audience.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Namco
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade (Japan only)
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
Over the years, North American gamers have gradually become aware of many excellent Japan-only games which are tremendously high in quality and a lot of fun to play but weren’t very marketable at their time of release due to their strong connections to Japanese culture. Wonder Momo is one of the best-known games in this vein – it’s completely playable without knowing a word of Japanese, but it’s also so distinctly rooted in the tropes associated with henshin hero and tokusatsu shows like Ultraman, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider that many of the game’s choices would have been completely lost on an American audience in the late 1980s. It’s also a game that revels in bishojo magical hero girl anime trappings, which was truly unique for the time and made the game really stand out in Japanese arcades.
The high concept behind Wonder Momo is that you’re playing as a pop idol actress on stage in the Namco Theater and battling a bunch of costumed stuntmen while a crowd of headband-wearing male fans watches from below. As Momo, you wear a blue jumper with a short skirt, but if you can touch a tornado that occasionally appears onstage, you’ll whirl around and transform into a masked heroine with a pink jumper, blue sleeves and a glowing “Wonder Hoop” which is basically a hula hoop you can toss at enemies and retrieve as it bounces back. With the right power-up, Wonder Momo can also utilize a beam attack where she holds up her hands at a 90-degree angle and fires in a manner very similar to Ultraman, and she can pick up another attack that allows her to spin and shoot beams both left and right.
Lest you think the crowd is just a visual element and the stage is just a fun way to frame the action, you’ll periodically have to dodge a kid with a camera who follows your progress and tries to snap a picture, blinding Momo momentarily and making her blush.
(While it’s a common point of conjecture that Momo is perhaps embarrassed because the photographer was trying to see up her skirt, she can’t be too shy; the game’s curtain will sometimes descend with a picture of her in nothing but a bath towel, and that skirt is short enough fly up briefly during Momo’s kicking and jumping animations. Clearly, anime “fan service” is very much a part of the culture this game is emulating.)
Momo’s show takes place on a wooden stage with sixteen different levels divided into four shows as she repels the invasion of the “Phantom Warudemon Army” led by a disembodied brain named Mozu. In each act, she’ll battle gray-suited, red-masked Modoki (similar to the Putties in Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers) as well as flying ninjas, crystals or robots. The vast array of bosses are one of the highlights of the game. To stay consistent with whole conceit of Wonder Momo, they appear to be either people in monster suits or elaborate mechanical puppets. One is a guy in a crab costume. Another is a pudgy golden robot. Another’s a cybernetic T-rex who breathes fire. There’s a round robot with skinny legs who attacks with headbutts. There’s a monster who carries a bazooka with boomeranging rockets. There’s a robot called “Mother Queen” that starts out as a giant flying cone of spinning spikes, but which eventually sprout mechanical legs and stalk its way towards you. There’s even a breakdancing ninja monster named Shamoan (an allusion to Michael Jackson’s famous exclamation from his song, “Bad”) and a sword-wielding, purple-haired female rival named Amazona.
Wonder Momo feels like a side-scrolling beat ‘em up because it’s a game where you’re constantly kicking enemies and knocking them off the stage. Momo even has a signature move where she turns towards the audience and does a split kick, launching her legs in both directions. And yet because the game involves a lot of back and forth across the stage (which is only about two and a half screens in length), it feels very different from progression-oriented games like Kung-Fu Master. That the game takes great pains to remind you that your foes are just actors in a play - even having Momo and the bosses wave to the crowd at the end - also makes Wonder Momo feel surprisingly nonviolent despite all the kicking, beam-shooting and hoop-throwing.
While the game plays like a challenging 1980s beat ‘em up and lacks the refinement the 1990s brought to the genre, it’s still quite fun to play and has a few things which really stand out today. The first is the music, which transitions from a happy (and quite catchy!) schoolgirl tune to a more determined boss battle tune once Momo transforms. The second is the game’s wonderful sense of humor, which includes things like a parody of the MGM lion sequence before Momo’s show begins and some amusing curtain illustrations between scenes. A third element is the voice acting, which includes digital samples of a Japanese voice actress who sounds like she’s voicing an anime character. Some of the other enemies also speak, including the crab boss, who says “Kani! Kani!” (“Crab! Crab!”) when he attacks with his pinchers.
Wonder Momo has long been a game only Japanese players and arcade emulation fans have had access to. In Japan, the game was re-released in compilations for the PlayStation and Wii but was also ported to the PC Engine in a fairly faithful adaptation that includes a few additional story scenes, but which lacks the voice acting and has slightly downgraded graphics. The arcade original is definitely the one to play. Fortunately, North American and European gamers can finally play a legally emulated arcade version of the game on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 thanks to HAMSTER Corporation.
Interestingly, Namco Bandai attempted to revive Wonder Momo in the 2010s with a popular webcomic on their ShiftyLook Media site called Wonder Momo: Battle Idol which focused on a new high school heroine named Momoko (the original Momo’s daughter, as it turns out) fighting the same Warudemon alien invaders 25 years later amidst her attempts to become an idol. After Momoko gains the power of transformation, the new Wonder Momo fights alongside the original and a new variation of Amazona who’s blond this time around. The group is also followed around by a photographer who seems to have an infatuation with Momoko. The comic was popular enough to warrant a collection published by Udon and a 5-episode collection of anime shorts which are all still available to watch on Crunchyroll (though, it should be noted, the webcomic has much more story to tell and is the better of the two). Wonder Momo also appeared as a character several times in the Bravoman comic, which is fitting given that the 1988 Namco arcade game Chōzetsurin Jin: Bravoman shares many similar inspirations with Wonder Momo.
The webcomic also resulted in a sort-of sequel as Namco Bandai produced a mobile video game adaptation in 2014 called Wonder Momo: Typhoon Booster. It’s a good-looking game with a great soundtrack and was developed by WayForward Technologies (creators of Shantae and developers of DuckTales: Remastered, A Boy and His Blob and The Mummy Demastered). While it lacks the charm of the original Wonder Momo and tells a side-story to the anime rather than returning to the original conceit of a stage show, it’s still nice to see the series get a second wind. Sadly, the game was Japan-only and has since been delisted; the ShiftyLook Media webcomic project has also since been discontinued.
While Wonder Momo is something of a deep cut in terms of relevance to modern gaming, it’s a game that’s definitely worth experiencing even today. While the clunky controls and ease of getting hit can make it quite difficult to progress through initially, it’s easy enough to play it on an arcade emulator with save states and fumble your way through the story. The charming characters, fun conceit and memorable music definitely make the game worthwhile. Western gamers in the 1980s might not have understood much of what this game was depicting, but those who’ve grown up with a stronger familiarity with anime, kaiju and Power Rangers shows will definitely find it accessible and enjoyable.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!