RIKI 8Bit Game Collection Is a Rockin’ Compilation Album Compilation

RIKI 8Bit Game Collection is one of those releases that puts a lot of the information right there in the title: it’s a Famicom compilation — a Famicompilation, if you will — and it’s spearheaded by manga artist RIKI. These are recent releases rather than original licensed titles, and some of them are more music than game. We’ve enjoyed a lot of these in their original forms, and we’ve been spending time with this new collection to let you know what to expect!

Included are five games — “games” — Kira Kira Star Night, Astro Ninja Man DX, 8Bit Music Power, 8Bit Music Power Final, and 8Bit Music Power Encore. We use the quotes there because the last three are essentially albums with visualizers rather than something with gameplay, but they’re very cool versions of the things they are for sure.

The 8Bit Music Power releases, which have launched sporadically since 2017, contain too many composers to list. The general idea is that it’s a compilation album from all the chiptune artists RIKI could get to join in. Accompanying these is a suite of cute animations, as well as an interface for manipulating the NES’ sound channels in real time. The first one has a few more interactive elements, but the last two smartly focus on the tunes themselves.

At a certain point, bringing these releases back into modernity would defeat the purpose. After all, much of the impressive appeal of the cartridges is what they get decades-old hardware to do! That said, the crucial thing here is accurate audio emulation, and in our time with the collection, it seems faithful enough to our ears. It’s admittedly not quite as cool a way to experience it as booting up an old Famicom, but that’s not really an option most have.

Since the games have a native 4-by-3 aspect ratio, the game shows bits of RIKI’s art from each title by default in the vertical letterboxing. You can change or remove these, and even stretch the display if you’re a monster, but we don’t mind the initial configuration. One option we wish were there is a zoom crop, since a lot of time the bottom of the 8Bit Music Power screens are just the game title and the top could have some room for truncation. The result could look nice, we think?

Kira Kira Star Night and Astro Ninja Man DX are indeed games, but as games go, they’re pretty close to visualizers too. In Kira Kira Star Night, you collect star icons as they fall from the sky in various formations. The appeal of the game is letting the soundtrack wash over you and watching the elaborate backgrounds and animations.

Astro Ninja Man DX, the latest release of the bunch, is a single-screen shooter in the vein of early-’80s arcade classics. You gain more and more… ninja astronaut silhouettes?… and shoot more projectiles at once to take down enemies. This again feels more like a way to enjoy the music, though the formula is closer to a familiar score-chasing arcade game than Kira Kira Star Night.

While the games themselves won’t hold your attention for too long, RIKI 8Bit Game Collection is a handy little app to keep on your Switch for its unbeatable soundtrack. And hey, it’s also a lot cheaper than buying cartridge versions, so it’s an accessible way for those who’ve been interested for a while.

RIKI 8Bit Game Collection launches December 12, 2024 on the Nintendo Switch for $19.99. It was developed by RIKI and City Connection and published in the West by Embracer subsidiary Clear River Games.