Review (2025 August)

Following the retro platformer mini games in the Nanashi no Game series, two DSi games called Noroi no Game Chi & Goku (as "Chi" and "Goku" afterwards) were released in 2009. Each has a bunch of retro platformer levels without any stories: 5 easy (ノオマル) levels, 20 medium (アナザア) levels and 5 hard (ジゴク) levels . Easy levels are not really easy, some medium levels are already very tricky and hard levels are insane tortures. Visually awful and tricky as hell, Chi & Goku are designed for those masochistic hardcore players to train and challenge themselves. That said, most players are not their audience and will get frustrated and drop out soon after some quick plays.

To me, the trick part already started before starting Chi & Goku. Since Chi & Goku are DSi games, common NDS emulators like DeSmuME and NO$GBA do not work in this case. The technical issues took me a fair amount of time to tackle, until I found a solution in the end, in particular Melon DS. Explaining the exact research or problem solving process will take a few long paragraphs to do, so let's ignore that boring part to save space.

Chi & Goku – simply completing every level in a legit way is a great great achievement. Some would argue that with enough patience, everyone is able to complete every level. Well that might be true, but the fact is very few has the minimum required skills and perseverance to keep dying and practicing till the end. As playing on an emulator, I did use "smart" features like Save & Load to help me learn and practice the levels. Thus in the end, I still completed every level in the following way: "Continuous playing from the beginning to the end under the normal running speed." I had some of my best moments with Chi & Goku.