What were the Saint Seiya Famicom games?
A two-part RPG that taught a generation of children to read a health bar as a burning Cosmo.
Bandai split the Sanctuary arc across two cartridges. Saint Seiya: Ōgon Densetsu (Golden Legend) arrived on August 10, 1987, ten months into the anime’s run, mixing RPG exploration with side-view action. Ōgon Densetsu Kanketsu Hen, the Conclusion Chapter, followed on May 30, 1988 to finish the Twelve Palaces. Together they are the franchise’s founding games, and its most collectible.
THE TWO CARTRIDGES
1987 and 1988Ōgon Densetsu · 1987
Part one: Seiya’s rise and the road to Sanctuary. Its hybrid structure, town-and-talk RPG wrapped around action stages, was Bandai’s house style for Jump licenses, and Saint Seiya wore it better than most.
The French exception
The first game was released in France on the NES, one of the very few Famicom manga games of its decade to cross into Europe at all. France had the anime on TF1 from 1988; the cartridge followed the cartoon, as everything in this franchise’s geography does.
Kanketsu Hen · 1988
Part two never left Japan. It completes the Gold Saint gauntlet the first cartridge began, and its save-the-best-for-last structure makes the pair a single work in two boxes: a set, for collecting purposes, or nothing.
Saint Paradise · Game Boy · 1992
The handheld coda: a card-battling RPG with super-deformed Saints, November 13, 1992, reaching the Poseidon arc the Famicom pair never touched.
THE AFTERLIFE
Remakes and reissuesPerfect Edition · WonderSwan Color · 2003
Bandai’s own remake fused both Famicom games into one cartridge for the WonderSwan Color, July 31, 2003, covering the anime’s first 73 episodes. Critics were unkind (Famitsu, 19/40); the object itself, a 1987 RPG reborn on a 1999 handheld in 2003, is pure collector catnip.
J Legend Retsuden · 3DS · 2013
Both originals returned unaltered in this Famicom compilation for Nintendo 3DS, the pair’s first official reissue on modern hardware.
What to look for
Complete-in-box Japanese copies with the manual are the standard; the French NES edition of the first game is the cross-border prize, a French-market Bandai cartridge of a Japanese RPG, and correspondingly scarce.