Who sang the musical numbers in Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon?

Anime song royalty, hired to sing inside a game cartridge.

The Library already asks why this game has a giant robot and musical numbers. This page names the voices. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (1997) was built on a 128 megabit cartridge, oversized for its era, in large part to hold high quality sung numbers and voice samples at a time when Nintendo 64 games simply did not sing.

There are three. The Theme of Ganbare Goemon is sung by Hironobu Kageyama, the defining voice of anime theme songs. I Am Impact, the giant robot Impact's entrance song, is sung by Ichirou Mizuki, the elder statesman of that same tradition, exactly the casting a heroic robot theme demands. Gorgeous My Stage is performed by Toshihiro Tachibana and Etsuyo Ota. Around them, four composers, Shigeru Araki, Yusuke Kato, Saiko Miki, and Yasumasa Kitagawa, built a score mixing traditional Japanese instruments with modern ones. The songs, with forty tunes and an I Am Impact remix, were released on CD on October 3, 1997.

THE THREE NUMBERS

Casting as a design decision

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon Japanese Nintendo 64 box art

The Japanese Original · 1997

Ganbare Goemon: Dance of the Neo Peach Mountain Shogunate. Even the subtitle is a dance. The villains' plot is to turn Japan into a stage theater, so the heroes answer in song.

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon American Nintendo 64 box art

The American Release · 1998

The sung numbers survived localization, a notable choice in an era when vocal tracks were routinely cut or replaced for Western releases.

Dungeons That Build

Away from the numbers, the dungeon music starts minimal and grows in complexity and length the deeper the player goes, the quiet counterpart to the cartridge's loudest trick.

The CD

The October 1997 soundtrack album pairs the three vocal numbers with forty game tunes and closes with a six minute remix, I Am Impact Momoyama Mix 1997.

Who sang the musical numbers in Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon?

THE THREE NUMBERS

THE FIRST WORD