Why does Mystical Ninja have a giant robot and musical numbers?

Start with the villains. The Peach Mountain Shoguns, led by Spring Breeze Dancin' and Kitty Lily, do not want to conquer Japan so much as to restyle it: their plan is to turn the country into a Westernized fine arts theater and its people into their audience, and the game opens with their peach-shaped ship lasering Oedo Castle into a European palace. A plot like that earns its finale honestly: the two leaders confront the heroes with a full production number, Gorgeous My Stage, before the last act begins. The singing is not decoration on this game. It is the conflict, staged.

There are three cinematic musical numbers in all. Hironobu Kageyama sings the Theme of Ganbare Goemon, Ichirou Mizuki sings I Am Impact, and Toshihiro Tachibana and Etsuyo Ota perform Gorgeous My Stage, over a score by four composers mixing traditional Japanese instruments with modern pop. Konami engineered the game around them: at 128 megabits, the cartridge was made much larger than most of its peers specifically to hold high quality musical numbers and voice samples. The soundtrack album followed on October 3, 1997 with forty tunes from the game and a remix of I Am Impact, and IGN, reviewing the American release, warned that the songs would permanently burn themselves into your brain.

The robot works the same way. Impact is Goemon's giant friend, summoned by conch shell when an enemy machine appears, castle-crushing King Robots and kabuki robots among them. Every summoning begins with a music video and a high-speed dash in which Impact smashes buildings for the oil that becomes his health, then settles into a first-person cockpit duel of punches, kicks, a chain pipe, nasal bullets, and a laser, with Rumble Pak support the manual never even mentioned. It is tokusatsu logic, the giant hero answering the giant monster, folded into a series built on surreal humor and cheerful anachronism. In a game where the enemy's ultimate weapon is a stage show, a singing robot is not a non sequitur. He is the headliner.