Riki 8Bit Game Collection Review (Nintendo Switch): Strong retro vibes aren’t enough

The Riki 8Bit Game Collection has some interesting ideas and excellent tunes – but that’s not enough to make it worth picking up at full price.

Score: 2/5

Ethical disclaimer This review is based off code sent to me by the publisher of the Riki 8Bit Game Collection.

That gets them a review, nothing more, nothing less, no editorial control or input. I feel strongly that ethical disclosure is something that far too often gets buried in reviews, if it’s mentioned at all. Now, on with the review…

I am – as should be a surprise to basically nobody by this point – something of a retro game fanatic. There’s just something about the 8 and 16 bit eras of gaming especially that makes me happy, not that I’m averse to modern games.

Also read:

Why Retro Gaming Matters For Every Gamer

Retro Gaming Repair: Is It Something That Novices Can (Or Should) Do?

Retro Game Shopping In Japan: Are The Good Times Really Over?

Still, I’ve long argued that every gamer should be a retro gamer, but I’ll freely admit that many retro titles have not aged well at all. If you weren’t around in their heyday they can feel impossibly hard, or weirdly balanced, or just look janky to your eyes.

What’s been particularly interesting to me in recent years has been the exploration of retro style themes in entirely new games, whether that’s freshly made “homebrew” games for classic platforms, or just games that try to capture the retro aesthetic in new ways.

That’s pretty much the core promise of the Riki 8Bit Game Collection, which states the following in its game description:

Ask yourself this. (Honestly!) Don’t you wish you could travel back to that magical 8-bit era of the 80s? A time when everything was simpler, brighter, and more colorful.

When pixel artists crafted game characters dot-by-dot, and musical magicians transformed beeps and blips into soulful, timeless melodies—the very soundtrack of our youth.

With the old-school arcade games and irresistibly catchy music albums contained within Riki 8bit Game Collection, that dream of the past becomes a reality!

In theory, then, the Riki 8Bit Game Collection should be absolute heroin to be injected directly into my brain.

In theory… and also, obviously, don’t do drugs, kids, like the arcade games tell you not to.

If you remember this from back in the day… congratulations, you’re old, like me.

The problem with theory is that cold, hard reality often comes crashing into the room, and the cold hard reality here is that while the intent and style of the Riki 8Bit Game Collection is absolutely spot on, the package as a whole is just too slender to justify its price tag.

The Riki 8Bit Game Collection is made up of five “titles”, and that might make you think that it’s a collection of five games, what with the whole “Game Collection” suffix, right?

It’s not so.

It’s two games, and three collections of fresh retro-styled 8-bit music collections. Specifically on the game side you get Kira Kira Star Night! And Astro Ninja Man DX, while on the music side there’s 8 Bit Music Power, 8 Bit Music Power Final and 8 Bit Music Power Encore.

The music collections are… fine, I guess?

They do feature tracks from some truly legendary Japanese music composers including Yuzo Koshiro, Manabu Namiki and Junya Nakano amongst others. Alongside the music you get some neat displayed animations that play alongside each track, and it’s clear that a decent amount of work has been put into making this all fit together.

I could be narky here and state – and I wouldn’t be wrong – that they could have just bundled up all three music collections into one set player, which would be easier for browsing, but there’s a bigger problem here, I feel.

I pick up my Switch (or a Switch controller when it’s docked) because I want to play games.

It’s not really something that I use as a music player to speak of. If I want to play music, I have a serious quantity of smart speakers I can do that through, or I’ll stream it through my phone – but not so much the Switch.

It’s honestly something I think could have worked a whole lot better if the Riki 8Bit Game Collection had a PC release, because I could totally see myself putting a lot of the music here on in the background while I’m working. Doing so by suspending the Switch’s sleep features so it plays beside me feels all kinds of redundant to me.

If you’re particularly keen on the music side there is a physical special release edition of the Riki 8Bit Game Collection that can be purchased in Japan — I’ve seen it myself on store shelves — and that appears to come with a soundtrack CD that you could listen to all kinds of ways once you’d ripped it to a digital sound file — a totally legal thing to do if you own a CD of music in Australia, by the way.

That leaves the Riki 8Bit Game Collection with just the two games to rely on.

So visually sweet it’s practically giving me diabetes just looking at it.

Kira Kira Star Night! is a very simple back and forth jumping game where you’re tasked with catching enough stars falling from the sky before the time runs out.

Cute (static) cut scenes between levels definitely give it that 8 bit vibe.

The default character (others unlock on a successful completion of the game) has two jump heights, and… that’s it.

Run, jump, catch star, repeat. That’s all.

Kira Kira Star Night! isn’t particularly difficult, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome, with a full run lasting no more than about 10 minutes, but it’s also astonishingly slender in terms of gameplay, even when you do unlock characters with different move patterns.

Getting here does not take long. Games don’t have to be long to be good, but they need a gameplay hook that makes you want to keep playing.

I absolutely can get on board with simple score attack games like this; there’s a reason why I return every once in a while to Nintendo’s classic Game & Watch games, because they balance this kind of gameplay really well for the most part.

For the most part. I’d argue that, say Ball and Flag are irredeemably dull, but give me something like Octopus or Greenhouse and I can play for hours just trying to top my own high scores. Kira Kira Star Night!, despite its flashy cute visuals, falls far too simply into the “dull” side of the spectrum.

That leaves the Riki 8Bit Game Collection with just Astro Ninja Man DX, a wackily titled, up-the-screen shooter whose core gimmick is that you collect extra Ninja Men for multiple firing patterns as you go.

Content warning: If you’re sensitive to lots of flashing lights, neither of the Riki8 Bit games will be good for you.

Think of it like the double ship in Galaga, but dialled way up and with visuals that strongly remind me of what was done with systems like the Commodore 64 back in the day.

Being Japanese produced, it’s probably trying for more of an MSX aesthetic, but I’ll take my own nostalgic cues from it if that’s alright with you.

I also totally appreciate how the in-game manuals look like they could have been ripped from GameFaqs in about 1997…

Astro Ninja Man DX is decent fun, and it’s easily the best part of the package. Regular weapon firing is done automatically, with your only controls being left and right and choosing when to fire off your “ninja sword” beam attack to clear more persistent foes.

As a standalone title, Astro Ninja Man DX is the kind of thing I could recommend as a much cheaper Switch game.

However, that’s not the way that the Riki 8Bit Game Collection has been packaged up.

Riki 8Bit Game Collection: Alex’s Verdict

So very many Switch titles, are pure soulless shovelware. The eShop is infested with the damned things.

That would be an entirely unfair assessment of the Riki 8Bit Game Collection, because it’s clear that the teams and composers that have worked on each “title” do have a deep love of the 8 bit era and the game and especially musical styles that predominated back then.

From a pure passion standpoint, it’s hard to critique the Riki 8Bit Game Collection.

From a gaming value perspective, however, it’s hard to recommend unless you’re super passionate about 8 bit music and you’re happy using your Switch as a music player a lot of the time.

Take the music out and you’re left with one very slender star catching game that will leave many players, even fans of retro titles rather bored very quickly, and one decent and interesting shoot-em up.

At the $30 price point that the Riki 8Bit Game Collection commands here in Australia, it’s hard to see that as particularly good value at all.

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