Batten Tanuki no Daibouken puts a tanuki front and center, the shapeshifting creature from Japanese folklore that appears again and again in the country's popular art and fiction, embarked on a great platforming adventure ("daibouken"). It's representative of a trend very much of the Japanese '80s catalog: taking a folkloric figure any local kid would recognize and turning it into the star of a jumping-and-obstacles game.
Outside Japan it's practically unknown, which makes it a good entry point for anyone wanting to explore that side of the catalog that never crossed borders: familiar genre mechanics wrapped in an aesthetic that today reads as genuinely exotic to Western eyes.
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