Four NES exclusive games — two released in the 1980s, and two released in the 1990s — are being re-released next week as a collection, according to a new announcement. They are not returning via the Nintendo eShop on either the Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch 2, but on PC via Steam. And this is happening on April 15. Meanwhile, each game will come with only Japanese language support. Whether English language support will be added in the future remains to be seen. If this is the intention, it has not been communicated.
More specifically, NihonGame has announced a new four-game NES collection called Hiryu no Ken Collection, which includes four games from the Hiryu no Ken series. These games include: Hiryu no Ken, Hiryu no Ken II: Dragon no Tsubasa, Hiryu no Ken III: Gonin no Ryusenshi, and Hiryu no Ken: Special Fighting Wars. According to NihonGames, these are just simple ports of all four games. In other words, these are not remasters, let alone remakes, and they don’t even appear to be enhanced ports, but just straight ports of the NES classics.
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A 41-Year-Old Video Game Series
For those unfamiliar with this fighting action game series, Hiryu no Ken dates back to the arcade and 1985. Meanwhile, the Japanese developer originally behind the series is the one handling these new ports. Considering the original developer is involved, this re-release is presumably testing the waters for interest in a new game in the series, but this is just speculation.
As you may know, the series has been dormant since the Game Boy Color game, Hiryu no Ken Retsuden GB. To this end, the series has been dormant since 2000, aka for 26 years. And considering it was a niche series to begin with, particularly outside of Japan, it is fairly surprising to see it returning, though less surprising considering its original developer is still around.
It is unclear how much interest in 2026 there is for Hiryu no Ken, especially when it’s Japanese language support only. Certainly, not many are going to jump into the series for the first time with this collection, which is primarily a nostalgia play. And if it’s a nostalgia play, you’d think you’d want to deliver the games as everyone remembers them, which means including more language options.
All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts or, alternatively, drop into the ComicBook Forum and participate in the conversations happening over there.