Rainbow Parasol Collection Bundles Three Taito Originals — Only One Has a Product Code

A compilation makes a promise in its track list: here are the originals. Rainbow Parasol Collection, out on 8 October, lists three — Rainbow Islands CS, Parasol Stars and Spica Adventure — and in all three cases the obvious guess about what “the original” means turns out to be wrong. One of the three is not a game but six of them, and one of those six was never released at all. One has an “Arcade Mode” for a game that never ran in an arcade. And one is presented as an arcade game from 2005 that is itself a port of something two years older that ran on a phone.

For a buyer, the three titles collapse into a much shorter list. Across every Japanese release behind this collection, the catalog carries exactly one product code. Everything else has to be found by its Japanese name, and this article measures how well that works.

• Rainbow Islands CS is not one game. It is six home conversions, and the sixth — the Genesis localisation of Rainbow Islands EXTRA — was cancelled before its planned 1994 release. This collection is the first time it has shipped anywhere
• Parasol Stars has never had an arcade version. Its “Arcade Mode” is the name for the unmodified-original mode; the game debuted on a PC Engine HuCARD on 15 February 1991
• Spica Adventure’s arcade release (June 2005) is not its first release either. The game first appeared as a Japanese mobile phone app in October 2003. Its proper title carries a star: スピカ☆アドベンチャー
• The PC Engine Rainbow Islands was published by NECアベニュー, not Taito, and the catalog records it as needing a Super CD-ROM² system rather than the plain CD-ROM²
• One product code exists in the whole set: T-11073, on the Mega Drive Rainbow Islands EXTRA. Every other row is blank in that field
• Measured at Suruga-ya: T-11073 returns 6 listings, of which 2 are the right game. レインボーアイランドEXTRA returns 0 — the shop spells it レインボーアイランド エキストラ, which returns 3

What is “Rainbow Islands CS”?

CS stands for consumer — the Japanese industry term for home releases as opposed to arcade ones. So Rainbow Islands CS is not a port of the arcade game. It is a box of ports of the arcade game, six of them, presented side by side so you can see what each machine made of the same design.

The thing they are all converting sits in the catalog as row M731928: レインボーアイランド, October 1987, Taito, copyright line ©TAITO CORPORATION 1987. A revised arcade version, レインボーアイランドEXTRA, followed in March 1988 as row M732018. Both are arcade cabinets, so neither has a product code and neither is a thing you can buy on a shelf.

The six conversions in the collection, in Taito's own listing:

• Famicom — the first home version, 1988. Cut to eight worlds, with event scenes added at world clear, and world 6 replaced by an original KiKi KaiKai world found nowhere else. Catalog row M878453: 26 July 1988, cartridge, 5,500円 before tax
• Nintendo Entertainment System — the North American build of the Famicom version, with the post-world demos in English. The girl Sayo who appears after the KiKi KaiKai world is renamed CINDY
• SEGA Master System — released in Europe and South America. It follows the earlier home versions' world structure but moves the palette closer to the arcade original
• PC Engine CD-ROM² — the high-fidelity one, using the disc capacity to reproduce the arcade game closely, plus a save function and a “diamond” mechanic that relaxes the secret-room entry conditions. Catalog row M758733: 30 June 1993, 7,600円 before tax, published by NECアベニュー, and recorded as requiring a Super CD-ROM² system
• Mega Drive — a conversion of Rainbow Islands EXTRA rather than the base game, with seven stages playable in normal mode. Catalog row M727175: 5 October 1990, Taito, 6,800円 before tax, product code T-11073 · G70000016A
• Genesis — the North American localisation of the Mega Drive version, planned for 1994 and cancelled. It has no catalog row because it was never published

Two of those six are worth pausing on, for opposite reasons. The Genesis build is the headline: a finished-enough conversion that was shelved thirty-two years ago and is arriving now inside a compilation, which makes this collection the only way it has ever been sold. The PC Engine version is the quiet one, and it is the version most likely to trip up a shopper. The publisher on the disc is NEC Avenue, not Taito — a distinction that matters because Japanese shops file by publisher, and searching Taito's catalog will not surface it. It is also a Super CD-ROM² title in the catalog record, not a plain CD-ROM² one, which is a hardware requirement rather than a label.

One gap worth naming, since this site's English titles come from Wikidata: the Wikidata item for Rainbow Islands lists ZX Spectrum, NES, Atari ST, Commodore 64, PC Engine and Amstrad CPC as platforms, and does not list arcade, Mega Drive or Master System at all. Three of the six versions in this collection are absent from the structured data about the game they are versions of.

Parasol Stars never had an arcade version

Parasol Stars is the sequel where Bubby and Bobby put down the rainbow and pick up a magic umbrella, and it is a fixed-screen game rather than the vertical climb of Rainbow Islands. It debuted on a PC Engine HuCARD on 15 February 1991: catalog row M754304, Taito, 6,600円 before tax, one to two players, with a multitap listed as recommended equipment and the copyright line ©TAITO CORPORATION 1991.

That date is the whole point. Taito's page describes the collection's version as offering “a Standard Mode with various extensions and an Arcade Mode reproducing the original version,” and it is easy to read “Arcade Mode” as pointing at an arcade cabinet. There was never one. Parasol Stars is a console game that skipped the arcade entirely — unusual for a Taito series of that era, and the reason the third entry in a famously arcade-born trilogy has no PCB behind it. In this collection, “Arcade Mode” means the PC Engine game as it shipped, unmodified.

The overseas releases came later and went elsewhere: a NES version reached Europe in 1992, and there was a Game Boy conversion. Neither was a Japanese release, so neither is in the catalog, and neither is what you want if you are buying the original.

Spica Adventure started on a phone

Spica Adventure stars Nico, a five-year-old-minded girl with no sense of justice whatsoever, exploring a tin planet with an umbrella — the umbrella being the thread back to Parasol Stars and the reason it is in this box.

Taito's page describes the collection's version as built around “an Original Mode based on the arcade version released in 2005,” and the arcade version is real: catalog row M732945, June 2005, Taito, sourced from Monthly Arcadia No. 61 and Monthly Amusement Journal No. 49. But the game existed before that. It was first distributed in October 2003 as a mobile phone app in Japan, which is why the Wikidata item lists mobile phone alongside arcade as a platform and describes it as a 2003 game. The 2005 cabinet is a conversion of a phone game, not the first version of it.

The catalog carries a second arcade entry as well, row M732946, dated January 2011 and sourced from the January issues of the same two trade magazines. The catalog does not say what that entry is or how it differs from the 2005 one. This article does not explain it either; it reports that it is there.

The title is also worth getting right. It is written スピカ☆アドベンチャー, with a star, on the arcade record and on Wikipedia; the collection renders it without one, as スピカアドベンチャー. Both spellings refer to the same game.

There is nothing here to buy secondhand. A phone app from 2003 and an arcade board are not shelf items, and the measurement bears that out: スピカアドベンチャー returns 0 listings at Suruga-ya, and スピカ☆アドベンチャー returns 2, neither of which is this game — the star breaks the query and the shop falls back to matching fragments, returning an unrelated title both times. Broadening to スピカ returns 8 listings and makes it worse, because ピカ also sits inside ピカチュウ. Of the three games in this collection, this is the one where the collection is the only way to own it.

One product code in the whole set

Every buying guide on this site turns on the same question: does the release carry a code you can paste into a shop, or do you have to search by its Japanese name? Across this collection the answer is lopsided. Of the catalog rows behind all three titles — two arcade Rainbow Islands entries, the Famicom conversion, the PC Engine CD conversion, the Mega Drive conversion, the PC Engine Parasol Stars, and two arcade Spica entries — exactly one carries a schema:productID value. That is the Mega Drive Rainbow Islands EXTRA, row M727175, with T-11073 and G70000016A.

The reason is a property of the data rather than of the games. Rows that carry product codes in this catalog are the ones sourced from the games collection that records physical packages field by field; rows compiled from magazines and reference books carry the date, the publisher, the price and the copyright line, but not the code printed on the label. Row M727175 is the only one of these eight sourced that way, and it shows: it also carries the JAN barcode 4988611900123, the box dimensions, and the fact that the package contained a 20-page manual and a survey postcard.

What the code is worth in practice, measured rather than assumed: T-11073 returns 6 listings at Suruga-ya, and 2 of them are the right game — both レインボーアイランド エキストラ, both filed under Taito. The other 4 are noise, and instructively so: a PS3 recorder kit, an amiibo, a novel and a PSone Books reissue of Persona. A short hyphenated code is a weak query, and the shop matches it loosely. The code works, but you have to read the results.

The spelling matters more than the code does, and this is the part worth writing down. The catalog and the cartridge label both render the title in Latin letters: レインボーアイランドEXTRA in the arcade record, RAINBOW ISLANDS EXTRA on the Mega Drive label. Neither of those finds it. レインボーアイランドEXTRA returns 0 listings. RAINBOW ISLANDS EXTRA returns 0. The shop writes the second word in katakana — レインボーアイランド エキストラ — and that returns 3, all of them Taito, all of them the right game, including one manual-only listing. The space is optional; レインボーアイランドエキストラ returns the same 3.

For the base game, レインボーアイランド returns 13 listings and mixes everything together: Taito entries alongside an NEC Avenue one (that is the PC Engine CD version, and the publisher field is how you tell it apart), plus the WonderSwan Party's Party, the DS New Rainbow Islands, the PSP Hardy Gurdy game published by Marvelous, a Taito Milestones compilation, and a Puzzle Bobble that has no business being there. Read the publisher and the sub-title before you buy. パラソルスター is the clean one: 1 listing, Taito, no ambiguity at all.

Where to buy the originals

Rainbow Islands EXTRA · レインボーアイランド エキストラ · Mega Drive · 1990 · Taito · product code T-11073 · G70000016A

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by product code) · Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee · eBay
Search for this on Kataban →

Rainbow Islands · レインボーアイランド · Famicom (1988, Taito) and PC Engine Super CD-ROM² (1993, NECアベニュー) · no product code on record

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee · eBay
Look up レインボーアイランド on Kataban →

Parasol Stars · パラソルスター · PC Engine · 1991 · Taito · no product code on record

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee · eBay
Look up パラソルスター on Kataban →

Spica Adventure · スピカ☆アドベンチャー · mobile phone (2003), arcade (2005) · Taito · no physical Japanese release

Three Umbrellas, Three Decades

The rainbow came first, in an arcade cabinet in 1987. The umbrella followed on a HuCARD in 1991, in a game that never saw a coin slot. And the umbrella came back in 2003 on a mobile phone, of all places, before anyone thought to put it in a cabinet. That is sixteen years and three completely different ideas of what a Taito game was for — and the compilation puts them on one Switch card as if they were siblings.

They are, in the way that matters: same studio, same instinct for a two-player fixed screen, same willingness to hand you a strange tool and let you work it out. But the originals are not interchangeable, and two of them are still sitting on shelves in Japan under names that do not look like the names on the box. If you buy the collection and one of the three is the reason, the Mega Drive cartridge is the one with a code on the spine. Start there, and search the rest in katakana.