This article does not measure fun. The ranking is not 'order of how good it was to play' but 'order of how well the published record has survived.' Secondhand market prices and how hard a copy is to find are not measured either.
How the population was built. The intersection of the Japanese Wikipedia shooting-game category tree and the Super Famicom software category (50 titles), and the equivalent intersection on the English Wikipedia (94 titles), were mechanically extracted, and the 37 titles appearing in both became the starting point. From there, the boundary rule excluded run-and-gun and action-shooting titles (the Japanese edition names them individually) and ported FPS titles. The editorial call was to draw the line at 'shooting at the screen,' and that excluded bundle is disclosed here by category rather than by name.
The classification authority was fixed to the Japanese Wikipedia category. Only the 9 titles that couldn't be decided that way were supplemented using the English category, and titles still undecided after that were supplemented using the infobox in the article. The publisher's own self-described genre is not used — for instance, the publisher itself describes Pop'n TwinBee Rainbow Bell Adventures as an action game, but changing the authority just for that one case would turn the rule into 'whatever fits the moment,' so it stays in the population under the rule as written.
The scope is Super Famicom software released in Japan. A title that had no domestic release and came out only overseas (an arcade title, named in the Japanese edition) was excluded.
Versions are not mixed. What counted toward revivals and re-releases is only the Super Famicom version. Arcade or Mega Drive re-releases under the same title are a different version and are not counted. For Space Invaders -The Original Game- and Item 25 (no published English title), the Super Famicom version was released under a different title, and for the latter, that title could not be confirmed in published sources.
'Not found' is split into three cases. ① checked but no publication turned up, ② could not be reached, ③ the party behind the title itself can't be confirmed — the cards write out this distinction. The absence of a re-release does not mean the game was inferior. Rights-holder circumstances aren't visible from outside.
There is a gap in the research. Nintendo's distribution-record database does not include the Wii Virtual Console, so publisher announcements were used to fill that gap. Also, among the titles where no re-release turned up, 5 did not get a reverse lookup from the revival-label side (Item 17 (no published English title), COSMO GANG THE VIDEO, Item 28 (no published English title), Item 11 (no published English title), and Item 20 (no published English title)). None of them turned up in either publisher materials or Nintendo's records. Item 30 (no published English title) is a separate case — it was released with no official publisher at all, so this pathway simply doesn't apply to it from the start, which is a different kind of gap from 'we didn't get to it.'
The source of each release date is distinguished in the writing. For a date that exists only in Nintendo's software-search records, no citable sentence can be shown to readers, so the card adds 'per Nintendo's distribution records'. That date is cross-checked mechanically against the record as retrieved.
Some titles had their Super Famicom version released under a different title. Space Invaders' publisher timeline lists the game under the title Space Invaders -The Original Game-. Item 25 (no published English title)'s Super Famicom version was also released under a different title, but that title could not be confirmed in published sources, so this text does not give it.
For some titles, the publisher's attribution could not be confirmed. S.T.G is said to have had a different publisher for its arcade version than for its Super Famicom version, but no published source backing up the Super Famicom-version publisher was found. So it is treated as a case where the party behind it 'cannot be confirmed' (a company name is never written without distinguishing which version it applies to). Item 24 (no published English title) has not had its publisher identified either, for the same reason.
For titles whose company is gone, some entries use news reporting as a source. Only when no record survives on the publisher's current site, news reporting of a publisher or rights-holder announcement is used as the source, and that is noted in the ledger (Cotton 100%'s publisher has a closed registry).
When published sources conflict with each other, no claim is made either way. Cotton 100%'s release year differs between the rights-holder's own timeline and news reporting, so this text does not state a year.
There are 4 exact ties (18 titles in total). It means every yardstick measured landed on the same tier for each pair. Breaking a tie would require bringing in something this article decided not to measure, so ties are shown as-is, sharing the same rank number. See the table below for details.
Most of these games have no English name that anyone published. A published English title could be found for 14 of the 30; the other 16 are shown as “Item N,” where N is their position in this list — not their rank, because tied works share a rank number. We did not romanise the Japanese titles. Inventing a spelling would put words in a publisher's mouth, which is the one thing this article is about not doing. Not one published Traditional Chinese title could be found for any of the 30, so the Chinese edition carries the English titles where they exist. Company and hardware names are given only where a published English spelling exists in the material we saved; otherwise they are described by kind. The verbatim quotations are in the Japanese edition only — a translated quotation can no longer be checked against the page it came from.