This was a game I more or less picked up not just because it's a Konami game (so likely to be at least pretty good), but also because the main character Fuuma is one of the characters in Wai Wai World. I didn't really know much anything about the game other than that it seemed to be in hell, so I dove right in and beat it in one sitting~. I used online guides mostly for the dungeon maps and for what items did, and it took me just about five hours to beat the game on real hardware.

In a very Famicom way, the game has a pretty weird story that honestly isn't THAT important. Some 12000 or so years in the future (apparently), in the first year of the demon lord, the demon lord Ryuukotsuki emerged from Hell to try and take over the surface world ruled over by the three Getsu brothers. The brothers ended up defeated, and only the youngest of the three, Fuuma, survived. On a quest to save the world and avenge his fallen brothers, Fuuma starts out to retrieve their three legendary pulse blades and stop Ryuukotsuki once and for all. It isn't ultimately any more complicated than collecting a Triforce with only three pieces, but it makes for a unique setting at the very least and does exactly as much as it needs to.

The setting at hand is the hell-ified surface world that Ryuukotsuki has begun to make his own, and you traverse it between an overworld and pathway-like stages. You go around a top-down overworld, and whenever you bump into a stage, you need to get to the other end of it to get to the other side of it on the world map. The stages themselves several dozen in number, but they're all just linear paths in which you jump over pits, kill enemies, and find the occasional special item or powerup.

The way this game approaches powerups and items is kinda weird, at least compared to a lot of other games I've played. The closest thing I could compare it to would be something like Ys, as your sword's power grows as you kill more and more enemies. It takes a fair while to get to max power, but you'll very likely get that strong before you beat the game. There are hidden items in stages as well as items sold in shops, with some being consumables and some being genuinely their own items. The new weapons you find are super useful and have unlimited uses, and the consumables range from having fairly confusing uses to some being damn near invaluable, and acquiring new items is always worth it when you can afford them. The extra weapons you can find are extra useful especially because Fuuma's normal sword's range is SUPER short, so those ranged weapons you find are gonna save your hide a LOT, at least until the sword significantly out-powers them. It's not a terribly unique or complicated system, but it's a pretty darn fun version of that sort of thing.

There are three dungeons hiding three bosses that guard the three pulse swords that you'll need to fight Ryuukotsuki, but while the bosses (which are all generally pretty good fun and well designed) are fought in the same 2D style the rest of the game is done in, the dungeons are first-person mazes (which are a huge pain in the butt, and I wasn't in the mood to make my own maps, so I looked up maps online XP). It's not really true to call them first-person, actually, as they're actually third-person behind Fuuma. At specific points, you'll encounter monsters that you need to fight by slashing your sword in front of you, and moving back and forth will cause you to slash at them in diagonals. These are pretty neat fights, even if they get a bit repetitive once you've seen the three or four encounters that particular dungeon has to offer. The 3D dungeons aren't awful (even without looking up maps), but they're definitely the weakest parts of the game (particularly because when you run out of lives at the bosses, you of course have to go through their entire slow plodding designs AGAIN to get to the boss again XP).

The presentation is pretty darn solid and what you'd expect of Konami for the time. The graphics are colorful and well defined, the bosses and enemy designs are creepy and well detailed, and the music is pretty darn good too (with the overworld theme in particular being quite the memorable track).


Verdict: Recommended. It's not exactly Castlevania in how well done any of it is, but it's a very solid runner up as a sort of little brother to Castlevania 2. This actually came out about a month and a half before Castlevania 2 (making it more like a slightly older cousin, I suppose :b), and really does feel like the game you would've bought at the time if you didn't have a disc system yet so you couldn't get Castlevania. While it definitely isn't as good as Castlevania 2, it's not that far behind it, and if this Zelda 2-style side-scrolling action/adventure genre is your jam, this is definitely not a title to miss out on. You'll probably need a guide to know what different items do, but once you get beyond that, this is far from the hardest action/adventure game on the Famicom to import either, and the price is pretty cheap to boot~.