You know, there are some games that get called "clones" of other titles for no reason. Neutopia, however, has all reasons to be called a Zelda 1 clone.

It's an open-world adventure game where you control a hero with a sword who can only move in 4 directions, needs to complete 8 dungeons, has bombs (8 initially, +4 on each upgrade), a tool to burn trees, a stepladder to bridge one-tile gaps... You get the idea.

It's not a bad thing, mind you. Zelda 1 has a unique feel that hasn't been replicated within the series ever, but it's also not a small task to take one of the best games ever and copy it so blatantly. Due to this, some problems this game might have become more apparent, since those problems weren't present in its main inspiration that was, at the time of the release, three whole years old.

Let's start with the most obvious thing: Neutopis is a little easier and way more hand-holdy when it comes to exploration, featuring not one but four open worlds, each one opening after two dungeons have been completed. The maps, I believe, are no bigger than 8x8 screens so it can't really replicate the same sense of adventure as Zelda 1 had, nor can it capture its non-linearity.

Much like Zelda, almost every screen has a secret doorway or a staircase, accessed much like you would find them in Zelda, too. They're way easier to find, which isn't an issue, but their contents are a mixed bag. You'd think pretty much having them all but marked ensures that player sees them all, but for some reason a lot still have repeated hints. There are a LOT of caves that are basically a waste of time, telling you how to find a Rainbow Drop, for example.

The dungeons are basically full-on Zelda 1 style with one item, a map, and a boss key instead of a compass. The only difference is that they have a LOT of bombable walls. I honestly think minimum amount of bombs should've been raised to 12 at least, because enemy drops are unreliable, and you'll be bombing every side of the room, because as two or three NPCs early on point out, the map isn't that reliable.

So, that would be Neutopia: a competent Zelda 1 clone, if not for one thing that I never got over. You know how in the original Zelda almost everythin is one-tile, from you to basically every standard enemy? Neutopia ditches that and makes itself very unpleasant to play due to this.

There are strange decisions in Neutopia regarding hitboxes and hurtboxes all over the place. The player character is two tiles tall, for example. Naturally, if your feet occupy a place one space below where a projectile is flying, you shouldn't get hit, right? No, unfortunately. For whatever reason your head is vunerable to everything, and while it makes sense visually, it doesn't register as dangerous because you perceive the player character as standing tall, not lying and crawling all over the place. Enemies feet connecting with your head shouldn't do damage if you're both just walking, but they do, and it's always infuriating. The decision to give some enemies, like bats, shadows, is similarly weird, as you never have to know where they are in relation to the floor and it just screws with your expectations of their placement. You can't walk under them, you always need to hit the sprite of the bat itself, and again, Zelda 1 did that so much better with limited animation on Keese.

Early on in the game you get the fire rod capable of burning trees and stalactites for some reason, and another thing you may quickly discover is that the sword is PRECISE. I feel like in Zelda if I swung into an enemy tile, it'd get hit. Here, it feels like your sword is maybe a few pixel wide, so an enemy being slightly off-center means you just don't hit them.

The reason I'm mentioning the fire rod is that its hitbox is much, much better, so in this game where the main weapon is the sword, you might just not use it, instead going for weaker, but ranged option at most times.

Neutopia is one of those games that's just stuck. It can't stand on its own two feet, yet every time I booted it up I got the distinct feeling of "I wish I was just playing Zelda 1" due to some kinks in enemy and player behavior. It's not incompetent or even that bad, but when it borrows so much from a much better game, why shouldn't I just play that game instead?

Neutopia FINISHED! 7/10 It is an adventure game made in 1990 by the now defunct Hudson Soft for the TurboGrafx-16 known in Japan as the PC Engine. The game took a lot of water from the original The Legend Of Zelda on Nes/Famicom.

Yes I did 100٪

But that's not a bad thing, on the contrary it manages to be original! It has the same idea of ​​getting key items to defeat the big bad.

Here we control Jazeta, the hero of this story (I can't get used to his strange name 😅) and his objective is to save the princess from the clutches of Dirth where one day in the dead of night the sinister villain kidnaps the princess, Dirth is nothing more nothing less than the Demon King of the story, where he was born from people's impure thoughts and hatred, is it a cliché? YES! Is it bad for that? NO! I like clichés and happy endings and that will never tire me.

But Neutopia was fun here we will have to collect 8 medallions scattered around the world to have enough power to defeat the great evil.

It's a game that makes you angry but you CAN finish it and see the credits, it's almost like a Roguelike of the time, you lose a good amount of money if you have a Game Over, the healing items are super expensive! The scarcity of life recovery hearts, which here are cherries, is very difficult to get these drops from monsters.

The battles are an interesting point, no boss is repeated! Everyone has unique attack patterns and the penultimate boss of the game gave me stress because he seemed invincible! How much damage must I have done to him?! I don't even know...

The positive points of Neutopia are its songs, seriously! Congratulations to the game sound team! The game is divided into 4 areas that have 2 dungeons, each area has its own music, and ends up fitting well with the themes and as the game spends a good part in the central areas of each world, until you reach the main dungeons the music does not become annoying is pleasant to the ears, another positive point is the addition of the compass, throughout the game the NPCs tell you to be guided by the compass it is really useful and points out where the evil is coming from so I wasn't lost where to go as it is quite responsive.

The negative point is not even that the game was inspired by the original The Legend Of Zelda but that it took the bad things from the original Zelda, our hero uses his sword but it only works forward, it's like he was sharpening a knife instead of a sword this is typical of games of the time, short-range weapons, so if your sword doesn't hit correctly you can miss the enemy and the infernal noise when you have low health also brought... NO NEED TO SIGNAL THAT I'M DYING! And out of curiosity, the game took the same idea as the original Zelda of blowing up walls and burning trees to be able to enter the residents' "houses" there are no traditional houses, the few buildings are dungeons or a main area and certain points of reference all live in caves , was it one of the ways to survive the monsters? You know, I'll never have an answer.

But my final considerations are that Neutopia was an interesting game that used the original The Legend Of Zelda as inspiration but managed to have its own identity, unfortunately the game was lost in time and you wouldn't be able to afford a TurboGrafx-16, much less the game , the most accessible way nowadays and the one I used was to use it on the Wii's Virtual Console, but you can use other alternative means such as emulation, unfortunately the game was abandoned and was never re-released, there is a sequel to the game called Neutopia II, it seems to be I'll talk about it much more fully in the future.
If you're a fan of Zelda like me and wanted to see how games at the time were inspired by famous franchises and in the 90s what there were most were games that were inspired and tried to copy the ones that worked.

Regarding recommending the game, it's because of your curiosity if you played it or are going to play it based on this post, tell me what you thought of the game, I'll be curious to know about your adventure.

Moving onto the next game Maru recommended, this is the Zelda clone series of the PC Engine. Neutopia is a game I've heard Maru talk about before but I've never tried. He said it was just okay, and that's about the place I'm at if not a bit lower. I played the English version of this and used save states a lot mostly for preserving bombs and making getting through the game a bit less time consuming.

Neutopia is a really shameless Zelda 1 clone with some NPC elements from Zelda 2 thrown in for good measure. You have a top-down perspective with a main character going through 8 dungeons to get 8 power objects to then fight a big bad guy and rescue the princess at the end. It's not a terribly memorable game in regards to anything about its presentation, but it's doesn't really fail at any element of the presentation. It's honestly a really surprisingly well translated game for 1990, with only some minor punctuation errors here and there. The game just isn't terribly ambitious, so it didn't leave much of an impression with me.

This is pre-LTTP, so your main character Jazeta's main attack is just sticking his sword out directly in front of him like Link does in Zelda 1. This wouldn't be so bad if Jazeta weren't also taller than his feet are wide, so you have a big problem of your sword hitting a relatively small area in front of you compared to how tall your hitbox is. The sword is borderline useless a lot of the time with how numerous and fast enemies are, and that never improves throughout the game. Your sword only gets more powerful, never wider or larger.

This is heavily mitigated, though, by the fire wand that you get relatively early in the game. This is something Neutopia copies from YS moreso than it does from Zelda, but that fire wand is an invaluable tool with how it can not only fire at range, it also gets more powerful the higher your health is (and it gets stronger the higher your max health gets as a result), and it's also a ranged attack that you can fire even diagonally. All that said, the combat is routinely quite frustrating and while the bosses tend to be easy to very easy, the normal enemies swarming you is easily the most difficult thing in the game.

Outside of that, the dungeons aren't terribly interesting, and are very derivative from Zelda 1 in how they're mostly just a series of rooms. There aren't really ever any larger puzzles or even rooms bigger than one screen, and dungeons don't even have keys aside from locking the boss room. The dungeons are more exercises in bomb conservation/use to find the increasingly numerous hidden rooms in each successive dungeon, and battle gauntlets as you fight through trying to find the crypt key and the crypt itself to fight the boss in it. There is also one hidden upgrade for either your shield, sword, and armor (to help you block more projectile types, hit harder, and protect against damage better respectively) in each dungeon and sometimes hidden in the overworld.

The overworld itself differs a bit from Zelda in that there are basically four of them, and you unlock a new one every time you beat the two dungeons in the previous one (with the last two simply unlocking the path to the final boss). There are NPCs scattered all over the place, either in staircases behind bushes you need to burn down or behind a very obvious wall you need to use a precious bomb on, but most of them simply give a little (often nearly useless) information or yet another potion or bomb shop. It really does suck that there's no overworld map, but none of them are too terribly huge, so it's not so bad. It is a little funny how even the way you talk to NPCs, automatically walking halfway up the screen to them so text can appear on the screen, is also nearly exactly how Zelda 1 does it XD

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This isn't an utterly terrible game or anything, but it's definitely not a good game. It's got a lot of unpolished, unambitious, and uninspired design to it, sure, but it doesn't do anything particularly unforgivably poorly. What this reminds me of more than anything is Blossom Tale on the Switch. A Zelda clone that mostly just reminds you of better Zelda games you could be playing instead. However Neutopia has the added hurdle of not having aged that well in the nearly 30 years since it came out, and also needing to use passwords to save if you're playing on the real hardware. It's not a terrible use of your time, but I don't think I ever would've played it had I not gotten it on the PCE Mini.