fe17
1990
Loom is a point & click adventure game initially released in January 1990 for MS-DOS by LucasArts using the SCUMM engine, with Brian Moriarty as its Designer. There are multiple versions for this game, but the initial release was on a floppy disk and had 16-color EGA graphics with no voice acting, while the version that I played, the "Talkie" version, released in 1992 on CD with 256-color VGA graphics. This version includes voice acting, but some scenes are censored and there are some cuts as far as conversation close-ups and puzzles with multiple solutions go.
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
There is also a version that came out for the Japanese FM-Towns in 1991 which many fans consider to be the "definitive version", while Brian Moriarty himself considers the initial EGA version to be the "real" edition. If you want to play the game for yourself, I can say the 1992 version compared to the 1990 version will not drastically alter your opinion of the game, so if you value VGA graphics and voice acting, I would go with that.
Anyway, what's this game about?: In Loom, you play Bobbin Threadbare, a 17-year-old who is part of the "Weaver's Guild", a group of people who became masters of woven fabric and over time gained the ability to weave "patterns of influence into the very fabric of reality", meaning they could actually change the color of something, turn invisible and heal, among other things. In this world, many other Guilds that focus on a singular craft exist and the Weavers Guild was persecuted for using "witchcraft", resulting in their escape to an island that became their new home, Loom, called after their guild symbol, a loom (an apparatus for making fabric).
Events unfold and Bobbin Threadbare is born, however in unforeseen circumstances, and the loom's pattern is thrown into chaos as a result. This means that throughout his life, Bobbin is not allowed to learn the Guild's ability to weave, since he is seen as the one who has cursed the guild. He is raised by "Dame Hetchel", an old serving woman, who in secret teaches Bobbin the basics of weaving and when Bobbin turns 17 and the story starts, it is her who gives him his mission.
At the start of the game, the Elders summon Bobbin to the Sanctuary to determine his fate. As he arrives, he sees how the Elders punish Dame Hetchel. They turn her into an egg, only for a swan to crash into the room from a window and turn all the Elders into swans as well. The Elders shout that this is all Bobbin's fault as they fly off to who knows where.
This is where the actual gameplay begins. One of the elders dropped his "distaff" (a stick to which wool is wound for spinning), and Dame Hetchel is still in the room as an egg. You pick up the distaff, point it to the egg, and four notes start playing. You repeat this four-note pattern (called a "draft), and the egg starts to hatch ("open"). Out comes Dame Hetchel as a cygnet (young swan) and tells Bobbin about his mission, about how the "Third Shadow" will cover the world and why he has to find the swans.
So to summarize, you play Bobbing Threadbane, something is wrong with the "loom" and the Elders of your guild blame you. You are left on your own when all Elders are turned into swans and leave the island that you live in, so you pick up the distaff and have to use the "Weaving ability/magic" to try and find the flock and try to stop the world to be covered by the Third Shadow.
This is where Loom is very different to pretty much all other graphical adventures of its time. Instead of an interface with a bunch of verbs and an inventory to store items, you are solely equipped with the distaff. The distaff shows up horizontally on the interface and every few inches of it make up one sound, each being higher than the next. For each "draft" (magical ability), you need to figure out the corresponding four-note sound. For opening something, this sound turns out to be "E-C-E-D". Later on for example, you find for trees with holes in them, and each tree you click presents you with one note. Once you get all four, you have a draft. You don't know what the draft is for until you actually successfully tried it on something. This particular one for example was used to "twist sth". As you progress further and further, you unlock more and more notes on your distaff, which you need to do to be able to play some of the more advanced drafts which may use letters (like "A") that you are not skilled enough to play.
But with that, let's move over to my rating system to discuss all aspects of this game individually.
STORYTELLING: Throughout the story in this game, which only takes about 3-4 hours depending on the difficulty you pick (more on that in a bit), you visit many different areas and meet different Guilds like the Blacksmiths Guild or the Shepherds Guild. You visit the Forge, the home of the Blacksmiths, Crystalgard, the headquarters of the Guild of Glassmakers and a cathedral, home of the Guild of Clerics, among many other locations. The world created for this game overall is very unique and to know that this is not just a playground for your main character but rather a world that is actually alive definitely aids the telling of stories concerning both the main quest and of simple side stories. For each Guild you stumble upon, you meet one or multiple characters who tell you what their kind is like, what kind of problems ail them and what goals they pursue. The Glassmakers for example are building a massive Sythe atop the Crystalgard. For what purpose?
The main story that ties all this together is an interesting, yet convoluted one that falls victim to the use of a lot of "this happens so that this can happen" methods of storytelling and especially scenes that should call for urgency just don't and the pacing of it all can fall a bit flat as a result. For example, in the final showdown with Chaos, instead of taking your distaff, with which you are pretty much incompetent, and forcing you to teach him the ways, he just stands there until you do something. Worst of all, the game has been made with a trilogy in mind, and according to Brian Moriarty himself, both himself and others just wanted to do something else after Loom was finished, and they just never got back to it. So expect a cliffhanger ending and change your plans of playing this game if that bothers you. It probably should, but the game is worth experiencing nevertheless I think.
The voice acting in the versions that include it is actually much much better than I would have expected and while the main character's voice actor made him sound a bit whiny throughout, the cast overall did a great job. I played the first chapter without voice first and definitely am glad that I played the voiced version afterwards.
Unlike many other LucasArts adventure games of its time, Loom is more serious and has few humorous elements included (though they are certainly there). As someone who has tried some Monkey Island but didn't finish any of their games prior to Loom, I can say that I prefer the more humorous games and graphical adventures with often odd solutions to puzzles definitely fit the "Comedy" category more.
GAMEPLAY: There is a "Book of Patterns" that comes with your copy of the game, if you indeed do want to buy a copy for $100+ these days. For everyone else, there is the manual online which includes it, and while it's not necessary to be used in my version of the game, the initial release does have a puzzle right at the start that is unsolvable without the manual in hand. Otherwise, the "book" lists a bunch of drafts (spells) and you can use it to write down the notes that the game gives you. Otherwise, it's recommended to write down the notes elsewhere, because the first draft you learn (open) will be needed to solve puzzles in the final third of the game, and writing down is the only option to access it. Almost all drafts are randomized for each playthrough, so you can't look up the notes online either.
Apart from using drafts, there isn't really much gameplay in this game. You walk around, you find items to click on and you either are rewarded with a new draft or you can try to use known drafts on it. Some drafts I didn't really find any use for, so I wonder if they were a) a distraction or b) used for optional puzzles, but the devs found a creative use for most drafts at least twice and sometimes, the game also requires you to think outside the box. How? You learn the draft "twist". But what about when you have to untwist something? In that case, try the draft backwards.
Spelling out a draft can take quite a while, so if you try multiple ones at something to guess the puzzle solution, it can take you a few minutes to go through all of them. This is nothing unusual for games of its time but with no skip animation button it did get boring after a while to wait and see what happens. Being more skilled at these games than me might mean you figure these puzzles out quicker than me though and limit your amount of unsuccessful attempts.
Finally, when you start the game, there are 3 difficulty levels. PRACTICE, which shows you the letters for each note, which note you hear and it also spells out all four letters at the end. STANDARD, which also shows letters and marks the note you hear, but it doesn't spell it out in the end. It's pretty much the same difficulty level though. EXPERT, which neither shows letters nor which part of the distaff the note comes from, meaning you have to figure out which part of the distaff makes which noise at first and then make out those notes from hearing. It's definitely much harder than the other two difficulties but also more than doable.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: The voice acting is very good. I didn't quite warm up to the voice of the main character, but the rest did a fine job. Especially later on in the game, you could hear the end of the previous dialogue line cutting into the next dialogue line, which got more and more notable right into the finale.
The game's sound design is overall good but has similar issues. When the four notes of a draft play for example, one or more of the note sounds are cut off for a split second almost every time.
The soundtrack has a mystical and classical theme and from what I've read online, it's highly regarded and a big part of the experience for many. It definitely is a big part in enhancing the experience, I agree, but I wasn't quite enamored with it. Sound cutting issues were present here as well and while I understand music was limited to the most important moments due to technical limitations, it didn't help my experience when 90% of the game was played without any music in the background. Overall, it's a solid and fitting soundtrack but the times have raised expectations on what to expect there for sure.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Loom received top or near-top grades for its graphics at the time and even today its sophisticated art design and its colorful, varied landscapes stand out over many other games coming out in and around 1990.
ATMOSPHERE: Music, sound and graphics work well in tandem with the game's lore and world building to create an atmospheric adventure, however the rarely used music due to the technical limitations at the time does take away from the atmosphere, especially whenever you are stuck on a particular puzzle and spend minutes without any sound, whether its from the soundtrack or from the musical notes coming out of the distaff.
CONTENT: There isn't that much here outside of the main story, which takes 3-4 hours to beat, but considering the premise of this game, it works in its favor that the game is shorter than comparable graphical adventures.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Overall the structure in this game works well, but at times the places you find the necessary drafts from to progress seem pretty random. In addition, the final chapter seems rushed and at least to me, the puzzle solutions seemed unintuitive.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The distaff being the key component is certainly unique. I think it's fair to say that it's unlikely that you've played any game quite like Loom. It didn't really stick as a concept, ostensibly, but it shows developers desire to innovate at the time where a more traditional adventure would have been a safer bet. Plus, at worst it makes Loom stand out, since the unique gameplay feature is not something that I would call "bad" at all. The game sold over half a million copies all told from what I've read, so it wasn't a commercial failure either.
REPLAYABILITY: You can replay it once to get a better grasp of the plot and especially to try the game on expert if you played your first playthrough on PRACTICE/STANDARD, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game works fine overall and is completely playable.
OVERALL: You should have probably already played this game if you're a fan of point & click adventures, especially of this day and age. Unlike many other games from this time period, this one does not require you to go through magazine or internet tips on how to solve puzzles in order to complete it. Even the manual says that the devs created this game in a way that they wanted you to complete and fully experience it, so you won't be stuck for too long at any particular puzzle. And that's good, because even if the story is not as mesmerizing today as it might have been in the early 90s, it's still one worth telling and one that a faster pace, by nature of the player being stuck at puzzles far less, does a lot of good.
_____
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- "Unknown Gamer" from the GamePro Issue 41 (Dec 92): "Loom's magic comes mainly from its highly creative and original use of music"
- "Leslie Mizell" from the Game Player's Issue 12 Vol. 2 Nr. 6 (June 90): "[...] sit back and watch the spellbinding graphics as the story unfolds."
1990
This is the type of game I would have spent hours of time and lots of money on in the arcades as a kid. A game similar to Code Name: Viper, called Rolling Thunder, was actually an arcade game, but Code Name: Viper itself was released for the NES.
This is a side scrolling action game where you control "Mr. Smith", a special forces operative who is tasked by "Commander Jones" to take down seven hideouts of a drug syndicate. There is a mystery here to uncover and it reveals itself bit by bit after each stage you complete.
There are two weapons in this game, a pistol and a machine gun. Enemies are mostly syndicate members who are differentiated by color of their outfits. A blue member needs two shots to be killed and can only hit you by running into you, while a pink member can be killed with just one shot, but has a pistol of his own. You only have two lives, at least in the first three levels I've played, so this game can become very tricky real fast.
Not only are just two lives a problem, but you can accidentally run into an enemy that just gets into frame, you can enter a wall (to free hostages) and run into enemies or a bullet right as you exit the wall etc. Expecting a smooth experience I did not, so I'm not surprised that there were some annoyances here.
However, the gameplay loop got me trapped for a few hours anyway and if it weren't for the fact that I will likely play dozens of games like this in the coming days, weeks and months, I wouldn't have minded trying a bit longer to finish. But the game only gets harder from here and looking at a Longplay of it on YT, I doubt I'll get close to the level necessary to play through this.
But definitely worth checking out and would have been a favorite of mine back in the day.
This is a side scrolling action game where you control "Mr. Smith", a special forces operative who is tasked by "Commander Jones" to take down seven hideouts of a drug syndicate. There is a mystery here to uncover and it reveals itself bit by bit after each stage you complete.
There are two weapons in this game, a pistol and a machine gun. Enemies are mostly syndicate members who are differentiated by color of their outfits. A blue member needs two shots to be killed and can only hit you by running into you, while a pink member can be killed with just one shot, but has a pistol of his own. You only have two lives, at least in the first three levels I've played, so this game can become very tricky real fast.
Not only are just two lives a problem, but you can accidentally run into an enemy that just gets into frame, you can enter a wall (to free hostages) and run into enemies or a bullet right as you exit the wall etc. Expecting a smooth experience I did not, so I'm not surprised that there were some annoyances here.
However, the gameplay loop got me trapped for a few hours anyway and if it weren't for the fact that I will likely play dozens of games like this in the coming days, weeks and months, I wouldn't have minded trying a bit longer to finish. But the game only gets harder from here and looking at a Longplay of it on YT, I doubt I'll get close to the level necessary to play through this.
But definitely worth checking out and would have been a favorite of mine back in the day.
1990
Yo! Noid released in March 1990 in Japan and November of the same year in NA, is a side scrolling platformer developed by Now Production and published by Capcom for the NES. Well, that's a lie. The game that was actually developed was called "Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru". Pretty much the same game then simply got a visual overhaul in "The Noid" style, The Noid being a Domino's Pizza mascot at the time.
So instead of the game being about a Ninja, it's actually about a Mascot stopping his evil twin to get some pizza as reward.
With that, let's talk about what Yo! Noid is about.
As established, you play as the Noid, a long-eared red rabbit-like creature that likes pizza a lot. He is equipped with a yo-yo and has to fight two obstacles. The first? Platforming through a variety of different levels like the icy and slippery second stage. Or how about the first stage, which takes place along a wharf. The land moves up and down and the water rises and falls, so the Noid has to avoid falling into the water when this happens. The second obstacle? A large variety of random enemies. In the first stage for example, you have to worry about flying birds, random humans and also fishes that jump out of the water. In later stages, there are bats, wasps, flying bullets, falling icicles and more.
The re-skinning of the Ninja game to fit the Noids "universe" falls awfully flat and while it may be a minor complaint, the stages just feel incosistent and random. In the first level, the humans that attack you are just random pink men with a harpune in hand. There is no meaning to the color they wear and their attack is simply walking into your character. In addition, it's a water level but you got both fish and bird attacking you. Why are the birds flying so low? I guess I'm looking for logic unnecessarily here and it probably is a weird complaint, but there isn't much else this game offers apart from world & level design, gameplay and its soundtrack.
The music in this game is typical 8 bit music, but it doesn't sound as catchy as I'm used to from other games. Plus, music is reused for two consecutive levels, even if they are thematically very different from each other, so there doesn't appear to be much thought given there.
Gameplay in this game I would describe with one word: Frustrating. The hit box of both the Noid and enemies is very inconsistent and simply stretches many inches away from the character models. Even though you jump above and past an enemy, the game sometimes still says you hit the enemy. You only have one life before a stage resets, so this exacerbates the frustration there. Sometimes, hit detection is really just completely random, especially in a skateboard level where you are meant to hit pigeons with the back of the wheel. The same hit two times can result in a kill or death seemingly at will of the game.
In stage 2, the ice level, the footing of the ice was also frustratingly inconsistent. You have to jump on a small, icy and slippery platform and most of the time, you would slip one way or the other and would have to try and adjust your footing before slipping off and falling to your death. However, sometimes you wouldn't slip at all and stand still. It really wasn't possible to tell which roll of the dice you would get. Not to mention that sometimes it would look like your character was slipping off, but it was actually a graphical glitch making it appear that way, and trying to adjust against the "phantom slip" would result in falling to one's death as well.
But later stages do kind of make up for the frustration of the earlier levels with the use of pogo sticks and even some levels where you are flying and have to avoid spikes in a level that is designed in a way that reminds be of Floppy Bird. But getting to these stages takes a high frustration tolerance for many hours and also is mired with what I have to call the "worst boss fights in video game history".
Or at least as far as I have experienced so far, the experience through 1990 and beyond should lead me to valleys far darker than what Yo! Noid has to offer. But this game will undoubtedly be a first ballet worst boss fights Hall of Famer if for nothing else. Because the boss fights in this game are ... PIZZA EATING CONTESTS.
After every odd numbered stage, you face your evil twin in a pizza eating contest. What does this entail? Both you and him have a deck of cards with numbers from 1-5. The evil twin, Mr. Green, makes the first selection at random, let's say 2. Then you can choose one of your cards. If you select 3, which is your highest numbered card in the earlier stages, then you win the round and get 1 point to your total. You need to get a specific amount of points before your opponent does to win the boss fight. There are also power up cards, so you can double your 3 to 6 and get 5 points to your total. That's literally it. These fights can take up to 2 minutes and throw you out of the action completely. They are boring and it's only a matter of time before you win, not a matter of skill, unless you think 2 is higher than 3, in which case you will lose. In Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, you have to prove that your "Ninjutsu" is higher in what is essentially the same game, simply thematically different. But in both instances, boss fights suck.
I checked the Internet Archives to find reviews of this game in Magazines way back when and I found it listed in the "Video Games & Computer Entertainment issue of December 23rd, 1990". It's very positive about the game, maybe too positive, but even it denotes the boss fights as "the only area that's not fun for gamers of all ages". If you didn't play this back in the day and aren't wrapped in a nostalgia bubble for it, you likely will find that most areas of this game are not fun for gamers of all ages.
P.S.: Did you know that this game sold for $49.95 USD at release? No, seriously. We give gaming companies shit for their business practices these days, and rightfully so, but selling a re-skin of a game that you already made and one that has so little content for 50 bucks would surely cause a shit storm or two if a similar thing happened in the age of social media. I loved seeing this price because it made me appreciate how spoiled we are with incredible indie games going for barely half the price at release and offering a hundred times more. Is it weird to compare this random game from 1990 to indie games in 2022? Maybe. But maybe not.
To top it off: According to the VG&CE magazine, "the hilariously exaggerated look of concentration that replaces his buck-toothed grin" when The Noid whips out his yo-yo "is worth the price of admission". How liberating it must have been to have such low expectations that an animation is worth $50. I'll definitely take this positivity over "Starfield is unplayable if faces don't show 2% more emotion" any day though.
So instead of the game being about a Ninja, it's actually about a Mascot stopping his evil twin to get some pizza as reward.
With that, let's talk about what Yo! Noid is about.
As established, you play as the Noid, a long-eared red rabbit-like creature that likes pizza a lot. He is equipped with a yo-yo and has to fight two obstacles. The first? Platforming through a variety of different levels like the icy and slippery second stage. Or how about the first stage, which takes place along a wharf. The land moves up and down and the water rises and falls, so the Noid has to avoid falling into the water when this happens. The second obstacle? A large variety of random enemies. In the first stage for example, you have to worry about flying birds, random humans and also fishes that jump out of the water. In later stages, there are bats, wasps, flying bullets, falling icicles and more.
The re-skinning of the Ninja game to fit the Noids "universe" falls awfully flat and while it may be a minor complaint, the stages just feel incosistent and random. In the first level, the humans that attack you are just random pink men with a harpune in hand. There is no meaning to the color they wear and their attack is simply walking into your character. In addition, it's a water level but you got both fish and bird attacking you. Why are the birds flying so low? I guess I'm looking for logic unnecessarily here and it probably is a weird complaint, but there isn't much else this game offers apart from world & level design, gameplay and its soundtrack.
The music in this game is typical 8 bit music, but it doesn't sound as catchy as I'm used to from other games. Plus, music is reused for two consecutive levels, even if they are thematically very different from each other, so there doesn't appear to be much thought given there.
Gameplay in this game I would describe with one word: Frustrating. The hit box of both the Noid and enemies is very inconsistent and simply stretches many inches away from the character models. Even though you jump above and past an enemy, the game sometimes still says you hit the enemy. You only have one life before a stage resets, so this exacerbates the frustration there. Sometimes, hit detection is really just completely random, especially in a skateboard level where you are meant to hit pigeons with the back of the wheel. The same hit two times can result in a kill or death seemingly at will of the game.
In stage 2, the ice level, the footing of the ice was also frustratingly inconsistent. You have to jump on a small, icy and slippery platform and most of the time, you would slip one way or the other and would have to try and adjust your footing before slipping off and falling to your death. However, sometimes you wouldn't slip at all and stand still. It really wasn't possible to tell which roll of the dice you would get. Not to mention that sometimes it would look like your character was slipping off, but it was actually a graphical glitch making it appear that way, and trying to adjust against the "phantom slip" would result in falling to one's death as well.
But later stages do kind of make up for the frustration of the earlier levels with the use of pogo sticks and even some levels where you are flying and have to avoid spikes in a level that is designed in a way that reminds be of Floppy Bird. But getting to these stages takes a high frustration tolerance for many hours and also is mired with what I have to call the "worst boss fights in video game history".
Or at least as far as I have experienced so far, the experience through 1990 and beyond should lead me to valleys far darker than what Yo! Noid has to offer. But this game will undoubtedly be a first ballet worst boss fights Hall of Famer if for nothing else. Because the boss fights in this game are ... PIZZA EATING CONTESTS.
After every odd numbered stage, you face your evil twin in a pizza eating contest. What does this entail? Both you and him have a deck of cards with numbers from 1-5. The evil twin, Mr. Green, makes the first selection at random, let's say 2. Then you can choose one of your cards. If you select 3, which is your highest numbered card in the earlier stages, then you win the round and get 1 point to your total. You need to get a specific amount of points before your opponent does to win the boss fight. There are also power up cards, so you can double your 3 to 6 and get 5 points to your total. That's literally it. These fights can take up to 2 minutes and throw you out of the action completely. They are boring and it's only a matter of time before you win, not a matter of skill, unless you think 2 is higher than 3, in which case you will lose. In Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru, you have to prove that your "Ninjutsu" is higher in what is essentially the same game, simply thematically different. But in both instances, boss fights suck.
I checked the Internet Archives to find reviews of this game in Magazines way back when and I found it listed in the "Video Games & Computer Entertainment issue of December 23rd, 1990". It's very positive about the game, maybe too positive, but even it denotes the boss fights as "the only area that's not fun for gamers of all ages". If you didn't play this back in the day and aren't wrapped in a nostalgia bubble for it, you likely will find that most areas of this game are not fun for gamers of all ages.
P.S.: Did you know that this game sold for $49.95 USD at release? No, seriously. We give gaming companies shit for their business practices these days, and rightfully so, but selling a re-skin of a game that you already made and one that has so little content for 50 bucks would surely cause a shit storm or two if a similar thing happened in the age of social media. I loved seeing this price because it made me appreciate how spoiled we are with incredible indie games going for barely half the price at release and offering a hundred times more. Is it weird to compare this random game from 1990 to indie games in 2022? Maybe. But maybe not.
To top it off: According to the VG&CE magazine, "the hilariously exaggerated look of concentration that replaces his buck-toothed grin" when The Noid whips out his yo-yo "is worth the price of admission". How liberating it must have been to have such low expectations that an animation is worth $50. I'll definitely take this positivity over "Starfield is unplayable if faces don't show 2% more emotion" any day though.
We are in March 26, 1990. The more popular Amazing-Spider Man game of the same year was still four months away, but developer Oxford Digital Enterprises pounced and released their version first for the Commodore 64 and Amiga, before porting it to most notably the Atari ST later. Considering that the other game released for a handheld device only (the Game Boy), there wasn't really any competition between both games, so this narrative I just created is probably incorrect.
But here it is, The Amazing Spider-Man, published by Paragon Software (NA, Empire Software for EU) and being so far inferior to the Game Boy game that even the description of it on Grouvee reads "Not to be confused with the Game Boy title released in the same year". Or how about the Marvel Fandom Wiki having a page for the Game Boy game, but no mention of this one.
To keep it short, the plot in this game revolves around Mysterio, who kidnaps Mary Jane. That's it. There is a comic book style presentation of the story and then there is one happy ending image at the end, but that's it. You didn't play these platformers for their stories though, so what was gameplay like? Well you were controlling fat Spider-Man.
With that, let's dive into each aspect of my reviewing system one by one, starting with, very briefly, the story.
STORYTELLING: Again, you didn't play these games for their story, even though games like Ninja Gaiden obviously did at least make an effort in that regard during this time (the sequel released only two weeks after this Spider-Man game). We do rate story(telling) though, so let's see. As mentioned, the beginning of the game, at least in some versions (the Atari version didn't even have these from what I've seen), shows us three slides of images designed like in a comic book, where we see Mysterio kidnapping Mary Jane and Peter Parker being angry. That's pretty much it. Environmental storytelling is pretty much non existent throughout, there is little sense to be made with the sheer randomness with which assets were used, most even being unassociated with Spider-Man (there are a lot of R2D2s running around in this game).
GAMEPLAY: When I say "fat" Spider-Man, I mean it. The first image of gameplay you see is Spider-Man hunched forward like he's either been playing too many video games and ruined his posture or gained a ton of weight or he has significant back problems. Moving forward reveals even worse truths. Spider-Man walks as if he is carrying a bag filled with 200kg of sand and when he jumps, he does levitate for a good 3 seconds, but only jumps up a few inches overall. When he falls down, he often lands flat on his face and walks around sniffing the floor for a good few feet before you can manage to make him stand upright again. When he climbs walls, he doesn't climb up or down like a spider, but more like a cat, using both arms simultaneously first, followed by both of his legs to push himself forward.
Long story short, the animations are very bad, funnily so. The slow movement just makes it worse, because funny bad is always manageable, but boring bad is just a slow death to the players enjoyment. I often look at gameplay online after I finish playing and pretty much always do I find hundreds of nostalgic comments that range from "this was my childhood game" to "this is one of the greatest games ever made", and while some of the former was present with this game as well, most did acknowledge that this game is actually just not good. Doesn't mean the memories weren't precious of course.
Progressing in this game is done by climbing in a very slow pace, by using your web to fly over enemies and by activating buttons that allow you to progress forward. If you position yourself correctly, you can even shoot your web to access buttons that are otherwise inaccessible. Enemies in this game are skeletons, rats, R2D2s and basic humans, among others. Rats for example follow you around, while most of the others have a set route which they follow. Most enemies don't bump into you, but they rather just walk past you, and every second that you are in contact drains your health. Your health bar is displayed as a standing giant Spider-Man to the right of the screen. His body starts turning into a skeleton with each percent of health that you lose, starting from his feet all the way to to the top of his head. Once he is a full skeleton, the game ends.
There are some OK ideas here, but overall it is just not fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is no voice acting, but in the Amiga version, there is the oddest remix of a male and female voice saying Spider-Man, making me feel glad that no actual voice acting is in the game. Well, there is the "ugh ugh ugh" sound when you or enemies take damage, which just sounds unsettling.
I didn't figure out a way to turn off the music and only display sound effects, but I have seen plenty of videos with that kind of alignment. For me, the music played nonstop and it was just one track being put on repeat. Music in this generation of video games was pretty catchy most of the time and this was certainly OK, but not something I would want to listen to outside of this game. Plus some variation would have been nice.
Sound in this game is abysmal. The sound of the web, the sound when you step onto a platform and the annoying click it makes at the end, the aforementioned damage noise, the awful sound of doors opening and no actual sound for a lot of the moving platforms, enemies and effects (which I guess I should be glad for) mean that the overall sound design is just very poor.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: There are just a bunch of random assets used and placed to create levels that make sense from a level design standpoint, but little sense from an artistic standpoint, let alone from a Spider-Man universe standpoint. Not much to like here either.
ATMOSPHERE: The incoherent art design and world building, an average singular track vs. poor sound design (if you use music, you can't really hear the sounds, so pick your poison, though I'd choose the music) and a game that is not a looker even for its time and you got a game that is bereft of atmosphere.
CONTENT: Once you get past the slow animations, the poor controls and everything else, the puzzles in this game are actually interesting enough and the game does offer a challenge to those looking for one. There isn't that much variety in what this game offers though, it's a lot of buttons pressing to unlock other buttons to press, which open up new locations or make your enemies fall to their deaths.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: This isn't actually that bad. The game misses some variety, there isn't really anything to unlock, but there are puzzles present and some that require some brain power to solve. There is also some good interconnectivity here and there, meaning a previously inaccessible area can be unlocked as you progress, leading you back to a previous room, where a previously "non-pressable" button can now be pressed to progress elsewhere. It's not always intuitive, it's repetitive but it's probably the best part about this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: Apart from the web swinging, which is 'unique' but in a bad way, there is nothing here that stands out.
REPLAYABILITY: If you do enjoy this game, there is of course the added incentive of beating your high scores and your times. There isn't much leeway in how you can complete this game, there isn't that much creative space for that, but you can always try to be quicker and receive less damage I guess.
PLAYABILITY: The game works well, the only issue I had was that sometimes I would clip into a level below the one I was on and the game would glitch out for a second. There is even a clip of someone glitching his way from the early stages all the way to the final level, if you want to check that out.
OVERALL: Definitely the worst game of this challenge so far and will probably find its way into the Top 5 Worst Games of the Year by the time I finish 1990. Or I've been relatively lucky with the first 4 games and this is what a good chunk of 1990 will look like. I doubt that though. Don't play this game if you're looking for a fun platformer, there are hundreds of better options out there in this time frame.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- Nothing. I couldn't find a single magazine that reviewed this game at the time. I did find the Game Boy in every single one though.
But here it is, The Amazing Spider-Man, published by Paragon Software (NA, Empire Software for EU) and being so far inferior to the Game Boy game that even the description of it on Grouvee reads "Not to be confused with the Game Boy title released in the same year". Or how about the Marvel Fandom Wiki having a page for the Game Boy game, but no mention of this one.
To keep it short, the plot in this game revolves around Mysterio, who kidnaps Mary Jane. That's it. There is a comic book style presentation of the story and then there is one happy ending image at the end, but that's it. You didn't play these platformers for their stories though, so what was gameplay like? Well you were controlling fat Spider-Man.
With that, let's dive into each aspect of my reviewing system one by one, starting with, very briefly, the story.
STORYTELLING: Again, you didn't play these games for their story, even though games like Ninja Gaiden obviously did at least make an effort in that regard during this time (the sequel released only two weeks after this Spider-Man game). We do rate story(telling) though, so let's see. As mentioned, the beginning of the game, at least in some versions (the Atari version didn't even have these from what I've seen), shows us three slides of images designed like in a comic book, where we see Mysterio kidnapping Mary Jane and Peter Parker being angry. That's pretty much it. Environmental storytelling is pretty much non existent throughout, there is little sense to be made with the sheer randomness with which assets were used, most even being unassociated with Spider-Man (there are a lot of R2D2s running around in this game).
GAMEPLAY: When I say "fat" Spider-Man, I mean it. The first image of gameplay you see is Spider-Man hunched forward like he's either been playing too many video games and ruined his posture or gained a ton of weight or he has significant back problems. Moving forward reveals even worse truths. Spider-Man walks as if he is carrying a bag filled with 200kg of sand and when he jumps, he does levitate for a good 3 seconds, but only jumps up a few inches overall. When he falls down, he often lands flat on his face and walks around sniffing the floor for a good few feet before you can manage to make him stand upright again. When he climbs walls, he doesn't climb up or down like a spider, but more like a cat, using both arms simultaneously first, followed by both of his legs to push himself forward.
Long story short, the animations are very bad, funnily so. The slow movement just makes it worse, because funny bad is always manageable, but boring bad is just a slow death to the players enjoyment. I often look at gameplay online after I finish playing and pretty much always do I find hundreds of nostalgic comments that range from "this was my childhood game" to "this is one of the greatest games ever made", and while some of the former was present with this game as well, most did acknowledge that this game is actually just not good. Doesn't mean the memories weren't precious of course.
Progressing in this game is done by climbing in a very slow pace, by using your web to fly over enemies and by activating buttons that allow you to progress forward. If you position yourself correctly, you can even shoot your web to access buttons that are otherwise inaccessible. Enemies in this game are skeletons, rats, R2D2s and basic humans, among others. Rats for example follow you around, while most of the others have a set route which they follow. Most enemies don't bump into you, but they rather just walk past you, and every second that you are in contact drains your health. Your health bar is displayed as a standing giant Spider-Man to the right of the screen. His body starts turning into a skeleton with each percent of health that you lose, starting from his feet all the way to to the top of his head. Once he is a full skeleton, the game ends.
There are some OK ideas here, but overall it is just not fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is no voice acting, but in the Amiga version, there is the oddest remix of a male and female voice saying Spider-Man, making me feel glad that no actual voice acting is in the game. Well, there is the "ugh ugh ugh" sound when you or enemies take damage, which just sounds unsettling.
I didn't figure out a way to turn off the music and only display sound effects, but I have seen plenty of videos with that kind of alignment. For me, the music played nonstop and it was just one track being put on repeat. Music in this generation of video games was pretty catchy most of the time and this was certainly OK, but not something I would want to listen to outside of this game. Plus some variation would have been nice.
Sound in this game is abysmal. The sound of the web, the sound when you step onto a platform and the annoying click it makes at the end, the aforementioned damage noise, the awful sound of doors opening and no actual sound for a lot of the moving platforms, enemies and effects (which I guess I should be glad for) mean that the overall sound design is just very poor.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: There are just a bunch of random assets used and placed to create levels that make sense from a level design standpoint, but little sense from an artistic standpoint, let alone from a Spider-Man universe standpoint. Not much to like here either.
ATMOSPHERE: The incoherent art design and world building, an average singular track vs. poor sound design (if you use music, you can't really hear the sounds, so pick your poison, though I'd choose the music) and a game that is not a looker even for its time and you got a game that is bereft of atmosphere.
CONTENT: Once you get past the slow animations, the poor controls and everything else, the puzzles in this game are actually interesting enough and the game does offer a challenge to those looking for one. There isn't that much variety in what this game offers though, it's a lot of buttons pressing to unlock other buttons to press, which open up new locations or make your enemies fall to their deaths.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: This isn't actually that bad. The game misses some variety, there isn't really anything to unlock, but there are puzzles present and some that require some brain power to solve. There is also some good interconnectivity here and there, meaning a previously inaccessible area can be unlocked as you progress, leading you back to a previous room, where a previously "non-pressable" button can now be pressed to progress elsewhere. It's not always intuitive, it's repetitive but it's probably the best part about this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: Apart from the web swinging, which is 'unique' but in a bad way, there is nothing here that stands out.
REPLAYABILITY: If you do enjoy this game, there is of course the added incentive of beating your high scores and your times. There isn't much leeway in how you can complete this game, there isn't that much creative space for that, but you can always try to be quicker and receive less damage I guess.
PLAYABILITY: The game works well, the only issue I had was that sometimes I would clip into a level below the one I was on and the game would glitch out for a second. There is even a clip of someone glitching his way from the early stages all the way to the final level, if you want to check that out.
OVERALL: Definitely the worst game of this challenge so far and will probably find its way into the Top 5 Worst Games of the Year by the time I finish 1990. Or I've been relatively lucky with the first 4 games and this is what a good chunk of 1990 will look like. I doubt that though. Don't play this game if you're looking for a fun platformer, there are hundreds of better options out there in this time frame.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME:
- Nothing. I couldn't find a single magazine that reviewed this game at the time. I did find the Game Boy in every single one though.
Elvira: Mistress of the Dark is an adventure game / RPG developed by Horror Soft and released by Accolade in March 1990 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It is named after the movie that released in 1988. A sequel was released in 1992, which already gives us a hint that this game must have done alright commercially.
And sure enough, the reception for this game was very good. On Wikipedia you won't find a score below 4 stars or 81% and it received the Computer Gaming World RPG of the Year Award for 1991. Not sure why it won a year later, but know that the competition wasn't light at the time.
In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, we play, well, ourselves, called upon by Elvira to prevent her great-great grandmother Emelda's return from the dead. The game plays in a castle and has multiple elements. It is part point & click adventure with its typical verb-interface (open, unlock, look in), part action game with real time combat and part horror game as it uses a lot of gore and has some scary surprises in store overall.
If you don't know Elvira, as a non-American I didn't before today (though her style does look familiar), she is a character portrayed by Cassandra Peterson and was most popular in the 80s. She is most known for her gothic, cleavage-showing wardrobe and her edgy humor.
I checked out the movie before playing and thought it was a funny movie, though a lot of gore and horror is present in it, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. Sure enough, it's a lot of tense, creepy horror interspersed with Elvira's edgy humor.
In the game, you control your character by clicking forward, turn right, turn left or turn around. Whenever an enemy approaches, you start in attack mode and have to click LUNGE / HACK to strike. Depending on a variety of stats and some RNG, your strike hits or is blocked. If you hit, often you get a second attempt (again, depending on your stats vs the enemies) but if you are blocked, you go over to Defense Mode and have to BLOCK / PARRY.
But let's dive deeper into that whilst we go through each category in more detail.
STORYTELLING: You start the game by moving two steps forward before being arrested. In a humorous little scene, your character is in his dark prison cell as light shines in and the characters jaw DROPS. In comes Elvira, and she quips that you were sent to save her, but instead she is saving you. She brings her to her room in this castle, in which she is a prisoner. Her great great grandmother Emelda is about to awaken from the dead, so you have to help prevent that from happening.
Elvira then is found in a kitchen where she can mix spells for you, she can also climb into a little hole if you find her some light for that and there are a variety of other things that she does / expects you to do, but most of the time, she is not gonna be on screen. She is pretty much her witty self from the movies and TV shows and it works well.
Then there is the guy who arrested you, who seemed to be on drugs or something, and later an old woman who takes over the kitchen, meaning you have to "scare her off", otherwise Elvira will not mix any more spells for you.
Depending on how you stand on her edgy humor and a horror story like this one, this might work or it might not. It's not particularly advanced story telling and most of the game is spent in combat or exploration, with some environmental storytelling as well to be fair. There isn't that much here overall, but it's solid.
GAMEPLAY: Combat took a while to get used to, especially defense. Your enemy reaches back for a swing for a second before striking to your left or your right. From what I figured out, BLOCK or PARRY is assigned to one side during a specific fight, so when he attacks left, you BLOCK for example. However, I believe stats matter here too and sometimes, I would click it too early or too late and the swing would hit me anyway. Considering that you have 99 LIFE to start, you can lose it all rather quickly, especially because the tougher enemies can be found very early on. But the game has a real time combat system that was uncommon for the times and even if it isn't great, it's still unique.
This means that the entire game is filled with trial and error moments that you will die to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Make sure to save often.
The rest of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. For example, outside in the garden area, a man stands with a bird on his arm. When you get too close, the bird jumps into air and flies at you. Within this time, you have to figure out how to defeat it. Turns out, there is a very specific way to beat it, and if you don't have the item, a bolt, go and find it. The game doesn't indicate that you need it though, but this is one of the easier "puzzles" to solve. Problem is, your aim is terrible, so you can't hit it. What do you do now? The manual has a tip regarding that if you're stumped, but even though the answer is very "game-y", it kinda makes sense.
Many puzzles are like that. Often they do make sense and you'll get them eventually. The problem is, figuring out where item A is to use it with item B to get the wanted result can take a long time and will involve a lot of dying. Considering your life points are rather low, even saving a lot will still mean losing a lot of time to find this random item. Games back in the day did this a lot I notice to add an additional "challenge" for people looking to complete games, so you probably will either have to use a guide or look for hours and get lucky. Not the most fun.
To complete puzzles and for combat purposes, you have an inventory and can drag and drop items in and out of it. The manual says that you have a lot of space and shouldn't be shy when picking things up, however there are a lot of necessary items to collect and going over the invisible quota happened quicker than I would have liked. If you are over encumbered for too long, you become too tired and the game ends, so it's actually important to pay attention. Luckily you can simply drop items anywhere and then pick them up later. But there's a lot of inventory management without a lot of "reliable" management to be done.
Plus, there is a kitchen where Elvira mixes you spells, but once you visit and exit for the first time, the kitchen is blocked by an old lady and you need to find an item later to get her out. Until then, no spells. That means you shouldn't go there for a while, but if you don't, you gotta keep the ingredients in your inventory, which means you have to manage dropping them somewhere and getting back to them later. There is some strategy involved here, but to me it wasn't the most fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is a little line by Elvira when she first talks to you, but it's not even linked to what she is actually saying, so it's not much more than a noise and not worth discussing.
The sound design is solid. From the sound of swords clashing to the sound of enemies shouting when being hit (though the sound is the same for both man and monster), not to mention the sound when you beat a sharp wooden stick into the chest of a vampire with a hammer, the sound design works well in line with the game's atmosphere.
The real highlight of this game though is its soundtrack (for the Amiga version). There are three or four tracks that you hear based on the location you are in and all set the mood perfectly. The track in the garden especially I could definitely listen to outside of the game. The music is creepy, unsettling truly does the most work to make this game feel like a horror game. I can recommend a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Oh man, what can I say here? I think it's safe to say that this game is one of the bigger gore-fests of its time. The first character you meet that imprisons you for example has no pupils. Or the first time you are in combat, you realize that whenever the enemy's health depletes, cuts in his chest become visible. But that's the harmless stuff.
Because whenever you die, your character's demise is shown in very graphic ways. When the bird manages to kill you, it takes your eyeballs and you see your character in that particularly gruesome image. When a vampire bites you, you have bite marks in your head. When the old lady gets her hands on you, your head ends up swimming in a cooking pot. There are many more unique ways you die and even the most basic death is hard to look at, not to mention that your character is bloodied in every scene.
ATMOSPHERE: The grotesque design mixed with the tense music and the appearance of a bunch of in-theme characters make this one of the more atmospheric games of 1990.
CONTENT: If you know what to do, this game takes a bit over an hour. If you don't, you'll probably be busy closer to 10 if you use guides sparingly. 10 hours will be filled with a lot of reloading and guessing on which way to go in which order, in addition to inventory management, so a shorter length or a bit less complexity in the level design would have done this game good I think.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: As I mentioned, the design is too complex at times and a lot of it has to do with the dungeon (here: castle) being small overall, but filled with enemies that are too strong at pretty much every second door, meaning you will go into the wrong direction or enter the wrong room on a very regular basis.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The amount of gore present here is certainly noticeable and I'm gonna say it's unlikely that there were many other games like this back in the day where you had so many different ways of seeing your character's death. If you enjoy horror games, this definitely pushed the scene in the right direction, but if you're in it for the RPG mechanics, it'll probably not be as welcomed.
REPLAYABILITY: Once you have finished the game, there is some replayability in approaching puzzles slightly differently or of course trying to beat your previous time (or limiting the amount of reloads), but generally the game is fairly linear in how to solve things.
PLAYABILITY: The game is perfectly playable.
OVERALL: The focus on puzzles in addition to the RPG mechanics present in this game make for awkward gameplay mix. If you're a fan of one genre but not so much of the other, this will probably be off-putting to both fronts. If you enjoy both genres however and don't mind experiencing how a mix between the two would work, and especially if you don't mind but rather welcome the horror elements in this game - which set a great atmosphere - you'll likely enjoy the game for what it's worth, however the complexity and the reliance on save states may be frustrating to you.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Leah Wesolowski for Computer Gaming World Issue 82 (May 91): "these images are simply not acceptable for two-year-olds (in reference to the gory scenes) No shit, Leah.
And sure enough, the reception for this game was very good. On Wikipedia you won't find a score below 4 stars or 81% and it received the Computer Gaming World RPG of the Year Award for 1991. Not sure why it won a year later, but know that the competition wasn't light at the time.
In Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, we play, well, ourselves, called upon by Elvira to prevent her great-great grandmother Emelda's return from the dead. The game plays in a castle and has multiple elements. It is part point & click adventure with its typical verb-interface (open, unlock, look in), part action game with real time combat and part horror game as it uses a lot of gore and has some scary surprises in store overall.
If you don't know Elvira, as a non-American I didn't before today (though her style does look familiar), she is a character portrayed by Cassandra Peterson and was most popular in the 80s. She is most known for her gothic, cleavage-showing wardrobe and her edgy humor.
I checked out the movie before playing and thought it was a funny movie, though a lot of gore and horror is present in it, so I wasn't sure what to expect with this game. Sure enough, it's a lot of tense, creepy horror interspersed with Elvira's edgy humor.
In the game, you control your character by clicking forward, turn right, turn left or turn around. Whenever an enemy approaches, you start in attack mode and have to click LUNGE / HACK to strike. Depending on a variety of stats and some RNG, your strike hits or is blocked. If you hit, often you get a second attempt (again, depending on your stats vs the enemies) but if you are blocked, you go over to Defense Mode and have to BLOCK / PARRY.
But let's dive deeper into that whilst we go through each category in more detail.
STORYTELLING: You start the game by moving two steps forward before being arrested. In a humorous little scene, your character is in his dark prison cell as light shines in and the characters jaw DROPS. In comes Elvira, and she quips that you were sent to save her, but instead she is saving you. She brings her to her room in this castle, in which she is a prisoner. Her great great grandmother Emelda is about to awaken from the dead, so you have to help prevent that from happening.
Elvira then is found in a kitchen where she can mix spells for you, she can also climb into a little hole if you find her some light for that and there are a variety of other things that she does / expects you to do, but most of the time, she is not gonna be on screen. She is pretty much her witty self from the movies and TV shows and it works well.
Then there is the guy who arrested you, who seemed to be on drugs or something, and later an old woman who takes over the kitchen, meaning you have to "scare her off", otherwise Elvira will not mix any more spells for you.
Depending on how you stand on her edgy humor and a horror story like this one, this might work or it might not. It's not particularly advanced story telling and most of the game is spent in combat or exploration, with some environmental storytelling as well to be fair. There isn't that much here overall, but it's solid.
GAMEPLAY: Combat took a while to get used to, especially defense. Your enemy reaches back for a swing for a second before striking to your left or your right. From what I figured out, BLOCK or PARRY is assigned to one side during a specific fight, so when he attacks left, you BLOCK for example. However, I believe stats matter here too and sometimes, I would click it too early or too late and the swing would hit me anyway. Considering that you have 99 LIFE to start, you can lose it all rather quickly, especially because the tougher enemies can be found very early on. But the game has a real time combat system that was uncommon for the times and even if it isn't great, it's still unique.
This means that the entire game is filled with trial and error moments that you will die to dozens, if not hundreds of times. Make sure to save often.
The rest of the game is puzzle solving and exploration. For example, outside in the garden area, a man stands with a bird on his arm. When you get too close, the bird jumps into air and flies at you. Within this time, you have to figure out how to defeat it. Turns out, there is a very specific way to beat it, and if you don't have the item, a bolt, go and find it. The game doesn't indicate that you need it though, but this is one of the easier "puzzles" to solve. Problem is, your aim is terrible, so you can't hit it. What do you do now? The manual has a tip regarding that if you're stumped, but even though the answer is very "game-y", it kinda makes sense.
Many puzzles are like that. Often they do make sense and you'll get them eventually. The problem is, figuring out where item A is to use it with item B to get the wanted result can take a long time and will involve a lot of dying. Considering your life points are rather low, even saving a lot will still mean losing a lot of time to find this random item. Games back in the day did this a lot I notice to add an additional "challenge" for people looking to complete games, so you probably will either have to use a guide or look for hours and get lucky. Not the most fun.
To complete puzzles and for combat purposes, you have an inventory and can drag and drop items in and out of it. The manual says that you have a lot of space and shouldn't be shy when picking things up, however there are a lot of necessary items to collect and going over the invisible quota happened quicker than I would have liked. If you are over encumbered for too long, you become too tired and the game ends, so it's actually important to pay attention. Luckily you can simply drop items anywhere and then pick them up later. But there's a lot of inventory management without a lot of "reliable" management to be done.
Plus, there is a kitchen where Elvira mixes you spells, but once you visit and exit for the first time, the kitchen is blocked by an old lady and you need to find an item later to get her out. Until then, no spells. That means you shouldn't go there for a while, but if you don't, you gotta keep the ingredients in your inventory, which means you have to manage dropping them somewhere and getting back to them later. There is some strategy involved here, but to me it wasn't the most fun.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: There is a little line by Elvira when she first talks to you, but it's not even linked to what she is actually saying, so it's not much more than a noise and not worth discussing.
The sound design is solid. From the sound of swords clashing to the sound of enemies shouting when being hit (though the sound is the same for both man and monster), not to mention the sound when you beat a sharp wooden stick into the chest of a vampire with a hammer, the sound design works well in line with the game's atmosphere.
The real highlight of this game though is its soundtrack (for the Amiga version). There are three or four tracks that you hear based on the location you are in and all set the mood perfectly. The track in the garden especially I could definitely listen to outside of the game. The music is creepy, unsettling truly does the most work to make this game feel like a horror game. I can recommend a listen.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: Oh man, what can I say here? I think it's safe to say that this game is one of the bigger gore-fests of its time. The first character you meet that imprisons you for example has no pupils. Or the first time you are in combat, you realize that whenever the enemy's health depletes, cuts in his chest become visible. But that's the harmless stuff.
Because whenever you die, your character's demise is shown in very graphic ways. When the bird manages to kill you, it takes your eyeballs and you see your character in that particularly gruesome image. When a vampire bites you, you have bite marks in your head. When the old lady gets her hands on you, your head ends up swimming in a cooking pot. There are many more unique ways you die and even the most basic death is hard to look at, not to mention that your character is bloodied in every scene.
ATMOSPHERE: The grotesque design mixed with the tense music and the appearance of a bunch of in-theme characters make this one of the more atmospheric games of 1990.
CONTENT: If you know what to do, this game takes a bit over an hour. If you don't, you'll probably be busy closer to 10 if you use guides sparingly. 10 hours will be filled with a lot of reloading and guessing on which way to go in which order, in addition to inventory management, so a shorter length or a bit less complexity in the level design would have done this game good I think.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: As I mentioned, the design is too complex at times and a lot of it has to do with the dungeon (here: castle) being small overall, but filled with enemies that are too strong at pretty much every second door, meaning you will go into the wrong direction or enter the wrong room on a very regular basis.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: The amount of gore present here is certainly noticeable and I'm gonna say it's unlikely that there were many other games like this back in the day where you had so many different ways of seeing your character's death. If you enjoy horror games, this definitely pushed the scene in the right direction, but if you're in it for the RPG mechanics, it'll probably not be as welcomed.
REPLAYABILITY: Once you have finished the game, there is some replayability in approaching puzzles slightly differently or of course trying to beat your previous time (or limiting the amount of reloads), but generally the game is fairly linear in how to solve things.
PLAYABILITY: The game is perfectly playable.
OVERALL: The focus on puzzles in addition to the RPG mechanics present in this game make for awkward gameplay mix. If you're a fan of one genre but not so much of the other, this will probably be off-putting to both fronts. If you enjoy both genres however and don't mind experiencing how a mix between the two would work, and especially if you don't mind but rather welcome the horror elements in this game - which set a great atmosphere - you'll likely enjoy the game for what it's worth, however the complexity and the reliance on save states may be frustrating to you.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Leah Wesolowski for Computer Gaming World Issue 82 (May 91): "these images are simply not acceptable for two-year-olds (in reference to the gory scenes) No shit, Leah.
Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos came out in March/April 1990 for the Famicom and as an arcade game. As a sequel to the much beloved Ninja Gaiden, it had a lot to prove and based on the review scores of 35/40 (EGM), 8.5/10 (IGN) and 4/5 Stars (AllGame), it appears the reception was generally positive. It's also a game that was influential and progressive in multiple ways, a game that according to the Video Games & Computer Entertainment Magazine is "proof that video games are learning how to evoke players' emotions and entertain just like a movie or TV show can".
In this series you play a Ninja called Ryu Hayabusa. And as that snippet of the VG&CE review shows, this series did something few, if any, platformers did back in those days, which was putting more focus into the storytelling. The antagonist in this game is Ashtar, an evil lord who is looking to open the Gate of Darkness. Even at the time this was cliché but these games went beyond simply introducing a villain to give slight back story for why the character we are controlling goes against a barrage of dangerous enemies and hazards in each level.
There are other innovations present in this game but let's talk through the game one by one by looking at the 10 criteria by which I rate games.
STORYTELLING: Let's stick with the story for now. The first cutscene you see is Ashtar declaring his evil ambitions, followed by Ryu meeting a stranger who tells him that his love interest from the first game, Irene, was captured. Most of these scenes are presented in a pretty simple way. Most of the time, you see the still face of a character in front of mostly blank background. For Ryu, the background is often simply purple and the only movement you see is the character being pulled from left to right and vice versa. Sometimes you see a little more detail like a brick wall or the full body of a character, and in the rarest, yet prettiest of instances, the camera zooms out to show us how Ryu is observing an enemy fortress in shots that I'd call ahead of its time.
The story is advanced after finishing stages and there is quite a lot more to it than I would have thought, with a whole bunch of twists and turns throughout pertaining to characters first introduced in this sequel and one's from the original. However, twists and turns and surprises await us after seemingly every stage, so after Ryu's seventeenth "What the....?!" it starts to get stale.
Undoubtedly though, having a character humanized as much as Ryu Hayabusa surely added a lot to the experience back in the day, or at least it would have for me.
GAMEPLAY: I didn't play the first game, but I did watch a playthrough of it and also read some reviews to see what advancements had been made. In Ninja Gaiden, a side-scrolling platformer, you are equipped with a sword and slash your way through a horde enemies like those damn birds, soldiers who fire weapons, weird goblins that turn into a ball and roll into you, lizards that spit bullets and of course a bunch of bosses that appear at the end of a level.
You can jump, you can hold onto a wall and climb it (couldn't climb in the original), you can get a bunch of power ups like ninja stars, fire projectiles and duplicates of your self that stay a few feet behind your controlled character and repeat what you do (also new for this game). This feature in particular is worth pointing out. You can have up to two duplicates and you can position them in ways that can give you major advantages in battle. Since they don't take damage and disappear after a set amount of time (to my knowledge), you can, if you are skilled and persistent enough to figure it out, position the duplicates in a way that they face the enemy, while you face the other way and stand many feet away from danger. Even if you then slash in the wrong direction yourself, your duplicate attacks the enemy without any danger of repercussion. So it adds a new element that is actually very clever and can be incredibly useful.
Unfortunately, while the controls were lauded at the time, they haven't aged well. Slashing with your sword is unsatisfyingly inaccurate, especially when swinging at flying enemies or when jumping yourself. Since the main thing in this game is slashing, you can imagine how it impacts enjoyment. The inaccuracy can also probably be assigned to poor hitboxes. Often, the hit box of enemies is smaller than it should be, while for you, it's larger than it should be. This I have found has been an issue often back in the day and was of course more tolerable than then it is today.
Bosses are mostly actually pretty fun, but I noticed that at least one boss fight was entirely re-used from the first and the final boss battle was just so bananas that I said "fuck it" after reaching Phase 2.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that enemy placement is another annoying part to this game. At times, there is just so much going on that being hit is pretty much unavoidable, and I wish at times the game would flow better to make for a smoother experience, even if at the expense of making the game slightly less challenging.
ATMOSPHERE: This is above average for a game of its time for sure. As far as levels go, the dark area comes to mind that illuminates whenever lightning hits. Some distant shots in cut scenes, as described earlier, are actually beautiful and for the graphical limitations that were present at the time, atmospherically this definitely drew me in.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: No voice acting. Music is catchy and memorable and also adds a lot to the cinematics, while the sound of your sword slashing through enemies and power up items is satisfying.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: From what I've noticed, graphics are a step up from the original. The game is colorful, there is animation in wind, lightning and even beating hearts on the wall on one level, plus moving clouds during boss fights, that make the game stand out graphically. It still has a grainy look though, even for its time, more noticeably than in a different game I played in 1990 already, Code Name: Viper.
CONTENT: Playing it without save states like me and actually beating the final boss proper will take quite a while I imagine and it's fun enough if one wanted to push through. There are also more levels here than in the original from what I've read. So it's an average affair for arcade games in 1990 but what is also an average affair from that time is that the game is not bloated in any regard.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Levels are varied bring unique challenges. There is a level where wind blows left or right, making timing important to be able to progress. One level is dark and you will fall to your death if you don't wait for that lightning that illuminates the stage for a second to show you when to jump. Levels are interrupted with cutscenes, which are mostly short enough to not become tiresome and were also unique at the time. The "Game Over" screen sends you to the start of the stage you are in with 3 lives again, instead of to the first stage, which I appreciated. However, in some levels, enemy placement was wild and made for a hectic affair. Enemy spawning was odd at times as well. If an enemy spawned at the edge of the screen and you killed it without moving forward, the enemy would keep on spawning ad infinitum. So being driven backwards at any time would get annoying quickly because you would have to face the same enemies again. Overall though, level design is solid in this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: As mentioned before, the duplicated Ryu's add a different element to combat and the cinematics were progressive, making this a notable game in terms of innovation.
REPLAYABILITY: You can mix it up slightly with power ups in subsequent playthroughs and of course try to beat your high score, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game worked fine throughout.
OVERALL: I enjoyed this game and it's definitely a solid candidate for the 1990 Top 5/10. I can see why it's beloved even today, but it's unlikely to attract many mega fans if someone tries these games for the first time in this day and age. In any case, it's a classic for sure.
In this series you play a Ninja called Ryu Hayabusa. And as that snippet of the VG&CE review shows, this series did something few, if any, platformers did back in those days, which was putting more focus into the storytelling. The antagonist in this game is Ashtar, an evil lord who is looking to open the Gate of Darkness. Even at the time this was cliché but these games went beyond simply introducing a villain to give slight back story for why the character we are controlling goes against a barrage of dangerous enemies and hazards in each level.
There are other innovations present in this game but let's talk through the game one by one by looking at the 10 criteria by which I rate games.
STORYTELLING: Let's stick with the story for now. The first cutscene you see is Ashtar declaring his evil ambitions, followed by Ryu meeting a stranger who tells him that his love interest from the first game, Irene, was captured. Most of these scenes are presented in a pretty simple way. Most of the time, you see the still face of a character in front of mostly blank background. For Ryu, the background is often simply purple and the only movement you see is the character being pulled from left to right and vice versa. Sometimes you see a little more detail like a brick wall or the full body of a character, and in the rarest, yet prettiest of instances, the camera zooms out to show us how Ryu is observing an enemy fortress in shots that I'd call ahead of its time.
The story is advanced after finishing stages and there is quite a lot more to it than I would have thought, with a whole bunch of twists and turns throughout pertaining to characters first introduced in this sequel and one's from the original. However, twists and turns and surprises await us after seemingly every stage, so after Ryu's seventeenth "What the....?!" it starts to get stale.
Undoubtedly though, having a character humanized as much as Ryu Hayabusa surely added a lot to the experience back in the day, or at least it would have for me.
GAMEPLAY: I didn't play the first game, but I did watch a playthrough of it and also read some reviews to see what advancements had been made. In Ninja Gaiden, a side-scrolling platformer, you are equipped with a sword and slash your way through a horde enemies like those damn birds, soldiers who fire weapons, weird goblins that turn into a ball and roll into you, lizards that spit bullets and of course a bunch of bosses that appear at the end of a level.
You can jump, you can hold onto a wall and climb it (couldn't climb in the original), you can get a bunch of power ups like ninja stars, fire projectiles and duplicates of your self that stay a few feet behind your controlled character and repeat what you do (also new for this game). This feature in particular is worth pointing out. You can have up to two duplicates and you can position them in ways that can give you major advantages in battle. Since they don't take damage and disappear after a set amount of time (to my knowledge), you can, if you are skilled and persistent enough to figure it out, position the duplicates in a way that they face the enemy, while you face the other way and stand many feet away from danger. Even if you then slash in the wrong direction yourself, your duplicate attacks the enemy without any danger of repercussion. So it adds a new element that is actually very clever and can be incredibly useful.
Unfortunately, while the controls were lauded at the time, they haven't aged well. Slashing with your sword is unsatisfyingly inaccurate, especially when swinging at flying enemies or when jumping yourself. Since the main thing in this game is slashing, you can imagine how it impacts enjoyment. The inaccuracy can also probably be assigned to poor hitboxes. Often, the hit box of enemies is smaller than it should be, while for you, it's larger than it should be. This I have found has been an issue often back in the day and was of course more tolerable than then it is today.
Bosses are mostly actually pretty fun, but I noticed that at least one boss fight was entirely re-used from the first and the final boss battle was just so bananas that I said "fuck it" after reaching Phase 2.
Finally, it's worth pointing out that enemy placement is another annoying part to this game. At times, there is just so much going on that being hit is pretty much unavoidable, and I wish at times the game would flow better to make for a smoother experience, even if at the expense of making the game slightly less challenging.
ATMOSPHERE: This is above average for a game of its time for sure. As far as levels go, the dark area comes to mind that illuminates whenever lightning hits. Some distant shots in cut scenes, as described earlier, are actually beautiful and for the graphical limitations that were present at the time, atmospherically this definitely drew me in.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE: No voice acting. Music is catchy and memorable and also adds a lot to the cinematics, while the sound of your sword slashing through enemies and power up items is satisfying.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN: From what I've noticed, graphics are a step up from the original. The game is colorful, there is animation in wind, lightning and even beating hearts on the wall on one level, plus moving clouds during boss fights, that make the game stand out graphically. It still has a grainy look though, even for its time, more noticeably than in a different game I played in 1990 already, Code Name: Viper.
CONTENT: Playing it without save states like me and actually beating the final boss proper will take quite a while I imagine and it's fun enough if one wanted to push through. There are also more levels here than in the original from what I've read. So it's an average affair for arcade games in 1990 but what is also an average affair from that time is that the game is not bloated in any regard.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN: Levels are varied bring unique challenges. There is a level where wind blows left or right, making timing important to be able to progress. One level is dark and you will fall to your death if you don't wait for that lightning that illuminates the stage for a second to show you when to jump. Levels are interrupted with cutscenes, which are mostly short enough to not become tiresome and were also unique at the time. The "Game Over" screen sends you to the start of the stage you are in with 3 lives again, instead of to the first stage, which I appreciated. However, in some levels, enemy placement was wild and made for a hectic affair. Enemy spawning was odd at times as well. If an enemy spawned at the edge of the screen and you killed it without moving forward, the enemy would keep on spawning ad infinitum. So being driven backwards at any time would get annoying quickly because you would have to face the same enemies again. Overall though, level design is solid in this game.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION: As mentioned before, the duplicated Ryu's add a different element to combat and the cinematics were progressive, making this a notable game in terms of innovation.
REPLAYABILITY: You can mix it up slightly with power ups in subsequent playthroughs and of course try to beat your high score, but there isn't much replayability beyond that.
PLAYABILITY: The game worked fine throughout.
OVERALL: I enjoyed this game and it's definitely a solid candidate for the 1990 Top 5/10. I can see why it's beloved even today, but it's unlikely to attract many mega fans if someone tries these games for the first time in this day and age. In any case, it's a classic for sure.
Batman: The Video Game is a collection of platform games that are different in gameplay and story depending on the platform it released for, developed and published by Sunsoft.
The first version released for the NES in 1989 and is a side-scrolling platformer with features like the grappling hook, wall jumps and projectile weapons like the batarang and batdiscs.
The version I played, the Game Boy version, released on April 13, 1990 and is much less ambitious in both graphics and gameplay. It features Batman with a gun and is also a side scrolling platformer.
There are two other versions for the Sega Genesis, a game I will play as we move further along in 1990, and a PC Engine version which released in Japan-only and is an action-puzzle game.
Each game ties in to the movie from 1989 starring Jack Nicholson as the Joker to varying degrees, with the Game Boy version having the "least relation".
STORYTELLING
There is almost none present. Each "chapter" starts and ends with a very brief cutscene involving Joker and Batman. It would have been nice to have a bit more here or, as I will discuss later, more of a Batman feel in the level and/or graphic design, because while the game was fun, it could have been called anything but Batman and no one would have batted an eye.
GAMEPLAY
A lot of fun. If you are looking for platformers from this time and are looking for a game that is easier than usual for this period (1), that has more generous hit boxes (2), doesn't take too long (3) and has some variation (4), you'll find a pretty good game in the GameBoy version of Batman: The Video Game.
This is a side scrolling platformer with your usual dangers. There are enemies that simply follow a pre-determined route and will damage you if you touch them. Later on, they start shooting at you as well. Plus you can of course fall down to your death as well. You control Batman who is pointing a gun forward at all times. Batman using a gun already doesn't seem quite like Batman, but so be it. You can find a bunch of power-ups as you go through levels which alter your damage output and the way your gun shoots. Some give you more power but reduce your range, some make the bullet fly in half circles up and down. Stages are different enough that specific bullets (each different bullet variation is marked with a letter like "N" or "S) will be required to go through them without taking any damage, or perhaps even go through them period. One stage for example has enemies covering a whole platform and can't be shot at with the low-range bullet, so you have to jump on top of it and sacrifice some of your health. If your health is too low at that point, you're basically guaranteed to die. But each level allows you the opportunity to switch to a more usable bullet.
Shooting and platforming becomes more and more tricky as the game goes on, but it doesn't really become hard until about Chapter/Stage 3. I immediately noticed how hit boxes were really the opposite of what I came to expect out of games from 1990. Bullets could touch your sprite and you sometimes would take no damage. Especially when crouching down, bullets would touch your head but it wouldn't register as a hit. Conversely, bullets that barely scrape the enemy still hit them. Pretty much all the other games need you to be way more specific and give you way less leeway there, so this was a welcome surprise. As you will find out over the course of this game, that does make the game simpler, but it's hardly easy throughout. It's simply actually beatable without spending dozens of hours perfecting later stages. If you are a side-scrolling platform veteran however, this game will not scratch that hardcore challenge itch that you might have.
There is also a bat mobile shmup type level which offers some nice variety and is pretty challenging as more and more enemies and bullets start flying around you.
Boss fights are not that plentiful and end up being bullet-sponge fests more than anything, so they were a bit of a let down.
But overall, gameplay wise I had a lot of fun with this, even if the last stage and boss fight did my head in.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound design was average, which is good for the time, but the firing sound could have done with a little bit more 'oomph'. This gun holding animation-starved Batman could have definitely used it to give him at least some sort of badass vibes.
I liked the music but only because it pretty much sounds like any other soundtrack of its time, and most 8 bit soundtracks were bangers, but as with most of this game, it didn't give off any Batman vibes.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The Game Boy games of this time weren't particularly nice to look at, and that is no different here. Many magazines and reviews of the time I found call this game one of the better looking Game Boy games of the time, so I'm going to believe them here. Still, there isn't much here, you could have put any character in here instead of Batman and it would have done the same, minus the presence of Joker in cutscenes (his in-game character also looks like a random detective-like NPC though).
ATMOSPHERE
It has a typical Game Boy platformer atmosphere and that is totally fine, but again, it doesn't feel at all like Batman. I find this to be a good platformer first rather than a bad Batman game, so it depends on what you value more here.
CONTENT
There isn't much here, but what is here is fun. It took me roughly 4 hours to beat it.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
It's an odd choice to turn this into a generic platformer because Sunsoft's other Batman games in this 'package of platformers' include a lot more of Batman's typical gear, in addition to wall climbing. Here, they just gave BATMAN a gun and said enjoy.
There are four chapters with 3 or 4 stages in each and apart from the final one, which was so long, I enjoyed going through them all. Boss fights also took too long even though they didn't take long to figure out.
But the game gets an additional bonus for putting each level in different locations. For a 1990 Gameboy game, that is commendable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
From the reactions of 1990 it's clear that this game was one of the better Game Boy games at the time, both graphically and in terms of gameplay, which is good, but not innovative.
REPLAYABILITY
You can play games with about a handful of different 'bullet effects' and of course try to beat your high score, or try to go from start to finish without any continues. The boring and long boss fights and not many gameplay elements overall to take away some from the game's replayability.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
This is a game that is not notable as a package because it pretty much only does one thing really well or even above-average, but what it does well is be an enjoyable, fair platformer that is atypical for this time where games were supposed to be punishing to artificially increase playing time of otherwise short games. This one does that in its final chapter as well, but even then it is more than beatable and flows well overall, if it weren't for those long and boring boss fight interruptions.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Steve Harris for Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 14 (Sep 90): "The graphics, by GameBoy standards, are superlative"
- Sushi-X for Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 14 (Sep 90): "Gee Batman, better lose a few pounds and put that gun away and slug it out like you're supposed to" Glad this was addressed back in the day as well. Fyi, he gave the game a 7/10 anyway because this really is a fun game.
- ?? for Mean Machines Issue 3 (Dec 90): "if you're a Nintendo owner, miss this game at your peril."
The first version released for the NES in 1989 and is a side-scrolling platformer with features like the grappling hook, wall jumps and projectile weapons like the batarang and batdiscs.
The version I played, the Game Boy version, released on April 13, 1990 and is much less ambitious in both graphics and gameplay. It features Batman with a gun and is also a side scrolling platformer.
There are two other versions for the Sega Genesis, a game I will play as we move further along in 1990, and a PC Engine version which released in Japan-only and is an action-puzzle game.
Each game ties in to the movie from 1989 starring Jack Nicholson as the Joker to varying degrees, with the Game Boy version having the "least relation".
STORYTELLING
There is almost none present. Each "chapter" starts and ends with a very brief cutscene involving Joker and Batman. It would have been nice to have a bit more here or, as I will discuss later, more of a Batman feel in the level and/or graphic design, because while the game was fun, it could have been called anything but Batman and no one would have batted an eye.
GAMEPLAY
A lot of fun. If you are looking for platformers from this time and are looking for a game that is easier than usual for this period (1), that has more generous hit boxes (2), doesn't take too long (3) and has some variation (4), you'll find a pretty good game in the GameBoy version of Batman: The Video Game.
This is a side scrolling platformer with your usual dangers. There are enemies that simply follow a pre-determined route and will damage you if you touch them. Later on, they start shooting at you as well. Plus you can of course fall down to your death as well. You control Batman who is pointing a gun forward at all times. Batman using a gun already doesn't seem quite like Batman, but so be it. You can find a bunch of power-ups as you go through levels which alter your damage output and the way your gun shoots. Some give you more power but reduce your range, some make the bullet fly in half circles up and down. Stages are different enough that specific bullets (each different bullet variation is marked with a letter like "N" or "S) will be required to go through them without taking any damage, or perhaps even go through them period. One stage for example has enemies covering a whole platform and can't be shot at with the low-range bullet, so you have to jump on top of it and sacrifice some of your health. If your health is too low at that point, you're basically guaranteed to die. But each level allows you the opportunity to switch to a more usable bullet.
Shooting and platforming becomes more and more tricky as the game goes on, but it doesn't really become hard until about Chapter/Stage 3. I immediately noticed how hit boxes were really the opposite of what I came to expect out of games from 1990. Bullets could touch your sprite and you sometimes would take no damage. Especially when crouching down, bullets would touch your head but it wouldn't register as a hit. Conversely, bullets that barely scrape the enemy still hit them. Pretty much all the other games need you to be way more specific and give you way less leeway there, so this was a welcome surprise. As you will find out over the course of this game, that does make the game simpler, but it's hardly easy throughout. It's simply actually beatable without spending dozens of hours perfecting later stages. If you are a side-scrolling platform veteran however, this game will not scratch that hardcore challenge itch that you might have.
There is also a bat mobile shmup type level which offers some nice variety and is pretty challenging as more and more enemies and bullets start flying around you.
Boss fights are not that plentiful and end up being bullet-sponge fests more than anything, so they were a bit of a let down.
But overall, gameplay wise I had a lot of fun with this, even if the last stage and boss fight did my head in.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound design was average, which is good for the time, but the firing sound could have done with a little bit more 'oomph'. This gun holding animation-starved Batman could have definitely used it to give him at least some sort of badass vibes.
I liked the music but only because it pretty much sounds like any other soundtrack of its time, and most 8 bit soundtracks were bangers, but as with most of this game, it didn't give off any Batman vibes.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The Game Boy games of this time weren't particularly nice to look at, and that is no different here. Many magazines and reviews of the time I found call this game one of the better looking Game Boy games of the time, so I'm going to believe them here. Still, there isn't much here, you could have put any character in here instead of Batman and it would have done the same, minus the presence of Joker in cutscenes (his in-game character also looks like a random detective-like NPC though).
ATMOSPHERE
It has a typical Game Boy platformer atmosphere and that is totally fine, but again, it doesn't feel at all like Batman. I find this to be a good platformer first rather than a bad Batman game, so it depends on what you value more here.
CONTENT
There isn't much here, but what is here is fun. It took me roughly 4 hours to beat it.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
It's an odd choice to turn this into a generic platformer because Sunsoft's other Batman games in this 'package of platformers' include a lot more of Batman's typical gear, in addition to wall climbing. Here, they just gave BATMAN a gun and said enjoy.
There are four chapters with 3 or 4 stages in each and apart from the final one, which was so long, I enjoyed going through them all. Boss fights also took too long even though they didn't take long to figure out.
But the game gets an additional bonus for putting each level in different locations. For a 1990 Gameboy game, that is commendable.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
From the reactions of 1990 it's clear that this game was one of the better Game Boy games at the time, both graphically and in terms of gameplay, which is good, but not innovative.
REPLAYABILITY
You can play games with about a handful of different 'bullet effects' and of course try to beat your high score, or try to go from start to finish without any continues. The boring and long boss fights and not many gameplay elements overall to take away some from the game's replayability.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
This is a game that is not notable as a package because it pretty much only does one thing really well or even above-average, but what it does well is be an enjoyable, fair platformer that is atypical for this time where games were supposed to be punishing to artificially increase playing time of otherwise short games. This one does that in its final chapter as well, but even then it is more than beatable and flows well overall, if it weren't for those long and boring boss fight interruptions.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Steve Harris for Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 14 (Sep 90): "The graphics, by GameBoy standards, are superlative"
- Sushi-X for Electronic Gaming Monthly Issue 14 (Sep 90): "Gee Batman, better lose a few pounds and put that gun away and slug it out like you're supposed to" Glad this was addressed back in the day as well. Fyi, he gave the game a 7/10 anyway because this really is a fun game.
- ?? for Mean Machines Issue 3 (Dec 90): "if you're a Nintendo owner, miss this game at your peril."
1990
Crystalis is an Action RPG / Action Adventure game that initially released on April 13, 1990 in Japan for the NES. It was re-released for the Game Boy Color 10 years later and it's celebrated by many for being an "underappreciated NES gem".
The NES version is the one I played, and there are major differences in both versions in case you want to try it yourself. The Game Boy Color version has an almost completely new soundtrack that is worse in my opinion (1), from what I've seen it plays less fluidly and has lower resolution (2), a story sequence was altered (3) but most importantly, the Game Boy Color version is actually way more helpful in guiding the player and actually explains to you what the story is about (4).
STORYTELLING
So what do I mean by that last sentence? Well the issue I had with the NES version was that apart from a very brief introduction to the world in the menu screen, there was just about no explanation as to who you are or why you are fighting all these monsters and doing what these people told you to do. Every hour or two you'd get a line or so of information on what this game is about, but nothing substantial up until the end of the game, where all info would be dropped at once.
In the GBC version, there is a much longer intro sequence explaining why you were summoned and what the lore behind all those items and people is that you find and meet. Every time you find a useful item, one of the characters also would show up to tell you what it can do. Plus, characters also tell you a bit more about what to do next and there are much more intermissions filled with monologues on this world and its lore. Due to the other differences I listed which I actually dislike compared to the NES version, I still am glad I stuck with the NES version I guess.
So what's the story about? You play a hero that you name and that has been frozen in time for 100 years after a war in 1997 nearly meant the end of civilization. The survivors decided to abandon the ways and technology that led to this war and created a floating Tower, where they would live, gain power to control the world (to make sure no harm was done anymore) and to study the ways of magic. You and a companion of yours, Mesia, are now awakened 100 years after the war because an evil magician called Dragonia used his abilities to grow in power and fill the land with Monsters, to ultimately enter the Tower and control everything that is left of the planet.
Four magicians that will become your helpful companions in this world used their abilities to create four Swords of different elements. They used these to attack Dragonia, but he was able to take the Swords from them and scatter them throughout the land. With no additional way of defending themselves through magic, a safety put into place 100 years ago for a worst case scenario triggers and awakens both you and your companion Mesia. What you have to do now is find all four swords, which form the ultimate sword called "Crystalis", and use it to kill Dragonia and end his reign of power.
Throughout your journey, you meet these magicians and can use a skill called "Telepathy" to request hints from them. There are other characters as well that aid you in your quest, like the fisher that lets you use his boat if you find an item of his. There is also a guy called Kensu, who does help you out a lot but loves to play hide and seek and must be found many times to finally give you what you need.
In the NES version, you speak the absolute minimum with all of these characters, but in the GBC version, there is a lot more dialogue and detail to the lore. Since I played the NES version and won't play through the GBC version, I'm going to rate the NES version, which has none to little storytelling for most of the game, and not finding out the true reason for what you are doing for a long time isn't that motivating. It kinda pays off in the end though. There aren't that many twists and turns in this game, there is little environmental storytelling and overall, the package present here is average.
GAMEPLAY
As per usual for the time, gameplay interruptions are rare, so the action is pretty much constant. You start the game by gaining the Sword of Stone and you play the game by attacking the many different monsters with a thrust attack. Most of the enemies don't attack back but rather either walk in a pre-determined direction or into you, which damages you. Unfortunately, the enemies usually have a pretty tight hit box, so you have to do some positioning beforehand before you attack. It's not rare for you to do a 360 spin to try and position yourself in a way that opens up an attack for you without exposing you for damage by the enemies. Your hitbox sadly is much larger than it should be, so even if your character isn't actually touched, you will still take damage. This can become frustrating over the first couple hours as you try to figure out where the game wants you to attack from, but once you figure it out, it works most of the time as you want it to.
There are four swords of different elements to find in the game, and as a result, monsters with resistances and weaknesses to specific elements. While this is a good thing as it brings variety to the fold, it happens often that a room has two enemies with different resistances. Since there are no hotkeys, I would find myself equpping the Sword of Fire, killing an enemy, equipping the Sword of Water, killing an enemy and so on. This would not only throw me out of the action but also quickly become tiresome.
In addition, some enemies cannot be harmed at all until you reach a certain level. Worse even, bosses have the same effect. How does level 11 make you able to attack a character when level 10 means they are invincible? I don't know. But imagine my frustration when I tried my luck at a boss for 20 minutes, only to fail with each element because of a level difference. "Kill it with fire", a guide online said, which I used lavishly, though not only due to combat questions. When fire didn't work as well, I looked it up further. Turns out, I really had to be level 11 to hurt the boss, but my save state was right at the boss fight, so I couldn't back out. Luckily, I had a back up state from 30 minutes before, because otherwise that would have probably been the end of my run.
Leveling becomes harder and harder because the XP requirements grow exponentially, whilst I found that the XP you get by later enemies wouldn't increase quite as fast. This meant I had to grind for 30-60 minutes at multiple points to progress further, which even the most skilled walkthroughs incorporate online. Grinding has seemingly become a core feature of JRPGs since, and it's no more fun here than it is in Final Fantasy games for example, though at least here you don't have to load in and out of battles.
Dying in this game is very easy and checkpoints do not exist, so you have to save often to be able to actually beat this game. By now I'm used to it having played a bunch of other games from 1990 with similar requirements, but it's worth pointing out.
The game has a lot of different environments to explore, but often it requires you to do the same thing, just with a different element. There is however a snow area for which you will need Rabbit Shoes to be able to jump up a hill and most notably, there is a poison swamp, for which you will need to find a Gas Mask to not take damage from the poison.
Unfortunately, when I say "explore", I mean that you usually try to find a way forward and battle enemies. You do have to find "lost items" here and there, bring it back to someone and get something in return that enables further progress, however it's not like these items are shown anywhere on the map. A pendant for example is in a random spot in a cave and you find it by accident when walking over that exact pixel. There are some non-essential items to find, like healing herbs or teleportation boots, and secret locations to find those in.
Overall, gameplay is repetitive and exploration opportunities are limited, but it's enjoyable enough due to enough enemy variety and the core combat being fine once you figure out how to not take unfair hits all the time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
There is no voice acting. The sound design is good, but nothing special. You hear the same sounds in dozens of other RPGs or Action Adventures from that time.
The music is really good, but this compliment is only for the NES version. The overworld theme simply sounds fun, cheerful and catchy. My favorite track has got to be on the "sea" level. An above average soundtrack that can definitely be listened to outside of the game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN:
The game has solid graphics for the time and makes good use of color, but doesn't stand out beyond that at a time filled with games that look similar. There is a good variety in locations and especially the poison swamp is worth pointing out here again, but the majority of the game does take places in same-looking dungeons that simply use a different color based on the pre-dominant element.
ATMOSPHERE
The game mostly has a cheerful atmosphere in line with a lot of upbeat music, but it sometimes contrasts with the events in the game, like when a group of people are kidnapped and you wander to their desolate town with the same cheerful music as per usual. Even during the moments leading to the game's final battle it still felt too cheerful and sort of out of place due to the stake's involved per the game's storytelling. That said if you're looking for something to play that may have raised stakes but a more lax soundtrack, you'll be happy with Crystalis.
CONTENT
The game does take 10+ hours if you use guides here and there and are a first time player, but a few of those hours are spent grinding and you do hold the "attack" button for most of it. If you enjoy that, you'll probably enjoy your time with this game, which even with that playing time is much shorter than the RPGs of its time and therefore may be worth a try at least.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game plays rather linearly even though you can visit multiple locations at once. If you do visit those locations, you usually can't hurt the enemies, so there is no point to deviate from the main road. That main road involves doing the same thing usually and often walking through the same-looking corridors that simple have a different coat of paint. There is variety in locations here and there and the sea level offers a unique battleground at least. The final few locations are also much more unique in design, but the way the final chapter is designed is not necessarily my cup of tea, as it's boss fight after boss fight after boss fight until you meet the final boss, but wait, it's not the final boss, here he is, the end.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Most of what this game does has been done before this game came out and not all it does ages well. It's a good game for mixing these elements together and making this an enjoyable adventure overall, but I wouldn't say it set a new benchmark or brought anything new to the table, though its graphics were praised at the time along with the "depth", as in how much there is to do. As mentioned previously, some of the depth is stuffed with repetitive filler and therefore not simply a positive, unless you really are enamored with all core concepts here and don't want the game to end.
REPLAYABILITY
After a first playthrough, there isn't much that you can really do differently.
PLAYABILITY
The game works perfectly fine at all times and plays pretty fluidly.
OVERALL
This is a solid Action RPG / Action Adventure with very catchy music, varied environments and mostly enjoyable, though flawed combat. It's definitely worth taking a look at if you've enjoyed similar games like Zelda games or Final Fantasy, but it lacks depth and logic to its storytelling even when it does get going late into the game, key items are placed in arbitrary locations making progress very difficult and tedious without a guide and there is a lot of mandatory grinding required.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Martin Alessi for Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "A post-apocalyptic storyline with cinema displays mixes with one of the best search, solve and save the world games in recent memory."
- Chris Bieniek for VG&CE, Issue 20 (Sep 90): "the main thing that sets this title apart from most other [RPGs] is its tremendous depth. I've never seen a game with so many places to explore"
The NES version is the one I played, and there are major differences in both versions in case you want to try it yourself. The Game Boy Color version has an almost completely new soundtrack that is worse in my opinion (1), from what I've seen it plays less fluidly and has lower resolution (2), a story sequence was altered (3) but most importantly, the Game Boy Color version is actually way more helpful in guiding the player and actually explains to you what the story is about (4).
STORYTELLING
So what do I mean by that last sentence? Well the issue I had with the NES version was that apart from a very brief introduction to the world in the menu screen, there was just about no explanation as to who you are or why you are fighting all these monsters and doing what these people told you to do. Every hour or two you'd get a line or so of information on what this game is about, but nothing substantial up until the end of the game, where all info would be dropped at once.
In the GBC version, there is a much longer intro sequence explaining why you were summoned and what the lore behind all those items and people is that you find and meet. Every time you find a useful item, one of the characters also would show up to tell you what it can do. Plus, characters also tell you a bit more about what to do next and there are much more intermissions filled with monologues on this world and its lore. Due to the other differences I listed which I actually dislike compared to the NES version, I still am glad I stuck with the NES version I guess.
So what's the story about? You play a hero that you name and that has been frozen in time for 100 years after a war in 1997 nearly meant the end of civilization. The survivors decided to abandon the ways and technology that led to this war and created a floating Tower, where they would live, gain power to control the world (to make sure no harm was done anymore) and to study the ways of magic. You and a companion of yours, Mesia, are now awakened 100 years after the war because an evil magician called Dragonia used his abilities to grow in power and fill the land with Monsters, to ultimately enter the Tower and control everything that is left of the planet.
Four magicians that will become your helpful companions in this world used their abilities to create four Swords of different elements. They used these to attack Dragonia, but he was able to take the Swords from them and scatter them throughout the land. With no additional way of defending themselves through magic, a safety put into place 100 years ago for a worst case scenario triggers and awakens both you and your companion Mesia. What you have to do now is find all four swords, which form the ultimate sword called "Crystalis", and use it to kill Dragonia and end his reign of power.
Throughout your journey, you meet these magicians and can use a skill called "Telepathy" to request hints from them. There are other characters as well that aid you in your quest, like the fisher that lets you use his boat if you find an item of his. There is also a guy called Kensu, who does help you out a lot but loves to play hide and seek and must be found many times to finally give you what you need.
In the NES version, you speak the absolute minimum with all of these characters, but in the GBC version, there is a lot more dialogue and detail to the lore. Since I played the NES version and won't play through the GBC version, I'm going to rate the NES version, which has none to little storytelling for most of the game, and not finding out the true reason for what you are doing for a long time isn't that motivating. It kinda pays off in the end though. There aren't that many twists and turns in this game, there is little environmental storytelling and overall, the package present here is average.
GAMEPLAY
As per usual for the time, gameplay interruptions are rare, so the action is pretty much constant. You start the game by gaining the Sword of Stone and you play the game by attacking the many different monsters with a thrust attack. Most of the enemies don't attack back but rather either walk in a pre-determined direction or into you, which damages you. Unfortunately, the enemies usually have a pretty tight hit box, so you have to do some positioning beforehand before you attack. It's not rare for you to do a 360 spin to try and position yourself in a way that opens up an attack for you without exposing you for damage by the enemies. Your hitbox sadly is much larger than it should be, so even if your character isn't actually touched, you will still take damage. This can become frustrating over the first couple hours as you try to figure out where the game wants you to attack from, but once you figure it out, it works most of the time as you want it to.
There are four swords of different elements to find in the game, and as a result, monsters with resistances and weaknesses to specific elements. While this is a good thing as it brings variety to the fold, it happens often that a room has two enemies with different resistances. Since there are no hotkeys, I would find myself equpping the Sword of Fire, killing an enemy, equipping the Sword of Water, killing an enemy and so on. This would not only throw me out of the action but also quickly become tiresome.
In addition, some enemies cannot be harmed at all until you reach a certain level. Worse even, bosses have the same effect. How does level 11 make you able to attack a character when level 10 means they are invincible? I don't know. But imagine my frustration when I tried my luck at a boss for 20 minutes, only to fail with each element because of a level difference. "Kill it with fire", a guide online said, which I used lavishly, though not only due to combat questions. When fire didn't work as well, I looked it up further. Turns out, I really had to be level 11 to hurt the boss, but my save state was right at the boss fight, so I couldn't back out. Luckily, I had a back up state from 30 minutes before, because otherwise that would have probably been the end of my run.
Leveling becomes harder and harder because the XP requirements grow exponentially, whilst I found that the XP you get by later enemies wouldn't increase quite as fast. This meant I had to grind for 30-60 minutes at multiple points to progress further, which even the most skilled walkthroughs incorporate online. Grinding has seemingly become a core feature of JRPGs since, and it's no more fun here than it is in Final Fantasy games for example, though at least here you don't have to load in and out of battles.
Dying in this game is very easy and checkpoints do not exist, so you have to save often to be able to actually beat this game. By now I'm used to it having played a bunch of other games from 1990 with similar requirements, but it's worth pointing out.
The game has a lot of different environments to explore, but often it requires you to do the same thing, just with a different element. There is however a snow area for which you will need Rabbit Shoes to be able to jump up a hill and most notably, there is a poison swamp, for which you will need to find a Gas Mask to not take damage from the poison.
Unfortunately, when I say "explore", I mean that you usually try to find a way forward and battle enemies. You do have to find "lost items" here and there, bring it back to someone and get something in return that enables further progress, however it's not like these items are shown anywhere on the map. A pendant for example is in a random spot in a cave and you find it by accident when walking over that exact pixel. There are some non-essential items to find, like healing herbs or teleportation boots, and secret locations to find those in.
Overall, gameplay is repetitive and exploration opportunities are limited, but it's enjoyable enough due to enough enemy variety and the core combat being fine once you figure out how to not take unfair hits all the time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
There is no voice acting. The sound design is good, but nothing special. You hear the same sounds in dozens of other RPGs or Action Adventures from that time.
The music is really good, but this compliment is only for the NES version. The overworld theme simply sounds fun, cheerful and catchy. My favorite track has got to be on the "sea" level. An above average soundtrack that can definitely be listened to outside of the game.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN:
The game has solid graphics for the time and makes good use of color, but doesn't stand out beyond that at a time filled with games that look similar. There is a good variety in locations and especially the poison swamp is worth pointing out here again, but the majority of the game does take places in same-looking dungeons that simply use a different color based on the pre-dominant element.
ATMOSPHERE
The game mostly has a cheerful atmosphere in line with a lot of upbeat music, but it sometimes contrasts with the events in the game, like when a group of people are kidnapped and you wander to their desolate town with the same cheerful music as per usual. Even during the moments leading to the game's final battle it still felt too cheerful and sort of out of place due to the stake's involved per the game's storytelling. That said if you're looking for something to play that may have raised stakes but a more lax soundtrack, you'll be happy with Crystalis.
CONTENT
The game does take 10+ hours if you use guides here and there and are a first time player, but a few of those hours are spent grinding and you do hold the "attack" button for most of it. If you enjoy that, you'll probably enjoy your time with this game, which even with that playing time is much shorter than the RPGs of its time and therefore may be worth a try at least.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game plays rather linearly even though you can visit multiple locations at once. If you do visit those locations, you usually can't hurt the enemies, so there is no point to deviate from the main road. That main road involves doing the same thing usually and often walking through the same-looking corridors that simple have a different coat of paint. There is variety in locations here and there and the sea level offers a unique battleground at least. The final few locations are also much more unique in design, but the way the final chapter is designed is not necessarily my cup of tea, as it's boss fight after boss fight after boss fight until you meet the final boss, but wait, it's not the final boss, here he is, the end.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Most of what this game does has been done before this game came out and not all it does ages well. It's a good game for mixing these elements together and making this an enjoyable adventure overall, but I wouldn't say it set a new benchmark or brought anything new to the table, though its graphics were praised at the time along with the "depth", as in how much there is to do. As mentioned previously, some of the depth is stuffed with repetitive filler and therefore not simply a positive, unless you really are enamored with all core concepts here and don't want the game to end.
REPLAYABILITY
After a first playthrough, there isn't much that you can really do differently.
PLAYABILITY
The game works perfectly fine at all times and plays pretty fluidly.
OVERALL
This is a solid Action RPG / Action Adventure with very catchy music, varied environments and mostly enjoyable, though flawed combat. It's definitely worth taking a look at if you've enjoyed similar games like Zelda games or Final Fantasy, but it lacks depth and logic to its storytelling even when it does get going late into the game, key items are placed in arbitrary locations making progress very difficult and tedious without a guide and there is a lot of mandatory grinding required.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Martin Alessi for Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 13 (Aug 90): "A post-apocalyptic storyline with cinema displays mixes with one of the best search, solve and save the world games in recent memory."
- Chris Bieniek for VG&CE, Issue 20 (Sep 90): "the main thing that sets this title apart from most other [RPGs] is its tremendous depth. I've never seen a game with so many places to explore"
Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light is a tactical RPG and the first game in the Fire Emblem series, developed by Nintendo and Intelligent Systems and released for the NES on April 20, 1990 in Japan only. The first official Western release happened on December 4, 2020 for the Nintendo Switch, however for whatever reason Nintendo made it a timed exclusive, meaning it is not available for purchase anymore since March 2021.
That baffling decision aside and disregarding the fact that the newest Fire Emblem game was just recently announced, this series was not an instant hit. The initial reception by some critics was poor due to "poor graphics" and the game being "difficult to understand". This resulted in poor initial sales, a situation that would improve over time through positive word-of-mouth (especially a positive Famitsu column on the game about half a year after release) and led Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light to sell well over 300.000 units up until 2002.
Since the Switch version is no longer for sale, I wasn't able to play with the official translation. The translation I got, as I noticed after playing for many hours, did not really fit with the official names for items, characters and locations. The main protagonist / the prince is called Marth, not Mars.
STORYTELLING
The translation differences on seemingly everything notwithstanding, it was still "easy" to follow since the different translation was used consistently. Unfortunately, the game throws around a bunch of names of people and kingdoms all the time so it takes a while to get a grasp on what is going on. At first, many names simply end up sounding the same, so I had to find my way out of that web of confusion.
There are 25 chapters/missions in this game, and before and after each, there is some text or dialogue progressing the story, plus a small monologue during missions when you would get near the more notable chapter bosses.
You play as the Prince of Altea, Marth, who was able to escape when Altea was under attack by the Dolhr Empire. Marth's sister Elice sacrificed herself so that Marth could escape. During this time, their dad had left an ally, Gra, to watch over his kingdom, but Gra betrayed them to the Dolhr Empire. Meanwhile their dad had left to fight the leader of the Dolhr Empire, the Shadow Dragon, but failed and died. He used a Falchion in battle, a divine weapon that had stopped the Shadow Dragon 100 years earlier and it was taken from Marth's dad when he lost the battle. It is needed to fight the Shadow Dragon.
At the start of this game you stop an invasion of the new home of Marth, Talys, and then move out with your allies to fight the Dolhr Empire. Before that, you visit and free many other kingdoms and find more allies to aid you in your quest. All characters that aid you are named and have their own little back story (once the game ends, there is a brief summary on what each character is doing after the story conclusion, provided they survive).
And this is where the game gets its uniqueness from. The dev team decided to build on their experience from war games such as Famicom Wars, and add "RPG elements" to them. I think this game pushes the definition of an RPG, but that's a different discussion.
Each character is assigned a class and can level up to increase their stats. While this has gameplay implications only at first glance, it goes way beyond that. Characters barely have any dialogue apart from when your first recruit them, so building a connection to them is only possible on a limited scale. However, it still happens as you find characters that increase in level over time and improve in their abilities. You're excited when they then get criticial hits at the right time to get you out of tricky situations or you love them for simply being consistent throughout. And ultimately, this means it can hurt for a short while when you lose them to the perma-death system. It's a feeling I only know from XCOM games, but in those characters don't even have that backstory like they do here.
It's a system that is very limited here but is effective in general, and I can only imagine how much later entries built on it.
The main plot itself is convoluted for a first time player because you get a lot of lore dropped with no way to read it again or look up any info on anything. In general, the game lacks a tutorial or codex.
Once you get to grips with it, it is a solid plot but basic storytelling due to the technical limitations of the time. In addition, it was pretty typical for the time. I have just played 9 games in 1990 through this challenge so far and more than a few included the concept of "divine weapon is the only way to kill final boss". It works for a game to give the player needed motivation, so I can see why this seems to have been a popular choice for the overall theme. You'll be content with the storytelling for a game this old and with this much content outside of it, it'll the do the job, but nothing beyond that.
GAMEPLAY
Lots to discuss here. The game is a tactical RPG. Back in 1990, you would have found a lot of strategy games and a lot of RPGs, but few, if any, that combined the two.
The tactical part looks like this: You control a battle unit out of a set number of characters based on the level. Often, you would have about 15 units on the battlefield at once. If you had more characters available than the maximum possible amount - through recruiting them - a level would start by making you select the specific units that you want to deploy.
Once you do that, battle commences on a grid-based map. Maps changed for each level and would add strategical challenges, but wouldn't really change anything graphically or of their tone. The game has a turn-based battle system. You select a unit, move it up a specific number of grids based on the unit's Movement stat, and then attack an enemy if it is in range.
There are 21 classes in this game that mostly are specialized in something. There are your typical Fighters and Mercenaries who wield swords and axes and have average Movement range. Then there are your Archers who can only use bows, Clerics who cannot fight but only use a staff to for example heal or warp units (send them to anywhere else on the map, very useful) and Mages who can use powerful Magic and have high resistances. There are also "Pegasus Knights" that are on horseback and can fly over obstacles on the ground like buildings or trees, which usually take an additional step to move past for ground units.
Weapons usually have multiple different qualities. The lowest is the "Iron quality" and the best quality that is usually accessible is the "Silver quality". As you make more progress in this game, you come across many enemies that can resist Iron quality weapons, making the upgrade necessary. Luckily, money is literally no issue in this game, so all you need to do is buy new items. Unluckily, there is no "safe hub" or anything like that to stock up. Instead, shops are somewhere on the map in levels and usually guarded by enemies. Often, there would only be one store as well, so you could only send one unit to buy something per round. So I would spend multiple rounds after a map was cleared to just get everyone new items. This is a typical QoL issue that is surely handled differently in newer entries. I haven't played any Fire Emblem game up to this point, so I don't know.
Another QoL issue is how slow progression in this game is. When you control 15 units, you have to move all 15 units at a time, of course, but that takes a lot of time. This is probably a thing in current Fire Emblem games as well, and not the worst thing to do, but it does take a while and gets kinda boring once you are 10+ chapters in. I prefer the XCOM games here, where you only have 6 characters to control.
But again, this isn't the worst thing in the world. What is much worse is the individual battles themselves. The animation for one attack takes seemingly ages and when you enter over a handful of fights in a single round, it will take minutes to go through them all. Luckily, my emulator had a fast forward function, so I could skip through these much quicker. I didn't finish this game (I made it to Chapter 22/25) but I think it's worth pointing out that I got there in just 17 hours compared to the 26-40 hours it takes on a normal playthrough according to HLTB.
Strategically, there are a lot of ways to play this game thanks to the different classes and their specialties. If you want to bring a Cleric, Thief and Archer for example, they will not be - or you don't want them to be in the Thief's case - in close combat. A big system in this game is the "counter", which means if an enemy character attacks you, your character can counter and vice versa. If the Archer is attacked in melee combat, he will not be able to counter, which can make a big difference. Clerics don't attack at all. Thieves barely have any strength and limited health, so they usually will only be part of your squad to unlock doors and/or open chests. Clerics heal and warp and Archers can be devastating in long range combat, so they all do provide arguments for why they should be included in the squad.
But bring a few more Mercenaries, Fighters and Paladins and you'll have a lot more strength in Melee Combat. So do you go for more of them, or for a more mixed approach? All strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and more than a few will work, so it's nice to see these options being available.
Bringing the right squad to do the job becomes more important however when different Chapters are filled more with specific enemies that can only be significantly damaged with specific weapons. Some need to be fought with Magic, some with Arrows and some with Melee weapons. Plus, maps have enough strategical differences that having Pirates or Pegasus Knights that can go over water or having Mages and Archers who can shoot over walls becomes more important.
On the flipside, you can quickly find yourself in a bad situation when the most useful units for a particular level are the most under leveled. The only way to level up units is by having them battle. Especially later on, bringing those low level characters with you can be pretty bad since you will need all the fire power you got when the game starts throwing infinite reinforcements in your face until you finally defeat the boss and send Prince Marth to the Castle, which is a location he must visit to finish the level.
There is a balance that must be struck here, but I would have liked to get more additional ways to train my units outside of battle (probably expecting too much in a 1990 game). Especially when my strong units started dying late into game and enemy units just started being filled with strong Dragons that would show up in the dozens, the game pretty much had me in an impossible situation. You can't now level your low-level guys, nor can you even get them weapons since you need to do that within levels. When never ending groups of enemies come at you, when are you supposed to find the opportunity?
Due to this, I didn't get to finish the game, but there is a lot to like here.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. There is nothing noteworthy to discuss regarding the sound design, it sounded average for the time.
The music was definitely one of the highlights for me. 3 or 4 tracks were playing for most of the game, so it didn't necessarily have variety, but some tracks just were bangers, especially the start of chapter track. Look for "Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light- Chapter Start" on YouTube.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Even back then the game wasn't considered graphically pretty. I'd say it has some strong colors and the varied character design is pretty good, but there isn't much else to it besides that. You see the same few assets on every level, maps are mostly green spots of grass and even battles take place in a black background with nothing else on it.
ATMOSPHERE
Once I got firmly into the gameplay loop, playing this game was rather comfortable thanks to the mix of a solid soundtrack, uninspiring but not-ugly graphics and simply being around a cast of characters that have a place in this world and start to grow into trusted allies. It is nothing special but to me the atmosphere was rather positive than negative.
CONTENT
25 chapters, each take about 30-60 minutes on average. Lots of repetition here but also a satisfying strategical challenge throughout.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There is a good mix in the design of the maps, especially considering what technical limitations the devs had to battle. Map design and enemy placement means that challenges that players have to fight through are varied, but sometimes the enemy placement and especially reinforcements get so ridiculous that you have no way of progressing through them with the units you have on hand. And this was clear hours ago, you just weren't aware. Infinite reinforcements also mean that the amount of opportunity is limited to level up underleveled units and to stock up on weapons and other items in the lead up to chapters 20+, which was frustrating.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
One of, if not THE first tactical RPG that started a whole genre. Due to that, this game already gets iconic status, and it's a mix of genres that works pretty well too (as evidenced by the series status even today).
REPLAYABILITY
This game can be played in different ways, but the hours and hours of watching animations and moving your units make this a hard sell for people looking for replayability. Apart from improved stats, there also is no incentive to play through the game and try to keep different units alive compared to previous runs.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
Definitely worth checking out if you're a Fire Emblem fan and want to see its origins. There is also some fun to be had and mostly the game offers a fair strategic challenge. If you're a veteran of the series, you might also do much better than me in the first half of the game and go into the second half more prepared, which will make or break your chance of completing this game.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan-only release, nothing to find in Western magazines
That baffling decision aside and disregarding the fact that the newest Fire Emblem game was just recently announced, this series was not an instant hit. The initial reception by some critics was poor due to "poor graphics" and the game being "difficult to understand". This resulted in poor initial sales, a situation that would improve over time through positive word-of-mouth (especially a positive Famitsu column on the game about half a year after release) and led Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light to sell well over 300.000 units up until 2002.
Since the Switch version is no longer for sale, I wasn't able to play with the official translation. The translation I got, as I noticed after playing for many hours, did not really fit with the official names for items, characters and locations. The main protagonist / the prince is called Marth, not Mars.
STORYTELLING
The translation differences on seemingly everything notwithstanding, it was still "easy" to follow since the different translation was used consistently. Unfortunately, the game throws around a bunch of names of people and kingdoms all the time so it takes a while to get a grasp on what is going on. At first, many names simply end up sounding the same, so I had to find my way out of that web of confusion.
There are 25 chapters/missions in this game, and before and after each, there is some text or dialogue progressing the story, plus a small monologue during missions when you would get near the more notable chapter bosses.
You play as the Prince of Altea, Marth, who was able to escape when Altea was under attack by the Dolhr Empire. Marth's sister Elice sacrificed herself so that Marth could escape. During this time, their dad had left an ally, Gra, to watch over his kingdom, but Gra betrayed them to the Dolhr Empire. Meanwhile their dad had left to fight the leader of the Dolhr Empire, the Shadow Dragon, but failed and died. He used a Falchion in battle, a divine weapon that had stopped the Shadow Dragon 100 years earlier and it was taken from Marth's dad when he lost the battle. It is needed to fight the Shadow Dragon.
At the start of this game you stop an invasion of the new home of Marth, Talys, and then move out with your allies to fight the Dolhr Empire. Before that, you visit and free many other kingdoms and find more allies to aid you in your quest. All characters that aid you are named and have their own little back story (once the game ends, there is a brief summary on what each character is doing after the story conclusion, provided they survive).
And this is where the game gets its uniqueness from. The dev team decided to build on their experience from war games such as Famicom Wars, and add "RPG elements" to them. I think this game pushes the definition of an RPG, but that's a different discussion.
Each character is assigned a class and can level up to increase their stats. While this has gameplay implications only at first glance, it goes way beyond that. Characters barely have any dialogue apart from when your first recruit them, so building a connection to them is only possible on a limited scale. However, it still happens as you find characters that increase in level over time and improve in their abilities. You're excited when they then get criticial hits at the right time to get you out of tricky situations or you love them for simply being consistent throughout. And ultimately, this means it can hurt for a short while when you lose them to the perma-death system. It's a feeling I only know from XCOM games, but in those characters don't even have that backstory like they do here.
It's a system that is very limited here but is effective in general, and I can only imagine how much later entries built on it.
The main plot itself is convoluted for a first time player because you get a lot of lore dropped with no way to read it again or look up any info on anything. In general, the game lacks a tutorial or codex.
Once you get to grips with it, it is a solid plot but basic storytelling due to the technical limitations of the time. In addition, it was pretty typical for the time. I have just played 9 games in 1990 through this challenge so far and more than a few included the concept of "divine weapon is the only way to kill final boss". It works for a game to give the player needed motivation, so I can see why this seems to have been a popular choice for the overall theme. You'll be content with the storytelling for a game this old and with this much content outside of it, it'll the do the job, but nothing beyond that.
GAMEPLAY
Lots to discuss here. The game is a tactical RPG. Back in 1990, you would have found a lot of strategy games and a lot of RPGs, but few, if any, that combined the two.
The tactical part looks like this: You control a battle unit out of a set number of characters based on the level. Often, you would have about 15 units on the battlefield at once. If you had more characters available than the maximum possible amount - through recruiting them - a level would start by making you select the specific units that you want to deploy.
Once you do that, battle commences on a grid-based map. Maps changed for each level and would add strategical challenges, but wouldn't really change anything graphically or of their tone. The game has a turn-based battle system. You select a unit, move it up a specific number of grids based on the unit's Movement stat, and then attack an enemy if it is in range.
There are 21 classes in this game that mostly are specialized in something. There are your typical Fighters and Mercenaries who wield swords and axes and have average Movement range. Then there are your Archers who can only use bows, Clerics who cannot fight but only use a staff to for example heal or warp units (send them to anywhere else on the map, very useful) and Mages who can use powerful Magic and have high resistances. There are also "Pegasus Knights" that are on horseback and can fly over obstacles on the ground like buildings or trees, which usually take an additional step to move past for ground units.
Weapons usually have multiple different qualities. The lowest is the "Iron quality" and the best quality that is usually accessible is the "Silver quality". As you make more progress in this game, you come across many enemies that can resist Iron quality weapons, making the upgrade necessary. Luckily, money is literally no issue in this game, so all you need to do is buy new items. Unluckily, there is no "safe hub" or anything like that to stock up. Instead, shops are somewhere on the map in levels and usually guarded by enemies. Often, there would only be one store as well, so you could only send one unit to buy something per round. So I would spend multiple rounds after a map was cleared to just get everyone new items. This is a typical QoL issue that is surely handled differently in newer entries. I haven't played any Fire Emblem game up to this point, so I don't know.
Another QoL issue is how slow progression in this game is. When you control 15 units, you have to move all 15 units at a time, of course, but that takes a lot of time. This is probably a thing in current Fire Emblem games as well, and not the worst thing to do, but it does take a while and gets kinda boring once you are 10+ chapters in. I prefer the XCOM games here, where you only have 6 characters to control.
But again, this isn't the worst thing in the world. What is much worse is the individual battles themselves. The animation for one attack takes seemingly ages and when you enter over a handful of fights in a single round, it will take minutes to go through them all. Luckily, my emulator had a fast forward function, so I could skip through these much quicker. I didn't finish this game (I made it to Chapter 22/25) but I think it's worth pointing out that I got there in just 17 hours compared to the 26-40 hours it takes on a normal playthrough according to HLTB.
Strategically, there are a lot of ways to play this game thanks to the different classes and their specialties. If you want to bring a Cleric, Thief and Archer for example, they will not be - or you don't want them to be in the Thief's case - in close combat. A big system in this game is the "counter", which means if an enemy character attacks you, your character can counter and vice versa. If the Archer is attacked in melee combat, he will not be able to counter, which can make a big difference. Clerics don't attack at all. Thieves barely have any strength and limited health, so they usually will only be part of your squad to unlock doors and/or open chests. Clerics heal and warp and Archers can be devastating in long range combat, so they all do provide arguments for why they should be included in the squad.
But bring a few more Mercenaries, Fighters and Paladins and you'll have a lot more strength in Melee Combat. So do you go for more of them, or for a more mixed approach? All strategies have their advantages and disadvantages and more than a few will work, so it's nice to see these options being available.
Bringing the right squad to do the job becomes more important however when different Chapters are filled more with specific enemies that can only be significantly damaged with specific weapons. Some need to be fought with Magic, some with Arrows and some with Melee weapons. Plus, maps have enough strategical differences that having Pirates or Pegasus Knights that can go over water or having Mages and Archers who can shoot over walls becomes more important.
On the flipside, you can quickly find yourself in a bad situation when the most useful units for a particular level are the most under leveled. The only way to level up units is by having them battle. Especially later on, bringing those low level characters with you can be pretty bad since you will need all the fire power you got when the game starts throwing infinite reinforcements in your face until you finally defeat the boss and send Prince Marth to the Castle, which is a location he must visit to finish the level.
There is a balance that must be struck here, but I would have liked to get more additional ways to train my units outside of battle (probably expecting too much in a 1990 game). Especially when my strong units started dying late into game and enemy units just started being filled with strong Dragons that would show up in the dozens, the game pretty much had me in an impossible situation. You can't now level your low-level guys, nor can you even get them weapons since you need to do that within levels. When never ending groups of enemies come at you, when are you supposed to find the opportunity?
Due to this, I didn't get to finish the game, but there is a lot to like here.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. There is nothing noteworthy to discuss regarding the sound design, it sounded average for the time.
The music was definitely one of the highlights for me. 3 or 4 tracks were playing for most of the game, so it didn't necessarily have variety, but some tracks just were bangers, especially the start of chapter track. Look for "Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light- Chapter Start" on YouTube.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Even back then the game wasn't considered graphically pretty. I'd say it has some strong colors and the varied character design is pretty good, but there isn't much else to it besides that. You see the same few assets on every level, maps are mostly green spots of grass and even battles take place in a black background with nothing else on it.
ATMOSPHERE
Once I got firmly into the gameplay loop, playing this game was rather comfortable thanks to the mix of a solid soundtrack, uninspiring but not-ugly graphics and simply being around a cast of characters that have a place in this world and start to grow into trusted allies. It is nothing special but to me the atmosphere was rather positive than negative.
CONTENT
25 chapters, each take about 30-60 minutes on average. Lots of repetition here but also a satisfying strategical challenge throughout.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There is a good mix in the design of the maps, especially considering what technical limitations the devs had to battle. Map design and enemy placement means that challenges that players have to fight through are varied, but sometimes the enemy placement and especially reinforcements get so ridiculous that you have no way of progressing through them with the units you have on hand. And this was clear hours ago, you just weren't aware. Infinite reinforcements also mean that the amount of opportunity is limited to level up underleveled units and to stock up on weapons and other items in the lead up to chapters 20+, which was frustrating.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
One of, if not THE first tactical RPG that started a whole genre. Due to that, this game already gets iconic status, and it's a mix of genres that works pretty well too (as evidenced by the series status even today).
REPLAYABILITY
This game can be played in different ways, but the hours and hours of watching animations and moving your units make this a hard sell for people looking for replayability. Apart from improved stats, there also is no incentive to play through the game and try to keep different units alive compared to previous runs.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
Definitely worth checking out if you're a Fire Emblem fan and want to see its origins. There is also some fun to be had and mostly the game offers a fair strategic challenge. If you're a veteran of the series, you might also do much better than me in the first half of the game and go into the second half more prepared, which will make or break your chance of completing this game.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan-only release, nothing to find in Western magazines
1989
Bonk's Adventure is a platformer released for the TurboGrafx-16 and developed by Red Company and Atlus. Actually it apparently got initially released in December 15, 1989 in Japan, and released in April 1990 in NA (so it's technically not a 1990 game, but I played it anyway). It later was ported to NES and Amiga.
In Bonk's Adventure, you play as Bonk, who fittingly is equipped with a strong head that he can bonk his enemies with. He is a young, bald, strong caveboy and to go through levels, you have to hit enemies with your head, avoid running into them and ... well, that about covers it.
STORYTELLING
If you're looking for a platformer with a story, you got a little bit of story here. If you're looking for a bit more than about a dozen or so lines, you should look elsewhere.
In this game, there are 5 levels, which all have multiple different stages. At the end of each level is a boss, who thank you after you beat them and it appears as if they're being mind controlled by something. They all look kinda unique and most like dinosaurs, with one wearing boxing gloves and another glasses. And there is also a princess to rescue, Princess Za, but that's not something I learned from playing the game, since that goal only becomes known if you reach the final boss or read the manual.
There is a small little epilogue that is something cute to reward the player with, and while the story and characters will add to making the experience a bit more memorable, there isn't much here overall, not that there needs to be, since platformers live and die by their gameplay, especially in these times.
GAMEPLAY
This is a 2D-platformer and sees you fight a bunch of different enemies, some that fit the "10000 BC" theme of this game, some that don't necessarily feel as tied to it. There are dinosaurs, mosquitos, eagles that throw axes, erupting volcanoes, cacti and more. Some actively attack you, some simply follow a specific route. All pretty typical stuff.
The attack button leads to Bonk smashing his big slab of a head to the ground in front of him, so most ground-based enemies can be easily taken care of this way. Some enemies attack from the air, so a well timed jump can lead to Bonk smashing his head to the enemy from below, which does the trick just as well.
There is also an invincibility mode that you can trigger by eating some meat, similar to Mario collecting a star. This lets you rush through enemies, which is pretty neat thanks to the meat.
The gameplay mostly is the same throughout, but there are some water levels added to the mix as well. Plus, as mentioned, each level ends with a boss fight. The dinosaur with gloves is called "Punchy Pedro", the one with glasses called "Gladdis" and a big one with a cap that you fight first is called "Huey". Mostly, you try to avoid the stuff they are throwing while "bonking" the top of their heads until they die and are broken free from the claws of the ulitmate boss, King Drool.
The final boss fight is a pretty big mess and even playthroughs by skilled players will just not look all too pretty because it was just designed that poorly. Overall however, enemy design is mostly charming, though it does lack in variety over time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Average sound design for the time with sounds that you have heard in many other games. The sound quality is good overall.
As with many games from this time, Bonk's Adventure has a really solid soundtrack overall. It ranges from OK to really catchy, and while it's not a soundtrack I'd listen to outside of the game, it does enhance the experience in a positive way.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Very good. Levels are mostly in tune with the theme of the game, sprites are clean, the game has a very good use of the available color palette and most importantly, the animations in this game are great. From Bonk's angry demeanor when smashing his head to his outburst when he eats meat to turn invincible for a bit, to holding on to a ledge by using just his teeth, to holding his breath underwater and even foaming at the mouth when he dies - which did look a bit gross though - the animation here is really well done for the time.
ATMOSPHERE
From music to art design to sound, the devs created a pretty atmospheric game that is in tune with its theme.
CONTENT
There are 5 levels and a few bonus levels, plus all the boss fights. The levels are separated into multiple stages, so there is a good 5-10 hours of content here before you probably are good enough to beat the game. At times the sections do get repetitive and the game could have done with more power ups to mix things up, but there is good content here if you are looking for an old platformer to master or just beat.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
Especially early on, there is good variety in levels. There is your basic ground floor level, then there is the under water level and then there even is a level where you have the ability to swing from a liana. From there, levels start to feel a bit similar, probably due to the use of a few similar enemy types a lot. But there still are enough different levels here where I thought it was a plus overall.
The two big minuses come from the bad boss fight design at the end (which I didn't manage to get to myself but watched others play) and the cramming of enemies into tight spaces a lot. Even skilled players wouldn't be able to get out of those situations without taking damage, which is a sign of suboptimal level design to me usually. Sometimes you'd have two ground enemies coming at you with two monsters flying above and ready to fly down, so sometimes I would just have to be OK with eating the hit and use my invincibility seconds after that to get out fast. Due to that it didn't often flow well, which was annoying.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Different combat ability than other games based on looks and animation, but not too different in terms of mechanics. This was a fun little platformer but it didn't really bring anything new to the table.
REPLAYABILITY
Not much replayability here once you complete a playthrough, apart from trying to beat your high score of course.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
I've played platformers mostly since starting this challenge and I'd say out of all of them, this is an above average one overall thanks to it's solid presentation in pretty much every category you can think of from its animation work to the soundtrack to the color use. As an overall package, you're looking at a platformer that works well, that should provide a fun challenge for the couple hours you would spend with it, but probably will have controls that don't feel tight enough and levels that don't feel fair enough to make you wish to see it through until the annoying boss fight at the end, which is followed by a nice epilogue to be fair. Bonk's Adventure is a solid platformer for its time but not a must-play at this point.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Clayton Walnum for VG&CE, Issue 15 (Apr 90): "Bonk's Adventure is a terrific game, the best I've seen on the TurboGrafx-16 yet." | The TG-16 released in NA 8 months prior to this game
- The Eliminator for GamePro, Issue 10 (May 90): "The graphics and animation are great."
- Noreen Lovoi for Game Players Issue 9 (March 90): "a clever and thoroughly addictive game with cartoonlike graphics"
In Bonk's Adventure, you play as Bonk, who fittingly is equipped with a strong head that he can bonk his enemies with. He is a young, bald, strong caveboy and to go through levels, you have to hit enemies with your head, avoid running into them and ... well, that about covers it.
STORYTELLING
If you're looking for a platformer with a story, you got a little bit of story here. If you're looking for a bit more than about a dozen or so lines, you should look elsewhere.
In this game, there are 5 levels, which all have multiple different stages. At the end of each level is a boss, who thank you after you beat them and it appears as if they're being mind controlled by something. They all look kinda unique and most like dinosaurs, with one wearing boxing gloves and another glasses. And there is also a princess to rescue, Princess Za, but that's not something I learned from playing the game, since that goal only becomes known if you reach the final boss or read the manual.
There is a small little epilogue that is something cute to reward the player with, and while the story and characters will add to making the experience a bit more memorable, there isn't much here overall, not that there needs to be, since platformers live and die by their gameplay, especially in these times.
GAMEPLAY
This is a 2D-platformer and sees you fight a bunch of different enemies, some that fit the "10000 BC" theme of this game, some that don't necessarily feel as tied to it. There are dinosaurs, mosquitos, eagles that throw axes, erupting volcanoes, cacti and more. Some actively attack you, some simply follow a specific route. All pretty typical stuff.
The attack button leads to Bonk smashing his big slab of a head to the ground in front of him, so most ground-based enemies can be easily taken care of this way. Some enemies attack from the air, so a well timed jump can lead to Bonk smashing his head to the enemy from below, which does the trick just as well.
There is also an invincibility mode that you can trigger by eating some meat, similar to Mario collecting a star. This lets you rush through enemies, which is pretty neat thanks to the meat.
The gameplay mostly is the same throughout, but there are some water levels added to the mix as well. Plus, as mentioned, each level ends with a boss fight. The dinosaur with gloves is called "Punchy Pedro", the one with glasses called "Gladdis" and a big one with a cap that you fight first is called "Huey". Mostly, you try to avoid the stuff they are throwing while "bonking" the top of their heads until they die and are broken free from the claws of the ulitmate boss, King Drool.
The final boss fight is a pretty big mess and even playthroughs by skilled players will just not look all too pretty because it was just designed that poorly. Overall however, enemy design is mostly charming, though it does lack in variety over time.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Average sound design for the time with sounds that you have heard in many other games. The sound quality is good overall.
As with many games from this time, Bonk's Adventure has a really solid soundtrack overall. It ranges from OK to really catchy, and while it's not a soundtrack I'd listen to outside of the game, it does enhance the experience in a positive way.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Very good. Levels are mostly in tune with the theme of the game, sprites are clean, the game has a very good use of the available color palette and most importantly, the animations in this game are great. From Bonk's angry demeanor when smashing his head to his outburst when he eats meat to turn invincible for a bit, to holding on to a ledge by using just his teeth, to holding his breath underwater and even foaming at the mouth when he dies - which did look a bit gross though - the animation here is really well done for the time.
ATMOSPHERE
From music to art design to sound, the devs created a pretty atmospheric game that is in tune with its theme.
CONTENT
There are 5 levels and a few bonus levels, plus all the boss fights. The levels are separated into multiple stages, so there is a good 5-10 hours of content here before you probably are good enough to beat the game. At times the sections do get repetitive and the game could have done with more power ups to mix things up, but there is good content here if you are looking for an old platformer to master or just beat.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
Especially early on, there is good variety in levels. There is your basic ground floor level, then there is the under water level and then there even is a level where you have the ability to swing from a liana. From there, levels start to feel a bit similar, probably due to the use of a few similar enemy types a lot. But there still are enough different levels here where I thought it was a plus overall.
The two big minuses come from the bad boss fight design at the end (which I didn't manage to get to myself but watched others play) and the cramming of enemies into tight spaces a lot. Even skilled players wouldn't be able to get out of those situations without taking damage, which is a sign of suboptimal level design to me usually. Sometimes you'd have two ground enemies coming at you with two monsters flying above and ready to fly down, so sometimes I would just have to be OK with eating the hit and use my invincibility seconds after that to get out fast. Due to that it didn't often flow well, which was annoying.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Different combat ability than other games based on looks and animation, but not too different in terms of mechanics. This was a fun little platformer but it didn't really bring anything new to the table.
REPLAYABILITY
Not much replayability here once you complete a playthrough, apart from trying to beat your high score of course.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
I've played platformers mostly since starting this challenge and I'd say out of all of them, this is an above average one overall thanks to it's solid presentation in pretty much every category you can think of from its animation work to the soundtrack to the color use. As an overall package, you're looking at a platformer that works well, that should provide a fun challenge for the couple hours you would spend with it, but probably will have controls that don't feel tight enough and levels that don't feel fair enough to make you wish to see it through until the annoying boss fight at the end, which is followed by a nice epilogue to be fair. Bonk's Adventure is a solid platformer for its time but not a must-play at this point.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Clayton Walnum for VG&CE, Issue 15 (Apr 90): "Bonk's Adventure is a terrific game, the best I've seen on the TurboGrafx-16 yet." | The TG-16 released in NA 8 months prior to this game
- The Eliminator for GamePro, Issue 10 (May 90): "The graphics and animation are great."
- Noreen Lovoi for Game Players Issue 9 (March 90): "a clever and thoroughly addictive game with cartoonlike graphics"
1990
Final Fantasy III was released exclusively in Japan for NES on April 27, 1990 until it got a worldwide release multiple times since, the first of such occasions occurring in 2006 with the DS release (a 3D remake). Most recently, a Pixel Remaster released worldwide on July 28, 2021.
I have played the original NES version because the DS version, despite few QoL improvements, is a 3D remake and therefore differs significantly enough that I chose to stick with the original. If you're considering playing this game, I would only play the NES version if you are really into old school RPGs of this time and have already played and finished something similar. Even though I found this to be more than playable, it hasn't aged well in many aspects that make a playthrough without using any guide extremely difficult. The HowLongToBeat time on this game (~20 hours for a playthrough) is very wrong in that regard. You will be stuck multiple times, you will die multiple times and most importantly, you will have to grind a lot (though this will not differ much from version to version).
The grind part is probably my most significant issue with this game and the reason why I didn't finish the game, and I'd assume a reason for many others. The game introduced the "job system" to Final Fantasy. This is a system of different classes (white/black/red mages, warriors and knights, dragoons and ninjas etc.) that you can apply to your characters on the fly. Each job has a separate level to your overall level and only the job you are currently using gains XP. This is in itself a great system and we will learn how it gets refined over the next few entries as this challenge progresses, however the first time this is implemented creates quite a lot of pain to first time players, especially those who don't check guides for this game.
The game has multiple sections where specific jobs need to be used to actually progress through them, and especially once you get near the end, there only are very few jobs that will actually be good enough for you to beat the game. Since jobs don't get XP unless you use them, this means you either have to use a guide (1), have to be lucky and figure out a working group of jobs (2) or grind out multiple of them (3). Even if you end up using a guide, you will not be spared of the grind.
It is typical for JRPGs of this age that you are expected to grind, and it's something I have done for a few hours over my 15 total hours with this game, but ultimately even that wasn't enough to progress through the boss that I ultimately abandoned the game at. I've definitely extended my tolerance for grinding with this game, which was pretty much non-existent before starting this challenge due to my inexperience with games like these (current JRPGs I usually play on "easy"). If you have a high tolerance, again, without a guide there is a good chance you will have build the wrong "team" to face the final dungeon with, which makes this a tough game to recommend to first time players on multiple fronts.
But if you're OK with all of that and want to play this game to experience every Final Fantasy entry (if you haven't played any FF games before, I would have to suggest picking one from 4 onwards), then you can check out the following review sections to learn more on what this game has to offer and what I thought about it. :)
STORYTELLING
This game has a very basic story about darkness and light that ultimately is your typical "the world is about to end, so be its hero" plot. I've not played many games from this time but they've so far all been the same overall. The reason why they're the same is because it works and is motivating enough, but don't look for anything special in the plot of this game.
You control four orphans who at the beginning of the game check out a cave that opened up as a result of an earthquake and find a crystal of light. The crystal gives the four of them its power and tells them to restore the balance in this world. In the past (a thousand years ago), a group of Warriors of Darkness fought against a "flood of light" to restore the balance, now our heroes of Light need to do the opposite. There are light crystals and dark crystals, antagonists looking to abuse their power, a bunch of characters that are aiding our heroes and all that stuff that works but is ultimately not memorable.
What makes this game stand out in this aspect however is the lore and world building. Each town has multiple town-folk running around who are waiting to dump a tiny bit of lore on you when you talk to them. This is optional and you don't gain anything from it apart from immersion - some NPCs do offer you items though - but the immersion gained is definitely worth it. They talk about the town you are currently in, the towns that are near, secret caves and/or entry points, about important characters in the world, about what ails their town and so on. So if you're looking for something extra from this game's story, this is where you find it.
GAMEPLAY
You start by giving names to your four characters, who all have the Onion Knight "job" when you start. Once you find the crystal in the first dungeon, new jobs unlock and you can start turning your characters into Warriors, Monks and three types of Mages. With each new crystal you find later on, new job sets unlock, though some prove more useful than others. Especially the final one you find pretty much gives you some of the only viable jobs that will help you go through the end game portion. Unfortunately, since only an equipped job gains XP, choosing "wrong" ones at any point can make you lose hours to grinding up the level of your newly chosen job. Also, before switching jobs, you have to unequip all items a character currently has on them.
A character can have 2 weapons, head gear, body armor and something for their hands. To my knowledge there is no level requirement for gear, you just have to have the correct job for them, but I'm not 100% on that. You can buy gear in item shops, but also find a lot of gear in items throughout the game world. I found that the more useful gear usually was hidden in the game world. Unfortunately, you had no way of knowing what items do in this game, so I found myself looking that up online many times. For example, who knew that "MidgetBread" would reveal the map of a specific location you're in? Some items are explained through specific people in towns but you'd have to find that person first.
So whenever you would switch jobs, you would have to unequip the gear, switch the job and then equip new gear. Why gear wouldn't automatically unequip itself when you switch jobs? Well, that's because there is an arbitrary inventory limit, at least for the NES version. You can carry a billion potions, but you can't carry more than 40 different items. The only way to clear your inventory is to sell stuff or use a "Fat Chocobo" that can only be found in a few specific locations. Since a lot of items are useful and shouldn't be sold, I found myself having to quicksell some of the stuff that was useful whenever I found multiple chests in dungeons. The items in the chests wouldn't be shown until I had enough inventory space, so it happened that I quicksold something useful for something that I had no need for and that was cheaper.
The DS version I believe has unlimited inventory space, and this is yet another reason to go with that (I think most ports of the game are based on the DS version) or the Pixel Remaster.
The items you do get are pretty varied however. For mages, there are tons of spells to use, both to heal your party and to attack the enemy. For your hand-combat focused party members, there are swords, nunchaku, daggers, bows and more. Unfortunately, bows need arrows that in the NES version where limited, whilst in newer versions are unlimited. Plus, in all my time playing this game I didn't find a single store selling arrows. Still, a lot of variety here.
Combat is turn-based and you can take your time before choosing your action. Your characters can attack and depending on the items they carry and their jobs, they can parry or cast magic or even "jump" (jump in one round, attack from the top in the next). You can also run away (in the NES version this reduces your defense to 0 and doesn't always work, so you can insta-die this way) or use items. I used a Warrior, Monk, White Mage and Black Mage until I unlocked the Black Belt job, and this group worked pretty well since I just let my White Mage heal party members while auto attacking or using black magic with the others.
In the game world, you always find better weapons and spells and are always incentivized to explore, but ultimately will need to grind to get your character stats up.
There are no side missions, mini games or other gameplay features in this game besides the overworld travel and the combat. Overworld travel first happens on foot, but as you progress you unlock a boat, an airship and various improvements to the airship, which was pretty neat.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound and soundtrack vary depending on the version you play. The Pixel Remaster for example modernized both but especially the soundtrack is still recognizable from the original, just remixed a bit. Since I'm rating the original, I can say that the sound design is great and that the music is for the most part excellent. As far as the tone of the music goes, I found that some boss fights could have gone for a bit more of an eerier tone since you're fighting this guy that is just pure evil to a rather cheery beat, but the soundtrack overall is pretty fun to listen to.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The game looks really good for its time. Locations are really varied in terms of color, tiles and design, which is nice, and sprites look mostly clean but I also really like the attention to detail in a lot of areas or the dev's attempt to make some cutscenes look much more realistic than the technology allowed back then, like two characters having trouble falling asleep, the crystals sparkle transferring from west to east, NPCs dancing when you talk to them etc. There is also a huge variety of both enemy and character designs. With character designs I'm talking about the variety in how your own characters look when you change their jobs in particular. The models are different, unique and frankly some look pretty cool.
There are two minor gripes that I had that are worth talking about. First, some areas needed you to press a hidden button to progress. There was no indication that the button was at a specific wall, so I had to press every single one, which was not unique for this time but still annoying considering I sometimes had to fight multiple tough battles before I could find the right one. The other is that the NES version used a ton of flickering and flashing, which should be noted for those of you who have an issue with flashing lights. I believe this was toned down significantly in later versions.
ATMOSPHERE
Overall, the lore and world building, the soundtrack and the locations differing based on appearance and simply their placement in this world (Floating Continent, Flooded World etc.) made for a pretty atmospheric game.
CONTENT
There is a lot of content here. I got a bit over 1/3 of the way through this game as far as a walkthrough goes that I checked out after deciding to abandon the game, and that was after 15 hours where I used a guide a few times to not be stuck for too long when I didn't know where to go. I would be surprised if you get done with this game with less than 30, if not 40 hours of playing time on your first time with minimal uses of guides. The Pixel Remaster may be easier to go through since it provides you with maps but I don't think it saves you from the hours and hours of grinding that is necessary, which fills up your playing time but essentially is mostly qualitatively low content.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The NES version doesn't have side missions from what I can tell, so you go from main target to main target. At times, NPCs will follow you who have their little sub-story to worry about (which still is part of the main mission). These NPCs usually aren't around for long and don't help in combat, but you can talk to them and they sometimes give you advise. Their own little stories are nice little distractions from the heroes main goal, even if they don't necessarily all have happy endings. Since you don't spend much time with them however, nice distractions is what they pretty much all amount to and their endings often fall flat emotionally. Still, it definitely breaks up the monotony to have traveling mates who have their own goals and actually help you at the location you're going to anyway.
Apart from that, here is how it usually goes. You go to a town, get a mission which requires you to travel to a different town or usually to a dungeon. The dungeons often have multiple floors and require you to fight through a couple dozen random encounters before you meet the dungeon boss. You return to the town, get an item necessary to progress further, and so you do. It is not always clear where you have to go to progress, though most of the time it can be figured out by reading the dialogue or talking to people. Since the NES version doesn't have a map unless you have "MidgetBread" in hand, finding a town you know you need to go to can still be annoying.
The developers did a good job, mostly, of planning out dungeons in a way that lets you go through them without having your Magic Points run out, which would make completing it otherwise pretty much impossible. However, some dungeons require you to use a specific item/spell or some require you to change jobs, so it can happen pretty quickly that you are out of that item, magic points or CP and therefore stuck. In this regard, planning done by the devs was suboptimal at best.
Finally, the final dungeon, which I didn't get to play but have heard more than enough about, obviously sucks. It's a 2/3 hour dungeon with no way to save and multiple boss fights, some of which don't let you heal up in between. Emulators luckily let you do save states, but if you're playing without the ability of saving, there is a very good chance that you will run out of patience to beat this final dungeon.
It also doesn't help that the job system was implemented poorly here in that only a few specific jobs will help you beat this game and in that it requires a ton of grinding to be strong enough to win.
On a final note, most areas offer "secret routes" to chests that offer some incentive to explore. Some of these locations also aren't arbitrary and are actually very slightly marked, though you're more likely to notice after you found it than before on many occasions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
The job system of course was here to stay following its implementation into Final Fantasy 3. That alone means this game rates highly in that regard, however the implementation in FF3 itself is not great. Apart from offering a great variety, it's not like most of the jobs are viable for the end game. Actually, less than a handful are. On top of that, making some of these necessary for specific parts where they can be under leveled, or having you unable to switch due to a lack of CP (which admittedly will rarely be an issue) are other negative points worth mentioning.
In addition, the game focused a good amount of resources on the job & battle systems in favor of adding anything unique to the story.
REPLAYABILITY
This is a tough one to judge. On the one hand, there are a lot of jobs here that you'd think there is a lot more strategy to them that makes multiple playthroughs viable. On the other hand, it's unlikely you'll find much end-game success with more than a few of those jobs. Plus, you'll still be auto-attacking through multiple long grinding sessions.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
When you're playing this, it's clear that this game is higher in quality than most of its competitors at the time. While the job system is rather simple now, it obviously was a much bigger deal at the time and if I had to guess, I would assume that grinding wasn't seen as nearly as big of an issue as I make it out to be. If anything, it added hours to the playing time and increased the value of the cartridge. Today, I'd say the games faults do stand out and later entries that still have the old school charm are also much improved in pretty much all aspects, so I'd recommend playing Final Fantasy 3 only if you're looking to experience all games in this series or want to get the internet points that come with beating that final dungeon.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan only release, no magazine reviews for this one.
I have played the original NES version because the DS version, despite few QoL improvements, is a 3D remake and therefore differs significantly enough that I chose to stick with the original. If you're considering playing this game, I would only play the NES version if you are really into old school RPGs of this time and have already played and finished something similar. Even though I found this to be more than playable, it hasn't aged well in many aspects that make a playthrough without using any guide extremely difficult. The HowLongToBeat time on this game (~20 hours for a playthrough) is very wrong in that regard. You will be stuck multiple times, you will die multiple times and most importantly, you will have to grind a lot (though this will not differ much from version to version).
The grind part is probably my most significant issue with this game and the reason why I didn't finish the game, and I'd assume a reason for many others. The game introduced the "job system" to Final Fantasy. This is a system of different classes (white/black/red mages, warriors and knights, dragoons and ninjas etc.) that you can apply to your characters on the fly. Each job has a separate level to your overall level and only the job you are currently using gains XP. This is in itself a great system and we will learn how it gets refined over the next few entries as this challenge progresses, however the first time this is implemented creates quite a lot of pain to first time players, especially those who don't check guides for this game.
The game has multiple sections where specific jobs need to be used to actually progress through them, and especially once you get near the end, there only are very few jobs that will actually be good enough for you to beat the game. Since jobs don't get XP unless you use them, this means you either have to use a guide (1), have to be lucky and figure out a working group of jobs (2) or grind out multiple of them (3). Even if you end up using a guide, you will not be spared of the grind.
It is typical for JRPGs of this age that you are expected to grind, and it's something I have done for a few hours over my 15 total hours with this game, but ultimately even that wasn't enough to progress through the boss that I ultimately abandoned the game at. I've definitely extended my tolerance for grinding with this game, which was pretty much non-existent before starting this challenge due to my inexperience with games like these (current JRPGs I usually play on "easy"). If you have a high tolerance, again, without a guide there is a good chance you will have build the wrong "team" to face the final dungeon with, which makes this a tough game to recommend to first time players on multiple fronts.
But if you're OK with all of that and want to play this game to experience every Final Fantasy entry (if you haven't played any FF games before, I would have to suggest picking one from 4 onwards), then you can check out the following review sections to learn more on what this game has to offer and what I thought about it. :)
STORYTELLING
This game has a very basic story about darkness and light that ultimately is your typical "the world is about to end, so be its hero" plot. I've not played many games from this time but they've so far all been the same overall. The reason why they're the same is because it works and is motivating enough, but don't look for anything special in the plot of this game.
You control four orphans who at the beginning of the game check out a cave that opened up as a result of an earthquake and find a crystal of light. The crystal gives the four of them its power and tells them to restore the balance in this world. In the past (a thousand years ago), a group of Warriors of Darkness fought against a "flood of light" to restore the balance, now our heroes of Light need to do the opposite. There are light crystals and dark crystals, antagonists looking to abuse their power, a bunch of characters that are aiding our heroes and all that stuff that works but is ultimately not memorable.
What makes this game stand out in this aspect however is the lore and world building. Each town has multiple town-folk running around who are waiting to dump a tiny bit of lore on you when you talk to them. This is optional and you don't gain anything from it apart from immersion - some NPCs do offer you items though - but the immersion gained is definitely worth it. They talk about the town you are currently in, the towns that are near, secret caves and/or entry points, about important characters in the world, about what ails their town and so on. So if you're looking for something extra from this game's story, this is where you find it.
GAMEPLAY
You start by giving names to your four characters, who all have the Onion Knight "job" when you start. Once you find the crystal in the first dungeon, new jobs unlock and you can start turning your characters into Warriors, Monks and three types of Mages. With each new crystal you find later on, new job sets unlock, though some prove more useful than others. Especially the final one you find pretty much gives you some of the only viable jobs that will help you go through the end game portion. Unfortunately, since only an equipped job gains XP, choosing "wrong" ones at any point can make you lose hours to grinding up the level of your newly chosen job. Also, before switching jobs, you have to unequip all items a character currently has on them.
A character can have 2 weapons, head gear, body armor and something for their hands. To my knowledge there is no level requirement for gear, you just have to have the correct job for them, but I'm not 100% on that. You can buy gear in item shops, but also find a lot of gear in items throughout the game world. I found that the more useful gear usually was hidden in the game world. Unfortunately, you had no way of knowing what items do in this game, so I found myself looking that up online many times. For example, who knew that "MidgetBread" would reveal the map of a specific location you're in? Some items are explained through specific people in towns but you'd have to find that person first.
So whenever you would switch jobs, you would have to unequip the gear, switch the job and then equip new gear. Why gear wouldn't automatically unequip itself when you switch jobs? Well, that's because there is an arbitrary inventory limit, at least for the NES version. You can carry a billion potions, but you can't carry more than 40 different items. The only way to clear your inventory is to sell stuff or use a "Fat Chocobo" that can only be found in a few specific locations. Since a lot of items are useful and shouldn't be sold, I found myself having to quicksell some of the stuff that was useful whenever I found multiple chests in dungeons. The items in the chests wouldn't be shown until I had enough inventory space, so it happened that I quicksold something useful for something that I had no need for and that was cheaper.
The DS version I believe has unlimited inventory space, and this is yet another reason to go with that (I think most ports of the game are based on the DS version) or the Pixel Remaster.
The items you do get are pretty varied however. For mages, there are tons of spells to use, both to heal your party and to attack the enemy. For your hand-combat focused party members, there are swords, nunchaku, daggers, bows and more. Unfortunately, bows need arrows that in the NES version where limited, whilst in newer versions are unlimited. Plus, in all my time playing this game I didn't find a single store selling arrows. Still, a lot of variety here.
Combat is turn-based and you can take your time before choosing your action. Your characters can attack and depending on the items they carry and their jobs, they can parry or cast magic or even "jump" (jump in one round, attack from the top in the next). You can also run away (in the NES version this reduces your defense to 0 and doesn't always work, so you can insta-die this way) or use items. I used a Warrior, Monk, White Mage and Black Mage until I unlocked the Black Belt job, and this group worked pretty well since I just let my White Mage heal party members while auto attacking or using black magic with the others.
In the game world, you always find better weapons and spells and are always incentivized to explore, but ultimately will need to grind to get your character stats up.
There are no side missions, mini games or other gameplay features in this game besides the overworld travel and the combat. Overworld travel first happens on foot, but as you progress you unlock a boat, an airship and various improvements to the airship, which was pretty neat.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. Sound and soundtrack vary depending on the version you play. The Pixel Remaster for example modernized both but especially the soundtrack is still recognizable from the original, just remixed a bit. Since I'm rating the original, I can say that the sound design is great and that the music is for the most part excellent. As far as the tone of the music goes, I found that some boss fights could have gone for a bit more of an eerier tone since you're fighting this guy that is just pure evil to a rather cheery beat, but the soundtrack overall is pretty fun to listen to.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
The game looks really good for its time. Locations are really varied in terms of color, tiles and design, which is nice, and sprites look mostly clean but I also really like the attention to detail in a lot of areas or the dev's attempt to make some cutscenes look much more realistic than the technology allowed back then, like two characters having trouble falling asleep, the crystals sparkle transferring from west to east, NPCs dancing when you talk to them etc. There is also a huge variety of both enemy and character designs. With character designs I'm talking about the variety in how your own characters look when you change their jobs in particular. The models are different, unique and frankly some look pretty cool.
There are two minor gripes that I had that are worth talking about. First, some areas needed you to press a hidden button to progress. There was no indication that the button was at a specific wall, so I had to press every single one, which was not unique for this time but still annoying considering I sometimes had to fight multiple tough battles before I could find the right one. The other is that the NES version used a ton of flickering and flashing, which should be noted for those of you who have an issue with flashing lights. I believe this was toned down significantly in later versions.
ATMOSPHERE
Overall, the lore and world building, the soundtrack and the locations differing based on appearance and simply their placement in this world (Floating Continent, Flooded World etc.) made for a pretty atmospheric game.
CONTENT
There is a lot of content here. I got a bit over 1/3 of the way through this game as far as a walkthrough goes that I checked out after deciding to abandon the game, and that was after 15 hours where I used a guide a few times to not be stuck for too long when I didn't know where to go. I would be surprised if you get done with this game with less than 30, if not 40 hours of playing time on your first time with minimal uses of guides. The Pixel Remaster may be easier to go through since it provides you with maps but I don't think it saves you from the hours and hours of grinding that is necessary, which fills up your playing time but essentially is mostly qualitatively low content.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The NES version doesn't have side missions from what I can tell, so you go from main target to main target. At times, NPCs will follow you who have their little sub-story to worry about (which still is part of the main mission). These NPCs usually aren't around for long and don't help in combat, but you can talk to them and they sometimes give you advise. Their own little stories are nice little distractions from the heroes main goal, even if they don't necessarily all have happy endings. Since you don't spend much time with them however, nice distractions is what they pretty much all amount to and their endings often fall flat emotionally. Still, it definitely breaks up the monotony to have traveling mates who have their own goals and actually help you at the location you're going to anyway.
Apart from that, here is how it usually goes. You go to a town, get a mission which requires you to travel to a different town or usually to a dungeon. The dungeons often have multiple floors and require you to fight through a couple dozen random encounters before you meet the dungeon boss. You return to the town, get an item necessary to progress further, and so you do. It is not always clear where you have to go to progress, though most of the time it can be figured out by reading the dialogue or talking to people. Since the NES version doesn't have a map unless you have "MidgetBread" in hand, finding a town you know you need to go to can still be annoying.
The developers did a good job, mostly, of planning out dungeons in a way that lets you go through them without having your Magic Points run out, which would make completing it otherwise pretty much impossible. However, some dungeons require you to use a specific item/spell or some require you to change jobs, so it can happen pretty quickly that you are out of that item, magic points or CP and therefore stuck. In this regard, planning done by the devs was suboptimal at best.
Finally, the final dungeon, which I didn't get to play but have heard more than enough about, obviously sucks. It's a 2/3 hour dungeon with no way to save and multiple boss fights, some of which don't let you heal up in between. Emulators luckily let you do save states, but if you're playing without the ability of saving, there is a very good chance that you will run out of patience to beat this final dungeon.
It also doesn't help that the job system was implemented poorly here in that only a few specific jobs will help you beat this game and in that it requires a ton of grinding to be strong enough to win.
On a final note, most areas offer "secret routes" to chests that offer some incentive to explore. Some of these locations also aren't arbitrary and are actually very slightly marked, though you're more likely to notice after you found it than before on many occasions.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
The job system of course was here to stay following its implementation into Final Fantasy 3. That alone means this game rates highly in that regard, however the implementation in FF3 itself is not great. Apart from offering a great variety, it's not like most of the jobs are viable for the end game. Actually, less than a handful are. On top of that, making some of these necessary for specific parts where they can be under leveled, or having you unable to switch due to a lack of CP (which admittedly will rarely be an issue) are other negative points worth mentioning.
In addition, the game focused a good amount of resources on the job & battle systems in favor of adding anything unique to the story.
REPLAYABILITY
This is a tough one to judge. On the one hand, there are a lot of jobs here that you'd think there is a lot more strategy to them that makes multiple playthroughs viable. On the other hand, it's unlikely you'll find much end-game success with more than a few of those jobs. Plus, you'll still be auto-attacking through multiple long grinding sessions.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked fine at all times.
OVERALL
When you're playing this, it's clear that this game is higher in quality than most of its competitors at the time. While the job system is rather simple now, it obviously was a much bigger deal at the time and if I had to guess, I would assume that grinding wasn't seen as nearly as big of an issue as I make it out to be. If anything, it added hours to the playing time and increased the value of the cartridge. Today, I'd say the games faults do stand out and later entries that still have the old school charm are also much improved in pretty much all aspects, so I'd recommend playing Final Fantasy 3 only if you're looking to experience all games in this series or want to get the internet points that come with beating that final dungeon.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Japan only release, no magazine reviews for this one.
1990
Today I've played and beaten Gargoyle's Quest: Ghosts 'n Goblins, which is a spinoff to the arcade hit Ghosts 'n Goblins from 1985. Gargoyle's Quest itself released on May 2, 1990 in Japan for the Game Boy. This game focuses on the character Firebrand, a gargoyle known from the arcade game for being the most annoying enemy of all.
This game is mostly a platformer but can also be put into the Action Adventure category. It's even called an RPG, though if it classifies as that is questionable. There are two gameplay elements in this game. The first is a top down view of Firebrand as he moves around the overworld, a la Final Fantasy, Crystalis and all the other JRPGs of the time. Similarly to those, there are towns and dungeons you can enter, where you can talk to a few people and buy items, and you can even be put into random battles whilst traveling the overworld.
The other element is the platforming / random battles. Platforming is pretty simple and the amount of different obstacles aren't that many. You can jump, levitate/fly for a few seconds, hang on to walls and shoot projectiles. There are wasps, flying spiders and several ground enemies to fight whilst platforming past obstacles like spikes that try to spike you, water that tries to drag you down, fire bursting from the ground vertically and more.
Whilst random battles usually take a very short amount of time, dungeons have pretty long platforming sections and a boss at the end of them.
The game took me 5 hours to beat using save states but would take more than twice that without any I would assume due to the lack of health that is available and the game throwing you back pretty far whenever you get a GAME OVER screen. It's a solid platformer. I wouldn't say it was very hard, I mean I beat it (!), but that's because I used save states. I used save states in the other games I've played as well but those still were too tough to beat. The issue here isn't the platforming that makes this very hard to beat, but rather that you don't have much health and therefore have to do a whole lot of travelling and random-battling before you can attempt a dungeon again.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game starts by telling us that the "Great Realm" was attacked by Destroyers several hundred years ago and won, however at the start of this game, a threat looms once again. This time, it's Firebrand who has to save the day against the Destroyers' king, who is called "Breager".
On your journey, Firebrand has to get stronger and stronger to face him. Many allies aid him in that regard and there are many powerful members of the Destroyers that he has to face before he can get his hands on King Breager.
That's pretty much it. You can talk to a bunch of NPCs, mostly in towns, and you have to talk to a lot of barons of a lot of towns you visit, who tell you to go to Point A to get Item B. To get Item B, you need Item A, which the barons give you. You get Item B, return it to the baron, get Item C and move on. Slowly but surely, you learn a bit more about the world and your identity and ultimately try to save the Realm by defeating King Breager.
You can say "Yes" or "No" a bunch of times when you talk to Barons and others who give you tasks. King Breager even asks you to join him, to which I said "No". I always said the one you are expected to say to make progress, but unfortunately didn't try to say "Yes" to Breager or "No" to the others to see what happens. I can't imagine that much does happen since it would make you unable to progress. If that's true, there are no decisions you can make in this game. There really isn't anything that would make me call it an RPG.
Overall, the story is there and it's OK, it fleshes out the Ghosts 'n Goblins lore a tiny bit.
GAMEPLAY
The overworld gameplay is OK but not where the fun in this game is in my opinion. When you make your way to a town to receive your quest, you are thrown into random battles after every few steps. These take place in very small areas and are not all too varied. There are 6-10 different one's I encountered over 50+ random battles. In one you have to kill 3 enemies, jump to the next platform and somehow find a way to land on the platform below to kill the final 2 enemies, since it's a tight platform and they walk around constantly. You do that until you realize that you have individual health for each battle, so you just say screw it and let them hit you once to be able to kill them quickly and win the battle.
Each battle gives you 1-4 vials, which is currency in this game and is used exclusively to purchase "Talismans of the Cyclone", which are extra continues.
You can collect vials and talismans from vases as well, plus some items are hidden in the game world, which you can figure out by talking to the correct townspeople. One for example tells you that "wings" that let you hover above ground for a longer duration are hidden in a tree near the palace. Go there and you'll find them.
Apart from that, you receive pretty much all other items from quest-givers before and/or after you complete their quests. They give you new weapons (there are 4 total and some bosses are resistant to a few), they boost your wing ability and that's pretty much about it.
In the second gameplay section, the dungeon/platforming section, you do what you do in a lot of other platformers. There are rarely points where you are overwhelmed by too many enemies or environmental obstacles, but sometimes the controls don't feel tight enough, especially when you have to try to stick to a wall that is between two water sprites, both of which hurt you if you touch them and give you 2 damage. At the start of the game, that is enough for an insta-kill. Plus, sometimes you have to stick to walls and jump up to try and destroy a wall that blocks your path. If the ceiling is right there as well, you can be stuck in this weird loop of trying to shoot your projectiles in the split-second you got to aim at the wall before you drop down again.
Controls are still tighter than in most games I've played from this year up to this point, so those are mostly minor annoyances.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The sound design was mostly average, but sometimes a bit too in your face, especially when opening up the combat menu to change weapons. The music in this game was mostly average but there were some good tracks in here, however unlikely that I'll remember it as much as I will with other games I've played of this year so far.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Looks better than a lot of other Game Boy titles out there, but it's still a Game Boy game. There are no colors, which is OK, but worst of all assets are just reused all the time and the overworld / towns look almost identical throughout. I appreciate that the game has tried to mix some genres together during a time where releasing unfairly difficult, grab-the-players-coin arcade game type platformers seems to have been the norm, but it doesn't enhance the experience, rather the opposite I'd almost have to say.
ATMOSPHERE
Overall, the lore and world building, the soundtrack and the locations differing based on appearance and simply their placement in this world (Floating Continent, Flooded World etc.) made for a pretty atmospheric game.
CONTENT
Without save states, it'll take you closer to ten hours to finish this, but it can get annoying pretty fast. For a playthrough where you use save states, you are looking at closer to 4-5 and overall, I did appreciate the lack of filler in this game apart from random battles becoming repetitive at some point. Apart from the main missions and those battles however, there isn't much else here.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game works the same pretty much throughout. You make your way to a town in the overworld. On your way there, a few random battles take place in small areas and they end when you kill the enemies.
Once you make it to a town, you are given a quest and go to the dungeon, where you have to do some platforming. You kill a boss, return to the quest-giver, go to a new town and so it goes. It's a fun little loop but the game doesn't try to mix it up.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
As I mentioned before, I did appreciate the mix of genres, but those features typically found in RPGs (overworld with towns and dungeons to enter, leveling systems) are the opposite of fleshed out and didn't quite work. With a bit better execution and more technological possibilities this could work though.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't much incentive to replay this game after a first playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well overall but specific sections had very low FPS for some reason. I didn't have problems with the emulator with any other game and the FPS drops happened at the same few areas, which was noticeable, so I think it's worth mentioning, but I had no issues other than that.
OVERALL
An above-average platformer as an overall product, but I would put that on the platforming sections being fairer than others that I have played rather than the game having RPG / Action Adventure elements mixed in. Most of you will probably enjoy your time with this one, but I'd suggest the use of save states when playing. You won't need to use any guides however, and it won't take you too many afternoons to go through it either.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Charlie T. Aslan for GamePro Issue 13 (Aug 90): "Every once in a while, a game comes along that is so original and enjoyable it becomes an instant hit and remains a top-seller for years to come. Gargoyle's Quest [...] falls into this category." | Based on this review, the mix of genres was seen as a good thing, a reminder that MY reviews represent MY opinion and yours may vary
- ? for Nintendo Power Issue 12 (May-June 90): "The excitement of an action game and the depth of a [RPG] are combined in Gargoyle's Quest from Capcom."
This game is mostly a platformer but can also be put into the Action Adventure category. It's even called an RPG, though if it classifies as that is questionable. There are two gameplay elements in this game. The first is a top down view of Firebrand as he moves around the overworld, a la Final Fantasy, Crystalis and all the other JRPGs of the time. Similarly to those, there are towns and dungeons you can enter, where you can talk to a few people and buy items, and you can even be put into random battles whilst traveling the overworld.
The other element is the platforming / random battles. Platforming is pretty simple and the amount of different obstacles aren't that many. You can jump, levitate/fly for a few seconds, hang on to walls and shoot projectiles. There are wasps, flying spiders and several ground enemies to fight whilst platforming past obstacles like spikes that try to spike you, water that tries to drag you down, fire bursting from the ground vertically and more.
Whilst random battles usually take a very short amount of time, dungeons have pretty long platforming sections and a boss at the end of them.
The game took me 5 hours to beat using save states but would take more than twice that without any I would assume due to the lack of health that is available and the game throwing you back pretty far whenever you get a GAME OVER screen. It's a solid platformer. I wouldn't say it was very hard, I mean I beat it (!), but that's because I used save states. I used save states in the other games I've played as well but those still were too tough to beat. The issue here isn't the platforming that makes this very hard to beat, but rather that you don't have much health and therefore have to do a whole lot of travelling and random-battling before you can attempt a dungeon again.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game starts by telling us that the "Great Realm" was attacked by Destroyers several hundred years ago and won, however at the start of this game, a threat looms once again. This time, it's Firebrand who has to save the day against the Destroyers' king, who is called "Breager".
On your journey, Firebrand has to get stronger and stronger to face him. Many allies aid him in that regard and there are many powerful members of the Destroyers that he has to face before he can get his hands on King Breager.
That's pretty much it. You can talk to a bunch of NPCs, mostly in towns, and you have to talk to a lot of barons of a lot of towns you visit, who tell you to go to Point A to get Item B. To get Item B, you need Item A, which the barons give you. You get Item B, return it to the baron, get Item C and move on. Slowly but surely, you learn a bit more about the world and your identity and ultimately try to save the Realm by defeating King Breager.
You can say "Yes" or "No" a bunch of times when you talk to Barons and others who give you tasks. King Breager even asks you to join him, to which I said "No". I always said the one you are expected to say to make progress, but unfortunately didn't try to say "Yes" to Breager or "No" to the others to see what happens. I can't imagine that much does happen since it would make you unable to progress. If that's true, there are no decisions you can make in this game. There really isn't anything that would make me call it an RPG.
Overall, the story is there and it's OK, it fleshes out the Ghosts 'n Goblins lore a tiny bit.
GAMEPLAY
The overworld gameplay is OK but not where the fun in this game is in my opinion. When you make your way to a town to receive your quest, you are thrown into random battles after every few steps. These take place in very small areas and are not all too varied. There are 6-10 different one's I encountered over 50+ random battles. In one you have to kill 3 enemies, jump to the next platform and somehow find a way to land on the platform below to kill the final 2 enemies, since it's a tight platform and they walk around constantly. You do that until you realize that you have individual health for each battle, so you just say screw it and let them hit you once to be able to kill them quickly and win the battle.
Each battle gives you 1-4 vials, which is currency in this game and is used exclusively to purchase "Talismans of the Cyclone", which are extra continues.
You can collect vials and talismans from vases as well, plus some items are hidden in the game world, which you can figure out by talking to the correct townspeople. One for example tells you that "wings" that let you hover above ground for a longer duration are hidden in a tree near the palace. Go there and you'll find them.
Apart from that, you receive pretty much all other items from quest-givers before and/or after you complete their quests. They give you new weapons (there are 4 total and some bosses are resistant to a few), they boost your wing ability and that's pretty much about it.
In the second gameplay section, the dungeon/platforming section, you do what you do in a lot of other platformers. There are rarely points where you are overwhelmed by too many enemies or environmental obstacles, but sometimes the controls don't feel tight enough, especially when you have to try to stick to a wall that is between two water sprites, both of which hurt you if you touch them and give you 2 damage. At the start of the game, that is enough for an insta-kill. Plus, sometimes you have to stick to walls and jump up to try and destroy a wall that blocks your path. If the ceiling is right there as well, you can be stuck in this weird loop of trying to shoot your projectiles in the split-second you got to aim at the wall before you drop down again.
Controls are still tighter than in most games I've played from this year up to this point, so those are mostly minor annoyances.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The sound design was mostly average, but sometimes a bit too in your face, especially when opening up the combat menu to change weapons. The music in this game was mostly average but there were some good tracks in here, however unlikely that I'll remember it as much as I will with other games I've played of this year so far.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Looks better than a lot of other Game Boy titles out there, but it's still a Game Boy game. There are no colors, which is OK, but worst of all assets are just reused all the time and the overworld / towns look almost identical throughout. I appreciate that the game has tried to mix some genres together during a time where releasing unfairly difficult, grab-the-players-coin arcade game type platformers seems to have been the norm, but it doesn't enhance the experience, rather the opposite I'd almost have to say.
ATMOSPHERE
Overall, the lore and world building, the soundtrack and the locations differing based on appearance and simply their placement in this world (Floating Continent, Flooded World etc.) made for a pretty atmospheric game.
CONTENT
Without save states, it'll take you closer to ten hours to finish this, but it can get annoying pretty fast. For a playthrough where you use save states, you are looking at closer to 4-5 and overall, I did appreciate the lack of filler in this game apart from random battles becoming repetitive at some point. Apart from the main missions and those battles however, there isn't much else here.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The game works the same pretty much throughout. You make your way to a town in the overworld. On your way there, a few random battles take place in small areas and they end when you kill the enemies.
Once you make it to a town, you are given a quest and go to the dungeon, where you have to do some platforming. You kill a boss, return to the quest-giver, go to a new town and so it goes. It's a fun little loop but the game doesn't try to mix it up.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
As I mentioned before, I did appreciate the mix of genres, but those features typically found in RPGs (overworld with towns and dungeons to enter, leveling systems) are the opposite of fleshed out and didn't quite work. With a bit better execution and more technological possibilities this could work though.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't much incentive to replay this game after a first playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well overall but specific sections had very low FPS for some reason. I didn't have problems with the emulator with any other game and the FPS drops happened at the same few areas, which was noticeable, so I think it's worth mentioning, but I had no issues other than that.
OVERALL
An above-average platformer as an overall product, but I would put that on the platforming sections being fairer than others that I have played rather than the game having RPG / Action Adventure elements mixed in. Most of you will probably enjoy your time with this one, but I'd suggest the use of save states when playing. You won't need to use any guides however, and it won't take you too many afternoons to go through it either.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Charlie T. Aslan for GamePro Issue 13 (Aug 90): "Every once in a while, a game comes along that is so original and enjoyable it becomes an instant hit and remains a top-seller for years to come. Gargoyle's Quest [...] falls into this category." | Based on this review, the mix of genres was seen as a good thing, a reminder that MY reviews represent MY opinion and yours may vary
- ? for Nintendo Power Issue 12 (May-June 90): "The excitement of an action game and the depth of a [RPG] are combined in Gargoyle's Quest from Capcom."
1990
I've just beaten Captain Skyhawk, a scrolling shooter with vehicular combat, developed by Rare (Battletoads, Conker's Bad Fur Day & Sea of Thieves) and released for the NES in June 1990. It was also released for Arcade machines.
In this game, you are Captain Skyhawk, pilot of the plane "F-14VTS" and have to fight back against an on-going alien invasion. You never really see any aliens, nor do their spaceships and ground weaponry look very alien. If the game wouldn't have told me, I would have thought that we're simply fighting human terrorists or shooting up space stations for the fun of it. This is where I always crack up when I read reviewers of the time try to hype up the game's setting before diving into the gameplay. The Good Witch for GamePro Magazine's 13th Issue for example writes: "Imagine the ultimate parasites, creatures that suck the very life out of Earth and leave her a useless hulk spinning in space. This is the problem you, as Captain Skyhawk, must face." And then it's just you flying over 3D terrain and shooting at very normal looking planes and ground vehicles. Of course I admire the effort of trying to immerse potential players from the start and I doubt I would have done it differently back in the day, but that doesn't make it less funny to me reading it today, but in a good way.
This game is a vertical scrolling shooter and you fly around mountainous 3D terrain and try to dodge both enemy projectiles (which all look like the same "ninja star"-esque projectile) and the mountains off to the sides. There are 9 levels of that, with three different types of goals. In between, you have a little mini game where you have to line up your plane to be able to dock it perfectly into your station, plus a 2D mini level where you look at your plane from the rear, dodge incoming bombs and shoot up enemy ships that otherwise don't offer any resistance to gain some bonus points, which are then used to buy equipment at your station.
The gameplay loop is enjoyable, and especially the more fast paced segments were really fun, but what this game offers is limited, and it's not a looker (which is fine) nor a "hearer" (which was not fine).
____________
STORYTELLING
Within the video game, there is the littlest of environmental storytelling and that's it. And even that doesn't occur until the final objective of the game. Apart from that, there is no mention of where this game is set in, what your ultimate goal is or who you are. It just says "Alien Fleet destroyed" when you beat the game.
The real plot you will find in the game's manual, but apart from the final objective, it doesn't really translate to the full game. If you don't care for a story in a scrolling shooter like this, this is a non-issue, and I would guess that most of you do only care about the gameplay and about pretty much anything but the story. Still, it is worth mentioning that the game has no storytelling.
According to the manual, Aliens have invaded Earth and have built bases to drain Earth's energy. The end goal is to use this energy as fuel to vaporize Earth with a laser blast. You have to stop them by destroying their stations on Earth and ultimately destroying their space station.
As I mentioned, the ludonarrative dissonance makes the choice of an alien invasion story an odd one but since it is barely present, I didn't really think about it much further than that.
GAMEPLAY
You control a plane over simulated 3D Terrain. You can move your plane from side-to-side whilst the display scrolls vertically at an automated speed. You can also adjust your plane's altitude, and I found that reaching the highest possible level was the best strategy in order to avoid crashing into mountains. There doesn't really seem to be a reason to fly low. You can't crash into enemy planes or anything else besides those mountains that either are small and placed in the middle of an area or stretch out from the sides and at certain points only leave a very small opening for your plane to fit through.
In this vertically scrolling 3D part of the game, you use your "Cannon" to shoot. I found myself holding the A-Button throughout a level since your ammo is unlimited and enemies can show up at a moment's notice. There are also three other weapon types that you can stock up on whenever you finish a mission and manage to dock into your station.
There are "Phoenix Air Intercept Missiles" for air-to-air combat and "Maverick Air-to-Ground Missiles" and "Hawk Bombs" for air-to-ground combat. Over time you also get upgrades to your Cannon to make it fire quicker.
Enemies fire back with the same projectile pretty much. It's a small gray-and-white colored square shape and only one of these is fired individually every few seconds. Unfortunately, its effects are devastating, as one hit destroys your "specially designed plane" that was made specifically to combat the aliens. These projectiles and their hit boxes were a mystery to me throughout, as I never really could accurately say when it would hit my plane when I would fly past it and when it wouldn't. Figuring that out and maneuvering past it is really the key to success in this game, which apart from the final boss is pretty straightforward otherwise.
There are 9 total missions and they all go pretty similarly. There is the vertical scrolling section first, then a 2D section where you shoot down enemy planes to collect extra points and a docking mini game. The vertical scrolling section has one of three goals until the final missions: (1) Destroy enemy station, where you have to destroy four of its circled bases to make it explode, (2) Find scientist, where you have to destroy a prison holding a scientist in similar fashion to free him and grab some plane upgrades and (3) Drop supplies, where you have to drop supplies into holes that are placed somewhere in the map. You have to do that two times to win the mission.
The 2D section has the ships come from out of screen and become smaller as seconds pass until they disappear. If you hit them, you get points, if you don't, you don't get points. There are only bombs to dodge, which sometimes the ships carry with them. And if they spawn right where you are, you can be hit with it without even seeing the bomb, which results in instant-death. Annoying.
Finally, there is the docking mini game. There is a very small hole in a docking station in front of you. You have to align your plane on its level, wait for the right moment and press B to see a little animation where your plane circles toward the station. If you aligned it correctly, you enter the station and progress with the game. You can buy ammo there. If you fail, you crash against the station and lose a life. It's not really difficult once you understand it but I guess it's there.
There are 3 continues throughout the game, so if you're playing this game without save states, it can be tough to beat and will be pretty frustrating. If you use save states like me, it'll still be frustrating but becomes much more beatable until the final boss, which took me so many tries and almost made me rage.
Controls of the plane where alright but only because you really didn't have too much to do. Dodge a bullet if you can and then just fly from west-to-east whilst shooting your cannons, pretty straightforward throughout. Some missions for some reason had your plane flying 3x the normal speed for some reason, which meant having to somehow manage to anticipate where those valleys between the two mountains would show up, because otherwise you'd crash to your death. That was frustrating but at the same time, if you did it right, these missions would flow really well.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The music was good, nice to listen to, no complaints there. But the sound design was bad. The sound of the cannons firing was annoying and nothing cannon-like, so I'm not sure why each individual bullet you fired got its own sound, especially when having to auto-fire was almost a necessity. The sound of hitting enemies was unpleasant as well. There are some good parts about it, like the sound of enemy planes being destroyed or the sound in the 2D sections of far-away planes approaching. But overall, it wasn't good to listen to. Music would only play during boss fights or in the menu.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Maps were all the same (more on that in "Atmosphere") and at no point did it feel like I was fighting aliens and their advanced technology. I've seen some comments on YT videos saying that "the game is one of the best graphically for the NES", but I don't really see it, it just looked bland and very simple.
ATMOSPHERE
I'd say the 2D sections were the ones that made me feel the most like I was flying a plane in the sky. Dodging bombs, hearing enemy planes approach from a distance and having to align just right to destroy them was an extremely simple task truth be told, but it was still able to draw me in the most. The docking mini game added a little bit to the immersion as well I guess, but the 3D vertical scrolling section just didn't make me feel like I was fighting back against an alien invasion in this super-plane that was specifically constructed to fight them. There was no music playing, the sound design was mostly bad and it was enough for one tiny projectile to kill me and destroy the flow of the attempt.
CONTENT
There are 9 same-y missions and very little variety to approach them. It doesn't have filler however and having less missions works in the game's favor. I'd definitely rather have 9 than 18 missions if they are going to be similar. There still is a lack of content overall.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The 9 missions almost all play out exactly the same. The only ones I would call slightly different are the "supply drop" missions, which have no boss fight but rather just require you to time the drop of a package correctly. Other than that, you'll be doing the same thing over 9 missions in maps that pretty much are all the same. The only difference is that the placement of environmental obstacles is likely slightly different with each and that maps can have different colors. The terrain does only carry one (1) color (green or blue or orange), but it does change from mission to mission.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
I have never really played scrolling vehicular combat shooters like this one growing up, so this is almost entirely a foreign genre to me. Therefore I can't really judge this, but reviews I have read of the time don't mention this game excelling at any part or moving the needle in any way either. There is also no story component, very little adjustments you can make to your plane, the same maps with a different one-color terrain and very straightforward action.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't really any variety here, so the only reason for replaying this after winning would be to beat your high score, which is as the devs intended it I'd assume.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
It's the first game of this type I've played in probably 15 years, and even then I might have tried a vertical scrolling shooter with vehicular combat once or twice, so I have little experience to compare this to other similar games. On its own, it doesn't really seem to do anything particularly well, but its core gameplay loop and the challenge it provides is fun enough for a couple hours, if you're into this genre of games. But all of its features are very basic, which maybe is how these games were back then. I could also see this being more feature-poor than games that came out before or shortly after it, that is still be found out in the process of this project of mine.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- The Good Witch for GamePro Issue 13 (Aug 90): "Captain Skyhawk features a good combination of different game action [...]. Although the shoot-em-up action may not be challenging enough to keep an expert gamer busy for long, it's more than tough enough for the average player"
- ? for Nintendo Power Issue 16 (September-October 90): "Each level on this action packed flight simulation is fun and challenging"
In this game, you are Captain Skyhawk, pilot of the plane "F-14VTS" and have to fight back against an on-going alien invasion. You never really see any aliens, nor do their spaceships and ground weaponry look very alien. If the game wouldn't have told me, I would have thought that we're simply fighting human terrorists or shooting up space stations for the fun of it. This is where I always crack up when I read reviewers of the time try to hype up the game's setting before diving into the gameplay. The Good Witch for GamePro Magazine's 13th Issue for example writes: "Imagine the ultimate parasites, creatures that suck the very life out of Earth and leave her a useless hulk spinning in space. This is the problem you, as Captain Skyhawk, must face." And then it's just you flying over 3D terrain and shooting at very normal looking planes and ground vehicles. Of course I admire the effort of trying to immerse potential players from the start and I doubt I would have done it differently back in the day, but that doesn't make it less funny to me reading it today, but in a good way.
This game is a vertical scrolling shooter and you fly around mountainous 3D terrain and try to dodge both enemy projectiles (which all look like the same "ninja star"-esque projectile) and the mountains off to the sides. There are 9 levels of that, with three different types of goals. In between, you have a little mini game where you have to line up your plane to be able to dock it perfectly into your station, plus a 2D mini level where you look at your plane from the rear, dodge incoming bombs and shoot up enemy ships that otherwise don't offer any resistance to gain some bonus points, which are then used to buy equipment at your station.
The gameplay loop is enjoyable, and especially the more fast paced segments were really fun, but what this game offers is limited, and it's not a looker (which is fine) nor a "hearer" (which was not fine).
____________
STORYTELLING
Within the video game, there is the littlest of environmental storytelling and that's it. And even that doesn't occur until the final objective of the game. Apart from that, there is no mention of where this game is set in, what your ultimate goal is or who you are. It just says "Alien Fleet destroyed" when you beat the game.
The real plot you will find in the game's manual, but apart from the final objective, it doesn't really translate to the full game. If you don't care for a story in a scrolling shooter like this, this is a non-issue, and I would guess that most of you do only care about the gameplay and about pretty much anything but the story. Still, it is worth mentioning that the game has no storytelling.
According to the manual, Aliens have invaded Earth and have built bases to drain Earth's energy. The end goal is to use this energy as fuel to vaporize Earth with a laser blast. You have to stop them by destroying their stations on Earth and ultimately destroying their space station.
As I mentioned, the ludonarrative dissonance makes the choice of an alien invasion story an odd one but since it is barely present, I didn't really think about it much further than that.
GAMEPLAY
You control a plane over simulated 3D Terrain. You can move your plane from side-to-side whilst the display scrolls vertically at an automated speed. You can also adjust your plane's altitude, and I found that reaching the highest possible level was the best strategy in order to avoid crashing into mountains. There doesn't really seem to be a reason to fly low. You can't crash into enemy planes or anything else besides those mountains that either are small and placed in the middle of an area or stretch out from the sides and at certain points only leave a very small opening for your plane to fit through.
In this vertically scrolling 3D part of the game, you use your "Cannon" to shoot. I found myself holding the A-Button throughout a level since your ammo is unlimited and enemies can show up at a moment's notice. There are also three other weapon types that you can stock up on whenever you finish a mission and manage to dock into your station.
There are "Phoenix Air Intercept Missiles" for air-to-air combat and "Maverick Air-to-Ground Missiles" and "Hawk Bombs" for air-to-ground combat. Over time you also get upgrades to your Cannon to make it fire quicker.
Enemies fire back with the same projectile pretty much. It's a small gray-and-white colored square shape and only one of these is fired individually every few seconds. Unfortunately, its effects are devastating, as one hit destroys your "specially designed plane" that was made specifically to combat the aliens. These projectiles and their hit boxes were a mystery to me throughout, as I never really could accurately say when it would hit my plane when I would fly past it and when it wouldn't. Figuring that out and maneuvering past it is really the key to success in this game, which apart from the final boss is pretty straightforward otherwise.
There are 9 total missions and they all go pretty similarly. There is the vertical scrolling section first, then a 2D section where you shoot down enemy planes to collect extra points and a docking mini game. The vertical scrolling section has one of three goals until the final missions: (1) Destroy enemy station, where you have to destroy four of its circled bases to make it explode, (2) Find scientist, where you have to destroy a prison holding a scientist in similar fashion to free him and grab some plane upgrades and (3) Drop supplies, where you have to drop supplies into holes that are placed somewhere in the map. You have to do that two times to win the mission.
The 2D section has the ships come from out of screen and become smaller as seconds pass until they disappear. If you hit them, you get points, if you don't, you don't get points. There are only bombs to dodge, which sometimes the ships carry with them. And if they spawn right where you are, you can be hit with it without even seeing the bomb, which results in instant-death. Annoying.
Finally, there is the docking mini game. There is a very small hole in a docking station in front of you. You have to align your plane on its level, wait for the right moment and press B to see a little animation where your plane circles toward the station. If you aligned it correctly, you enter the station and progress with the game. You can buy ammo there. If you fail, you crash against the station and lose a life. It's not really difficult once you understand it but I guess it's there.
There are 3 continues throughout the game, so if you're playing this game without save states, it can be tough to beat and will be pretty frustrating. If you use save states like me, it'll still be frustrating but becomes much more beatable until the final boss, which took me so many tries and almost made me rage.
Controls of the plane where alright but only because you really didn't have too much to do. Dodge a bullet if you can and then just fly from west-to-east whilst shooting your cannons, pretty straightforward throughout. Some missions for some reason had your plane flying 3x the normal speed for some reason, which meant having to somehow manage to anticipate where those valleys between the two mountains would show up, because otherwise you'd crash to your death. That was frustrating but at the same time, if you did it right, these missions would flow really well.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The music was good, nice to listen to, no complaints there. But the sound design was bad. The sound of the cannons firing was annoying and nothing cannon-like, so I'm not sure why each individual bullet you fired got its own sound, especially when having to auto-fire was almost a necessity. The sound of hitting enemies was unpleasant as well. There are some good parts about it, like the sound of enemy planes being destroyed or the sound in the 2D sections of far-away planes approaching. But overall, it wasn't good to listen to. Music would only play during boss fights or in the menu.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Maps were all the same (more on that in "Atmosphere") and at no point did it feel like I was fighting aliens and their advanced technology. I've seen some comments on YT videos saying that "the game is one of the best graphically for the NES", but I don't really see it, it just looked bland and very simple.
ATMOSPHERE
I'd say the 2D sections were the ones that made me feel the most like I was flying a plane in the sky. Dodging bombs, hearing enemy planes approach from a distance and having to align just right to destroy them was an extremely simple task truth be told, but it was still able to draw me in the most. The docking mini game added a little bit to the immersion as well I guess, but the 3D vertical scrolling section just didn't make me feel like I was fighting back against an alien invasion in this super-plane that was specifically constructed to fight them. There was no music playing, the sound design was mostly bad and it was enough for one tiny projectile to kill me and destroy the flow of the attempt.
CONTENT
There are 9 same-y missions and very little variety to approach them. It doesn't have filler however and having less missions works in the game's favor. I'd definitely rather have 9 than 18 missions if they are going to be similar. There still is a lack of content overall.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
The 9 missions almost all play out exactly the same. The only ones I would call slightly different are the "supply drop" missions, which have no boss fight but rather just require you to time the drop of a package correctly. Other than that, you'll be doing the same thing over 9 missions in maps that pretty much are all the same. The only difference is that the placement of environmental obstacles is likely slightly different with each and that maps can have different colors. The terrain does only carry one (1) color (green or blue or orange), but it does change from mission to mission.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
I have never really played scrolling vehicular combat shooters like this one growing up, so this is almost entirely a foreign genre to me. Therefore I can't really judge this, but reviews I have read of the time don't mention this game excelling at any part or moving the needle in any way either. There is also no story component, very little adjustments you can make to your plane, the same maps with a different one-color terrain and very straightforward action.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't really any variety here, so the only reason for replaying this after winning would be to beat your high score, which is as the devs intended it I'd assume.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
It's the first game of this type I've played in probably 15 years, and even then I might have tried a vertical scrolling shooter with vehicular combat once or twice, so I have little experience to compare this to other similar games. On its own, it doesn't really seem to do anything particularly well, but its core gameplay loop and the challenge it provides is fun enough for a couple hours, if you're into this genre of games. But all of its features are very basic, which maybe is how these games were back then. I could also see this being more feature-poor than games that came out before or shortly after it, that is still be found out in the process of this project of mine.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- The Good Witch for GamePro Issue 13 (Aug 90): "Captain Skyhawk features a good combination of different game action [...]. Although the shoot-em-up action may not be challenging enough to keep an expert gamer busy for long, it's more than tough enough for the average player"
- ? for Nintendo Power Issue 16 (September-October 90): "Each level on this action packed flight simulation is fun and challenging"
I've just beaten Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a platformer for the NES developed and published by Capcom. Its producer was Tokuro Fujiwara, who was also the producer for the Mega Man series and the Gargoyle's Quest games. It released on June 8, 1990 in Japan and in NA the following day.
The game is based on the kids TV show with the same name, and one that I used to watch a lot as a child myself. It was a nice flash of nostalgia whilst looking up info on this game and I was surprised to recognize some of the characters despite me not having watched the show for at least 15 years.
The game starts with an image of Chip, Dale and their friends and a little text of Chip talking, who says that a neighbor's kitten was lost and needs to be found by them. From there, the 2D platforming gameplay begins. From my count, there are about 10 levels if you decide to do them all, but at least 2 can be skipped. Levels have multiple stages and conclude with a boss fight.
You get 3 hearts and 3 continues, after which you have to restart the game. The game is very short, I beat it in roughly 2 hours, and I'd say it's the best introductory platformer to late 80s / early 90s gaming that I have played so far. To put it simple: It can be beaten relatively quickly and it has pretty basic features.
More on that down below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game revolves around the cast of the TV show with the same name. There are Chip and Dale of course, but also their friends, namely Gadget, who in this game scouts ahead and gives players clue on upcoming levels once they finish the previous one, Monterey Jack, who finds "secret doors and pathways" for Chip and Dale (manual) and Zipper, who can be found as a special item and flies around you for a short while to kill every enemy in sight.
The intro dialogue between the friends reveals that the Rescue Rangers have a new job: Find the neighbor's lost kitten. During your search, the shows main antagonist, Fat Cat, introduces himself as well and will have to be bested to win the game later on.
Characters don't show up or talk apart from this intro until the end of the game. In between, only Gadget shows up to leave tips on upcoming levels, and Fat Cat has one little speech as well, but that's it. There is no storytelling beyond that. So it was pretty basic, which was more than fine for a game of this year of course.
GAMEPLAY
You can choose to control either Chip or Dale or even play with someone else. In each level you play, you must walk and jump for most of the game and either avoid enemies or kill them by throwing crates at them. There are cacti, electric wires and of course gravity that you can die to, but all of these deaths can be avoided by simply timing your jumps. There is nothing creative that you need to do to make it through this game. There is no jumping and slashing in mid air, climbing walls or stacking power ups that you need to worry about, especially since none of the latter are even available in this game.
All collectables are there for you to get "1 Ups". Collect 50 nuts, get a 1 up. Collect 10 stars, get a 1 up. Collect a 1 up item, get a 1 up. The only additional gameplay element that is provided in the game world are metal crates, which you can use to stack them up and access higher platforms.
Other than that, what I describes is pretty much it. There are 4 or 5 boss fights where you need to collect a red ball and throw it at the enemy whilst dodging their projectiles. This was very easy for most of the game, only the final boss gave me some trouble there.
After every level, an overworld opens up where you choose the next stage to go to. You can sometimes go one of two directions and pick different levels, but I haven't really tried going back and doing the level that I had missed, so I don't know if you are stuck with the direction you go in. Anyway, this offers tiny bit of replayability in a game that otherwise doesn't offer much depth.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The music was good as per usual for games of this time period, there is a remix of the theme song of the TV show here too and the sound design was solid as well, or at least in line with how most games of this time made everything sound.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I liked the graphics here. Good use of colors and despite the technical limitations at the time, the devs did a good job of creating detailed environments that all had an interesting theme. There aren't many enemies here, but they look unique and have clean sprites. There are few animations here and no special effects, so the game did well on the artistic front outside of those two areas.
ATMOSPHERE
Does it feel like a Chip 'n Dale game? I can't really say, it's been a while since I watched the show. I assume the enemies have some relation to the show, maybe, and all the characters do of course, and there definitely is relation to the show in the soundtrack but I can't judge it too much beyond that. As its own thing, I liked how the levels mixed up its themes, had bright colors, detailed environments and multiple unique assets included.
CONTENT
There are about 10 levels with bosses at the end of multiple of them. Almost every level adds new enemies, however there are a total of 10 enemy types overall, so variety is pretty limited there. The game is also very short at 2 hours or so based on someone with my ability, which I would call average. There is little filler, so I'll take 2 hours of this over 10 hours of some of the other, more unfair platformers, but at the end of the day 2 hours are pretty short and apart from themes and some new enemies, levels don't really mix it up in any other noticeable way.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
Artistically pleasing as levels are, they are not different enough in terms of gameplay challenge. I'd put this on lack of gameplay variety rather than the lack of puzzles, lack of environmental hazards and low enemy variety, but overall it's a combination of all those things.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
There isn't really anything the game does that stands out over the rest or moves the needle. Graphically I thought this game was above average, but if you just look at gameplay, you'll notice that it is pretty simple. There are no power ups in this game. You can't climb. You can't run faster, you can't double jump and you can't fly, you pretty much can't do anything apart from three things. Walk, jump and throw. Throwing is limited to apples, bombs and mostly, crates, which one hit enemies and clear your way forward. It's not a bad gameplay hook and the game doesn't need all of the things I mentioned before, but a bit of mixing up or one more feature or two would have served the game well. As it stands, it feels like a solid entry into the genre if for nothing else.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't really any variety here, so the only reason for replaying this after winning would be to beat your high score AND to choose a different path in the overworld when you select stages.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
Here is a game that uses a license and the platforming experience of its developers to be an enjoyable, albeit extremely average platformer. Due to its basic features, yet good soundtrack, solid graphics and short game length, it combines to make for a solid game to introduce newcomers to late 80s / early 90s platforming games. But unless you're the biggest Chip 'N Dale fan or have played this when you were young, it is unlikely that this makes for a game you will remember for long, which may be fine depending on your expectations.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Gary Barth for GamePro Issue 9 (Apr 90): "Chip 'N' Dale Rescue Rangers boasts the same fast action and detailed Disney graphics as [...] Mickey Mousecapades and Duck Tales."
The game is based on the kids TV show with the same name, and one that I used to watch a lot as a child myself. It was a nice flash of nostalgia whilst looking up info on this game and I was surprised to recognize some of the characters despite me not having watched the show for at least 15 years.
The game starts with an image of Chip, Dale and their friends and a little text of Chip talking, who says that a neighbor's kitten was lost and needs to be found by them. From there, the 2D platforming gameplay begins. From my count, there are about 10 levels if you decide to do them all, but at least 2 can be skipped. Levels have multiple stages and conclude with a boss fight.
You get 3 hearts and 3 continues, after which you have to restart the game. The game is very short, I beat it in roughly 2 hours, and I'd say it's the best introductory platformer to late 80s / early 90s gaming that I have played so far. To put it simple: It can be beaten relatively quickly and it has pretty basic features.
More on that down below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game revolves around the cast of the TV show with the same name. There are Chip and Dale of course, but also their friends, namely Gadget, who in this game scouts ahead and gives players clue on upcoming levels once they finish the previous one, Monterey Jack, who finds "secret doors and pathways" for Chip and Dale (manual) and Zipper, who can be found as a special item and flies around you for a short while to kill every enemy in sight.
The intro dialogue between the friends reveals that the Rescue Rangers have a new job: Find the neighbor's lost kitten. During your search, the shows main antagonist, Fat Cat, introduces himself as well and will have to be bested to win the game later on.
Characters don't show up or talk apart from this intro until the end of the game. In between, only Gadget shows up to leave tips on upcoming levels, and Fat Cat has one little speech as well, but that's it. There is no storytelling beyond that. So it was pretty basic, which was more than fine for a game of this year of course.
GAMEPLAY
You can choose to control either Chip or Dale or even play with someone else. In each level you play, you must walk and jump for most of the game and either avoid enemies or kill them by throwing crates at them. There are cacti, electric wires and of course gravity that you can die to, but all of these deaths can be avoided by simply timing your jumps. There is nothing creative that you need to do to make it through this game. There is no jumping and slashing in mid air, climbing walls or stacking power ups that you need to worry about, especially since none of the latter are even available in this game.
All collectables are there for you to get "1 Ups". Collect 50 nuts, get a 1 up. Collect 10 stars, get a 1 up. Collect a 1 up item, get a 1 up. The only additional gameplay element that is provided in the game world are metal crates, which you can use to stack them up and access higher platforms.
Other than that, what I describes is pretty much it. There are 4 or 5 boss fights where you need to collect a red ball and throw it at the enemy whilst dodging their projectiles. This was very easy for most of the game, only the final boss gave me some trouble there.
After every level, an overworld opens up where you choose the next stage to go to. You can sometimes go one of two directions and pick different levels, but I haven't really tried going back and doing the level that I had missed, so I don't know if you are stuck with the direction you go in. Anyway, this offers tiny bit of replayability in a game that otherwise doesn't offer much depth.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
No voice acting. The music was good as per usual for games of this time period, there is a remix of the theme song of the TV show here too and the sound design was solid as well, or at least in line with how most games of this time made everything sound.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
I liked the graphics here. Good use of colors and despite the technical limitations at the time, the devs did a good job of creating detailed environments that all had an interesting theme. There aren't many enemies here, but they look unique and have clean sprites. There are few animations here and no special effects, so the game did well on the artistic front outside of those two areas.
ATMOSPHERE
Does it feel like a Chip 'n Dale game? I can't really say, it's been a while since I watched the show. I assume the enemies have some relation to the show, maybe, and all the characters do of course, and there definitely is relation to the show in the soundtrack but I can't judge it too much beyond that. As its own thing, I liked how the levels mixed up its themes, had bright colors, detailed environments and multiple unique assets included.
CONTENT
There are about 10 levels with bosses at the end of multiple of them. Almost every level adds new enemies, however there are a total of 10 enemy types overall, so variety is pretty limited there. The game is also very short at 2 hours or so based on someone with my ability, which I would call average. There is little filler, so I'll take 2 hours of this over 10 hours of some of the other, more unfair platformers, but at the end of the day 2 hours are pretty short and apart from themes and some new enemies, levels don't really mix it up in any other noticeable way.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
Artistically pleasing as levels are, they are not different enough in terms of gameplay challenge. I'd put this on lack of gameplay variety rather than the lack of puzzles, lack of environmental hazards and low enemy variety, but overall it's a combination of all those things.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
There isn't really anything the game does that stands out over the rest or moves the needle. Graphically I thought this game was above average, but if you just look at gameplay, you'll notice that it is pretty simple. There are no power ups in this game. You can't climb. You can't run faster, you can't double jump and you can't fly, you pretty much can't do anything apart from three things. Walk, jump and throw. Throwing is limited to apples, bombs and mostly, crates, which one hit enemies and clear your way forward. It's not a bad gameplay hook and the game doesn't need all of the things I mentioned before, but a bit of mixing up or one more feature or two would have served the game well. As it stands, it feels like a solid entry into the genre if for nothing else.
REPLAYABILITY
There isn't really any variety here, so the only reason for replaying this after winning would be to beat your high score AND to choose a different path in the overworld when you select stages.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
Here is a game that uses a license and the platforming experience of its developers to be an enjoyable, albeit extremely average platformer. Due to its basic features, yet good soundtrack, solid graphics and short game length, it combines to make for a solid game to introduce newcomers to late 80s / early 90s platforming games. But unless you're the biggest Chip 'N Dale fan or have played this when you were young, it is unlikely that this makes for a game you will remember for long, which may be fine depending on your expectations.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
- Gary Barth for GamePro Issue 9 (Apr 90): "Chip 'N' Dale Rescue Rangers boasts the same fast action and detailed Disney graphics as [...] Mickey Mousecapades and Duck Tales."
(This is the 15th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet is in my bio.)
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (released on July 20, 1990 in Japan only - available in NA/EU through MGS3: Subsistence for PS2) is the first Metal Gear game I have actually played and beaten, even though I've played a bit of MGS1, 3 and dozens of hours of MGS 5. I've abandoned those for various reasons over the years, mostly due to being distracted by other games and/or finding them too difficult (tried to play without guides), but I do plan on going through the entire series over the next few years.
For today, I am happy to say that the second MSX Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima has been beaten. It took me roughly 7 hours and I did use a guide whenever I didn't know what to do, and in my opinion, you will have a hard time beating this game without one. The gameplay mechanics themselves will not be a problem, but there are multiple instances where (1) you need an item for a boss that is very easy to miss and (2) you need to backtrack to an area and it can be hard to make out where you need to go. During those backtracking parts, often you will probably figure it out if you just check every available door but I decided to take a look at the guide whenever it took me about 10 minutes of looking around without being able to figure out my next move.
Sometimes the answer to a puzzle can be pretty convoluted as well. In one part of the game, an area is locked off by lasers. A guard is at that spot as well. There is a little shack next to it, and later on you find a keycard that allows you to enter. A few children in there tell you that "the lasers are turned off at night": There is no traditional day & night system in this game, so you can't just wait for it to be night. No, instead you have to find something elsewhere, figure out to use it near the guard, wait a few seconds for the guard cutscene to trigger, which makes him then turn off the lasers. You can get it eventually thanks to to the tips by the children, but sometimes it gets more complicated with fewer tips, at which point checking a guide is almost a must.
If you don't mind using guides a few times here and there, great, because the game is among the better ones you will get to play in 1990 and offers a fun way to spend a few afternoons. It improved on basically everything compared to the first Metal Gear game by Kojima. Plus, as I understand it, it's canon to the Metal Gear universe and much of what MG2 does is apparently repeated in some way or another in MGS1 and 2, both in gameplay and story.
More on the game in detail below.
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STORYTELLING
The game starts with a lengthy cut scene that briefly summarizes the plot of the first game and the setting for this one. After conflict between large nations like Russia, the USA and China started to settle down, a new nuclear threat emerged in 1999, the year this game is set in (4 years after the previous one). The country is called "Zanzibar Land", which arms itself with nuclear weapons and stars invading nearby countries.
In addition to this, there is an ongoing oil crisis (the game's premise and its story themes are evidently still relevant today). A Czech biologist named Kio Marv invents "Oilix" a microbe that synthesizes petroleum, and Zanzibar Land kidnap him to gain military superiority through a combination of nuclear weapons and Oilix.
Solid Snake receives his mission by Foxhound, a special forces squad, to sneak into Zanzibar Land and rescue Kio Marv. Of course, there is a nuclear weapon called "Metal Gear" to worry about as well, as Zanzibarland are mass-producing Metal Gear units.
The beauty of this story is manifold, though you won't necessarily fall in love with the in-game plot itself. It works well, it includes plot twists and plenty of both sad and thoughtful moments. Considering that this is a video game from 1990 however, it won't blow your socks off at this day and age. What I really appreciated, however, was the attention to detail.
If you look at the manual of this game, it shows you a biography of each relevant character (did you know Snake speaks 6 languages?). It lists all basic information about Zanzibar Land (population: 40,000), it even explains what kind of training Foxhound aspirants need to go through, what gear they wear during missions and what Foxhound itself even is. The game then mentions some of this information during radio conversations, some optional, some mandatory.
The radio/codec in general is a great feature because it has a ton of immersive uses that are both helpful and engaging. Each character has their own frequency and you can ring them to partake in optional conversations, which don't always trigger depending on what situation Snake finds himself in. But when they do, you can ring Holly to learn more about Zanzibar Land and your environment. You can ring Roy Campbell, your commander, to get more information about your mission and some helpful tips. You can call Kazuhira Miller, who often does meta commentary on "not drinking too much soda when playing" or "not playing within 30 minutes of eating" (not very immersive, but humorous/actually interesting). You can also call Johan Jacobsen to get some tips whenever animals are involved. This system gets fleshed out in future entries but this game is a big step in the right direction in that regard.
Throughout the game, you will meet characters either to rescue them or to help them (or for them to help you) and each time you do, there is an engaging conversation that you can follow along. One such conversation that was pretty memorable happened between Snake and Gustava. While waiting, both literally sat down and just talked about Gustava's past, why she became involved with the STB and about the only man she ever fell in love with. I love this sort of stuff and it helps make the bigger moments in the game's story hit that much more.
Most impressive about the story in this game has got to be its meta commentary on war. It is barebones compared to what I know future games delve into, but there is still plenty of thoughtful stuff here about how soldiers are pawns of leaders who don't care about them, about how some children who are saved from battlefields are simply trained to be put back into the battlefield and about how some soldiers don't have a life worth living outside of the battlefield, so they may as well die on it. It gives the "evil" antagonists a "motivation" for their actions unlike what you will see in almost any other game, where the simple goal is to reign over the world, whereas here, it goes way beyond that.
I'm probably making the story out to be way more than it actually is, but I truly do find the attention to detail and the themes to be impressive features of this game and something that obviously stuck around big time in future iterations.
GAMEPLAY
Where to start? You play Solid Snake, a special ops soldier, and have to sneak into Zanzibar Land to find Dr. Kio Marv. When you start the game, your are equipped with your radio to contact a few individuals who will help you. You immediately get access to a handgun, some rations (healing items) and you obviously have your next-level sneaking abilities.
The game has a LIFE bar that increases each time you defeat a boss. Boss fights sometimes occur within minutes of each other, sometimes you don't fight one for over an hour. There are close to 10 in total and are pretty varied. You fight a chopper, a Running Man that just keeps running away whilst the room fills up with toxic gas, a Ninja that throws stars and teleports and of course a Metal Gear. They are pretty simple once you know what to do and are equipped for them. Often, you can simply tank their damage and just eat Rations while you fire back until they die.
To aid you with your mission, there is a RADAR for the first time in the series. It is a 3x3 screen that shows each adjacent screen and marks enemies and yourself as dots. It is pretty primitive, in that it doesn't actually show which direction the enemies are facing, so it often happened at first that I walked into a screen and immediately alerted the guards because they were staring into my direction. Later on I figured out to let the enemies walk the other direction first, at which point I obviously knew which way they were facing.
Guards in this game have a bigger field of view compared to the previous game (45°) and sometimes stand still and turn there gaze to the left or right. In addition, there are multiple different floors in this game, some that squeak when you walk over them, which alerts the guards and makes them look around. For moments like these, you can crawl, which doesn't make any noise. Plus, you can hide under stuff, either to move past enemies yourself or hide until they move past you.
There are some sections where a room is dark (you get Night Vision goggles), where a room fills with Toxic Gas (Gas Mask) or mines are on the floor (crawl over them to pick them up and/or use a Mine Detector). The situations you find yourself in are plentiful and there is a safe and easy solution to everything. The tough part is finding them sometimes.
The big gameplay loop you have here is in finding Key Cards, which help you unlock areas that previously were inaccessible. There are 9 Key Cards and after you find 3, you can find a Key Card that combines them all (Red Card, Blue Card, Green Card). There are plenty of areas with multiple doors which all require a different key card to unlock, which is kind of annoying. You open a door with Key Card 4, then have to use Key Card 2 for the next one and Key Card 6 for the other one.
Overall, the depth in gameplay is definitely above anything other than some RPGs of the time probably, and it's a lot of fun, even today.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
-
No voice acting. I liked the sound design, while I found the soundtrack to range from OK to very good. The quality of the soundtrack really shined whenever the game entered action or story heavy scenes, while some of the overworld themes were catchy as well. I really enjoyed the intro theme too.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Metal Gear 2 certainly looks good for a 1990 game. It is much improved compared to Metal Gear in both use of colors and variety of locations. There is also more detail within locations, like the sewers, the "forest" area (not sure what the official name was), the swamps and then smaller locations like an infirmary, dining rooms etc.
ATMOSPHERE
I found this game to have fitting atmosphere throughout, but the game technically was obviously pretty limited in what it could do. It didn't help the setting that you spend like an hour on elevators it felt like, and I also found some things off putting and too game-y, like the fact that kids were just running around in random rooms waiting to give you tips on how to progress.
CONTENT
For a playthrough without the use of a guide, you are looking at a game that is about 10-15 hours long. If you use a guide here and there, you're looking at 6-8 hours, which for games of this time that are not RPGs or endless games is in my opinion the perfect length. Games at this time simply weren't feature rich or technically able enough to provide a lot of content that is limited in repetition.
I don't think I would necessarily have been to keen on spending ~$50 per game back in the day for this length, but the shorter length does a lot of good to the enjoyment of the game if we disregard that initial price tag.
There is a lot of fun stealth gameplay here that offers enough variety in how to approach things thanks to a multitude of stealth mechanics and weaponry. There is enough here that even a second playthrough may be worth it to you to approach some scenarios slightly differently. It's not like you can take different routes to get to the same destination - the game is pretty linear in that regard - but the moment to moment action can definitely easily be switched up a little bit.
There is some backtracking and as mentioned many times, you will likely need to use a guide here and there unless you're very patient, but Metal Gear 2 offers the best mix of quality and quantity of all 15 games I have played of 1990 up to this point.
Once you beat the game, there is a "boss rush" mode that unlocks as an additional mode.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There are a few main areas (two different buildings, forest/swamp area, desert) and the game asks you to backtrack a lot, but each time you do, you are able to enter new areas that are unlocked by acquiring a key card. Buildings have multiple doors and floors that require different key cards (there are 9) and each time you enter a new area within an area, there is enough of a different stylistically that it doesn't really feel repetitive. Often there are new stealth challenges added as well, but it could have definitely been much more difficult in that regard.
You can obviously alert guards, but it isn't really that punishing, especially on Easy difficulty. You can simply go to the next screen and hide underneath something and the guards will disappear without being on "semi-alert" status or something like that like they do in future games.
The structure of this game is pretty much the same throughout, and it's a fun structure, so I don't have too much to say about that. You get your mission to go to Area X, on your way you find key items hidden in specific rooms, you sometimes gotta piece together which item you need to use at which point, and then you fight a boss to progress further. It all works well.
One thing I didn't like was how key items were sometimes hidden somewhere and totally missable. Some bosses for example can only be hurt with one specific weapon, like the chopper early on, so I didn't particularly enjoy showing up to that one unable to do any damage. Often, once you do find the item, defeating them is rather simple.
So yeah, overall pretty good stuff with that small complaint.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Absolutely one of the more innovative games I've seen so far and it introduced many mechanics that were still in use when MGS1 released 8 years later. This game had everything you would want from a sequel. Bigger field of view for enemies makes stealth a bit more difficult, but the game offers a lot more "toys" for the player in terms of equipment, plus you can sneak and hide underneath stuff, and there is a lot more detail in the game's story telling.
REPLAYABILITY
There are two areas that will make this game slightly more replayable. There is a lot of equipment that I didn't use in my first playthrough. First, because I played it on easy (only available through MGS 3: Subsistence) and second, because there really are so many items and not all are necessary to be successful. There is a blanket for example that you can hide under, which I didn't use. Mice and cold medicine are other items that come to mind as one's I didn't require, to a point where I don't even know what cold medicine might be usable for. There are lots of other items like that which were in my inventory until the game was beaten.
The second area that allows for a little replayability are the radio conversations. There are dozens of optional conversations that you can try to find and I'm sure I didn't get to listen to all of them. It's nothing compared to what future games will offer, but considering the issue of memory limitations was pretty big at the time, it's impressive to see this much room put aside for optional conversations that offer (1) additional lore about the world and its inhabitants, (2) meta commentary and (3) humorous interactions.
Apart from this, you will experience everything in a singular playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
So far, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was definitely the best game I have played that released in 1990. Impressive amount of features with limited filler to pad play time, by far the most story telling and character development, limited frustration apart from not knowing where to go or what to do a few times and definitely a step in the right direction for video games. I think it's unlikely that I will manage to hold off from playing MGS1 all the way until I reach 1998, but I'll try, just to really build up that anticipation.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Nothing here since it didn't release outside of Japan until 2005.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (released on July 20, 1990 in Japan only - available in NA/EU through MGS3: Subsistence for PS2) is the first Metal Gear game I have actually played and beaten, even though I've played a bit of MGS1, 3 and dozens of hours of MGS 5. I've abandoned those for various reasons over the years, mostly due to being distracted by other games and/or finding them too difficult (tried to play without guides), but I do plan on going through the entire series over the next few years.
For today, I am happy to say that the second MSX Metal Gear game made by Hideo Kojima has been beaten. It took me roughly 7 hours and I did use a guide whenever I didn't know what to do, and in my opinion, you will have a hard time beating this game without one. The gameplay mechanics themselves will not be a problem, but there are multiple instances where (1) you need an item for a boss that is very easy to miss and (2) you need to backtrack to an area and it can be hard to make out where you need to go. During those backtracking parts, often you will probably figure it out if you just check every available door but I decided to take a look at the guide whenever it took me about 10 minutes of looking around without being able to figure out my next move.
Sometimes the answer to a puzzle can be pretty convoluted as well. In one part of the game, an area is locked off by lasers. A guard is at that spot as well. There is a little shack next to it, and later on you find a keycard that allows you to enter. A few children in there tell you that "the lasers are turned off at night": There is no traditional day & night system in this game, so you can't just wait for it to be night. No, instead you have to find something elsewhere, figure out to use it near the guard, wait a few seconds for the guard cutscene to trigger, which makes him then turn off the lasers. You can get it eventually thanks to to the tips by the children, but sometimes it gets more complicated with fewer tips, at which point checking a guide is almost a must.
If you don't mind using guides a few times here and there, great, because the game is among the better ones you will get to play in 1990 and offers a fun way to spend a few afternoons. It improved on basically everything compared to the first Metal Gear game by Kojima. Plus, as I understand it, it's canon to the Metal Gear universe and much of what MG2 does is apparently repeated in some way or another in MGS1 and 2, both in gameplay and story.
More on the game in detail below.
____________
STORYTELLING
The game starts with a lengthy cut scene that briefly summarizes the plot of the first game and the setting for this one. After conflict between large nations like Russia, the USA and China started to settle down, a new nuclear threat emerged in 1999, the year this game is set in (4 years after the previous one). The country is called "Zanzibar Land", which arms itself with nuclear weapons and stars invading nearby countries.
In addition to this, there is an ongoing oil crisis (the game's premise and its story themes are evidently still relevant today). A Czech biologist named Kio Marv invents "Oilix" a microbe that synthesizes petroleum, and Zanzibar Land kidnap him to gain military superiority through a combination of nuclear weapons and Oilix.
Solid Snake receives his mission by Foxhound, a special forces squad, to sneak into Zanzibar Land and rescue Kio Marv. Of course, there is a nuclear weapon called "Metal Gear" to worry about as well, as Zanzibarland are mass-producing Metal Gear units.
The beauty of this story is manifold, though you won't necessarily fall in love with the in-game plot itself. It works well, it includes plot twists and plenty of both sad and thoughtful moments. Considering that this is a video game from 1990 however, it won't blow your socks off at this day and age. What I really appreciated, however, was the attention to detail.
If you look at the manual of this game, it shows you a biography of each relevant character (did you know Snake speaks 6 languages?). It lists all basic information about Zanzibar Land (population: 40,000), it even explains what kind of training Foxhound aspirants need to go through, what gear they wear during missions and what Foxhound itself even is. The game then mentions some of this information during radio conversations, some optional, some mandatory.
The radio/codec in general is a great feature because it has a ton of immersive uses that are both helpful and engaging. Each character has their own frequency and you can ring them to partake in optional conversations, which don't always trigger depending on what situation Snake finds himself in. But when they do, you can ring Holly to learn more about Zanzibar Land and your environment. You can ring Roy Campbell, your commander, to get more information about your mission and some helpful tips. You can call Kazuhira Miller, who often does meta commentary on "not drinking too much soda when playing" or "not playing within 30 minutes of eating" (not very immersive, but humorous/actually interesting). You can also call Johan Jacobsen to get some tips whenever animals are involved. This system gets fleshed out in future entries but this game is a big step in the right direction in that regard.
Throughout the game, you will meet characters either to rescue them or to help them (or for them to help you) and each time you do, there is an engaging conversation that you can follow along. One such conversation that was pretty memorable happened between Snake and Gustava. While waiting, both literally sat down and just talked about Gustava's past, why she became involved with the STB and about the only man she ever fell in love with. I love this sort of stuff and it helps make the bigger moments in the game's story hit that much more.
Most impressive about the story in this game has got to be its meta commentary on war. It is barebones compared to what I know future games delve into, but there is still plenty of thoughtful stuff here about how soldiers are pawns of leaders who don't care about them, about how some children who are saved from battlefields are simply trained to be put back into the battlefield and about how some soldiers don't have a life worth living outside of the battlefield, so they may as well die on it. It gives the "evil" antagonists a "motivation" for their actions unlike what you will see in almost any other game, where the simple goal is to reign over the world, whereas here, it goes way beyond that.
I'm probably making the story out to be way more than it actually is, but I truly do find the attention to detail and the themes to be impressive features of this game and something that obviously stuck around big time in future iterations.
GAMEPLAY
Where to start? You play Solid Snake, a special ops soldier, and have to sneak into Zanzibar Land to find Dr. Kio Marv. When you start the game, your are equipped with your radio to contact a few individuals who will help you. You immediately get access to a handgun, some rations (healing items) and you obviously have your next-level sneaking abilities.
The game has a LIFE bar that increases each time you defeat a boss. Boss fights sometimes occur within minutes of each other, sometimes you don't fight one for over an hour. There are close to 10 in total and are pretty varied. You fight a chopper, a Running Man that just keeps running away whilst the room fills up with toxic gas, a Ninja that throws stars and teleports and of course a Metal Gear. They are pretty simple once you know what to do and are equipped for them. Often, you can simply tank their damage and just eat Rations while you fire back until they die.
To aid you with your mission, there is a RADAR for the first time in the series. It is a 3x3 screen that shows each adjacent screen and marks enemies and yourself as dots. It is pretty primitive, in that it doesn't actually show which direction the enemies are facing, so it often happened at first that I walked into a screen and immediately alerted the guards because they were staring into my direction. Later on I figured out to let the enemies walk the other direction first, at which point I obviously knew which way they were facing.
Guards in this game have a bigger field of view compared to the previous game (45°) and sometimes stand still and turn there gaze to the left or right. In addition, there are multiple different floors in this game, some that squeak when you walk over them, which alerts the guards and makes them look around. For moments like these, you can crawl, which doesn't make any noise. Plus, you can hide under stuff, either to move past enemies yourself or hide until they move past you.
There are some sections where a room is dark (you get Night Vision goggles), where a room fills with Toxic Gas (Gas Mask) or mines are on the floor (crawl over them to pick them up and/or use a Mine Detector). The situations you find yourself in are plentiful and there is a safe and easy solution to everything. The tough part is finding them sometimes.
The big gameplay loop you have here is in finding Key Cards, which help you unlock areas that previously were inaccessible. There are 9 Key Cards and after you find 3, you can find a Key Card that combines them all (Red Card, Blue Card, Green Card). There are plenty of areas with multiple doors which all require a different key card to unlock, which is kind of annoying. You open a door with Key Card 4, then have to use Key Card 2 for the next one and Key Card 6 for the other one.
Overall, the depth in gameplay is definitely above anything other than some RPGs of the time probably, and it's a lot of fun, even today.
MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE
-
No voice acting. I liked the sound design, while I found the soundtrack to range from OK to very good. The quality of the soundtrack really shined whenever the game entered action or story heavy scenes, while some of the overworld themes were catchy as well. I really enjoyed the intro theme too.
GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN
Metal Gear 2 certainly looks good for a 1990 game. It is much improved compared to Metal Gear in both use of colors and variety of locations. There is also more detail within locations, like the sewers, the "forest" area (not sure what the official name was), the swamps and then smaller locations like an infirmary, dining rooms etc.
ATMOSPHERE
I found this game to have fitting atmosphere throughout, but the game technically was obviously pretty limited in what it could do. It didn't help the setting that you spend like an hour on elevators it felt like, and I also found some things off putting and too game-y, like the fact that kids were just running around in random rooms waiting to give you tips on how to progress.
CONTENT
For a playthrough without the use of a guide, you are looking at a game that is about 10-15 hours long. If you use a guide here and there, you're looking at 6-8 hours, which for games of this time that are not RPGs or endless games is in my opinion the perfect length. Games at this time simply weren't feature rich or technically able enough to provide a lot of content that is limited in repetition.
I don't think I would necessarily have been to keen on spending ~$50 per game back in the day for this length, but the shorter length does a lot of good to the enjoyment of the game if we disregard that initial price tag.
There is a lot of fun stealth gameplay here that offers enough variety in how to approach things thanks to a multitude of stealth mechanics and weaponry. There is enough here that even a second playthrough may be worth it to you to approach some scenarios slightly differently. It's not like you can take different routes to get to the same destination - the game is pretty linear in that regard - but the moment to moment action can definitely easily be switched up a little bit.
There is some backtracking and as mentioned many times, you will likely need to use a guide here and there unless you're very patient, but Metal Gear 2 offers the best mix of quality and quantity of all 15 games I have played of 1990 up to this point.
Once you beat the game, there is a "boss rush" mode that unlocks as an additional mode.
LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN
There are a few main areas (two different buildings, forest/swamp area, desert) and the game asks you to backtrack a lot, but each time you do, you are able to enter new areas that are unlocked by acquiring a key card. Buildings have multiple doors and floors that require different key cards (there are 9) and each time you enter a new area within an area, there is enough of a different stylistically that it doesn't really feel repetitive. Often there are new stealth challenges added as well, but it could have definitely been much more difficult in that regard.
You can obviously alert guards, but it isn't really that punishing, especially on Easy difficulty. You can simply go to the next screen and hide underneath something and the guards will disappear without being on "semi-alert" status or something like that like they do in future games.
The structure of this game is pretty much the same throughout, and it's a fun structure, so I don't have too much to say about that. You get your mission to go to Area X, on your way you find key items hidden in specific rooms, you sometimes gotta piece together which item you need to use at which point, and then you fight a boss to progress further. It all works well.
One thing I didn't like was how key items were sometimes hidden somewhere and totally missable. Some bosses for example can only be hurt with one specific weapon, like the chopper early on, so I didn't particularly enjoy showing up to that one unable to do any damage. Often, once you do find the item, defeating them is rather simple.
So yeah, overall pretty good stuff with that small complaint.
CONCEPT/INNOVATION
Absolutely one of the more innovative games I've seen so far and it introduced many mechanics that were still in use when MGS1 released 8 years later. This game had everything you would want from a sequel. Bigger field of view for enemies makes stealth a bit more difficult, but the game offers a lot more "toys" for the player in terms of equipment, plus you can sneak and hide underneath stuff, and there is a lot more detail in the game's story telling.
REPLAYABILITY
There are two areas that will make this game slightly more replayable. There is a lot of equipment that I didn't use in my first playthrough. First, because I played it on easy (only available through MGS 3: Subsistence) and second, because there really are so many items and not all are necessary to be successful. There is a blanket for example that you can hide under, which I didn't use. Mice and cold medicine are other items that come to mind as one's I didn't require, to a point where I don't even know what cold medicine might be usable for. There are lots of other items like that which were in my inventory until the game was beaten.
The second area that allows for a little replayability are the radio conversations. There are dozens of optional conversations that you can try to find and I'm sure I didn't get to listen to all of them. It's nothing compared to what future games will offer, but considering the issue of memory limitations was pretty big at the time, it's impressive to see this much room put aside for optional conversations that offer (1) additional lore about the world and its inhabitants, (2) meta commentary and (3) humorous interactions.
Apart from this, you will experience everything in a singular playthrough.
PLAYABILITY
The game worked well at all times.
OVERALL
So far, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake was definitely the best game I have played that released in 1990. Impressive amount of features with limited filler to pad play time, by far the most story telling and character development, limited frustration apart from not knowing where to go or what to do a few times and definitely a step in the right direction for video games. I think it's unlikely that I will manage to hold off from playing MGS1 all the way until I reach 1998, but I'll try, just to really build up that anticipation.
WHAT THEY SAID AT THE TIME
Nothing here since it didn't release outside of Japan until 2005.