Monster in My Pocket (NES Review)

Monster in My Pocket
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January, 1992
Designed by Shiro Murata & Etsunobu Ebisu
Published by Konami
United States Exclusive
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Konami games often look glitchy in screenshots. It’s because their techniques create graphics that look great in animation but poor in screenshots. Monster in My Pocket looks fine, but it’s certainly one of the lower-mid-rung games in their lineup.

Monster in My Pocket was a short-lived toy line that was like M.U.S.C.L.E. with monsters instead of wrestlers. Like Dynatron City, there was a failed TV pilot (which they cover the failure by calling it an “animated special”), and an NES game. This one is by Konami, who was the obvious choice for this. I imagine MIMP creators Morrison Entertainment Group did their research and decided the Castlevania people would be PERFECT for their game about bite-sized monsters. You can’t fault their logic, but sadly for them, Konami completely phoned this one in. I think Konami assumed this was a media franchise aimed at little kids, so they built the game accordingly. I’ve played plenty of NES releases that I guess are made with younger kids in mind, but I don’t have to guess this time. It’s baby’s first horror game. That’s the only explanation that makes sense, given the circumstances.

This could have just as easily been a Honey, I Shrunk The Kids game. Replace Dracula/Frankenstein with the boy and girl from the film, and the monsters with bugs. Boom, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. It’s not even much of a stretch, really.

Konami was capable of creating amazing gameplay and awe-inspiring set pieces by this point. Monster in My Pocket has NONE OF THAT. It’s a shockingly bare-bones platformer with the only real twist being a double jump. You have one attack, and one attack only. There’s no weapons. There’s no power-ups. There’s no items beside a single type of health refill. The level design is incredibly basic, with only two “moments” that change-up the gameplay formula: a brief section where you run down a staircase rail and a brief section where you ride a crane. Either of those could have easily happened in any game where the concept isn’t being small. Hey, I think the idea of tiny creatures having an adventure in a giant-sized world has legs, but it can’t carry the game all by itself like Konami seems to believe it would. It’s just a facade. We, the player, know that it’s just the background theme, which in the limitless world of video games can be made to look like anything. You could replace the background visuals in Monster in My Pocket with any other theme and it wouldn’t change a single thing, because Monster in My Pocket just doesn’t do enough to make you feel small.

Hell, some of the level themes don’t even lend themselves to the concept. The caves that make up the final stage are a gaming staple, and it comes with having no sense of scale at all. I have no idea how big Dracula could or couldn’t be by looking at this. But even when it does have scale, it’s not like the gameplay is better for it. It put the mildest smile on my face when I had to hop-up a chain link fence, but that smile quickly vanished, because that’s the gag in its entirety. You’re only small because the background graphics say you are. Nothing in the gameplay does anything clever to make the concept feel consequential.

Besides completely botching the theme, I can honestly say that Monsters in My Pocket does nothing wrong. Which is not to say it’s good, because it’s not. Ironically for a game that’s about being tiny in size, it’s too short. At only six normal-sized levels, I think the average gamer will only need around 30 minutes to finish it. Combat is okay, but nothing special. You just sort of swipe at enemies with your hands, creating a “force wave” in front of you. It’s satisfying enough at the start, but when you realize it’s the ONLY thing in the entire game, it gets old quickly. In fact, by the midpoint of Pocket, I was often opting to instead leg it. The only thing players are given to break-up the monotony is the occasional oversized item to throw at enemies. In the first level, it’s keys. Which is really confusing the first time you play it. Keys are the universal gaming symbol of having doors to unlock. Here, they’re just generic crates to throw. Reusable, though. If you wish, you can keep picking them up and tossing them at more baddies until you get bored with them. Which you will.

I’m getting bored again just looking at these screens.

What irks me is it didn’t have to be this way. You can choose to play as Dracula or Frankenstein, but both play identically. Talk about a missed opportunity. A quick check of the toy franchise shows that there’s literally hundreds of figures. Even by 1991, when this went into production, the variety was staggering. Only having two playable characters that have identical skills, attacks, and jumping was, frankly, a little lazy. This seems to have been done for the sake of co-op, so neither player would be stuck with “the bad one.” With the sheer variety the figures offer, why not give players four to six characters? Or maybe have a different character with different abilities for each stage? Or maybe even a Mega Man-like adventure with six to eight characters who then join your party when you beat them? Konami was literally handed a license to go nuts and they turned in one of the least imaginative platformers they’ve ever done. It’s shocking, frankly. They really did make a children’s Castlevania game, only with none of the fun parts of Castlevania. Or, if not Castlevania, they were trying to do for the platformer what Ninja Turtles did for the brawler. Either way, this is one boring game, and one I think even little kids will grow tired of.

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Oh, and it ends on that laziest of tropes: a boss rush! Only this boss rush has no health refills between the first five bosses in the sequence. Thankfully, you do come back to life immediately after dying. It’s padding, plain and simple. Again, it’s not that Monster in My Pocket does anything wrong. But, it is proof positive that all the talent in the world doesn’t mean anything if you don’t apply it. There’s nothing memorable about Monster in My Pocket. That by itself is frustrating, because you know Konami is capable of so much better with these themes and characters. It’s so basic that you’d think this came out a year before Dracula’s Curse, not two years after. Or, to further put it into perspective, this came out just after Super Castlevania IV. Inexcusable. Monster in My Pocket is as shallow as the flop sweat it seems to be covered in. I’m not mad at you, Konami. I’m just disappointed in you.
Verdict: NO!
And why the hell is this an NES game? Shouldn’t it be a Game Boy release?