Wizards & Warriors (NES Review)

Wizards & Warriors
aka Densetsu no Kishi Elrond (Japan)
Platform: NES
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Acclaim
First Released December, 1987
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The Japanese version, Densetsu no Kishi Elrond, has some differences from the US release, the most important of which is that your life is represented by a numeric value and can actually become higher than the 1,500 life points you start with. The first level has no enemies in the overworld, but the Potion of Levitation is obtainable faster. Finally, bosses are reordered, and the last boss battle ends with the cave collapsing on you. This part kind of sucks because the rocks that fall on you cause 500 damage, and my favorite spot to fight the boss is quite far from the final door. I wish I’d played this version first instead of last while making this review. Like the US version, there’s unlimited continues, so it’s not really harder, but by the time I got around to playing it, I was a bit burned-out on Wizards & Warriors. I’ll review Ironsword eventually.

While it was the PlayStation I got for Christmas in 1996 that started my gaming life, there were video games in my house before then. I just didn’t really care about them. I liked watching TV, but for whatever reason, playing games on a TV didn’t catch my attention until I played Crash Bandicoot on a PlayStation kiosk when I was 7. But, my father owned a few consoles, each with a couple launch-window games and usually a baseball game or two in the mix. He’d play them once or twice, get busy at the office, and never touch them again. Sometimes he’d see games for those consoles on clearance and buy them, but they’d stay unopened (Zombies Ate My Neighbors was such a game). After marrying my mother and moving into an actual house, the game consoles would linger around to occupy any visiting children while my parents entertained guests. At one point, he even grabbed the tag to buy a 3DO at Costco before my mother put her foot down and said “it’s $600! You’re going to spend that kind of money on a game you’ll play TODAY and never again?” And that was the end of his frivolous console buying. Among those consoles he had a handful of games for was an NES. One of those games became the first “retro game” that I remember beating, when I was 10. In fact, I know the exact date I beat Wizards & Warriors. It was September 8, 1999. I only remember it because this is how I passed the slowest day of my childhood while waiting to leave to pick up my preorder of the Sega Dreamcast at a midnight launch, which was my first ever day one console.

In the US version of Wizards & Warriors, you have to spring off an enemy to get on top of the trees. In Japan, you should have the potion by this point. Also, the sky has clouds. Clouds are pretty.

I once called StarTropics the “absolute stupidest good game ever made.” Wizards & Warriors is giving it a run for its money. By all rights, this should be a terrible game. There’s items that just plain don’t work. There’s nonsensical level design. There’s a lot of busy work. Most damning of all is that Wizards & Warriors has one of the most flimsy and unimpactful primary weapons in the history of gaming. A sword so weak that it’s genuinely embarrassing. It barely extends beyond your character sprite and really has no range beyond what is directly next to you. Hell, not just next to you, but ON you, actively damaging you. That’s when you press the attack button. The best way to use it is by jumping. When he jumps, Kuros, the hero of the game, stiffens up in the same pose I make when I step barefooted on a cold floor. As if a shock wave is running up your body. THE HERO JUMPS LIKE THAT! When you do this, your sword is facing upward and any enemies who run into it are skewered. It’s still not satisfying. The sword has no sense of weight or gravity or violence at all. That SHOULD be a deal breaker, and for the three Wizards & Warriors sequels (how the hell did THIS of all games get three f’n sequels?) it’s probably going to be. They don’t have the item(s) that acted as the savior of the original game.

“Items that don’t work?” Yea, I’m not being snotty here. The items LITERALLY DO NOT WORK, and the behind the scenes story on how that happened has never been told. I’m guessing Rare Ltd. intended for them to behave differently, but by time they realized it just wasn’t going to happen, it was also too late to remove them from the game. There’s two items that they crapped the bed with. Above is the Cloak of Darkness, which makes you invisible. As in YOU, the player, can’t see where you’re at. Oh, the enemies can. Most of the enemy design in Wizards & Warriors is basically “heat-seek and make a bee-line towards the hero.” It’s not very intelligent, but that’s how the game works, and in theory, the Cloak of Darkness would screw up that algorithm. But, it doesn’t. The enemies still see and attack you. It also reduces damage done by basic enemies (not bosses) to one single hit point. By the way, almost every basic enemy only deals one hit point already. The other broken item is the “Boots of Lava Walk” which you’d think would allow you to walk on the lava. But, you take damage from the lava anyway, because presumably they forgot to program the immunity that’s right in the item’s name. Unbelievable.

But, the original game has one item.. well, two but they’re functionally the same.. that saves the day. It’s called the Dagger of Throwing, and it’s basically a boomerang that (1) has a sense of OOMPH that the sword doesn’t have and (2) has range. You get it just minutes after starting the game, too. Later in the game, you might find an upgraded version of the dagger called the Battle Axe of Agor that also works like a boomerang but does double the damage. Not only do these work, but they’re FUN! It’s a silly dagger/axe that circles around and cuts everything down in its path. It’s awesome, and it does actually manage to turn Wizards & Warriors into a serviceable action game, and one that allows you to appreciate all the other neat ideas that actually work.

This is odd: you can also use the dagger/axe to remotely collect any items that were placed by the designers on the map. See a gem? Throw the weapon at it and you’ll collect it. HOWEVER, if an enemy drops an item, including the gems, it doesn’t work. Your dagger/axe will pass right through it. It’s yet another example of Wizards & Warriors being inconsistently sloppy.

At its heart, Wizards & Warriors is about searching for keys and gems to open doors. There’s up to three colored keys that are hidden in each level, usually in a specific order. Find the red key to open the red door, inside which you’ll find the pink key for a pink door that contains the blue key, etc. Finding the keys is your main objective, but you also have to collect gems. Every level has a knight with a little cartoon word bubble that tells you how many gems you need for them to move aside. Gems are all over, including bundles of them in treasure chests. I played through Wizards & Warriors three times in the making of this review, and having enough gems was never an issue until the final stage of the game. In that stage, the target is 100 gems. But, the stage itself maxes-out at about half that. You have to grind-up the rest defeating enemies, who drop gems completely 100% at random. So random, in fact, that if you rewind, the item dropped might change to something else. Gems aren’t the only drops, either. There’s three different potions that temporarily grant hero Kuros special abilities, power-ups for the dagger/axe, screen-clearing magic eggs, and cuckoo clocks that freeze everything on screen for a few seconds. In all three sessions, it took me quite a while to build up 100 gems to fight the last boss, and it’s so boring and a terrible way to usher in the ending of the game. What were they thinking?

Sometimes the level design is truly wonky. Here, you can’t make the jump up to this next platform unless you have the pink potion (dropped AT RANDOM by an enemy, mind you), which allows Kuros to jump higher and also brings much needed attention to breast cancer research. There’s also a blue potion, which makes Kuros run faster at the cost of implied depression, and a red potion, which makes him temporarily invincible and also allows him to access the overpowered Tyrannosaurus-Red Dragon Thunderzord. A Zord so OP that sometimes it beat Lord Zedd’s monsters by itself. Thunder Megazord is just it with armor on.

One of the main themes of Wizards & Warriors’ level design is climbing. Although stages can be sprawling, you’ll usually be platforming around vertically instead of horizontally. This includes a humongous castle near the end of the game that has retracting platforms. It’s not quite as annoying as Mega Man’s disappearing/reappearing blocks. There’s two items that assist with this style of gameplay. The first is the Potion of Levitation, which allows you to float about a character length in the air as long as you hold UP on the D-pad. Yes, you can then jump from this position, giving you a little extra lift. If you’re on those retracting platforms, holding UP will also allow you to wait while the platform is once again usable. The other item is so badly named I would have guessed this game was badly translated Japanese if I didn’t already know it was Rare Ltd. that made it. It’s called, I kid you not, “The Feather of Feather Fall.” With it, if you hold UP while falling, you glide slowly, which can allow for you to clear larger gaps with ease. Again, FUN items. No notes. And they really help raise Wizards & Warriors to the level of decent.

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Of course, neither of these items help Wizards & Warriors as much as the ability to rewind mistakes. Wizards & Warriors has unlimited continues, and if you game over, you restart on the same spot you died, with no penalty except a loss of points. And now you know how 10 year old me managed to beat the NES cart. But, I almost quit as a child, especially on the giant castle. One mistimed jump can cost you several minutes of climbing. By the time I finished my third session of Wizards & Warriors yesterday, I wasn’t missing any jumps and didn’t need to rewind, but those first two sessions? Oh, I was missing. Good lord, was I ever missing. And, just to experience true agony, in the second of my three play sessions, I didn’t allow myself to rewind jumping mistakes. In some jurisdictions, this would qualify as self-harm. The shafts you’re climbing up are MASSIVE too. As a child, I fell to the bottom of the castle stage twice. That I remember that to this day gives you an idea of how painful that climb can be.

If you jump on these the roots, you slide, and there’s nothing you can do to stop yourself. So, naturally, in this section they did things like put hidden gems that stop your jump below the normal height in a way specifically designed to cause you to slide down several stories of roots.

Movement in general is weird in Wizards & Warriors. The controls are fine, truly, but the levels are designed to throw off your judgment for what platforms you can and cannot reach. Sometimes in a good way, and other times, not so much. It varies. Sliding off sloped surfaces is part of the physics of the game, and it’s especially annoying in some of the stages, but rewinding fixed me from having to climb back up and start over. Most importantly, rewinding allowed me to undo item pick-ups I didn’t want. Those useless items I mentioned above? Yea, they’re actually worse than useless, because getting them means LOSING a more valuable item. Namely, the overpowered Boots of Force, which allow you to kick open treasure chests instead of needing to find the right colored keys. While the shield, throwing knife/axe, Potion of Levitation, and Feather of Feather Fall are permanent upgrades, the Boots can be lost by opening the wrong chest for an item you don’t want. Trust me, you don’t want ANY other item until late in the game, where you MIGHT want to swap it for the Wand of Power. That’s an item that allows you to do massive damage, and by that point, you have to fight enemies to get gems anyway.

The end game has some real mean-spirited enemy placement. These skulls are indestructible and sit on platforms you need to use. They really didn’t stick the landing on Wizards & Warriors’ end game at all, but that’s fine. The overall experience should take even a first-timer less than two hours to complete. It goes by quickly. Less quickly if you’re a 10 year old girl hyped to play Sonic Adventure and Soulcalibur on her first ever launch day game console.

History hasn’t been kind to Wizards & Warriors, but then again, it never really got a chance at redemption. The last release in the franchise was Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power. Nobody really talks about it anymore. The owners of the Acclaim library aren’t doing anything with it. It wasn’t included in Rare Replay. It’s one of those IPs that just vanished off the face of the Earth. Now, I’ve played Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II and Wizards & Warriors III, and I get why the franchise is done. Those were terrible games that took away the projectile weapon that made the first game tolerable, leaving only the flimsy sword that was horrible to begin with. However, we have to remember that the first game was at least good enough to spawn all those terrible sequels in the first place. And it’s not that bad, people. It’s messy and the music is awful and the sound effects are terrible and the noise the game makes when you’re almost dead could make a person want to puncture their eardrums with a cotton swab. But, the throwing weapons are fun, the sense of exploration is very well done, and the boss fights are satisfying. If this were re-released today, it’d NEED rewind, but with it, I think it’d be weird if the average gamer didn’t have fun. Wizards & Warriors: an unlikely NBA Finals, but a decent enough NES adventure.
Verdict: YES!

Now I’m going to try out a new feature: the post-retro review fun fact!

Post-Retro Review Fun Fact: Kuros was in a bad Captain N: The Game Master-like cartoon called Video Power, in a segment called The Power Team with other Acclaim game stars. And you thought Captain N was bad. Kuros teams with Max Force from NARC, Tyrone from Arch Rivals, Kwirk, a sentient tomato from an obscure Game Boy puzzle game, and finally.. Bigfoot. As in the famous original monster truck that they had the rights to because he was in an Acclaim video game. Unbelievably, Video Power lasted into a second season, and even weirder, the second season dropped the cartoon and became a game show instead. I wish they’d had shows like this when I was a kid. My mother and I watched a WHOLE LOT of Nickelodeon Gas as a child. I miss Gas. A whole network of children’s game shows that were so fun to watch. OH GOD, I’m nostalgic now. I’ve reached that age. Now I feel bad for making fun of my readers for being nostalgic for so long. Forgive me, friends!