Konami Wai Wai World (Famicom Review)

Konami Wai Wai World
Platform: Famicom
Released January 14, 1988
Designed by Konami
Never Released Outside of Japan
NO MODERN RELEASE*

*Really should be NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED but technically a mobile port was released in 2006.

Wai Wai World has two MAJOR problems that I couldn’t get over. This is the first:

Hug the screen to scroll.

Enemy already in shooting animation, leading to automatic damage.

No, I don’t mean Simon Belmont fighting a dragon from the Goonies. Hypothetically, that’s cool. What’s not so cool is how much you have to hug the screen to get it to scroll. I can’t say for certain it’s solely responsible for Wai Wai World getting a NO! (spoiler alert) because this is a generally problematic and boring game. But it’s impossible to know, because the combat would be transformed by normal scrolling. What do I mean by that? Well, the game that Wai Wai is most often compared to is Castlevania. The Wikipedia page says gameplay is, quote, “very similar to Castlevania.” VERY similar. Folks, it’s just not true. I hate it when Wikis say crap like this. Those completely generalized “the game is a top-down maze, so it’s essentially like Pac-Man or Bomberman” type of comparisons like with the PC Engine version of Batman. Do not go into this thinking you’re playing a Japanese exclusive Castlevania that lets you also play as Goemon and Mikey from The Goonies.

Few non-RPGs have as many ROM hack translations out there as Wai Wai World has, but you really don’t need a ROM hack or know Japanese to play it. The walkthrough at StrategyWiki should be more than enough. You might need the slot machine to bring back dead characters, but I never lost a single person. Well, I did but it was BS so I rewound it. What?

Wai Wai World has the stairs from Castlevania that are essentially identical to the ones from the first Castlevania and that’s where the similarities end. The combat doesn’t feel like Castlevania. The action doesn’t feel like Castlevania. Hell, Wai Wai World doesn’t even feel like Castlevania when you’re in the Castlevania level playing as Simon Belmont and fighting skeletons and Dracula. I’m not kidding. It feels like a bad bootleg of Castlevania, and it’s from the same company! That is one of the most f*cking astonishing failures of game design I’ve seen in my life and worthy of mockery, but I’m going to play along anyway and use Castlevania as an example. So, when you’re scrolling the screen in Castlevania, where are you on screen?

IN THE CENTER OF THE SCREEN! And where are you in Wai Wai World?

You’re closer to the side than you are to the center.

Because of the scrolling, combat is lacking in the elements I think the average player seeks from action games, like excitement, catharsis, or a worthy test of your skills. Most of the time in Wai Wai World, enemies are sprung on you, and if they have the capability of firing a projectile, usually they fire and as soon as they appear. For a lot of them, their attack conveniently is measured perfectly to match the exact length of distance between you and the edge of the screen where you scroll. How lucky for them. So, as you scroll them into existence, they fire and you take a hit that you can not react fast enough to avoid. It’s nothing but a GOTCHA and a life slap.

The design is universally crap. That heart had actually been on the ground and in a treasure chest. By the way, as far as I could tell, the only thing in treasure chests are life refills. But, for whatever reason, only Goemon can open the chests, and when he does, the heart flies up in the air before landing. Throughout the Moai statue level, there’s multiple hearts placed within reaching distance that immediately fly up in the air to an unreachable platform. Even hearts that come from chests disappear relatively quickly, and as far as I could tell, you don’t have enough time to touch the chest with Goemon, scroll through the characters to reach Konami Man or Konami Lady, jump up in the air while holding down the button so you can enter your flying mode, then fly up and grab the heart, which only refills the character who is selected anyway. It’s so trollish. Maybe it’s a co-op thing. I dunno, but this game has a mean-spirited attitude in general so I assume these were meant as jokes.

While life refills are plentiful via random drops, that’s not the point of an action game. There’s no sense of tension because the enemy has already spawned and damaged you before you even know there is an enemy, and so all the action is kind of retroactive, as if combat comes with a life tax. It takes the joy out of making progress, because you’re in a state of hyper-vigilance whenever you’re moving forward, especially as the enemies become more dangerous. If you become low on health, you essentially have to heel-toe forward until you rebuild your health because no amount of skill can protect you from enemies who spawn into existence already in their attack animation right in front of you. At one point, I did find my entire roster critically low on health and resources in the Hell stage, and it sure as heck wasn’t fun. I assume the scrolling was done this way to accommodate co-op, which Wai Wai World offers. It isn’t more fun with two players, especially for the person who goes first and does the scrolling. It just goes to show that arbitrary co-op ruins everything. And I’m not even entirely sure it’s the WORST problem.

Here’s the second major problem with Wai Wai World:

In that picture King Kong (yes, King Kong. This game is weird) is successfully landing a punch. LOOK HOW FAR AWAY I’M STANDING FROM THE THING I’M PUNCHING! And this isn’t one of those games where that works only one way. You can’t use sprites to suss out a safe distance between enemies and the bullets they spray because the collision is universally horrendous. That, combined with the fact that most attacks have no middle frames of animation, make Konami Wai Wai World a game completely lacking in cathartic combat. There’s no OOMPH to the attacks, no sense of violence at all, and thus no immersion. You feel like you’re playing a sloppy-ass game that wants to be quirky without any of the actual charm or effort that made Konami an elite NES developer in the first place.

Even the space shooting level that happens before the final level isn’t good. This feels like a bad knock-off of a Konami space shmup. Even the boss at the end feels like it’s a deleted scene from Life Force that was cut for extreme lameness.

It’s just not a fun game to play, or to explore. Rather than being Castlevania, which I can’t stress enough this is nothing like besides the staircases, this is much more like The Goonies. Not the excellent NES sequel Goonies II, but the first one that never got an American NES release. The combat especially feels just like it: flimsy and lacking in weight. If you’ve not played Goonies 1, instead think of this as a poor man’s Zelda II. Specifically Zelda II’s dungeons, which the levels in Wai Wai World are very similar to in structure and feel. Only, there’s no hub-world and instead you use the starting screen on each stage and hidden warp zones to return to the game’s Mega Man-like level select screen.

I probably shouldn’t have used this picture because hot damn, that looks fun. I just played Wai Wai World two and a half times and know it’s a terrible game, and my brain is still telling me “look at that! Golly, that looks good!”

The basic gameplay idea is you start with the superheroes Konami Man and Konami Lady, and you have to go around looking for keys in stages that allow you to unlock the star of a Konami game that’s trapped within the stage. There’s six in total: Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Mikey from The Goonies, Goemon aka Mystical Ninja, the hero of the Famicom exclusive Getsu Fūma Den (which I’ll try to review in 2025), one of the Moai from Gradius (one of 76 games reviewed in Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review) and King Kong from another Famicom exclusive called King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch (again, I’ll try to get to it in 2025). After you save them, you do a single shmup level with Vic Viper from Gradius or the TwinBee. It’s one of the most random lineups ever, but it’s not like Konami in 1988 had a deep roster to pull from.

Dracula isn’t even a boss in the Castlevania stage, but he’s a major nuisance who absolutely spams the screen with bullets. Do you see the armor next to him? You cannot get it until Konami Man and Lady have the ability to fly. If you play the game by the universally suggested order, Castlevania is the 2nd and 7th of ten steps. Unlike a lot of Wai Wai World’s problems, this is one that I get what they were aiming for, but having the stuff just laying around doesn’t lend it that air of importance. They really needed to implement the items in a way that felt more eventful. There are some big bosses that drop keys and one even directly unlocks a new character, but it’s not enough.

It still sounds like such a neat idea, but after a while most of the characters feel too samey. Goemon stands out because he attacks almost diagonally. Simon stands out because the whip has reach. King Kong stands out because his collision box seems King Kong-sized. But, besides Simon’s whip, none of the basic attacks feel radically different, and thus none of the characters feel radically different. You’ll want to rely heavily on sub-weapons for combat. The sub-weapons use one point of ammo, except Simon’s boomerang which uses five points (that was the smartest design choice they made because three can be thrown at a time and it’s very overpowered) and Fuuma’s ninja stars, which cost three points. Each character has a sub-weapon hidden somewhere in their level, but you probably won’t be able to get a few in a single run through their stage and will have to return later. Wai Wai World has far too much backtracking, some of which is optional, and some of which isn’t. 

I had to use my standard safety configuration of sitting far from the screen and drowning out the room with lights while fighting bosses because of epilepsy concerns. I figure I should use this space to remind people that I’m partnered with AbleToPlay to help spread awareness of photosensitivity, which is going to be an issue for older games. Wai Wai World wasn’t always bad with it, but damaging bosses leads to my specific trigger of bright, white flashing. Go support AbleToPlay and sign up to help curate information on risky games, or games that are suitable for people with limited motor functions, or colorblind players, or deaf players. It’s a great idea and I’m so down with it.

For example, the easiest level in the game is Feudal Japan, where Goemon is. Find the key, slay a dragon, get Goemon, who has the highest basic attack of any character. Trust me, that comes in very handy for the rest of the game. However, in order to get Goemon’s lucky cat sub weapon, you need to have the Konami Mantle. That’s a cape that lets Konami Man and Lady Fly, which also makes them lay down and stretch out their arms heroically, which allows them to squeeze through tight spaces. The Mantle is located in Hell, which in order to get into the majority of the stage, you need King Kong, since only King Kong can jump high enough to get past one specific jump that blocks off the majority of the stage. King Kong is located in the big city. In order to enter the majority of the Big City’s stage, you need Mikey from the Goonies because only he can fit through the tiny hole that blocks off the majority of the stage.

This is where it gets kind of silly. Mikey is the only one who can fit through this hole, which appears early in the Big City stage. It’s a tried and true Metroidvania trope of “find the thing that lets you get through the small gap.” It can be done well. I have no objection to the morphing ball in Metroid. I can believe that makes total sense. But, for Wai Wai World’s suspension of disbelief to work, you have to make believe that none of the other characters can crawl. Crawling, otherwise known as that thing that babies do. And that sh*t in the picture isn’t exactly morphing ball-sized. It’s a teenager-sized gap. You mean to tell me that Simon Belmont, slayer of vampires, the man who walked into Castlevania and didn’t immediately run back out when he saw walking skeletons and the literal personification of death, can’t duck his head just a little bit to save the f*cking world? Really?

So, you have to go to the Goon Docks stage and get Mikey in order to get King Kong in order to get the cape in order to go back through a level you already beat once just to pick up a couple things you missed before. Some games can pull off this kind of design mentality, but Wai Wai World can’t, because the gameplay’s lack of excitement renders the backtracking and replays a complete slog. If the combat along the way had been good, I might have been talking about this design being genius, but instead, Wai Wai World is just so boring that it’s insufferable. It’s so frustrating because I really do get the sense that somewhere in this disaster, there’s a great video game.

The game ends on a Metroid-like “everything is blowing up” escape. You’ll want to use Konami Man or Lady and just fly through it, because if you mess up only once, you won’t have enough time to finish.

Switching characters is too clunky, as it’s done spontaneously by holding up while pressing the A button. That was silly, because it forces you to jump as you change, which causes a lot of problems in the heat of battle. You can’t pause and switch characters, which would have helped. Changing from your main weapon to the sub-weapon is done by holding down and pressing A. If only there was one specific button on the Famicom/NES controller you could use to help SELECT which character you wanted. A select button, if you will. Well, this is once again a foible of the co-op. The Famicom’s controllers are hardwired into it, and the second player controller is lacking START and SELECT buttons, and thus the crappy swapping system Wai Wai World has. Say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. Why couldn’t they also have SELECT switch characters for those of us playing single player? Because guess what? They did do that, sort of! You can use select in the shmup stage to switch between the Gradius ship and the TwinBee ship.

Oh, now you’re using a logical control scheme, for one level, at the end of the game? Oh you bastards. You absolute no good rotten bastards. Are we entirely sure this whole game isn’t some kind of practical joke?

Wai Wai’s final nail is that it doesn’t even feel like a Konami NES game. It feels like one of those modern indie games that tries so hard to feel like a popular 80s style generic action game and comes so close that it triggers the uncanny valley. The best example, and this is going to sound like such a nitpicky thing, but just the act of turning around and attacking is totally different here than it is in Castlevania. When I try to turn around and attack a monster that’s right on my ass in Castlevania, I can usually do it. In Wai Wai, I usually didn’t do the “turn around” part and swung my weapon in front of me. The timing of movement and attacking is all wrong, and in a game that’s based entirely around having enemies spawn right on top of you, that’s a mortal wound. You know, I thought I was heading towards a “competent but boring” NO! verdict, but this is actually a very incompetent game. It’s so technically wrong on so many different levels that whatever the hell Konami was aiming for in terms of style and substance doesn’t even matter. You can’t play with good intentions, only the end results.

This part here, where you get Konami Lady’s sub-weapon, is one of the most broken elements I’ve seen in a game. That looks like a normal elevator in the game, but it’s actually a quick-dropping booby trap. So quick that it’s basically an instakill. You have to wait until you get the Mantle to fly down to it. Well, except the gap is so narrow and the collision so spotty that I died anyway several times from the game deciding I had landed and springing the trap when I clearly was not standing on anything. I mostly didn’t cheat playing this, but I did rewind those incidents, because that was straight-up bullsh*t.

It’s really hard to judge creative design like level layout or the potential of enemy attack patterns when the game’s flaws are entirely mechanical in nature. Of all the retro games I’ve reviewed over the last year or two, no game is begging for a quality of life ROM hack as much as Wai Wai World is. I’d LOVE to see a talented, passionate ROM hacker give this game a tune up that fixes the scrolling, collision, and movement physics. Fix two of those those aspects, any two really, and I think Wai Wai World would at least rise to the level of “solid.” Fix all three and, for all I know, this might be a historically fantastic 8-bit game. Wai Wai World is such a mess that I honestly can’t figure out what its ceiling could have been. But, what I do know is myself and everyone else who hears about this game wants it to be better than it actually is. Even as you’re playing it and coming to the slow realization that what you’re playing is actually quite crappy, you still want this premise and these characters to come together and blow you away. I don’t want a re-release of this. I want a remaster, and I want to see what happens.
Verdict: NO!

THE INDIE GAMER CHICK CASTLEVANIA REVIEW SERIES
 Castlevania (NES) Dracula’s Curse (NES) Adventure (GB) Belmont’s Revenge (GB)
Super Castlevania IV (SNES) Dracula X (SNES) Rondo of Blood (SuperCD²)
Chronicles (PSX) Circle of the Moon (GBA)  Kid Dracula (NES) Kid Dracula (GB)
ROM Hacks (NES) Konami Wai Wai World (NES) Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō (NES)