Hey gang! I wanted to provide a quick update since it’ll be a few more days, maybe a week, before the next IGC review is posted, but it’s going to be a big one. I’m currently working on Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story – The Definitive Review. It’ll contain full reviews for all forty-two games in the collection plus my review of the documentary and emulators. This review is over five-hundred days in the making since I started it in May of 2024 and abandoned it, but those completed reviews were still there, and now I’m finishing it. I’m happy I am, because Gridrunner? Ah, so good. No seriously, guys, SO GOOD. But I still have over two-dozen games left to play and write-up. It’s slow going because Jeff’s games often have hidden layers of complexity and nuances that take a while to get a feel for. But it’s great! I’d never played Gridrunner or Mutant Camels or any of his stuff besides Tempest 2000, even though I’ve known Jeff for a while. So this has been fun and I’m happy to finally knock this set out. After experiencing Gridrunner, safe to say this $30 set is cruising to one of the easiest overall YES! verdicts I’ve given. The documentary portion is probably the smallest of the Gold Master series so far, but it’s solid.
There’s an alternative universe where Jeff instead wrote down “Alpacas!” And that’s literally the only difference between that universe and ours as far as I could tell. Somehow, the company is still called Llamasoft too. Weird, right? Like, as far as alternative realities go, pretty disappointing, really. Oh and they spell “Tuesday” differently. It’s “Twosdays” there. So Jeff wrote “ALPACAS!” and Tuesdays are “Twosdays” and that’s it. No different world leaders or anything. Finland wasn’t wiped out by a zombie virus, at least in that universe. The one I was at before that? Well, I mean, I don’t want to think about it, but this last one still had Starbucks on every corner. F*cking Golden State Warriors are having a disappointing season there too. Even the coffee tastes the same, and coffee always tastes different in alternative realities, but not this one. I was there. Hardly worth the trip through time and space.
After I finish Llamasoft, I’m honestly not sure what comes next. BUT, it’s the holiday season and in recent years I try to have special features that feel like celebrations of gaming. Back in 2022, someone told me that Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include made for great airplane reading during his holiday travels. Made my day, totally, and I’ve heard similar stories from other holiday features, like Game & Watch: The Definitive Review. I f*cking hate boring airplane rides, so the idea that someone wasn’t bored because of my work? God, that made my year. Well, I mean, what was left of it. A week or so was made, but it was MADE dammit. I’ve been really proud of my holiday features too. They’ve been some of the work I’ve been the most proud of, and I want to keep being proud of them, but that requires games that capture my imagination. Last year I had Light Guns and Tetris Forever. This year it’s Llamasoft and whatever comes next. I really want to do Atari 50 (especially since Part One, with all the new games or modern takes on old games, has been up for a while) but I’m going to guess knocking out all 160 retro games in Atari 50 and its DLC sets isn’t going to be possible in the time span I have. I do have other Definitive Review options, including some oddball choices like SNK 40th Anniversary, which I have covered at IGC but not as a full fledged Definitive Review. Gosh, I should have saved Konami SHMUPs for Christmas. Alas.
If I do SNK 40th, I would probably throw in at least some reviews of the games mentioned in that collection’s timeline that weren’t actually included as playable games in the set, such as Vanguard II.
I have Marvel vs. Capcom Collection. I could do the original Capcom Arcade Stadium since my Definitive Review for 2nd Stadium is one of my most popular features ever. I could grab the new Mortal Kombat set. I’m open to ideas. There’s so many collections out there that I could cover. For the first time in a couple years, I don’t have a Taito Milestones set to do at this time of year so my schedule is open. Or, I can do a make believe set. In 2025 I’ve done Kung Fu Master and games inspired by it, I’ve done Adventure Island, and I even did Kid Niki of all things. I could do something like that with another forgotten franchise. Or I can go back to knocking out Nintendo classics just so I have those reviews up for reference for the under the radar stuff. I’m open to ideas. One idea that’s likely a non-starter is a follow up to 2024’s light gun feature as I need the stars to align perfectly to have my family there to play it with me and I can’t guarantee it. But if I were to do it, would you rather have Sega Light Phaser for the Master System or classic coin-op light gun games?
Colecovision: The Definitive Review could be fun.
In 2026, I’m hoping for a lot more inspiring sets. I’m guessing an Intellivision collection is coming from Digital Eclipse and Atari, but I’m only guessing. I would REALLY hope for a modern release of Activision Anthology, only using the Gold Master format with interviews from the people who were there. I’ll even settle for a hefty ($30 or more) update to Atari 50 for it. It fits, right? Or a modern Midway Arcade Treasures. My dream Gold Master release is Dragon’s Lair, even though I already have a review up for Dragon’s Lair Trilogy. But we don’t have a collection for Dragon’s Lair that has all the important behind the scenes features, and I can’t imagine a game that would have more interesting details. I want that, and more importantly, I think gaming needs it, but the window for it is closing. It’s a morbid thing to think about, but it has to be said that a lot of golden age developers are getting up there in age and when they’re gone, that’s it. The window is closed forever on hearing their stories directly from them. This is why I’m hoping other companies get their rears in gear and do their retro sets using similar formats to Digital Eclipse, with interviews and behind the scenes stuff. Look, collections are great, but if you really want to erase the cynical cash grab vibe that can come with them, you need those extra features. That extra effort shows it’s a labor of love first and a money-making venture second, which ironically probably will make more money. Dear publishers: I’m on your side here. I’m your target audience, a totally average gamer. If that’s what I’m into, it’s what everyone is into. We’re looking for inspirational stories, and the golden age of games are full of those stories.
Once Upon a Katamari Available on All Major Platforms Played on an Xbox Series X Released October 24, 2025 Developed by RENGAME Published by Bandai Namco Entertainment $39.99 smacked into a wall in the making of this review. This Review was played ONLY on an Xbox Series X.
IMPORTANT: As I was finishing this review, it was announced that UPDATES AND DLC ARE COMING, but unless they add more original, fresh level concepts, it won’t flip my verdict. The DLC is just more music and accessories. Nope, that won’t be enough. But, I try to be fair so I will play post-patchwork and write an update in the near future. This is why you stopped reviewing new games, Cathy, ya dummy.
SPOILER WARNING THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES LEVEL THEMES, THE END GAME, AND SPOILS THE PLOT SHORT SUMMARY: AN UNSATISFYING REHASH MY VERDICT IS A FIRM NO!
Party like it’s 2005! Let’s all wear Ugg boots and gossip about Paris Hilton! In fairness, this is one of two new concepts I really enjoyed. The innovation? Wind. The theme? Tumbleweeds. That’s not a bad idea. There’s a lot of “not a bad idea” ideas in Once Upon a Katamari. I can’t believe I didn’t like this more.
“I hope the next Katamari isn’t a REROLL, but a completely modern Katamari that feels modern. I say that because I can’t say I’ve played a game that maximizes the Katamari concept’s potential. I don’t think it exists yet.“
That’s what I said in my review for We ♥ Katamari: REROLL. Cue the sad trombone noise, because THAT game still doesn’t exist. Once Upon A Katamari, the first brand new Katamari game on a console since 2009, still looks and feels like a game from twenty years ago. It’s not like Katamari Damacy ever felt cutting edge to begin with (even if it actually was), but it could get away with it because it was such a novel concept of a game. Now it’s 2025, and Katamari as a gameplay mechanic is established and even part of pop culture. So my demoralizing disappointment in Once Upon a Katamari mostly confirmed my suspicion that I would not be nostalgic for the way games looked in the PS1/PS2 era. But it’s not just the outdated graphics that deflated my experience. I was enjoying the new game when I first started playing it. The idea that I would be writing such a largely negative review never entered my mind, but as the game went along, I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I thought I would be. Finally I had to admit that this is too much of a rehash and I’m kind of over the same old thing.
I did plow through to get 100% of the achievements. The final unlock was a second stage based around rolling up the cousins, and ONLY the cousins. Those were both two of the most boring Katamari stages I’ve played. You can also see my create-a-cousin at the bottom. That was the best I could do at making a cousin who looks like Sweetie, my mascot.
Now, I really, really love the core gameplay of the Katamari Damacy franchise. I was VERY excited when it was announced. I want you to keep that in mind because I didn’t expect to be as unhappy with Once Upon a Katamari as I am. I’m so frustrated that, rather than rebooting the franchise with a much-needed graphics overhaul and a greater emphasis on high-score chasing and speed running, they just made a glorified level pack. One that, frankly, doesn’t care all that much about scores or times and is still as self-congratulatory about its characters as every other game in the series after the first one. What used to be a charming and addictive experience is now shackled by a publisher and developers that dig their heels in and refuse to evolve Katamari past its original style.
Never change. Seriously, never change and continue to be a B-list game with middling sales. I feel like an idiot for caring. Here’s a thought: for those fans who buy these games because they think the obnoxious characters are the bees’ knees, make them optional. Let players who only care about high scores and fast times toggle-off the pop-up dialog.
The time travel theme had me hyped, and while it proves that it can work at times to freshen up the concept in a “whole new settings” kind of way, the gameplay is firmly stuck in 2004-2009. The different eras rarely feel utilized to their fullest effect, with levels that often don’t play up to their strengths and instead just recycle the same old gimmicks. Rolling up dinosaurs? Sign me up! Using that setting for the dull-as-hell “collect only 50 objects” level? Not so much. Besides, after over two decades, the camera and the physics just are not getting better, which is going to override any sense of newness the time travel theme could have added. The action is constantly being obscured by walls, with many stages being worse about that than others. Too many indoor settings are based around closed-in spaces, which doesn’t really work in a game where you continually grow in size and are incentivized to grab everything in sight, including stuff stashed against walls.
Even when the ball is small and you’re inside areas that are hypothetically vast and open, it doesn’t matter because things will inevitably block the camera, and that’s not even counting all the pop-up texts that happen dead center in the middle of the playfield. If you don’t think cameras have come far in games, try playing Super Mario 64 and Mario Odyssey back to back. Camera development in 3D games has come a long way since 2004, and that’s why Once Upon a Katamari’s style of throwback is obnoxious instead of nostalgic.
Like, hey, there’s a level set in ancient Egypt where you have to roll up mummies? That sounds awesome! Crying shame about how they closed in the walls so tight that you’re constantly unable to see what you’re doing. Characters and moving objects are still set along tracks and have no complicated behavior and look as blocky and ugly as they last did in 2009, and all those problems ultimately work against the satisfaction of rolling mummies up. It’s weird that they didn’t comprehend that things that weren’t big problems from 2004 to 2009 are going to be big problems in 2025 because gaming has come so far.
Even the “roll-up the planets you made/meteors you earned/stardust” is back and basically the same as before. I’d say they pulled a Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens but even that at least felt like a rehash that utilized modern technology.
There is no better feature a sequel can have than embracing innovation. We’ve already experienced Katamari with all these problems. You know what we haven’t experienced? Katamari WITHOUT these problems. That’s what they should’ve done to freshen up the gameplay. They could have recycled the same old gimmicks until the cowbears come home and it still would have felt new and modern if they had fixed all the problems that have been part of this franchise from the start. Give us the smoothest, most intuitive and hang-up-free Katamari of all-time. They didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: new levels and themes are great, but if all the bad parts come along for the ride and some of the levels are so similar to old ones that they feel more like remixes than outright new stages, well, then it’s just an expensive level pack, isn’t it?
And the objectives mostly are direct rehashes (like Cowbear) or variants of old ones (instead of a sumo wrestler, it’s now a Samurai). Very few feel genuinely original.
I don’t know if the problems are genuinely worse than ever, or if it only seems like it. A good example of what I mean is the act of climbing. Climbing has always been hit or miss in Katamari. You won’t know until you reach the top of what you’re climbing if you’re going to be knocked-back off by an invisible wall or a tiny bump in your Katamari ball. This has been a part of the franchise since the beginning and it seems to be even worse now. I was constantly banging and recoiling off the top of all walls great and small, including ones I should have been big enough to climb. In the old west level, one of the crowns is hidden on a roof. I needed to replay the stage three times because I would bang off the top of the ladder and get knocked back down. Since the knock-back when you bang can be brutal, sorry but after twenty years, they needed to fix it. Even WHEN you need to climb feels inelegant or outright wrong. Topography that by all rights should be small hills, bumps, lips, or ramps aren’t, even late in the game. Like this:
You can see the 12M checkpoint barrier a little in front of me. You’ll also note I’m close to 2M bigger than the checkpoint AND EVEN THEN I have to slow-climb up this tiny little bump in the terrain that outright failed to activate more than once. It’s terrible level design.
What you’re seeing in that picture should be a bump or a slope, but it’s a wall that requires you to press up against the surface and slowly push up it. I mean, if you’re lucky. Sometimes the climbing mechanic just straight-up doesn’t activate. This is one of those situations where I thought maybe my controller was broken (I did end up wearing out an analog stick playing this game, but that controller was old). I had tons of moments where I attempted to climb a small hill or a ladder and the damn ball just idled without moving at all despite the fact that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I could excuse crap like that for twenty year old versions of this game, when the idea and gameplay was still new. Katamari ain’t new anymore. How could they not fix anything after twenty-one years? Arguably the only improvements are the draw distance is well done, at least on Xbox, and there’s now a single button you can press to dash. However, if you dash too many times in a row you lose it for a stretch.
I don’t know what the answer is, but I know that in 2025 it should be possible to have action not be obscured like this.
I also don’t remember getting jammed as much in any Katamari game. It’s not just because of the items, the magnet and the rocket, either. The magnet has a similar effect to the King Shock from Katamari Forever, and it can absolutely trap you in areas, especially if you grow big enough to no longer be able to squeeze past any exits. It happened a few times, because the magnet has range and is able to pull things past gaps the ball already can’t fit past. While it’s still very fun to use and adds a lot of post-game high score chasing, it also is capable of ruining your run and has an undeniable inelegance to it. But again, at least that backfire effect feels kind of like a video game type of hazard. Getting stuck between two objects though? Not so much, but it happens enough to be notable. In Once Upon a Katamari, I got stuck in ways that I literally couldn’t believe I couldn’t wiggle out of, like this:
Yeah, I’m really stuck there on basically nothing, and remained stuck long after that clip ended. I have no clue how I did it. Oh sure, the one time it feels like my Katamari doesn’t bang off something I can’t roll up and I become ensnared by it. Maybe it’s just a product of poorly thought-out layouts. While wrapping up this review, I realized only two stages made me sit-up in my chair. In the biggest Katamari game ever. There’s like fifty stages, give or take, and two really stood out. Two. And I had a week to think about that, too. Sigh. The best parts of Once Upon a Katamari are undeniably addictive in that “just one more game” kind of way, but they’re also unmemorable. The best levels are, you know, fine. The magnet is fun and probably the highlight of the game because it added the most value to the experience. There’s also a time-freezing stopwatch that, yes, also stops the timer and adds some much needed strategic flexibility. Though I’m not entirely convinced that the locations of the items were precisely chosen to maximize player options and decision making, the game is better off for having them. The other two items are nowhere near as fun. The rocket just led to a whole lot of banging into things and the radar lasts too long.
Here’s a tip for those who actually give a squirt about your scores: any item you haven’t used when you finish a level will carry over to the next stage you play, no matter which stage it is. After I finished all the levels and found all the hidden crowns/cousins/presents, I would play Make It Bigger 1 and bank a magnet, then go play the level I’m score chasing. Additionally, if you reset the stage or finish it and choose to replay it instead of banking the final result, you’ll get the item back! You can replay it as many times as you need with that starting item.
Also, while the radar item remains valuable in levels where you’re searching for specific items (like “Tag You’re It” Cousins-search levels or Pharaoh’s Request), for other levels, it’s rendered useless once you’ve found the present, crowns, and cousins. The game could have rewarded players for 100%ing those stages by replacing the now useless radar with another magnet or rocket, or hell, player’s choice! That’d be cool! But nope, the radar remains and since it takes a while to wear off and you’re capped at one item at a time, it becomes another thing you actively want to avoid. It’s just another sign of how little thought was given to the big picture of the player’s experience. Hell, the level layouts feel like that in general. They might as well just make the stages randomly generated for how inelegant the object placement is. And while I’m whining about items, the camera pulls away when you grow enough to reach a checkpoint to show the physical location of it, and it doesn’t instantly teleport back to you. It moves through the playfield while the timer is going and the game is live. It only takes a split second, but if an item is active, you might lose some of the time you get with it.
I thought all the “find all the specific things” stages were middling at best. In Ancient Rome, you have to locate eight philosophers. If their locations were randomly generated, I might have liked these more. But they’re not, and there’s also no online leaderboards. Once I got an S ranking for this stage and all the items out of it, there really was no point in coming back to it since it just isn’t very fun after the first time. The layout is later recycled for “collect roses” which is much more enjoyable.
Everything about Once Upon a Katamari reminds me that Namco is the same company that didn’t understand why Pac-Man was a hit and bet on the wrong aspects of it for the first couple sequels. The gameplay and the high score/fastest time chasing are why Katamari is a viable release for Namco in 2025, and they didn’t even know that. You can’t see what your high scores/best times are or even what your rankings on levels are from the quick travel menu. That really solidifies my theory that neither the developer nor the publisher understood what keeps players coming back to Katamari. I mean, to not even have the rankings listed? To have no quick access list of what levels you’ve S-tiered or gotten the three benchmark coins from? Here’s what the quick travel menus look like:
You have to manually go to the level, and not just the level, but then you have to click the level and do a “skip dialog thing” to load the “confirm you want to play this level” pop-up and THAT’S what lists your scores. You can also go view “the cosmos” but that’s several steps as well. What the hell? There’s also nothing that lists which levels you’ve earned meteors on, or if you even can earn a meteor at all on a level. I *love* getting those meteors. It always feels like an accomplishment. That they’re not even listed in the cosmos screen, a “bonus feature” in the hub world’s “S.S. Prince” spaceship is just mind blowing. There’s no leaderboards at all, local or online so you can only see your absolute #1 biggest size or fastest time, assuming you didn’t trade a best time for a lower score for whatever reason (you can do that). Hey Namco, you might not realize this, but you have the perfect old school arcade scoring game here. Twenty years later and you still don’t see that?
I earned multiple meteors on some stages. Before I got down to 16 seconds, I got meteors with different names (I think) for slower times. So, like do they ALL count? Only the best one? I’d like to see a list of which ones I got, but Namco and RENGAME seem to believe nobody cares and people are just here for the soundtrack (and I thought this was the weakest soundtrack of any of the console games, easily) and the self-congratulatory story.
Once Upon a Katamari is the least concerned with your best and worst times of any game in the franchise so far. There’s not even an achievement for getting all S-rankings either, which, hey, I guess that means you don’t have to stress doing good on stages that aren’t fun, which is like half the stages anyway. The one thing they did add is three tiers of object-collecting benchmarks for most stages that earns you coins that you can spend to get new facial expressions or gestures for the create-a-cousin feature. The currency system is fine but benchmarks are just dumb and you can only earn the lowest available in each run, plus it only starts after you beat a level for the first time. I would have preferred hiding the coins in the stage. Oh and, once again, you can’t check and see what levels you have or haven’t got the coins from using the quick travel menu. It gets worse. The big climatic stage where you roll up the universe and all the stars? That has no recorded score attached to it at all. I’m not kidding! Oh, there’s a score. Look, it shows it and everything!
Look, a score! There it is, in the corner!
But it doesn’t record that score. It just lists the level. Who cares? It’s only the climax of the f*cking game, with a level populated by objects YOU created. Why would you want to keep track of how well you’ve done with that? Pssh, what are you, some nerd who actually cares about scores? AND IT GETS EVEN WORSE! Three eternal stages are included, like in past Katamari games. In older games, while they were “just for funsies” levels, they still kept track of your high scores. Once Upon a Katamari’s eternal stages don’t. Again, they tell you a score, but they don’t record it. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t complete the object catalog using eternal levels. I mean, unless I rolled up everything in Eternal 3 and somehow didn’t get a single new object for the catalog. So the eternal modes serve no purpose at all except to create stardust that will be inserted into a level that also doesn’t keep track of high scores. WHY EVEN INCLUDE THEM THEN?
They really leaned heavily into the action-blocking dialog in this one.
The poor menus, lack of caring about the actual scores, and baffling DLC model that’s focused almost entirely on music instead of gameplay makes me think that Namco and RENGAME are operating under the mistaken belief that people play Katamari for anything but the gameplay. That the real appeal is limited only to the famous soundtracks or the “humorous” and/or “quirky” King of All Cosmos. The music of this Katamari is the least catchy in the series so far. Not a single earworm. Nothing like, say, Katamari on the Swing from We Love. As for the King? Holy f*ck. Okay, maybe he was cute and funny in the first game, but he’s since become the single worst character in the history of video games. He just ruins everything. His bullsh*t isn’t funny. It’s just obnoxious. It’s 2025 and the King of All Cosmos still has dialog blocking the screen. If you don’t move your hands from the dual stick tank controls (in a game where you usually don’t want to stop moving, mind you) to skip the dialog that blocks the screen during live gameplay, it might linger on the screen for quite a while. Here’s me beating As Fast As You Can 2 in sixteen seconds.
See how much of that sixteen seconds had text blocking the screen? It begs the question, ahem, WHAT THE ACTUAL F*CK IS WRONG WITH YOU DEVELOPERS? Did you not get attention as children? This is about as charming as a clown honking a horn, spritzing water, and pieing people in the face at a mass casualty funeral for stillborn puppies! People have been complaining about this since 2004 and they just keep doubling down on it like it’s the thing that got the game to 2025 and not, you know, the ball and the rolling stuff up part! Like every other Katamari game, the same dialog repeats every single level. Whether you’re rolling up cousins or ninjas or bowling pins, you will see the same dialog block the screen every single goddamned replay, and this in a game that heavily encourages replaying levels. The only exception are the presents since, once you have found them, they don’t return in each replay.
And in this game, it’s not just the King of All Cosmos that blocks the action. For whatever reason, they placed the “your Katamari is as big as…..” boxes in the center of the screen even though there’s plenty of non-action-blocking room at the bottom of the screen. What the actual f*ck? What….. the actual…… f*ck?!
Speaking of doubling down, levels that completely go against the frantic nature of Katamari are still here and horrible as ever. Cowbear, the level that ends the very first time you roll up a cow or bear because ain’t that quirky is back. Just like previous games, the developer’s definition of what constitutes a cow or a bear is trollishly open to interpretation. Run over a single carton of milk that you couldn’t see because the camera is still one of the worst of any 3D action game? The level is over because a carton of milk counts as a cow, even though there isn’t a cow on the package. Well that’s just ridiculous. Saying a carton of milk counts as a cow is like saying a yeast infection is a baby. What’s really infuriating is that the king states the rules require you to catch a cow or a bear. Um, milk isn’t a creature. You don’t “catch” it, nor is it caught in the “catch!” sense. They’re sitting on the ground. YEAH, I’M BEING THAT PETTY! This gimmick f*cking sucks and they keep bringing it back! Petty disappointment is all I’ve ever gotten out of it.
How does touching a piece of cardboard with a picture of a cow or bear on it constitute catching a cow or bear?
Either way, the fast-paced, intense Katamari gameplay is dropped and you’re forced to inch your way through the level while trying to avoid signs that have pictures of cows or tiny little bear wind-up toys, because those count. It wasn’t fun the first time in 2005, and twenty years later it’s still a slog. The best thing I can say about it: at least the level layout isn’t as bad as it was in We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever. BUT, it’s still a pretty boring layout and it’s just not fun. It was never fun, and I don’t get how anyone could enjoy it. It feels like a completely different game. Other returning stinkers include several “only pick up 50” levels. Again, you have to heel-toe your way through the levels despite spotty physics and a terrible camera, trying desperately to avoid the tiny things. I don’t like them, but I could have tolerated having one in the game. There’s (checks notes) more than one, so now I hate the whole concept of 50-only because too many of them replace the type of levels I want to play, which were really just “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels.
It looks like a Koosh Ball but actually it’s just one of the laziest levels in the history of Katamari, where the object is to roll-up icicles. It’s also one of the smallest levels ever in a Katamari game. This was so uninspired that I was genuinely embarrassed for the developers after playing it. It was kind of sad, really.
Sadly, it’s not the only “high concept” stinker. New to this game (I think, at least, my brain seems to have deleted all the handheld games from memory) is a level where you have to roll up sweet, sugary food objects and avoid non-sweet foods. Instead of just trying to create a large ball, you’re trying to maximize the sweetness of the ball to 100%. The setting is a vast open air market and food court, and things like plates don’t count towards the objective.
The drinks? They’re like milkshakes or something. Those are what you want. The things with the caps? That’s mayonnaise. Not sweet, and they come with a hefty penalty. Okay, now go have fun with this totally well thought-out level!
That doesn’t sound like a terrible idea at all, but such a specific concept requires beefing-up the graphics, play control, and camera so that it’s easier to tell things apart and you’re not constantly getting screwed by a camera. Oh and maybe ditch the King of All Cosmos for levels like this since this requires closely paying attention to what’s in front of you instead of just rolling up everything tinier than you. And this is why doubling down on boxy retro graphics, the same 2004 “enemy” behavior patterns, and the screen-blocking text of the King of All Cosmos crosses the line from a bad idea to outright self-sabotage.
In America, ketchup is legally a vegetable.
What could have been a highlight in a modern game is a terrible level when you’re a glorified expansion of a 2000s game. Telling sweet things apart from non-sweet things isn’t intuitive. You have to replay the level and brute force memorize a good portion of the items to know what column they count in. Telling a pepper apart from an apple would be easier if you used that space age technology to actually look good. Not only that, but the scoring system sucks, because most of the sweet things only cause an incremental bump in the sweetness of the ball (with exceptions, like the shaved ice), but the wrong foods come with a harsh penalty. So while building the sweetness is slow, losing it happens too quickly. You know, I wish I could play this layout without the gimmick. It would have been one of the more fun layouts.
Yeah, yeah, you’re supposed to play it multiple times and get a feel for what’s sweet and what isn’t, but nuts to that. The “tofu” looks like a dessert to me. Also, would this be a good time to point out there’s tons of sweet variants of tofu. I once had a tofu custard that was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had, then I forgot the specific name. I think it was Douhua. Try it if you ever see it on a menu! It’s fantastic! It also kind of proves that this whole “sweet/not-sweet” formula needed to be completely unambiguous. How about adding stink lines to the wrong stuff? Oh wait, that would probably somehow ruin the retro look.
Not every new concept is a dud, though most of the “new” gimmick stages are just reworked versions of old stages. Remember the snowman level? They took the same basic “cover as much of the ground as possible” concept and made it worthwhile by theming a stage around rolling a water ball around a desert. The hook is that you have to continuously dunk the ball in water sources to keep it moist. While it diverges from the core Katamari gameplay and that normally annoys me, it’s fine as a one-off side quest. The racing stage that I loved before returns, only this time it’s a boat race, and it’s just as fun and just as easy. Come to think of it, the whole game is crazy easy. I only failed on one level in my entire week-long play session, and it’s another returning stage: the fireball that you have to build up to light a central end-goal fire, which might be the single worst-designed layout in any Katamari game, and given how lazy that Koosh Ball level is, that’s saying something.
The only bright spot is I’m pretty sure the fire can’t just spontaneously go out. But I died multiple times on this stage from running into water. I never once lost on any other stage and usually got the S ranking within three attempts.
The “light the fire” stage takes place in Roman times and has a coliseum setting. But, they fashioned the layout like a maze, and I don’t mean like a Pac-Man style maze, but an actual “how do I get out of this thing?” maze, only while using the people in the audience as the walls. You have to build up the ball as big as you can and find your way to the center to light a fire. I’m almost certain you won’t ever be able to get big enough to roll people up and the object is to wiggle around the maze. It’s a really boring idea because there’s no room for spontaneity or to really even create your own strategy. It’s too narrow and too railed. It’s a f*cking maze, and Katamari is at its best when you’re in a big, open area where all the corridors are wide. The type of stages that are so vast that it’s overwhelming at first and you have to discover the best path to grow the ball. Also, the thing about mazes is they don’t usually offer replay value once you know the solution. This one is no different. Once you know the routes, the thing that made the stage “special” is over, but unlike other stages, the act of collecting isn’t fun. The pathways are too compact.
In this level you have to not only make the ball bigger, but you need to score X amount of beverages. Other stages have you grab coins or wooden objects and you can still fail if you don’t get the minimum, regardless of the ball size. This isn’t a horrible idea to evolve the gameplay. I still never lost from it, but there were a few close calls. Like “one over the number I needed at the last second” close. It was exciting, and that’s when the game works. They didn’t do that enough to justify $40 or even $20 in my opinion. If I had paid $15 for this, I don’t think I’d be as disappointed. Frustrated and angry? Sure. But not disappointed.
The things that would make up for what the game doesn’t do aren’t here. Again, no online leaderboards. No local leaderboards. The “take a picture of the Namco characters” thing from We Love Katamari REROLL that completely hooked me is gone. Each stage has three hidden crowns but they’re stupid easy to find. The cousins are too, while the presents offer a bit more of a challenge sometimes. For one, I had to look up the location, and it’s because it’s buried in an arbitrary spot on the snow level and only occasionally pops out like a prairie dog. We Love Katamari REROLL and 2009’s Katamari Forever’s hidden trinkets were so satisfying to find. The crowns aren’t, and I know they could have done a lot more. Like, why not hide record albums that unlock the legacy soundtrack? That would have kept everyone, including myself, playing after the credits rolled. Well, there is a legacy soundtrack, but sold separately as a fairly expensive DLC set that doesn’t even add new levels. Right before I published this, updates with new DLC were announced, but they don’t add new levels or new hidden items.
The coin stage is an example of a potentially fun level that keeps tripping over its own feet.
Let me be clear: Once Upon a Katamari isn’t some kind of face-palming disaster. If you’re incapable of getting bored playing this series, this is the biggest game in the franchise yet. There’s tons of levels and all the hamfisted quirkiness that’s been so awkward and exhausting since the second game was a love letter to itself is still here. If you just want a time travel-themed expansion pack of We Love Katamari or Katamari Forever, that’s basically what this is. And actually, I still think you’ll be disappointed. The main “As Big As You Can” or “As Fast As You Can” levels are limited to one setting, Japan, where it scales five times over the course of the game. Other themes might have “As Big As You Can” levels, but they usually don’t scale, and certainly don’t five times. Among the gimmick levels, I’m pretty sure only the returning “feed someone to make them fat but really it’s just an oblong starting ball” has three distinct tiers that open new areas. It really makes it clear that the theme is mostly skin deep, because the primary “as big as you can” or “as fast as you can” levels are so similar that I couldn’t really tell a difference between the new one from Once Upon and the old ones from past games. The big climax is rolling up the King, Queen, and the King’s father. It’s been done.
For what it’s worth, I did enjoy these levels, even if they have frequent camera issues because this time around, the settings are mostly indoors and involve going up and down flights of stairs. The “feed someone” theme is also kind of messed up when you think about it. Like, imagine if, instead of a sumo wrestler or a samurai warrior, it was a goose and the object was to force feed it to create foie gras. It would be the single most controversial game of the decade. But it’s a human and they’re asking for it so it’s okay. I mean, unless you intend the human to be foie gras, because that’s just delicious wrong. I meant wrong! Really!
Even the plot of the King of All Cosmos accidentally blowing up the Earth is here. “OMG he did it juggling a relic and being a show off! LOL, right?” Yea, I guess? I mean, that’s almost the exact same joke as the first game, ain’t it? I don’t get it. To me Katamari Damacy as a series is no different than one of those stand-up comedians who has used the same fifteen minute set for their entire careers. When your job is to literally make jokes, why are you telling the same jokes after twenty years? It gets old. And the joke of the Katamari games really isn’t funny when the characters and their “quirks” cost the actual gameplay so dearly.
A stage in the “present day” time era is basically “roll up all the food stuff, then roll yourself into a deep fryer.” This was the best level in the game, and the most fresh-feeling. What made it stand out is that it’s almost laid out like a platform game, with timing-based moving platforms and a heavy emphasis on very narrow pathways and pits that reset you beneath you. There’s never been anything quite like it from this franchise, and it feels fresh, and they decorated it in a way that’s memorably bonkers without feeling like they’re trying too hard.
Why does Katamari Damacy as a gameplay mechanic even need a plot? The Mario Kart games don’t have a plot. They didn’t come up with a reason for all the Mario universe characters to race. They just do it, and Katamari could be that way. Why not? You don’t have to drop the characters. Just drop the bullsh*t around the characters. Let the players play the game. Focus on high scores and fast times. That’s the fun, not the plot, and if after twenty years they don’t get that, they’ve lost the plot. Hell, they might as well have done this as DLC for We Love Katamari REROLL because, mechanically, the differences are so subtle that nothing really stood out to me, and I played the sh*t out of both. You’re also not appealing to anyone new to the franchise. This is made only for the fans, and that’s no way to grow a brand.
This release makes no sense at all. I was hyped for this, maybe too much. A big reason why this review took me forever to finish was I was genuinely stressing whether or not my disappointment was because I gave my hopes up for something better. My family didn’t help. The kids, the oldest of whom is 14, think Katamari looks fun, but not in a “drop what you’re doing and try it out” type of way. They actually thought I was weird for being so excited about Once Upon A Katamari during its introduction during the July 2025 Nintendo Direct. It’s just not a big deal to them. None of them needed to play it the way my generation did. I didn’t get a straight answer on why, either. They all agreed it looked fun, but not enough that any of them wanted to play it with me. That tells me the freshness is gone for good as long as THIS is Katamari. But, creatively dead doesn’t mean dead-dead. Katamari is still the PERFECT format for a raw, no-frills high score driven, fastest time franchise. If arcades could do games like this in 1980, Katamari’s gameplay would have been a Pac-Man level hit. Don’t be old school in body. Be old school in the soul. That’s where the good stuff comes from. Verdict: NO! *If you can get it for $14.99 or under, and you lower your expectations, and you have plenty of disposable income, meh, whatever, it’s fine for that. $40 for the same old game and very few bells & whistles like leaderboards or even proper menus and high score tracking is a slap in the face.
Haunted Castle aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: Arcade First Released December 26, 1987 Designed by Masaaki Kukino Developed by Konami Sold Separately via Arcade Archives
“I’m almost certain you don’t understand how flashing works.” By the way, his actual boss sprite looks nothing like this.
Sigh. Alright, let’s get this over with. Rip the bandage off. Pop this pimple. Yank out this white hair. You see, I just realized I’m only a few games away from having reviews posted for every 80s and 90s Castlevania game (not counting threeLCDgames or the cancelled Game.Com game, even though I have the ROM for it). I want to achieve that, but that means I have to actually sit down and review Haunted Castle, and it’s not exactly bad in a way that’s all that interesting. Hell, it doesn’t even have the benefit of being the worst Castlevania game. That honor goes to Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy (which is technically called THE Castlevania Adventure), and I’d rather be stuck with Haunted Castle than that game. Don’t mistake that as a complement, though I do genuinely have a couple small complements to make in this game that my friend Dave speculates only exists because Konami was pissy of having to cut Nintendo in on a third of Vs. Castlevania’s profits (which I intended to also review but it wasn’t so interesting I could get a whole review out of it).
“Oh, real mature, Cathy!”
First Complement: the soundtrack is really good. Second Complement: some of the settings and enemy sprites aren’t too bad. Really! There’s a convincing fog effect. The game’s version of “The Creature” is probably the closest it ever looked to being like the famous version of the Universal Studios Frankenstein.
Even if it’s a boring boss fight. Then again ALL of Haunted Castle’s bosses are boring.
There’s a genuinely spooky haunted dining room, complete with dinner and kitchen utensils attacking you. A graveyard catches fire and it looks threatening and/or menacing. While MOST of the settings are boring, it’s not all boring. And even when the settings are at their most lifeless, heck, I’ve still seen a lot worse than Haunted Castle’s tour offers. Granted, Simon’s sprite is distracting and his walking animation doesn’t feel confident or heroic. A lot of the sprite work is solid, but others are laughably pathetic. Like, look at this screenshot of blue-haired He-Man battling sawed-off Benjamin Franklin:
It’s supposed to be the fleamen/hunchbacks, but it looks EXACTLY like Ben Franklin. Then again, they did find over 1,200 pieces of human skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s home. I suppose we can’t completely rule out that he worked for Dracula and was possibly performing a ritual to bring him back in the Americas in the 1700s. If you’re reading this Konami, there’s your plot for the next Castlevania right there!
And now I’m out of nice things to say about Haunted Castle. No shortage of bad things to say, though to be honest, my heart isn’t even into that. It’s just not a very interesting game. The thing that stinks the most is probably the collision detection. Your hit box is just a square that feels much larger than you are, and then enemy attack patterns are tailored to take advantage of the wonky collision box. When it comes to enemies, their collision is much more sprite-accurate, so bats and projectiles require direct hits to kill. They also like to have enemies such as zombies or mummies spawn right next to you, and since ducking or jumping still feature a massive hit box, evasive maneuvers are too hard to pull off and defense is NEVER intuitive.
Platforming is kept to a bare minimum, which didn’t bother me. Most of the arcade barbarian subgenre of the late 80s had roughly the same amount of jumping and moving platforms. If nothing else, Haunted Castle’s maps are boilerplate. That’s all the proof you need that it’s the action that fails this game, not the settings.
So, for example, the mummies begin firing projectiles as soon as they finish spawning. They take multiple hits to kill, AND AGAIN, your box is massive. It’s not a guaranteed life loss, but the resulting gameplay isn’t fun because you’re reacting in anticipation of what this means for your collision box, and not the enemy itself. That’s TERRIBLE for immersion, and action games that aren’t immersive are in bad, bad shape regardless of anything else the game does right. It’s like starting a footrace by immediately stepping on a rusty nail. Even turning around to scratch-out enough distance to avoid their attacks, or to counterattack something else chasing you, usually isn’t effective because of how cramped everything is. Haunted Castle is remarkable because it does NOTHING right as an action game.
These things are an example of the developers crossing the line into full-on trollish design. You kill a skeleton and it turns into these ghosts that are too fast moving and too spongy to slay. Your only option is to start backing away as soon as you strike the killing blow on the skeleton and then duck out of the way of the glorified torpedo it launches at you. This isn’t actually a bad idea in a vacuum. If Haunted Castle had a larger variety of enemies, set-pieces or even styles of layout, this might actually be a great idea for a danger element, especially if you fine tune the layout based around the fact that this will happen. But given the flat, uninteresting layouts and overall lack of satisfying combat, these instead come across as the developer trolling for the sake of it.
It’s an example of counter-optimization, as your attacks are not suitable at all for closed-quarters combat, and almost all the basic enemies are fine-tuned specifically to crowd you and be just above or just below your attack box. The developers did such a good job of crafting and polishing the trollishness that there’s really no excuse for any bad aspect of Haunted Castle. It is polished, but not in a way that’s done for the benefit of entertainment. It’s a quarter-sucker, and nothing more. This was pretty foolish too, because somewhere along the way, they forgot that games that aren’t fun don’t suck as many quarters. Haunted Castle’s fixation on near-miss combat just makes it boring to the point of exhaustion. Even challenging arcade games need to be give-and-take, but this just takes. It skews too heavily in favor of the enemies. Because of that, literally everything else about the game would have to be amazing just to make Haunted Castle rise to the level of overall mediocrity.
It’s worth noting I played two versions of Haunted Castle (out of five total) for this feature, the ones known as VERSION N, which is the initial Japanese release, and VERSION M, which is the second North American ROM and the one notorious for its hard difficulty. Regardless of which version you play, the lack of intuitive collision detection is always the worst problem. I assure you in this shot, my sprite wasn’t anywhere near those fireballs or the bat. You can feel the difference regardless of the difficulty toggles by paying attention to the bats. Version M’s bats attack in a much more cruel, hard to avoid way.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game’s design is just really dull. Now I’m not expecting complicated or even ambitious level design from a coin-op, and I can put up with a game based around mostly flat corridors. Hell, I gave YES! verdicts to Rastan Saga and Cadash in Taito Milestones 3: The Definitive Review. Haunted Castle isn’t that different from those games, with its large sprites and flat, straight-line corridors, minimum jumping, and heavy combat focus. They’re all members of the same graduating class, more or less. But Taito’s beefy action arcaders had a better sense of timing and spacing with their straight line corridors, and even at their most unfair, they never felt as unfair as Haunted Castle. Those games have problems. LOTS of problems. But they also remembered to maintain the sense of entertainment that’s part of that agreement players have with coin-ops. You’re paying to have a good time, after all. Haunted Castle forgot the good time part. I think the design team assumed the settings and connection to the popular Famicom/NES game would be enough by itself to keep players pumping cash, and obviously myself and a lot of critics over the years think they were just plain wrong.
In the opening cutscene, Dracula was white, had jet black hair, and was clean shaven. Now he has green skin, gray hair, and wears a Vincent Price mustache. Simon, you know it gives me no pleasure to say this, but you have to consider the possibility that your new wife did this to him. And he has superpowers! You don’t, so imagine what she’ll do to you! Maybe you should just let her finish him off, because the dude looks downright sickly.
If Simon’s Quest is Exhibit A in the case of Konami not having a clue what they had with Castlevania, then Haunted Castle is clearly Exhibit B. I really think I’m on to something here. It’s not hard to imagine that Konami likely mistook Castlevania’s appeal as being ONLY tied to the superficial elements like the castle or Simon or Dracula and not to the fine-tuned, satisfying combat and heavily optimized level layouts. So perhaps the most positive thing I can say about Haunted Castle is the same thing I said about Simon’s Quest: they needed these failures to point them in the right direction.
This final lead-up to the Dracula fight is so embarrassing. It’s just a typical collapsing bridge sequence, maybe the longest example of this trope ever done in a game like this. You cannot stop to fight all the bats that are spaced out along the way and eventually have to accept a few life slaps. The collapsing bridge trope ALWAYS gets my heart racing, and it’s a damning indictment of how bad Haunted Castle is that it takes one of my favorite gimmicks and runs it into the ground so badly that it becomes boring AND THEN IT STILL KEEPS GOING! By the way, this is the ENTIRE final level of the game. It screams “we have no clue how to feel climatic!”
Haunted House might not be fun, then or now, but in a morbid way, we still owe it a lot. It showed Konami that Castlevania as a theme can’t work as an empty shell. That’s a lesson a lot of franchise owners never got. Sometimes it takes learning what a franchise shouldn’t be to realize what it can be. Or to put it another way, Konami had a red hot property Castlevania, and it’s a good thing they burned themselves on it a couple times very early in its existence, but in ways that didn’t damage the brand overall. I think that’s what allowed Castlevania to become one of the most consistently good franchises in gaming. It’s something like, say, Tomb Raider never got. Then when Tomb Raider suffered its first critical and commercial failures, those failures did real, lasting damage to the Tomb Raider brand. Castlevania’s early failures, on the other hand, were pretty much inconsequential to the brand, yet valuable lessons were still learned from a purely gameplay point of view. That’s why Haunted Castle is kind of a lucky break for gamers, because it allowed the owners of Castlevania to touch the stove while nobody was looking and say “yep, don’t want to do that again!” Verdict: NO!
Vampire Killer
aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: MSX2 Released October 30, 1986 Designed by Akihiko Nagata Developed by Konami Never Released in the United States
NO MODERN RELEASE
I played a patched version of the ROM created by developer FRS. The patch improved general performance without altering the core gameplay. It just readjusted the speed, more or less. WARNING: If you use this patch, you will need the ability to map keyboard commands to your controller or just outright use a keyboard (which can be used in addition to a controller) or you will NOT be able to finish Vampire Killer. You see, there’s a door/tunnel maze in one level that normally requires the ability to press both UP and DOWN at the same time, but this patch prevents that. Instead, you have to press “M” to enter the doors.
Get the patch HERE. And I apply patches using THIS TOOL. I should redo the MSX games in the Konami SHMUP feature using FRS’ patches.
If you’ve never heard of the MSX version of the original Castlevania, well, you’re in for a treat.
The original Castlevania wasn’t just released to the Famicom. Four days later, its cousin hit the MSX2 computer, and it’s, ahem, different. And this is why I love experiencing Konami’s output on the MSX, because they didn’t just shrug their shoulders and copy the maps from the more powerful NES. Instead, they took the base gameplay, roster of enemies/bosses, and level themes and settings and then reworked them to accommodate the MSX2’s hardware limitations. MSX in general is notorious for not handling scrolling all that well, and you can either roll with that and make side-scrollers that are played one screen at a time, or you can use it as an excuse to get creative. That’s what Vampire Killer does, turning the game into an exploration-based title where you search for keys to open doors and try to avoid soft-locking the game. Wait, what?
Weirdly, this carry-over from the NES game plays much smoother and more predictably on the MSX than on the NES. It’s MUCH easier to time the presses.
Yeah, soft locking is a legitimate possibility, and it’s not all that hard to do. First, let me explain what exactly is going on with Vampire Killer, because this isn’t Castlevania like anyone from America would be familiar with. Instead of just going from Point-A to Point-B, the MSX Castlevania features six levels, each of which is divided into three blocks. Each block has the standard Castlevania 1 door, just like the NES game, but there’s a twist: it’s locked. Hidden somewhere in the block is a silver key, which is not to be confused with gold keys like the one seen in the above screenshot. Gold keys can only be carried one-at-a-time and are only useful on treasure chests that lay around. The silver key looks like this:
Ignore the “Stage 20” thing because this screenshot is taken from the second loop after I beat Dracula, but this is really the first proper stage of Vampire Killer.
With a couple exceptions, the silver keys are usually hidden behind breakable walls and have to be searched out. It’s an inspired idea and it works fantastic. I mean, for the most part (she said as she eyes the rampaging elephant in the room). The blocks are never too big, either, and there’s one other twist: the maps wrap around. So when you reach the edge of the block you’re on, if it’s not walled off, you will come out the other end. So here’s the first screen in the first proper stage, and it’ll look familiar to NES fans:
Now, I could go to the right, like you would in the NES game. Or, I could go left, which won’t take me back outside the castle, but instead take me to this room on the far right side of the map.
Neat, huh? It’s not pointless, either. This is heavily incorporated into the level design and used for navigation-based puzzle solving, and it works vertically too. Well, sometimes. The vertical version of the map wrapping is a little more problematic because there’s also bottomless pits like any other Castlevania game. There are maps that you can find and pressing F2 calls them up, so you won’t necessarily have to jump blindly. But, I kind of wish they had just eliminated the potential for death by pits altogether and focused on the exploration, because it’s usually really well done otherwise. I enjoyed it so much I attempted to play this blind, with the only guide I used being StrategyWiki’s list of what all the items do.
See the person with a staff sitting on the ledge? They’re basically a shop, though you have to hit them over and over, which will eventually lead to them making a one-time offer to sell you an item. But it’s a LOT more complicated than that, because they change into different colors, and sometimes they’ll just give you hearts and sometimes they’ll take hearts from you. Even the sale mechanic itself has layers to it. Throughout the levels are two types of bibles: white ones and black ones. If you collect a black one, the price of the items in the shops will go up, but white ones make the price go down. It’s crazy how many extra layers of complexity they added to make this version stand out. They really went all out, which is in stark contrast to the elegant simplicity of the Castlevania that Famicom/NES owners got.
I highly recommend anyone who plays this for the first time keep that item page bookmarked, because there’s a TON of items that all work in a variety of ways, both passively and proactively, and almost never intuitively. In Vampire Killer, a whip isn’t even necessarily your primary weapon. The knife, axe, and boomerang REPLACE the whip once they’re picked up. Oh, and the axe doesn’t behave like the axe from the NES game and is instead a short-range boomerang, while the blue cross boomerang (which is fairly rare) goes faster and further. Oh, and if you don’t catch either of them on the return trip, you lose them and go back to your leather whip. Yep. I should also note the boomerangs and knife don’t use up hearts, but the two subweapons do, and they take “overpowered subweapons” to a whole new level.
I think Vampire Killer might earn the title “the weirdest 2D game in the franchise” because of how different it is from the typical Castlevania. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the whip was my least favorite weapon. I never use the throwing knives in most 2D Castlevania games, but I preferred them for this game because knives gave me range and speed without having to worry about losing them every time I used them. Plus, the knife was reliable in terms of collision, whereas whip was inconsistent. I was constantly whipping right through candles to no effect, and in general, the whip has none of the OOMPH you expect from a normal Castlevania game’s whip.
The subweapons are the holy water and the stopwatch. The stopwatch is another item I almost never use in Castlevania games that I got heavy usage out of in Vampire Killer, to the point that I actively sought it out. That’s weird, but not as weird as the method of activating the subweapons. To use the stopwatch, you have to jump in the air and press DOWN. Yes, really, but the holy water is even worse. To use the holy water, you have to jump in the air and tap LEFT or RIGHT. Now, I have twitchy fingers these days, so I was constantly throwing holy water accidentally while jumping at angles. Thankfully, hearts are plentiful and they’re not stripped from you between levels. That’s strange, because everything else is! Yep, ALL ITEMS wear off when you finish a level and you go back to your leather whip. Does it get weirder? Actually, yeah: you can possess the stopwatch AND the holy water at the same time, and they work on basically every boss except Dracula (because they can’t reach him). So five of the six bosses are pieces of cake in this game.
The bosses are CRAZY SPONGY if you try using your other weapons. But they have no invincibility frames at all, making the holy water’s fire extremely effective at quickly draining them. If your timing is true and you activate the stopwatch while throwing the holy water in a way where the fire is damaging them, one-shotting bosses is on the table for pretty much every non-Drac boss. My timing wasn’t, and I still beat Reapy McReapface with two bottles of water.
And it’s at this point I have to inform everyone that my ultimate verdict on Vampire Killer is a bizarre split decision based on how you play it. On the third block of the fourth level, I found myself unable to make progress and decided to use the StrategyWiki walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong, and I discovered I’d soft-locked the game. Right before you face the boss of the fourth level, Vampire Killer has the easiest-to-activate soft lock I’ve ever encountered in any game I’ve reviewed at IGC, and it makes this review much more complicated than it should be. I’m going to explain it, and if you know of an easier soft lock to activate in any game, meaning one that’s part of the natural game flow and not one you have to go out of your way to do, I want to hear it because I don’t think there’s ever been one.
SPLIT DECISION: PLAYING WITHOUT SAVE STATES OR REWIND
This is the room in question, and I should note that if you find a candle item (not to be confused with the candles you break with your weapon), it puts a highlight box around breakable walls. Keep in mind that all four blocks are destroyed at once, instead of one segment at a time. You can’t make a stagnated stepladder out of them.
See the key? You can’t jump up and get it, even if you have the item that lets you jump higher (which I don’t even think is located in the fourth level anyway). See the blocks in front of the skeleton dragon? If you break those before you get the key, you’re in BIG trouble, because now you have no way to reach the key. If the dragon is already dead and you break those blocks, you have soft locked yourself. The game is over and you have to reset from the beginning. If the dragon is not dead, you have to damage yourself using the dragon in a way where you pop upward and collect the key using the knock back, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off the knock back trick in the MSX game as it is in the NES game.
I’m 75% sure there’s a second potential soft lock in “Stage 17” where a player can render the game impassible if they collect a key before breaking blocks somewhere else on the map to create an escape route. The silver key is located behind the blocks to the right of the base of the stairs, but there’s no way to get out of the area unless you do other things first. I activated this one too, and while I think you can probably die on purpose and restart, I didn’t try it and just restarted the level from my save state.
This is inexcusable design and a critical failure of play-testing, but I think it’s even worse than that. Both potential soft locks feel kind of deliberate, like they were a planned part of the challenge. So either this is a deliberate design concept that nobody in their right mind would come up with or it’s just an example of why play testing is so crucial. Here’s the thing: I believe that a player’s natural instinct, in any game like this, is to smash every single block they see. Does everyone agree? Players shouldn’t expect to be able to end their entire run by breaking one block. Well, I did it, and if I hadn’t been using an emulator where I could rewind this mistake or load a prior save state, I would have been so furious beyond imagination. But it also feels like this is something a player could easily do by accident. First off, collision is NOT PERFECT. Second, if you have a boomerang weapon and try to smash the candle that’s right there in front of the blocks, you’ll break the blocks and that’s it. This is really bad design, and if you don’t have the means to play with an emulator that features rewind or save states, I don’t recommend even trying this game. This is completely unacceptable game design. Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION: USING AN EMULATOR
WITH SAVE/REWIND OPTIONS
Believe it or not, the red skeletons are probably the most threatening enemies in the entire game. They move super fast and they come back to life super fast.
Make sure you throw down plenty or save states or have your rewind set that it can go back several minutes. Did you? Cool. Let’s pretend those two soft lock sections aren’t a big deal, because they really aren’t if you have a nice emulator. I’m not trying to be wishy washy, but we’re not in the dark ages anymore and soft locks can be undone. So, what do I think of Vampire Killer overall?
I stopped and counted to ten and then carried on, and reminded myself that I genuinely enjoyed the maze-like levels.
Keeping it real, a lot of the appeal in Vampire Killer is from a novelty point of view. It’s just so different, for better and for worse. And there’s a lot of “worse” in the conversation. The famously elegant Castlevania combat and enemy design just isn’t here. The actual action of Vampire Killer is pretty sloppy and it lacks the PUNCH that the NES games have that made their combat so satisfying. So most of the appeal, at least for me, is playing a game that’s like an alternative universe version of what is one of the most important games of my life. One thing about the NES Castlevania is it has very conservative level layouts that rely heavily on fine-tuned enemy placement. The MSX game isn’t like that. It has genuinely ambitious level design, which often feels downright puzzle-like. Of course, it can also be so haphazardly done that you can end your game by breaking a single block. Ambition comes at a price.
In my first attempt to beat Dracula, I had the blue boomerang, and I missed catching it during the first phase and had to jump up and whip at the jewel on his forehead with the goddamned leather whip one shot at a time. Eventually I died from the stream of bats. I rewound the game and tried again, missed the boomerang, but I figured out how to block the bats. After a few minutes, I’d barely put any damage at all into Drac himself. Nuts to that. I reloaded the level and found the knife, and then I allowed the continuous stream of bats that he pukes out to knock me back while facing the correct direction (since the ledge doesn’t have enough room to turn around), and that’s how I finished it. It’s worth noting this is easily the hardest of the 8-bit Castlevania games and, if you attempt to play this cleanly, be ready for a game that plays dirty and is still kind of janky. I couldn’t do it. I tried, folks, and Vampire Killer ate my butt.
There’s a voice in my head saying “oh come on, Cathy! If this were any other game, would you be so quick to forgive that god awful soft lock design?” Okay, fair, and the answer is “probably not.” But Vampire Killer isn’t any other game. If the charm of a one-off novelty-like Castlevania experience knocked my socks off, why wouldn’t that apply to other fans? I make no guarantees here, but I think it’s worth checking out at least once if you’re a fan of the series. And I’m not giving it a pity YES!, either. I really did enjoy the level design for 16 out of the 18 blocks. I enjoyed the search for the keys. I enjoyed playing a Castlevania game that’s played one screen at a time and does things other Castlevania games don’t do. There’s a f*cking door maze in this game, for goodness sake!
In fact, the door maze is part of the soft lock room. Now, this will require you to have a keyboard or unlimited button remapping, including the ability to map keyboard controls to game controllers. If you don’t use the ROM patch that I used, this requires players to press UP and DOWN, at the same time. It’s assumed that players are on an MSX with a keyboard right in front of them, and with directional keys, you can easily press UP and DOWN at the same time. Oh, it’s a very inconsiderate and sloppy design, but mind you, for those players using a keyboard, UP is also “JUMP.” Because I’m insane, I tried playing the first level using a keyboard, and I spent the next minute kissing my controller and telling it I will never take it for granted again. I would have taken it even further, but I assume controllers come to life when nobody is looking, Toy Story-style and I don’t want it to judge me.
Hey, I like door mazes! Isn’t it kind of weird Castlevania has never really done a lot with them? They seem like they would lend themselves to the haunted house vibe, and it’s not like I wouldn’t have enjoyed the maze a lot if not for the sour note that ended it. So, I really liked Vampire Killer when it didn’t play as dirty as any game ever has. At the end of the day, after years of being curious about Vampire Killer, I’m actually happy I put in the time to finish it. I can’t say that about Simon’s Quest or Castlevania: The Adventure. Just don’t expect a masterpiece, because Vampire Killer certainly isn’t. Okay, fine, it’s a novelty. But hey, gaming is a big tent, and novelties have their place in it. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest aka Dorakyura II: Noroi no Fūin Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System Released August 28, 1987 (FDS) November 24, 1988 (NES) Directed by Hitoshi Akamatsu Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
If you’re saying “hey, wait a second, I don’t remember that map in the game” I would advise you to read past my verdict as I talk about quality of life ROM hacks, including the one I used for this review.
Disclaimer: I used a quality of life ROM hack for this review, but one that I feel didn’t fundamentally change the developer’s intent. There was no rebalancing of the experience system or the rate of hearts being dropped, no enemy rebalancing, no level design changes, and no changes to the items. The big changes were quicker day/night transitions, a better translated script, and more invincibility frames when you get hit. For the full review on the ROM hack I used, “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit, keep reading past my main verdict. NOTHING in the ROM hack I used changes how I feel about this game, so this is my definitive review of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a game I’ve been putting off reviewing for two years.
Castlevania II has some of the worst Metroidvania-style maps in gaming history. Just totally nonsensical design that neither lends itself particularly well to exploration or action. There’s moments like this, where the path branches out into two paths that will eventually merge anyway, and the commonplace enemies just shamble back and forth instead of having enemies tailored to this area of the game.
Put yourself in the shoes of director Hitoshi Akamatsu and the team behind Simon’s Quest. When the original Castlevania was nearing completion, they must have had some idea that they just created an absolute masterpiece and legitimate contender for the best game on the Famicom/NES up to that point. Not only that, but in Castlevania, they had a game with obvious global appeal and sequel potential up the wazoo. A game that lends itself specifically to sequels from a development point of view, since Castlevania is a LOT simpler than most people realize on face value. It nailed the theme, combat, item design, enemy design, and enemy placement (a seriously underrated factor towards any game’s masterpiece status), but it also features level design that’s actually fairly conservative. Hell, there’s a stage that doesn’t even have a single pit to jump over. The boldest it gets is in the final stage, which is by far the shortest. So they left a LOT of room to grow while staying within a traditional linear format.
Later, you get Dracula’s ring. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to slay him or marry him.
While I admire this sequel’s ambition, it feels like it tries to be too big for its own britches. Simon’s Quest is a very early, very primitive example of a Metroidvania. The irony is, it would be the franchise’s next attempt at this formula that would cement the “Vania” part of the genre’s name with Symphony of the Night. That tells you everything you need to know about how successful Simon’s Quest was despite the fact that it predates Symphony of the Night by just under a full decade. I’m sure they made this game with the best of intentions, but it’s actually remarkable how the direct sequel to Castlevania, a game that got pretty much everything right, manages to get nothing right from a gameplay perspective. It strips out everything that made the first game fun EXCEPT the theme and the most basic combat. It’s fascinating for sure, and it’s also got fans out there which (shrug) I mean, everything has fans. Joe Dirt had enough fans that Crackle did a f*cking sequel to it. What I don’t get is how someone who loved the first game can feel any connection between the two games that isn’t purely superficial.
This is the type of confusing thing that doesn’t bother me. When this came out, especially in the United States, the poor translation made some of the items confusing on how they worked. That sucks and I feel sorry for gamers back then, but it’s not 1988 anymore. There’s strategy guides, like the one I used that’s so useful I got the best ending on my first attempt, though I admit I used rewind to undo false floor GOTCHA traps. But hell, even emulator-based cheating shows that players have plenty of options for solutions if they get stuck or jerked around by the game design. The question I’m asking with this review is “how good is Simon’s Quest when you strip away all the bullsh*t and get down to the nitty gritty gameplay?”
And I’m not even talking about the infamous mistranslated script with its obscure hints, or the agonizingly slow transition from day to night that interrupts gameplay. I just played a version of Simon’s Quest without those things. Once upon a time, they might have been a problem, but after playing through this twice for this feature without those factors, I’ve come to the conclusion they were never *THE* problem. And the Metroidvania formula obviously isn’t a bad idea since the franchise would get its second wind via that genre in the 90s and 2000s. The problem is there’s a total lack of polish to Castlevania II that’s likely the result of a very short development cycle. This was released less than a year after the first game, which is insane given the scope and ambition they had for Simon’s Quest. Instead of just making your way from Point A to Point B, you now have to do things like kneel at a lake while possessing a specific color crystal ball, which will cause the screen to lower and reveal a hidden pathway. Re-read that last sentence. Doesn’t that sound like a game that took at least a year-and-a-half to develop, and not a matter of months?
I won’t claim there’s NO satisfaction in seeing this happen. It’s a cool reveal! I just wish they’d taken their time with the entire quest. You can’t do a 100 meter dash with a game this ambitious!
The rush job explains the total lack of polish and lack of fine-tuned enemy attack patterns and placement. The result is Simon’s Quest is a game with no tempo or flow to it. This can also largely be blamed on the Metroidvania format, which they clearly didn’t know how to build around. For example, the leveling-up system is based not on killing enemies but picking up the hearts they drop. The problem is enemies don’t always drop hearts. While I have no objection to using RNG for currency or item drops, I don’t like the idea of experience points being all-or-nothing RNG random chance. It’s bad game design to leave luck up to heaven. It really doesn’t help that the variety of enemies doesn’t work in a Metroidvania. With one or two small exceptions, none of the enemies feel particularly optimized for the environments they’re placed in. The enemies feel completely arbitrary and often don’t feel like there was much consideration for logic in their design, locations, or attack patterns. Too many just kind of shamble back and forth. The only time I ever felt a sense of danger in the entire game were a few moving block jumps.
Near the end of the game, I was still only up to level three even though I slayed every enemy that I crossed paths with. This meant enemies were especially spongy. As a result, I found myself grinding on these guys, who had high full-heart payouts, to get my level up, and in doing so, I almost cost myself the perfect ending. I beat Dracula as a level 5 (max is 6) on the seventh day/night cycle, which is the very last one that scores you a perfect ending. By the way, that shield I’m holding is actually Dracula’s rib. Of all the bones in the human body, that would not be my first choice for a shield, but I never found Dracula’s hip. Sasha the Kid: “maybe they meant it’s his RIB CAGE and they screwed that up too.” Okay, I can buy that.
What’s strange is that the XP system actually does have a thoughtfulness that’s designed to eliminate the potential for screw grinding. Once you beat enemies in a certain section, they won’t fill up your XP anymore regardless of whether they drop hearts. You have to be near where the next mansion is at, or maybe even inside the next mansion. Also, enemies you’ve already fought become stronger as the game goes along. These are positive ideas, but the cast of enemies just aren’t as fun to battle in these environments. Maybe if they had cut and pasted the entire Castlevania 1 combat system it could have worked, but they didn’t. The whip is back, and although it’s still kind of satisfying, it doesn’t feel quite as impactful as Castlevania 1 or Castlevania III’s whip cracks. Complementary sub-weapons like the axe or boomerang are gone completely, while the holy water loses its combat effectiveness and becomes actively annoying thanks to being so heavily incorporated into the exploration elements. Only the dagger really carried over from the first game, and that’s by far the item I enjoy using the least in Castlevania games. Go figure, right?
One of the new items, the diamond, is just really weak and lacking in the satisfaction of unleashing boomerangs or the axe. It just sort of bounces around. Meanwhile, the sacred fire is overpowered as f*ck. I beat the game with it.
But I think it’s really the level design that drops Simon’s Quest into gaming’s sewer. These are boring maps, and without the pitch perfect enemy placement of Castlevania 1, the sense of claustrophobia the first game had is completely missing. I didn’t really mind the confusing navigation or the backtracking so much. If you use the most optimized game route (I used StrategyWiki to guide my way) there’s really only one MAJOR instance of backtracking and a couple small ones. That’s not too bad for the Metroidvania genre at this stage of its existence. Okay, so I can’t imagine trying to figure any of this stuff out without a guide or a ROM that told me the name of the location I was at, but the days where gamers have to do this stuff blindly are a thing of the past. The problem is there’s only a small handful of sections where I sat up in my chair and said “now this kind of feels like the original game” like seen in the screenshot below.
I won’t say Castlevania II NEVER feels like Castlevania I. Right here, there’s something about the timing of when these fishmen pop out that makes me feel like I’m finally, at long last, playing a sequel and not a spin-off. And yes, since I couldn’t find any other place to talk about it, shout-out to the historically awesome soundtrack. One of the best on the NES. But I don’t play games to listen to music. I play games to play games. Good music can only make a good game better, but it can’t make a bad game better. At least that’s how I feel.
The object of Simon’s Quest is to navigate your way to five mansions to locate body parts of Dracula. Or four body parts and his bling since the last thing you get is the “ring of Dracula” though as Sasha the Kid pointed at, maybe the ring is attached to his severed finger. This actually isn’t a bad idea (I mean the mansions, not Dracula’s finger being stuck in a ring, which is gross, Sasha) but the execution is beyond pathetic. I’m guessing they were aiming for Zelda or Kid Icarus-like dungeon mazes, but they all look basically the same with slightly different colors. There’s also only six total enemies that you’ll ever see in the mansions, not counting the two, yes, TWO bosses total that appear before you fight Dracula. The main two enemies you’ll encounter are skeleton knights and knight-knights, which are functionally the same in that they just sort of patrol back and forth. Two enemies, spiders and slime blobs, appear in the overworld. There’s also hopping devils that shoot projectiles and run of the mill Castlevania bats. That’s the entire roster of mansion enemies. I think that by itself assured the mansions would get old fast and Simon’s Quest would get a NO!
It’s safe to say the primary strategy used by the skeletons and knights in the mansions is to force players to walk into them on the stairs. That’s so unimaginative and boring, which is totally in contrast to, again, everything the first game did. Castlevania I *did* use this concept, but it had more going for it. Castlevania II just keeps leaning heavier and heavier into it. Mind you, Castlevania staples like mummies, ghosts, and the Medusa heads are in this game, but not in the mansions.
Because of the low variety of enemies and the lack of architecture to make one mansion stand apart from the other, they don’t feel like events. Hell, the mansions have absolutely no personality at all. I was F*CKING PUMPED every single time I reached the front gate of a new one. The entrances look like you’re doing something big and important.
No notes. Okay, well, maybe a note. They needed a sign to tell you the name of the place, and maybe they could have done a little more to make the fences look unique.
But the contents inside let me down every single time. They’re complete f*cking slogs to work your way through. Beating a dungeon in Legend of Zelda feels like a big deal. Beating mansions in Simon’s Quest feels like busy work. You’ve got a sacred flame, Simon. Just burn the f*cking building down and grab the bag with the relic in it. It’s not like there’s anything else to do inside of them! Okay, so you have to find and purchase an oak stake to collect the relic, but even that is botched. Even though you can only carry one oak stake at a time, you can prepay for the next mansion’s stake after collecting the relic. The stakes should have been like the big keys in Zelda, IE unique to each mansion. Even if you pretend like that’s the case, the locations of where the stakes are purchased inside the mansions have no sense of discovery about them. They’re usually in arbitrary spots, with only one or two placed in a way that makes it feel like consideration was given towards incentivizing exploration.
This is a great example of Castlevania II’s development team not understanding how to handle progress. The above screenshot shows me getting the flame whip, which is the best weapon in the game and the final upgrade of the whip. This should be a huge, huge moment that’s built towards. There should be a boss fight attached to it, or a quest to retrieve macguffins associated with it, or hell, at this point I would settle for making it the most expensive item in the game since there’s really not a whole ton of sh*t to buy. Something, anything to make the morning star feel like a big deal. There’s none of that! It’s a free upgrade that’s just in the middle of an arbitrary spot. The best thing I can say is the backdrop is unique, but so what? It’s nuts that the people who did such a great job pacing Castlevania 1, to the point that it feels like it was calculated by f*cking NASA, didn’t understand how to present or pace these moments. And don’t tell me it’s because they swapped genres, because big moments in games should have an intuitive lead-up to them. You don’t just spring them on players like this. You build suspense. It’s storytelling 101.
For the most part, mansions are built around sprawling, dull layouts that rely on placing enemies at the top of staircases in a way where you have to wait a long time for them to move out of the way, or false floors. Castlevania II has an obsession with false floors. The only way to really tell if a floor is fake or not is to throw holy water at the ground (you have an unlimited supply of it) and if it goes through the floor, you know to jump over that spot. This is unjustifiable. I swear to you that I hate going back to this point over and over, but the first Castlevania cut a tempo like few games ever did, and here’s the sequel telling players to heel-toe it while gingerly throwing water at the ground like the flower girl dropping pedals at a wedding. It’s unimaginable that they believed this was an effective way to build upon Castlevania’s foundation. And it’s not like the level layouts would be fun without this. In the second mansion, “Rover Mansion”, the level is basically divided into two sides, and the side you start on has NOTHING in it. Okay, so I need to use a map that I’m borrowing from StrategyWiki that was originally created by Procyon. I added the arrow and circle.
Rover Mansion. Not pictured is Fido Mansion and Spot Mansion.
You start Rover Mansion in the bottom left hand corner, where the base of the arrow is. Everything in the circle is a gigantic, winding dead end. The idea is supposed to be that players will eventually discover a false wall. Except, as far as I can tell, there’s no practical clue towards this. I went through every bit of dialog in the game and nothing points towards this. It has to be discovered completely organically by throwing holy water at every solid surface until the player sees one of the jars pass through it. I have NO objection to that, besides the fact that it sounds kind of boring on its face value. What I do object to is the entire circled area in the above map serving ZERO PURPOSE! It’s there only for the sake of a wild goose chase, and that’s just NEVER fun in video games. Granted, they might not have realized that in 1987 and it took games like Simon’s Quest to make that a hard rule, but again, this is the same dev team who, with Castlevania 1, optimized a conservative layout like few games ever have, AND THIS IS WHAT THEY CAME UP WITH? This is some of the least optimized map design in the history of the medium. It’s a bad use of real estate, and inexcusable given what they did with so little in Castlevania 1.
The wall behind me is the false wall in question that’s the key to solving this level. It won’t be the last usage of this gag, but this is by far the least optimized version of it, because it renders half of a level completely pointless.
You can’t even say that sending a player off in a dead end adds to the replay value because it eats up time and could cost players the best ending. Time stops ticking in the mansions. There’s plenty of things that COULD have been done with that area. Why not locate the seller of the oak stake up in there? Why not hide the sacred flame, located in an arbitrary spot on the overworld map, in the furthest dead-end of that area? Why not stick a clue to the false wall being a thing up in there? EVEN IF that would have been bungled in the translation, the dev team isn’t responsible for that. What they are responsible for is a nonsense map, but Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is full of those. What’s becoming apparent is they fundamentally didn’t have a good game plan for creating this interconnected world or building an exploration-based experience. Simon’s Quest isn’t lacking for big events. Things like lowering the lake with the crystal, or summoning a whirlwind to teleport you to a previously inaccessible point of the graveyard absolutely work as big moments. It’s all the sh*t in between that fails as an action game and an adventure game.
Okay, so kneeling for several seconds is not a great means of activation. With events like this, I prefer a single press of the button, which is intuitive, to any form of delayed activation, which isn’t. But the whirlwind does show that they understood, at least on some level, the importance of a big, sprawling adventure having great big “ta-dah!” moments. That’s why I can’t excuse any of the mistakes. They weren’t completely clueless. If they were, this wouldn’t even have been in the game.
And to really hammer home how unprepared and misguided Simon’s Quest is, look no further than the lack of bosses. The first Castlevania was defined by its boss encounters. Even the MSX game was. Simon’s Quest, before Dracula, has two bosses, which appear in the 3rd and 5th mansions. Yep, you have to wait until the game is nearly halfway done before you even encounter your first boss. Presumably they based that on Metroid only having two bosses before Mother Brain. Except, I think the designers of Castlevania 1 should have known better and understood the importance of boss fights and building up to them. TWO bosses? Are you f*cking kidding me? And they’re not even good bosses. One of them is the Grim Reaper, who is the FIRST BOSS IN THE GAME! You don’t even fight him, the actual first boss, until the third goddamned mansion, and he’s a total sponge. The second boss is a spooky mask that’s apparently supposed to be the Castlevania debut of Carmilla. That should be a big deal, except it doesn’t look or feel like Carmilla, or even the skull version of Carmilla that would really debut in Rondo of Blood.
I don’t know if it’s THE worst Grim Reaper fight, but it’s up there for sure.
It floors me that they didn’t recognize the role boss fights played in the original game. And it gets even worse, because they’re not even really framed like bosses. They just appear in the room before the room with the Dracula relic. You can walk right past them since the door isn’t locked. Hell, the music doesn’t even change. There’s no showmanship to them at all. They even respawn after you collect the relic, like basic enemies do! It’s beyond belief that this is what they came up with. In this relatively massive game, THREE bosses, two of which aren’t even given music, and one of which (Reapy McReapface) is basically entirely optional? Because you can beat the game without killing the Grim Reaper. Carmilla has to be beaten because she holds a cross that gates off the entrance to Castlevania itself.
The sad part? This is probably THE highlight of the entire game.
Only the final boss is given the proper weight of a boss fight, but even Dracula himself isn’t very fun to battle. First off, he looks like the Grim Reaper instead of Dracula. Even the kids even said it when I said “hey, who wants to see me fight Dracula?” Second: he’s boring looking in general, but then again, a lot of the enemy sprites are. Third, he’s the easiest Dracula fight in the franchise’s history. I stun-locked him almost immediately with the magic flame sub-weapon and the game ended seconds later. I’ve been saying for a long time that bosses are the metronome of gaming. Simon’s Quest is the proof, because this is a game that feels like it never keeps a beat. In terms of raw gameplay, it’s not close to the worst NES game, but I still would like to nominate it for consideration anyway. They laid the perfect foundation for a sequel and squandered it. Unlike other bad games, they had every reason to do better and no excuses for how bad this is. And it’s HORRIBLE!
“You now possess Dracula’s maidenhead.”
Castlevania II misses the point of the first game so badly that I have to figure this is in the same boat as Super Pac-Man. When you read interviews with Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani, it’s plainly obvious he didn’t even understand why Pac-Man was a big hit and chalked it up to “people like to eat” even though there were plenty of other games where you eat stuff. He fixated on “eating is the attraction” for the first two sequels, Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal and they bombed badly because they featured boring mazes that were unoptimized for chasing and turning the tables (Ms. Pac-Man was made by someone else). It wasn’t until Pac-Mania years later that he seemed to finally realize eating dots was just a means to an end and it’s the chase and the pitch-perfect way of turning-the-tables that made Pac-Man blow up. I assume that’s what happened here as well. I’m guessing Konami and Akamatsu fundamentally didn’t understand what they’d accomplished with the original Castlevania. They probably chalked it up to the whip or the undead setting, but those were a means to an end. Castlevania was a masterpiece because it featured precisely fine-tuned, elegant action that was paced perfectly. All of that is gone here. Castlevania II has no polish and features maps and a game flow that doesn’t seem particularly well thought-out. It could have been salvaged, but they didn’t have time! They wanted to get this out ASAP. My theory is that Simon’s Quest is a victim of gold rush mentality.
You’ll notice a LOT of flat ground in these screenshots. Now, Castlevania 1 is a game that I’ve probably played more than any other NES game and it has a lot more of these straight corridors than people realize, but it can get away with it by utilizing a linear format with PERFECTLY placed enemies, which is to say nothing of the haunted house setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the boss fights to serve as checkpoints. You can’t get away with that type of design in a Metroidvania, and especially one that didn’t care one iota about boss fights. The result is a mostly boring landscape to travel.
I get it, by the way and can even see where they’re coming from. You have to consider the circumstances. Konami probably wanted to quickly establish a flagship franchise on the smoking-hot Famicom/NES, which was a new type of cultural touchstone that gamers of 2025 can’t really appreciate. Like, we saw the launch of the Switch 2 this year, right? Now imagine if Switch 2 completely pulled video games from the brink of death to become the single hottest consumer electronics item in the two biggest global markets for consumer electronics and there was a gap of major “brand names” associated with software for the platform. Brand names in this case being franchises. Now finally, I want you to imagine if the Switch 2 launch was as successful as it was (apparently historically successful), only without any established franchises and every hit game being the first game ever in that series. It’s hard to imagine, right? But that’s basically the situation Konami found themselves in with Castlevania.
Simon’s Quest shares blood with The Maze of Galious, a Famicom exclusive they developed which I will review sometime soon at IGC. I have no clue if it’s good or not, but while finishing editing this review, it occurred to me that Konami did do an unsung Metroidvania that I enjoy very much: Goonies II, which ironically I also reviewed (sort of) using a quality of life ROM hack. A full, stand-alone Goonies II review is also coming to IGC because I really want to try to get it re-released. I think it’s fantastic and one of the NES’ most underrated games. It also released half-a-year before Castlevania II did, which shows there’s no excuses for how badly done Simon’s Quest is since Konami knew what a good non-linear platform adventure should look like.
And again, they *had* to know Castlevania was their best piece of software by a country mile up to that point and that it had “marquee franchise” written all over it. So I totally understand the sense of urgency they must have felt to quickly, unequivocally establish the franchise as a brand name that consumers would associate with the world’s hottest brand. Hell, they probably felt being #2 to Super Mario Bros. in terms of direct association with the Famicom/NES was on the table, because it probably was. I don’t think Castlevania was ever that. If you’re an older reader of mine who grew up and went to school in the 1980s and early 90s, I’d LOVE for you to leave a comment and let me know how big Castlevania was among you and your friends in terms of status. Because I think that’s what happened here, and their plan didn’t fail, whether I liked Simon’s Quest or not. It was released just weeks after Super Mario Bros. 2 and sold pretty well, and Castlevania is a famous gaming franchise in the 2020s even with children who haven’t seen brand new Castlevania games in their gaming lives. Simon’s Quest played a part in that. And I’m not naive. I know Dracula’s Curse, my favorite NES game, was as good as it was because they had to make up for Simon’s Quest. We don’t get Castlevania III as good as it is if they don’t completely, utterly, epically, stupendously f*ck up Castlevania II first. So if nothing else, thanks for that, Simon’s Quest! Verdict: NO!
If it was *me* bringing Dracula back to life by assembling his dismembered body, including his heart, I think I would take a sh*t in Dracula’s heart before I started the re-assembly ritual. It’d be messy and gross, especially in the centuries before wet wipes were invented, but it’d be worth it. Then he comes back to life and is like “I, Dracula, prince of darkness, have returned! I vill now conquer zee world using my army of….. vhat are snickering at? Vhat’s so funny, Simon? Vhat, do I have a booger in my nose? And vhy is my chest so lumpy? Vait….. Oh no! Vhat have you done?! YOU SICK SON OF A VITCH!”
BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW
I already knew I hated Simon’s Quest going into this review. I’d tried playing it multiple times for an IGC review, and I just hate the f*cking game. But, it’s one of my most requested reviews, and it is Halloween and it’s tradition for me to do Castlevania games for Halloween. If I MUST do Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, I wanted to be able to examine the game at its peak potential, which meant utilizing a ROM hack. The problem is, there were SO MANY quality of life ROM hacks for Simon’s Quest to choose. It has to be one of the biggest bad games that people have tried to fix, and the volume of ROM hacks is pretty overwhelming to sort through. I wish I had time to review them all because I know how hard the ROM hacking community works, so I’m going to encourage everyone to check out ROMHacking.Net’s Castlevania II page. I went through the list and selected “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit. I chose it because bisqwit’s translation is cited at places like StrategyWiki and the Castlevania Wiki, and because his version of the game seemed to include the most quality of life upgrades while staying truest to the original intent (IE not improving heart drops, rebalancing enemies).
Bisqwit’s effort not only includes the map above and better translations of the text, but a fully done original prologue. Holy smokes! This goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that I kind of want to give bisqwit a hug, but hopefully being featured in one of my most requested reviews will suffice.
I intended for this to be my definitive Simon’s Quest review and the last time I ever play Simon’s Quest unless Konami puts out an official remake. So please keep in mind that the NO! verdict was not for Bisqwit’s ROM hack. He did a fantastic job improving a game that is, simply put, terrible and I’m bestowing an honorary YES! verdict to his work. If you’re a fan of Simon’s Quest, you’re weird, and also you really should check it out, along with other quality of life efforts for Castlevania II. By the way, I salute the entire ROM hacking community for their hard work. I seriously love and admire all of you and wish that more gaming media covered your work, but as long as I’m around, I intend to use my platform to spotlight your work. So, what made this version of Simon’s Quest different? The biggest change is the transition from day to night is instantaneous. Here’s what it (and the map) look like:
He also added more invincibility frames (what I normally call “blinking”) and the ability to jump off stairs but I didn’t even realize that and never used it until after I’d already beaten the game. Those are the only real efforts towards rebalancing I believe bisqwit did, and he also added a save system to replace the password system. Finally, the dialog is properly translated. Apparently some characters are meant to lie to Simon and provide red herrings that aren’t helpful to players, and I have no problem with bisqwit not changing that. He stayed true to the developer’s intent, whether that intent was stupid or not. The clue books you find in the mansions are much more clear, and you can go back and re-read them in the menu. Even the sign posts are better handled. Here’s some examples of the new dialog, which is based directly on the original Japanese text:
I’m grateful for his effort, because it confirmed to me that my problems with Simon’s Quest are related to nonsensical level design and terrible pacing that goes far beyond a slow transition from day to night. The version I played altered NONE of the level design, enemy difficulty, heart drop rates, experience system, etc. I’m confident that nothing I covered in the main review is going to be different whether you play the normal retail version of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or the version I played. So what’s here WAS my definitive review, and I’m glad to finally be done with it. This game sucks, but bisqwit’s effort does not. Thank you again bisqwit for your effort! YES! to your patch, even if the game itself is still a NO! And seriously, compilations need to do things like this. There is nothing inherently sacred about old versions of games and including OPTIONAL quality of life fixes is ALWAYS worth the effort, even if the game isn’t that much better for it.
Castlevania: Bloodlines aka Castlevania: The Next Generation (Europe) aka Vampire Killer (Japan) Platform: Sega Genesis Released March 17, 1994 Designed by Teisaku Seki Developed by Konami Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
To be honest, I’m surprised the enemies don’t mistake you as an ally. John Morris is built like one of those flea men wished upon a star and became a real boy.
This is my fifteenth review related to Castlevania, and hell, that doesn’t even count all the games inspired by it, for better (like Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon) and for worse (like Master of Darkness). Yet, I don’t think I’m close to running out of things to say about one of my all-time favorite action franchises. Good thing, because I’m not really close to running out of Castlevania games to review, either. And it IS an action franchise, or at least that’s why I’m into it. The awesome undead settings and bonkers mythos is just a bonus, because it’s the combat and the pace and the often clever enemy design and placement that keeps me coming back. I love the whip, and the boomerang and holy water and axe and the predictability of it. This is a strange thing to say about a game where you fight skeletons and the Grim Reaper itself, but Castlevania reminds me of slipping on my robe fresh out of the dryer. It’s comfort, in gaming form. I wanted to note that because Bloodlines is probably the most traditional and conservative Castlevania that also counts as “one of the weird ones.”
Boy, did I lose my sh*t on this part, because my up-to-this-point perfect run ended because I went right instead of left before the screen scrolled up enough to show me I was going the wrong way. I’m certain that I’ve played Bloodlines all the way through because I remembered certain aspects of the Grim Reaper and Dracula battles, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember any of the levels, even though there’s a couple spots that seem memorable. I’ll chalk it up to the bug zapper in my head.
Unique to the franchise, at least at the time this came out, is that this Castlevania was set in the 20th century, with the idea being that a witch accidentally re-alived Elizabeth Bartley, who is based on Elizabeth Báthory, who probably did kill a lot of people but the tales are largely exaggerated. No, she didn’t bathe in the blood of people to stay young, which does NOTHING for your looks anyway and makes you stink of iron for about a week though don’t ask how I know that. Those stories were first reported well over a century after the fact. There’s a modern effort to prove she was framed and the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign, but all the evidence says she killed between 30 and 300 girls, for which her reward is being the Lenny Luthor to Dracula’s Lex in the Genesis version of Castlevania. Which proves there’s no divine justice because a crime like that warrants being the second-to-last boss of Castlevania Adventure for the Game Boy.
Only the fourth level feels like it builds upon the war setting, and it does this by leaning into the camouflage colors, putting up some chain link fences and donning the skeletons in army helmets. Meh.
Why all this REALLY matters is because Bloodlines is set during World War I and has far and away the most unhinged story of the franchise. Get this: according to Bloodlines, it was actually Bartley who assassinated Franz Ferdinand using sorcery and started the Great War so she can use all the souls collected from the casualties of the war to bring back Dracula. Talk about devotion. All that effort to bring back one evil guy with an uncanny knack for coming back from the dead only to immediately die again at the hands of a family armed with what is really just enchanted cow hide on a stick when you stop and think about it.
Bartley also doubles as one of the most boring Castlevania bosses ever. You just smack her back and forth before her magic balls ripen.
Like so many other ideas in the franchise, the World War I setting sounds exciting, but doesn’t really amount to all that much. Only the fourth level, which has a couple steel drums laying around, reminded me “oh right, this is a 20th century setting.” Not that you should ever play Castlevania for the story because it’s too silly to take all that seriously. But I guess I was hoping for something like the Grim Reaper driving a tank or Frankenstein (excuse me, “The Creature”) in a biplane. It feels like a missed opportunity, and it’s not like this game was afraid to embrace the comically absurd silliness. One of the bosses is a downright playful set of sentient gears that I’d swear is more like a boss from a Toy Story game.
It’s a hard boss to get a good screenshot of, but this is the Pixar-like boss and you can sort of make out its body in this shot. It’s very animated and has a playful personality too. I actually felt bad killing it, so naturally the game makes you do it a second time during the home stretch. Now whether or not a boss that can be described as “whimsical” belongs in a game where a woman starts a war that killed twenty million people to bring her cousin back from the dead is another matter. Hey Thanos, if Lady Death spurns your wooing, I know someone who would probably be into you!
So ignore the theme, because this is a mostly boilerplate Castlevania with six levels, but a lot more bosses than levels. And I say “mostly boilerplate” because when this Castlevania experiments for one section of the final level, it’s completely out of its mind. I don’t even know how to describe the pictures you’re about to see, except to say I thought my emulator might have been broken at first.
In a nutshell, the screen is divided into three horizontal slices that aren’t in sync with each-other. The best I can describe it is like playing Castlevania in a fun house mirror, and it’s VERY confusing and disorienting, and I sort of like it and I sort of think it’s the worst idea ever. It’s rare that something is both those things, and I think the problem is it’s just not staged right. It doesn’t work as a set-piece because it’s in the room right from the start, so it feels like a glitch, when what they were REALLY aiming for, I think, is for it to sort of feel like a prototype for Eternal Darkness’ insanity effects. This really needed a graphic of Bartley casting a spell after the room starts to show what is happening. The same with the upside-down room that follows. It’s not the same as the famous “slam scrolling” from Dracula’s Curse, because that’s a very intuitive set-piece. This looks like something is wrong with your television in a bad way. It’s a magic act with only “the turn” and no “pledge” or “prestige.” So what should be a dazzling set-piece is reduced to confusion.
What’s especially frustrating about how badly they bungled those “magic trick” rooms is that they’d already shown they knew how to set up a high concept set-piece (well, for Castlevania) in this very game. I really thought this whole sequence was fantastic, and it’s staged correctly. There’s a lead-up with these blocks that’s a typical Castlevania style challenge and kind of mundane, then it starts raining these blocks, and it does it in a way that keeps you on your toes AND you don’t know where they’re going with it. The sequence then stops and returns back to normalcy in the same room. That’s how you do it! You have to lull a player into those types of gags. You can’t just do it willy nilly.
Is Bloodlines a good Castlevania game? Sure. It does Castlevania mostly right with few surprises, but few mistakes as well. Okay, so the Grim Reaper/Bartley fights were disasters. Actually, let’s just call level six a disaster saved by a decent Dracula fight, even if they gave Dracula’s final form the world’s most menacing vagina. SERIOUSLY WHY DID THEY DESIGN HIS CROTCH TO LOOK THAT WAY?! THEY EVEN GAVE IT LIPS, FOR F*CK’S SAKE!!
Probably literally for f*ck’s sake. I’d say “a little penicillin will clear up whatever form of demonic clap that is” but he was raised from the dead about a decade too early.
And there’s a second character, Eric, who uses “Alucard’s Spear” and he’s just not as fun to use. The stick has less OOMPH to it, so the combat’s satisfaction is significantly, dare I say catastrophically, muted. Thankfully he’s completely optional and I think a single run through the game with main character John Morris should be enough for any fan, though Eric’s addition did require one brief branching path that feels like a last-second band-aid more than something that was planned out. John Morris (son of Quincy Morris of the Dracula novel’s fame) can swing with his whip, something I didn’t realize until I reached this section where I reached a gigantic, unjumpable gap and was like “how the hell do you get past this?”
Answer: this way.
Meanwhile, Eric can do the Super Mario 2 charge jump thing, but the charge jump thing doesn’t move Eric horizontally. It’s basically only good for jumping directly above you, though you can jump VERY high with it and even bypass entire sections of the game with it. Of course, since you can’t swing and you can’t move horizontally, Eric can’t get past the room in the above screenshot, so what to do? Well, in the room BEFORE that room, you have to spring-jump up a series of slanted platforms.
Eric often looks more like an exotic dancer than a hero, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hell, I feel like someone should stick a $20 in his underwear. This is seriously the most erotic review I’ve ever had.
I wish they had optimized the game JUST for John Morris, because they clearly didn’t. The whip swinging goes largely underutilized presumably to accommodate Eric. It’s like, if you go to all the trouble of programming a whip swing, you want a lot more than one or two notable usages out of it, right? I got a LOT more usage out of Eric’s exotic super jump. Like, these rooms with gigantic clock gears that are one of my favorite Castlevania tropes? Yeah, they’re a little on the janky side in Bloodlines and I had trouble working them with John Morris. But Eric could just circumvent it by springing up to the target platform and ignoring the gears entirely.
Did I have fun? Sure. Do I get why this is so beloved? Uh…….. Kind of? Hell, my friend Matthew calls it his favorite Castlevania (well, “arguably” his favorite which I think means “I know, I know, but..”) and that made me stop and think how this ended up THAT. I think a lot of it, along with the idea that Bloodlines is one of the “weird ones” is tied to this being the first Castlevania for a non-Nintendo platform (if you don’t count MSX or Haunted Castle in the arcades). By the time I got deeply into gaming in 1998, the idea that Nintendo and Sega were at war seemed downright quaint, but now that I’ve got amazing friends who big parts of Sega during the SNES/Genesis war, I do get it, because I know how proud they were to land Castlevania. How earned it felt for them. Castlevania was a huge prize for Sega to nab, and for a lot of gamers, this was their first Castlevania. I’m sure to Nintendo, it felt like a shot across their bow. None of that matters in 2025 though. Bloodlines is not a great Castlevania game, and it’s not even a weird one. A deeply flawed one? Sure. But it’s also a good one. No arguments there. Verdict: YES!
If you live in Europe, this didn’t happen and so you should be cool and not read the following joke. I won’t be held responsible for warping your brain. If you live in the US, proceed. Ahem. “What the Red Cross does with their blood overstock.” Really, I feel Europeans probably could have read that and lived otherwise normal lives. Censorship is weird.
Donkey Kong Bananza Platform: Nintendo Switch 2 Released July 17, 2025 Directed by Wataru Tanaka and Kazuya Takahashi Developed by Nintendo $69.99 (normally $79.99) chopped down a mountain with the edge of my hand in the making of this review.
This is more like a whiny blog post than a normal review but I just put about two weeks into Donkey Kong Bananza and I’m not happy with the last third or so of the game. I spent two-thirds of Donkey Kong Bananza thinking it would go down as one of my favorite games ever, and it’s certainly not. Given how many total hours of euphoria Bananza gave me, I have to give it a YES! For a platformer, I don’t think a horrible final five or so hours should be capable of flipping the verdict of an amazing twenty-to-thirty hours of a rough but highly-entertaining experience. With that said, I’m really unhappy with the last several levels of Bananza, and there’s no way to explain it without spoiling it, so be warned.
THIS IS NOT A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW! I’m awarding Bananza a YES! verdict. That’s because there’s far more good than bad in this game. But I also HATED the last third of Bananza, and I explain why. And there will be spoilers!
I can’t remember being so frustrated with a game I loved before. Not even Wind Waker.
The above screenshot was a really bad sign of how things would end for Donkey Kong Bananza. In one of the worst boss designs I can remember, you have to manually travel between several past worlds just to smack main baddie “Void Kong” a few times in each world. And when I say “manually” I mean you have to chase Void Kong, smacking him and then chase him more because he runs away and his primary attack is to put crap between you and him. After you chase him and smack him enough times, a cut scene happens and he warps to a prior stage. You then have to go to the warp gong, hit it, then go to the next level the Void Kong is in. Repeat doing this until it tells you that you don’t have to anymore.
Imagine this in ANY OTHER game. Imagine you’re fighting the 5th boss in Legend of Zelda, only after getting a couple smacks on him, he teleports to the middle of the 4th dungeon, where you have to make your way to him and smack him a couple times, then he teleports to the 3rd dungeon, THEN BACK to the 5th dungeon. I don’t give a flying f*ck if you can just walk out of the dungeon and blow the warp whistle to cut down on the travel. It’s still a horrible, HORRIBLE idea, and yet it’s here and a major part of this game. I literally cannot believe anyone gave Bananza a perfect score unless you somehow teleported this game to 2001 and showed it to someone who was disappointed with GameCube’s launch lineup.
It’s a complete slog and a bore that grinds the game to a screeching halt. You have to chase him through the Junction Layer (“Layers” are levels), then chase him through the Hilltop Layer, then chase him through the Lagoon Layer, and then BACK to the Junction Layer. It’s not fun AT ALL. It’s not exciting AT ALL. It’s not satisfying to make progress AT ALL. I don’t remember a single boss fight that was transformed into unbearable busywork quite like this. It’s such an overindulgent idea that it should have been rejected out of hand when it was pitched. Yet, here it is, in the final game. Up to this point, I was head over heels for Donkey Kong Bananza. It’s the sequel to Super Mario Odyssey I’ve been waiting almost eight years for, and that’s not hyperbole. The game did recover after this sequence, but it would eventually crater for good, a solid five or so hours before the actual ending.
This should have been the best level in the game, but some REALLY broken gameplay mechanics put the screws to that. You know, this burger reminds me of something but at this time I can’t recall what.
Mario Odyssey leapfrogged the first WarioWare to become my all-time favorite video game. Okay, the fact that Odyssey and WarioWare are my two favorite games probably speaks volumes about my attention span but I don’t care. I couldn’t put Odyssey down and, as long as it didn’t involve a jump rope, I never got bored with it. I even beat it a second time last year. I found every Moon, in every stage, and all the post game stuff, TWICE. I would have totally bought Odyssey DLC if it had been offered. I was good to go for weeks or even months after I finished it, both times. And there are no words to describe how overjoyed I was that Bananza’s hunt for bananas and fossils is exactly like the moons and purple coins in Odyssey. Like, 90% like it. The fossils are based around the Terraria-like digging, but the SEARCH for them is identical. It’s a direct Super Mario Odyssey sequel in everything but the name. EVEN WITH THE NEW GAMEPLAY MECHANICS, it’s Super Mario Odyssey 2, or like amazing DLC for Odyssey that grants you a new character in Donkey Kong. The logic of the level design is the same. The amount of moons/bananas is basically the same, and the variety of ways to find them has a very similar vibe. Some are just laying around, others are bought, and some you have to go hell and back to get. Again, it’s a direct sequel with a new character. Period.
My strategy was basically to beat the stages, then systematically knock-out the bananas and fossils that I missed. As you can see, there’s a LOT of stuff all over. This is just one part of a bigger map, mind you. The main levels have multiple “layers” that each have their own challenges.
And I was in love. This felt like it justified my Switch 2 purchase by itself. No joke. I got so much value out of Bananza that I have to give it a YES! because the amount of quality gaming hours I experienced far exceeded the bad parts. And that’s why I was so frustrated by the last few levels of Bananza. The last “real” level that’s Odyssey-like is basically broken, and after that, the game just f*cking refuses to end. The fun is barely visible in the rear view mirror by that point. The last couple levels, especially, are boring settings and broken mechanics.The difficulty spikes dramatically while also slowing down because the game leans extra-heavily into knocking you off the stage. When that happens it takes away a balloon (balloons are so common that you dig them up even after you reach the max 99, which is crap) and returns you to the start of the sequence you were on. It’s a very slow mechanic because you have to fall all the way to the bottom of whatever pit you’re on, so it’s like if you were playing Castlevania and the legendary knock-back of that game took five to ten seconds to recover and start moving again. Maybe even longer.
This is near the start of the second-to-last level. There’s two levels in a row that are fake-out last levels before you get the proper final part of the game. You can punch through that concrete with the Gorilla Bananza but it’s slow. Everything about the last three or so hours of Bananza is slow.
I’m fine with the recovery time punishment when it’s my fault. If I’m walking around, trashing a level and I screw up and fall off the side of a wall or tunnel through a mountain into oblivion, fine. A long recovery time is a good incentive to not do that again. But I object to the enemy design deliberately going for the knock-back, because now you’re in the action part of the game and not the exploration part. Okay, it’s technically accurate that allowing an enemy to hit me is also my fault, but apples and oranges, because having such a long recovery time in the thick of battle is boring. It’s like the development team forgot that we’re playing video games specifically to not be bored, but the game’s sudden obsession over the final four levels with going for the over-the-ledge knockouts is beyond the pale. And suddenly all the mechanical foibles I had been overlooking for a couple weeks weren’t nothingburgers anymore.
This part specifically, which is the home stretch for the second or third fake-out final boss fight, placing you on this moving platform where you really can’t stop moving AND puts enemies that knock you out quite high up. Not only do you have to wait to fall all the way but it sends you all the way back to the start of this segment.
As much as I enjoyed DKB, it was never a perfect game. It has one of the worst cameras Nintendo has done since the GameCube era, back when 3D games were brand new and game makers were still figuring that stuff out. I assume it’s based on the “almost every solid surface can be destroyed” element. The camera is NOT suitable for it, as it’s often hard to find a good angle to do what you want to do. But then there’s other janky things. Many of the power-ups have multiple actions mapped to a single button. Tap the button to do one thing, hold it for the other, and it’s badly programmed, as regardless of what you INTEND to do, tap or hold, the game will do the opposite. It never gets better, either, and so even against the final-final-final-final-final boss (yes, all those finals make sense), I would need multiple attempts to perform the action I intended to do because the game doesn’t (can’t?) wait to see if I was holding or tapping the button. Which seems like it defeats the point of making it like that to begin with.
The elephant’s ability to slurp things up, especially when you level up those abilities, is so overpowered that it probably should have been saved for post game content. I mean, I LOVED it, but it also basically marked the end of “elegant” exploration in Bananza.
Whether you’re powered-up or not, the act of aiming a pile of terrain you’re holding, which pulls the game into a third-person view with a crosshair, fails constantly. Sometimes it will just plain not work the first attempt, or second, or third. Maybe it’ll throw the piece away, which means you have to scoop-up more. Since you probably NEED this mechanic to work when you’re trying to use it, especially if it’s during combat, it’s a pretty damning thing to happen as often as it does. The animal power-ups fail just as often. The elephant has two powers, the first of which is the ability to vacuum up the terrain. It’s ridiculously overpowered and will probably force you to reset the terrain on stages multiple times because you can render areas impassable, and I loved it. Except you do the vacuum by holding the button down, and often, instead of doing that, it will instead create a boulder out of the stuff stored in its trunk, which is done by tapping the button. And again, sometimes it’ll flip. Plus, you can combine those problems with the failure to register that you want to aim and throw the boulders you make, because that happens too. This game is a Russian nesting doll of mechanical failures.
When you actually get to the third-person crosshairs, it’s pretty accurate. Also, is it just me or does that spot of terrain look like the Prince from Katamari?
By far the most unreliable power-ups were the snake’s double jump and the gorilla’s charge punch. The snake is one of those “always hopping” mechanics that Nintendo keeps going back to, like in Mario Wonder, and it’s NEVER fun and they will NEVER get the message on that and stop including it. It’s so unimaginative to begin with, but unlike Mario Wonder, it’s not really optional for large stretches of Bananza. You even have to fight a boss as the snake. The snake can also cause slow motion by holding a button down, but once again, sometimes it just doesn’t work the first couple attempts, and I often needed multiple attempts to do a simple double jump up a straight wall. What’s crazy is that, when you’re able to free-climb on a surface, it’s like a Spider-Man game that controls perfectly. It’s only when it does anything but the basic Donkey Kong moves that the game becomes janky.
I lost count of how many times I tried to ride up a wind current as the ostrich and fell right off it because it’s not intuitive to jump first to use a flying button. It really doesn’t help that the move the button does when you’re not mid-air is useless. I never found a use for rolling as the ostrich. It’s a waste of a button.
All these issues make Donkey Kong Bananza probably the worst controlling 3D platformer Nintendo has done in several generations. By far the worst of any game I actually overall enjoyed. The Gorilla Bananza power-up, which is like a beefy version of Donkey Kong, has a charge punch. Just hold the B-button down and he’ll blink and then you can throw a punch for more damage. Except half the time, it doesn’t do it. It does something else. I don’t even know what, but not the charge punch. Even late in the game, when I was trying to charge-up the punch, I’d have to press and hold it again maybe two or three times before it worked. It really felt like maxing-out the upgrades for it didn’t help or maybe even made it more prone to failure. I know video game fans don’t like to wait for anything, but Bananza would have been so much better with another year or so of polish. There are dozens of moments, if not hundreds, where the game feels like a rough prototype. And the controls aren’t even as rough as some of the mechanics. Take the muck, for example. See this?
That ooze stuff is supposed to be like slug slime. That hole only opened up after two or three hits that seemingly did nothing.
It’s called “muck” and the final proper, Mario Odyssey-like level is themed around a theme park that got covered in it. It’s kind of like Mario Sunshine, except instead of having an easy-to-refill hose to wash it off, you have to pick up piles of salt and throw it at the muck, which will clear a tiny amount of it. You have to do this one pile at a time. That would be bad enough if it worked, but it doesn’t. Even no-questions-asked direct hits don’t always work. I don’t know if it’s because there’s a microscopic piece of debris in the way. I think that’s what has to be happening. Maybe they shouldn’t have been as stingy as they are with how much muck a handful of salt can clear. For muck without an enemy in it, one pile doesn’t do a lot. On its face value, it slows the game to a crawl IF it worked 100% as intended, and would have been a bad idea on its own. But it’s like the Nintendo Switch 2 can’t handle the idea of this pile of salt you pick up disintegrating into thousands of particles that evaporate the muck. If ANYTHING is in front of it, the whole pile you threw is lost. This was especially problematic with fossils that were embedded in it. Even trying to throw around the fossil and carve it out would just leave the damn thing suspended in air. I can’t believe they included this whole mechanic in the game. (shrug) It doesn’t work! I don’t know how else to say it! It doesn’t f*cking work, at least good enough to be used as much as it is.
That’s assuming the salt even gets picked up. There were a few times where I was standing over it and somehow picked up dirt instead.
Enemies and bosses can be the same way, too. Larger ones are covered in layers of one of the materials that you can dig through (usually whichever material dominates the level layout) and if you throw something at them, it’s never consistent from one throw to the next how much shield you’ll peel off. Sometimes a direct hit goes right through them and removes their shield, and other times it might just make a tiny little dent in it. There were a lot of instances where their shields would be incredibly misshapen from all the crap I’d thrown at them, but they were still alive and attacking because the direct hits weren’t registering the full damage to the “suit” the skeleton underneath it was wearing. It’s a very janky, inconsistent game that, frankly, often makes the Switch 2 feel less powerful. Like, in 2025, it kind of feels like this texture-based gameplay should be further along than this.
This mini-game in the Canyon Layer where you have to kill 10 Squeeloids is the ideal way to grind the maximum two hundred or so bananas that you can purchase for 100 coins + 300 gold. I didn’t know there was a cap and spent a long time grinding on it, since you can just hit “restart” after everything is dead (any coins you don’t collect will be automatically given to you after the last one dies). Also, notice there’s two records in this screenshot? This is also the ideal room to get the records really fast. I went from missing 100 or so to having everything in about thirty minutes. It’s “Canyon Layer Banana #11: Exploding Pork Platoon.” It’s super easy, too. Sometimes you can clear the whole screen in a single punch that causes a very satisfying chain reaction Later in the game, you get a costume that increases coin drops by over 40%. You can get 25 or more coins per round, which takes under fifteen seconds to finish.
And then there’s the finale. After chasing around Void Kong and his minions the entire game, and Void Kong is NEVER a satisfactory boss to battle with, at least compared to the massive bosses that buffer him, something weird happens. The game has a proper, satisfying enough ending, and even made me laugh. Donkey Kong gets trapped in the purple crap, and it’s pretty funny looking. My brain played the sad version “Frosty the Snowman” and I was in tears, howling with laughter.
But then Pauline sings him free, and that’s a good, proper ending to the game. It’s how the game started. First Pauline was covered in the purple crap during the tutorial stage, then DK was, and now they know their power and their wish can come true. Void Kong is defeated, peace and returns to the layers, and we reached the Infinity Banana, which grants wishes to whoever gets to it. It’s the Triforce of bananas, apparently. Those last couple hours were pretty bad, but overall, Donkey Kong Bananza was a really fun game.
But then this happens.
Excuse me, what?
What the f*ck? Yeah, the “Root” exists but the thing you think was the root was King K. Rool’s tummy. This wasn’t set up at all leading up to this. What follows is another level that sucks and is nothing like the Mario Odyssey-like adventure I had loved for the first couple dozen hours of gameplay. Also, now the big enemies that once had skeletons inside them are housing the Kremlings inside of them instead.
And then you eventually find King K. Rool and the Banana of Destiny and you fight. Well, the best thing I can say about the King K. Rool battle is that it’s a much better fight than I expected. I think the last boss in Donkey Kong Country is a BORING boss fight (frankly none of the bosses in Donkey Kong Country 1 are fun) but this time, he’s a proper big boss, unlike the lame Void Kong battles. It’s one of those “knock the thing they shoot back at them” fights. And hey, I got one last reminder that the Gorilla Bananza’s charge punch, which is the only thing that will knock his cannonballs back at him, just f*cking refuses to activate half the time, so that was nice. One final reminder that this is the least polished major Nintendo game in decades.
But then you win that battle, get the Root, and the game IS over. Pauline wished to return to the surface. Donkey Kong wished for bananas. Awesome. The game is finally over! It sucks that they added one terrible level to an already sloggy ending sequence, but it’s finally done. You have the Banana Root or whatever and you make your wish, the Banana Root blows its load and launches you and her up to the surface. Roll the credits. I mean, surely they’re not going to do the fake end credits thing like in Donkey Kong Country and then have the game continue even further.
Oh no.
My God. Okay, so after an extended cut scene that is clearly the ending, somehow King K. Rool shoots up this banana geyser you’ve been riding to the surface and ANOTHER final battle happens. Each of these final battles has been little more than a reminder of how haphazard DKB’s gameplay is. In this battle, you have to pick up chunks of the geyser and throw them at King K. Rool. You hold down the “grab a chunk” button” to bring up cross hairs to aim, assuming it works. It often doesn’t, like every other mechanic in the game. Sometimes I just couldn’t get the aiming crosshairs to work. Also, this is a battle that goes for the “make you fall off the edge and use a balloon” knock-outs. Awesome.
Thankfully, after five or six hits, King K. Rool is defeated FOR GOOD THIS TIME and…… wait, after all that, HE gets the Banana Root and it instantly gives him his wish to take over New Donk City? MOTHER F*CKER are you kidding me? How come MY wishes don’t work as fast as his? I think this root is evil!
And there’s even a new title screen!
I wanted to cry. And it’s YET ANOTHER terrible stage. It’s short at least, but actually, it’s also the worst part of the entire game because it’s got fast-rising, instakill lava. No time to enjoy the level design. Run for it, or you will die and have to start over from the last barrel you reached. Also there’s thorns and life-sucking hot rocks everywhere and enemies are still going for that one-shot knockout. It’s just the worst. And then, after all that, it’s essentially the same “knock the cannonballs back at King K. Rool” battle as before, only he uses the Banana Root to make him look like this:
Goddammit, Mom! What did I tell you about giving your likeness to Nintendo?!
Right before I finished this boss, I had to pause the game to ask “what the hell am I doing?” Seriously! I hadn’t had even a tiny amount of fun with Donkey Kong Bananza in several hours at this point. Everything I’d loved about the level design and themes and exploration had long since ended, yet the game just refused to stop. I was happy fighting the main villains, but then suddenly Nintendo lost their nerve to not get drunk on nostalgia and switched out the new cast for the old cast. It’s Avengers: Doomsday a year ahead of schedule! So, back to the same old boss Donkey Kong has been fighting for decades, and they didn’t even give him good levels. One of the DLC packs is apparently based on Donkey Kong Country. Why wasn’t THAT the final level? If you’re going to bring back King K. Rool, put him in the Donkey Kong Country level! F*cking lame. At least this time, it was the real ending. You beat King K. Rool, Pauline says she’ll learn to keep the beat without DK beating his chest, and he returns back to his world. Yes! The credits! It’s finally over!
“Three months later…”
Nope. I’m good.
This was one of the most negative reviews I’ve done, but I promise that I had a ton of fun with this.
Okay, so I’m disappointed that Donkey Kong Bananza had a terrible end game. I figured it would be like Mario Odyssey where I’d be joyously knocking out the much harder post-game content, but nah, I’m okay with never playing this again. Hell, I didn’t even pick up the post-game banana. That was my middle finger to a game that forgot that it’s supposed to be fun. All my interest in the post-game content or the DLC was reduced to zilch by one terrible level after another to close out what had been an overall rough but amazing game. Again, by raw ratio of good-to-bad, Donkey Kong Bananza is an automatic YES! Maybe if DKB had been a heavily story-based game, like an RPG, bungling the finale like this could ruin the overall game. But it’s a platformer, and most of the levels were huge, heavy in content, and pretty damn fun. Even the ice level had some damn clever stuff in it.
I liked the whole “singing to undo the purple stuff” mechanics. If anything, I think it’s a little under utilized. There’s no boss that you beat by singing. You might activate a battle with Pauline’s tune, but her singing is set up to be magical. Why not have some enemies that you strip their shield by singing at them. Not that this game needs more actions mapped to one button.
There’s a million reviews out there that talk about the positive aspects of Donkey Kong Bananza, so I’ll sum up my experience by noting that, by my count, there’s eighteen levels in the standard game, assuming New Donk City counts as a level. After being pretty dang bored with opening tutorial stage (Ingot Isle), which has a bland mine setting and doesn’t feature the geocaching-like search for bananas and fossils that I would become addicted to, the next eleven levels, starting with “Lagoon Layer” and ending with “Racing Layer” were the Mario Odyssey sequel I’d waited nearly a decade for. Not all of those are full-sized levels, but it doesn’t matter. For all the camera sloppiness, clunky controls, and mechanical failures, I’d LOVED Donkey Kong Bananza and was making an effort to get every single banana and every single fossil, because it was bliss and possibly my favorite game of the last five years. Other than that sprawling Void Kong fight, it’s a damn fun, damn charming game for that eleven level stretch.
Okay, the racing Diddy and Dixie Kong thing was lame as f*ck. I didn’t like how it controlled at all. BUT, I also won the first and only race I needed to get the banana and open up the next stage. Unlike the ending, the racing segment didn’t overstay its welcome. I’m guessing the post-game content hid a ton of bananas
The game didn’t really start to get bad until after the racing level, the “Radiance Layer” which became the point where I was ready for the game to start wrapping-up. The snake mechanic was introduced and was horrible. There’s large segments where you have to pick up blocks made of light that quickly fade away. It just wasn’t a very fun level at all, at least until the home stretch. Then the “Groove Layer” takes away your ability to transform and the digging/exploration is largely removed. It’s a HORRIBLY boring level, and that was pretty much the end of Donkey Kong Bananza as a good game. The next level, the Feast Layer, is the salt-on-muck level that, frankly, I think is terrible. It’s tragic, too, because Feast Layer’s level design was outstanding. It could have been the best level in the game if the salt/muck mechanics worked, but they don’t. That wouldn’t matter if the level design didn’t rely so heavily on eliminating that muck, but it’s literally the main hook of the stage, and it’s so bad that I can’t believe this was released in this state. There’s nothing worse than picking up a clump of salt, aiming carefully, hitting the muck you were aiming for DEAD ON and having f*cking nothing happen. Thus the potential best stage in the game is rendered not even fun at all.
This is so clever. You have to destroy a block in one place to teleport it to another. Several levels later, out of nowhere, Bananza includes THREE mini-games where you have to create a pathway for falling ice cubes using this “hit a block in one place and it goes to another place” gameplay, and I loved it.
The two full-sized levels that followed were boring, and the New Donk City finale with the rising lava was even worse. In a game based around exploration and discovery, they close things out with a fast-moving instakill sprint. A completely nonsensical idea barely less silly than ending Legend of Zelda with a game of football. But, none of the bad stuff undoes everything that came before it. I paid $70 for this. Did I get $70 worth of entertainment? Easily. And I’m not even mad that the game didn’t end sooner. I’m not arrogant enough to think that most fans won’t disagree with me. They’ll probably LOVE the entire King K. Rool sequence, and I’m happy for them. Hell, I envy them, because my Donkey Kong Bananza experience went from being certain I still had weeks worth of post-game content I’d be eating up to deleting Bananza from my Switch 2 while my sister played “Grounds for Divorce” by Elbow. Verdict: YES!
Froooosty the snowman……………. what’s wrong with me? It doesn’t even look like Frosty!
It’s always a thrill for me to have someone who found a Definitive Review looking for reviews of the big, famous games they already knew about, only to find out about hidden gems they overlooked that get lumped into the feature. That’s what makes the Definitive Review format fun for me. Today, I’m doing something a little different. Usually, under-the-radar games have to find their way into my Definitive Reviews by being paired with more famous games, but today, the big game in this feature is, itself, one of those under-the-radar games, at least to people my age. I’m guessing most of my older readers are probably familiar with Irem’s Kid Niki: Radical Ninja. It started as a coin-op but was much more known as a very early NES release by Data East in the United States (1987). Even with an Arcade Archives release, it’s a non-entity today that gets name dropped occasionally when talking about NES hidden gems. What its fans might not know is that it got a whopping three sequels that never came out in America. You might have played one and not even realized it, as one of these games was re-sprited as a Mario game for bootleg NES and Famicom carts.
You don’t know the bird was killed there! Maybe there’s a female bird on the other side of that room and that’s cupid’s arrow!
Today, I’m playing all five games in the Kid Niki franchise except the Commodore 64 and Apple II ports of the coin-op. And, because it’s fun for me, and also because I know Irem’s publishing partners at ININ Games read Indie Gamer Chick, I’m doing this using the imaginary retro collection format. So, I want you to pretend I’m reviewing a compilation of five games called Kid Niki: Radical Collection that my team believes would retail for between $19.99 and $29.99. Assuming ININ Games used the same emulator features they included in their 2024 re-release of Parasol Stars for the TurboGrafx-16, the emulator would earn Kid Niki: Radical Collection $10 in bonus value, which is my mandatory bonus for any fully stacked emulator in a retro set. That means these games have to earn between $10 and $20 in value to combine with the emulator and make Kid Niki: Radical Collection a worthy purchase, and that’s assuming no other special features are added that would earn bonus value. Let’s see how it goes!
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja aka Kaiketsu Yancha Maru Platform: Arcade Released in 1986 Developed by Irem Sold Separately as Part of Arcade Archives Read the Original IGC Review
My previous experience with Kid Niki, reviewed way back when my YES!/NO! system wasn’t even in place yet, left me pretty unimpressed. But, that was played with the limited-in-features Arcade Archives emulator that didn’t offer rewind and had save states that required me to quit all the way back to the title screen. Not the Kid Niki title screen, but Arcade Archives one. Since Kid Niki undergoes a dramatic difficulty spike the last couple levels well beyond my talent, I was curious if the game would be more pleasant with instantaneous emulator cheating features. Now, those features can’t change things like bland level design or remove the frustration of one of the most unfair, money grubbing finales in gaming history. Rewind and save states aren’t a cure-all. With that said, Kid Niki certainly benefits from these features and turned what I thought was a rubber stamp NO! into a much more complicated review.
The entire franchise you’re about to read about is only happening because of how damn satisfying the primary attack is. Which is going to make the fifth and final game in this feature an especially baffling experience. I still can’t believe they didn’t realize that.
The best thing Kid Niki has going for it, besides mostly sublime boss battles, is one of the all-time delightful 8-bit attacks. Instead of slashing a sword in front of you, you sort of spin it. I don’t know quite how the physics are supposed to work, but since basic enemies take one hit to kill and go flying with a satisfying pop, it’s kind of unforgettable. Instead of calling this the generic sounding Kid Niki, they should have named this The Adventures of Katana Twirly. Normally, this would be the type of attack that makes you want to slay every enemy, but two things prevent this. First, the timer counts down too quickly, and even if you don’t come close to timing out, you get more points for finishing with five or more minutes on the clock. Second: the screen can become completely flooded with enemies. Too many enemies for Katana Twirly to deal with, and sometimes they’ll keep spawning until you move.
You’ll notice Twirly’s hairdos aren’t the same in every pic. For screenshots of the coin-op, if he’s got messy hair culminating in a rat tail, like in this picture, the screenshot is of the US version. If he’s got a topknot (a “Chonmage” in Japan) it’s the Japanese version. The other major change is the Japanese original has no checkpoints. If you die, you have to start the level all over. Since a couple of the bosses are brutal, that’s too big a punishment. None of the differences are present in the Famicom/NES game.
You’re also armed with a decent jump that can clear most enemies, so when the playfield becomes flooded with too many baddies to deal with, legging is sometimes an option. Not always. Like in this shot:
You can see more enemies beginning to spawn in the right corner. Yes, they’ll come down in a virtual waterfall of enemies like you see on the left.
You’re going to need to inch forward to get these guys to stop spawning, because they come in at an angle that forces combat instead of avoidance. But in later levels, where bosses might require more time to fight, stopping to turn around and smack guys will just eat up time, especially since they’ll just keep spawning behind you. So in the next picture, it makes more sense to just ignore what’s behind you if it’s not a direct threat.
One other difference: the masked baddies have “angry eyes” in the Japanese version, whereas they look closer to Shy Guys in the US version.
Now, while I personally wasn’t trying to get a high score (what’s the point? I was cheating like I was Derrick Rose facing my SATs), I found myself just trying to save as much time as possible because I wanted to see if I could get the maximum end of level bonus. But even when I tried to rush through stages, I found myself wondering if it was even possible. Even cheating, I couldn’t so much as get the second tier bonus on some of the later stages, and I wasn’t close at all to the max bonus. So, while the combat is cathartic, and there’s even bonus points for wiping out full formations of enemies, there’s also an inelegance to Kid Niki that’s undeniable.
There’s two power-ups, one of which gives you a projectile that looks like your sword. The other is this shield that spins relatively slowly around you but does make progress easier. Both items are used pretty sparingly and wear off eventually.
I admit that I was a little too hard on the level design in my previous review. It doesn’t matter if they have bland platforming layouts because it’s the enemy attack patterns and formations that the design logic is based around. This is a combat-focused game that can do platforming but isn’t really a platformer. Good thing too, because the jumping isn’t perfect. Turning around to face the other direction mid-air isn’t possible. Once your feet leave the ground, if an enemy is behind you, you can’t do anything about it until you land. The Famicom/NES version, up next, isn’t built the same way and offers much, much more flexible combat. Of course, being the NES, there’s also a LOT less enemies and much fewer situations where I would have liked to turn around mid-air. That would have been SO valuable in this version. Alas.
This is the first video game boss who spends the fight, I kid you not, scratching his ass. This isn’t one of those Ring King “it only looks naughty” situations. He’s no-doubt-about-it got an itchy anus. Which explains why he’s so grouchy! By the way, the word he’s spitting at you apparently has no English equivalent but according to Cutting Room Floor, it’s a word that’s used to scold practitioners of Zen. I wonder if Phil Jackson ever screamed it in the middle of a game? That’s TWO Chicago Bulls references in one review, by the way. I do myself proud sometimes.
The coin-op version of Kid Niki is one of those games that proves the value of a great emulator. Katana Twirly goes from relatively easy to learn and clock to absolutely maddening, with minimal middle ground. The curve is so steep that they could name a street in San Francisco after it, and it all finishes with a level that has seemingly random, ultra-fast moving bubbles rise up from the ground. It’s one hit deaths, and because of that, it really feels like the dirtiest of dirty pool.
I had to replay this a dozen or so times in the US version. Weirdly, in the hypothetically harder Japanese version, I got a favorable pattern of bubbles for this segment and aced it. I would have been proud of myself if I hadn’t instead died by shorting jumps I’d already safely made several times before.
And even after you get past the random bubbles, you’re still not done. The last attack pattern of the last boss becomes downright frustrating since he won’t open up and become vulnerable until you retreat to the other side of the screen, giving him a chance to blow his hard-to-avoid columns of fire at you. I guess their heart was in the right place, since they made a cheese-proof boss. But they kind of shot the moon and went too far in the other direction.
You can see my sword is not in my hand. This is the novel mechanic that I’d never seen before Kid Niki. During boss battles, every time you successfully land a shot, your sword goes flying out of your hands and you have to retrieve it. It’s really clever, actually. A great idea that is successfully executed in six out of the eight boss fights. Hell, the sixth boss is even built around the retrieval part of this element. I just don’t like it for the final boss, which I feel is just too unfair and brutal.
I’m standing by my NO! verdict for the Arcade Archives release, but using my preferred emulator, yep, I’m flipping my verdict to a solid YES! But, that’s a YES! is dependent on the emulator because it just becomes too demoralizing without it. With it, Kid Niki actually is a pretty dang decent coin-op experience. Like so many classic 80s games, I’d love to play a version of this that drops limited lives in favor of unlimited lives and a death counter. If ININ and Irem wanted to do a collection of Kid Niki games today, they should consider reworking it with that style. Make it cheating proof and put up a leaderboard for fewest deaths in a run. Don’t forget the toggles, too, since there’s dip switch settings that adjust the difficulty. Mind you, all my whining about difficulty was done on the lowest setting. Granted, most arcade games are still brutal on low settings, but that’s because they need to kick you off to earn money.
I love the art direction. Like this? It looks exactly like how Japanese mythology depicts demon insects. Those big, vacant, nightmare fuel eyes? I couldn’t wait to be done with this boss. It’s a good fight, though. You have to cut it to the bone, segment by segment, before you can kill the head.
By the way, I easily died over fifty times playing the US version, but that was cut nearly in half in the “harder” Japanese version that I played afterward. Emulator cheating helps you to get good. I wasn’t born able to have a no-death run through Castlevania. I got to that point by using rewind and save states, until one day I realized I just didn’t need them anymore. I did the same thing, only faster, with Adventure Island this year. They’re cheating features, but they’re also training tools. Instead of having to work your way back to the sections that kill you, rewind or even quick save/quick load allows you to examine the segments of levels closely and instantly. In just one pitifully played full game run through Kid Niki where I cheated like crazy, I learned enough to cut my deaths in half for the next run. If I stuck with Kid Niki, I think in a few days I might even be able to do a no-game over-run. It’s the ultimate trainer. Basically gaming steroids, only without wrecking your heart and sex organs. Well, maybe your sex organs but that will happen for non-chemical reasons. Verdict: YES! **FLIP** $5 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection + $1 bonus for having both US and Japanese ROMs.
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja aka Kaiketsu Yancha Maru Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released in October 2, 1987 Developed by TOSE Published by Irem NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
The third boss is one of those bosses that breaks into smaller monsters until you eliminate them entirely. In the coin-op, this doesn’t happen if you hit this boss from behind. In the home version, she just breaks apart. Even worse: as far as I can tell, you can’t be killed by the smallest size in the NES version, which you absolutely could in the arcade game. I know, because I died from them more than once. If you look closely in this picture, you can see that my sprite is almost completely engulfing one of the enemies. I’m not cheating or using a code here. It just can’t hurt you. This happens a lot in Kid Niki, but the opposite is also true: some things kill you that aren’t even a little close to you. This has HORRIBLE collision detection, and it does ruin the game.
With a subtitle like “Radical Ninja” you would think Kid Niki would be riding Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ coattails. But Kid Niki in the United States predates the debut of the TMNT cartoon and toy line by a couple months. I can’t help but wonder if it released a year too soon, because it’s not a hugely known game. Long before I was doing retro game reviews, it was easy to notice that a handful of NES games came up as “hidden gems” more than others. Guardian Legend. Adventure of Lolo. Little Nemo the Dream Master. Those games come up so often it’s safe to say they’re not really “hidden” gems. They’re literally famous. Kid Niki doesn’t come up as much as those, so it still has that “forgotten” shine to it, but when it does come up, people tend to LOVE it. And I don’t get it, because this is a rough, borderline broken game. What do I mean? See this picture:
I survived that full-on contact with the enemy and walked right on past them.
Well, in this pic, they actually walked past me, but I did test it with me moving past them too.
Now here’s the same location, same enemies, but I’m a little bit further to the left when contact was made. Like a half step to the left. It killed me.
Here’s me, well away from the sprites of the projectiles thrown by the fifth boss, dying anyway.
Or how about having your forward momentum halted mid-jump? It happens constantly, I assume a byproduct of sloppy coding to the scrolling. In this clip, I’m holding left the entire time, but I just hit a wall that stops me from moving forward. You can see when I jump back to the platform, it doesn’t happen again. However, when I rewind to the original jump, the invisible wall stops me again. I’ve never seen anything like this in a game before.
And that even happens when you’re running along the ground. It only happens for a split second, but it absolutely does take away from the experience. You can see it happen in this clip:
It’s a damn shame that Kid Niki on the NES is so badly coded, because a lot of the charm of the coin-op did carry over. The well done graphics? Sometimes. Like, this looks pretty good:
This? Not so good. In fact, yikes!
The sprites are fine, but the setting really is just nothing. It’s like I suddenly fell into an Atari 2600 game. Now mind you, the very next screen over has a very impressive looking statue.
That looks great, especially for the time! I don’t know what happened to those backgrounds. I’d swear that’s a placeholder that they ran out of time for. And I know they’re capable of better, because some of the areas are REALLY close to the arcade. Take a look at this, and by the way, I have a white uniform on in the NES pic because of a power-up:
Arcade
NES
That’s pretty dang close, right? Now, gameplay is king and the NO! I’m going to be giving the NES version of Kid Niki has nothing to do with a small section of one level looking like sh*t. But I can’t help but wonder if that one “oh my God, what the f*ck?” section is indicative of a rushed game. Whoever coded this seemed satisfied with the sword attack and neglected several other areas. There’s no excuse for a game where mountains look that good to have a section of the game that looks like this:
BTW I’m running in place there. It’s one of those invisible walls.
The only aspect of Kid Niki’s home port that’s outstanding is the sword mechanic. It works better than in the coin-op since you can turn around mid-air and attack on both sides in a single jump. But everything else about Kid Niki, right down to the act of moving, is, at best, haphazard. At worst, it’s outright broken. That’s before I even talk about the gameplay concessions that had to be made for the home port. In the coin-op, the second boss has a deceptively dangerous attack pattern that requires you to jump over him to get a clean shot off. That’s completely gone in the NES game. He’s very vulnerable from the front, and as a result, I was able to beat him in a matter of seconds.
Arcade
NES/Famicom
Again, sometimes the nerfing works to the game’s benefit. The last level is MUCH more fair, and that’s a good thing. The random bubbles are slowed down just enough to make them an exciting obstacle to dodge while you fight the final boss. If this had more consistent collision detection, for all its problems, I would have given it a YES! without a second thought. The combat is that satisfying and the bosses, wimpy as they are compared to the coin-op, are still fun and unique. They even added some bonus stages into the game. Okay, so they’re hidden in arbitrary spots and I have no idea how anyone ever found them, but it’s the thought that counts.
Even the bonus stages aren’t free passes. Some of the eggs are whammies that spawn these creepy-ass bugs, and some give you extra lives.
But I can’t get over how badly developed this port is. It really feels like no bug testing was done. It’s the total lack of consistency that frustrates me. Some things can kill you when they’re not even close. Other things that should kill you, hey, sometimes you can just pass safely right through them. Horrible. I can totally understand why Kid Niki found itself as one of those beloved hidden gems. I wouldn’t consider the twirly sword attack to be equally as good as, say, Simon Belmont’s whip. But it’s not too far removed from it, either. If this had been a game I played early in my life, I don’t think I would have noticed all the glitches and momentum stoppages, or if I did, I wouldn’t have cared. But if the NES version of Kid Niki were to be in a modern collection, I would actually suggest they give it a tune-up. There’s a good game here, but I don’t think Kid Niki on the Famicom got the time or care it deserved in development. Is it worth fixing? Yep. Will it be? Probably not. Verdict: NO! And no bonus value would be added for having both the US and Japanese ROMs.
Ganso!! Yancha-Maru Platform: Game Boy Released July 11, 1991 Developed by Tamtex Published by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
You have to break blocks a lot in the Game Boy title. I wish it had a nicer crunch to it.
This Japanese exclusive first sequel to Kid Niki, released on my 2nd birthday, comes from the developers of the disastrous sequel to Kung-Fu, Spartan X2 for the Famicom. That was one of the worst games I’ve ever reviewed (it’s second from the bottom in Kung Fu Master: The Definitive Review), so my expectations for this were just about as low as you can get. I was worried for nothing, as Ganso!! Yancha-Maru is a genuinely solid little Game Boy action game that Americans absolutely should have gotten. It has a bigger cast of basic enemies and a much bigger emphasis on platforming than the previous game, but retains Katana Twirly’s primary attack. Unlike Kid Niki, navigation matters a great deal here, especially in the later half of the game, when retracting/expanding platforms and spinning platforms are introduced.
The little two block platforms above me shift from horizontal to vertical.
Despite the smaller screen size, the level design emerges as a genuine highlight. Levels might even split into upper and lower pathways, one of which will have more enemies than the other. Or maybe you’ll encounter a section that requires fast reflexes to smash through blocks before a platform underneath you retracts. All this while the game keeps a fairly consistent clip of combat. None of the collision problems that plagued the NES game get in the way here. Hell, three out of the four bosses are an improvement even though the “deflected sword” mechanic is gone. That’s a remarkable achievement! The first boss can be cheesed in just a matter of seconds, but future bosses require you to face their attack patterns and score hits when you can. I can’t stress enough: this is a pretty well done game.
The third boss drops these rocks that you have to kill, then it only allows you to score one hit per pass.
Unlike the previous Kid Niki coin-op and its NES port, Ganso!! Yancha-Maru is a pretty easy game. I only died three times, once to a boss, and twice to pits. The items from the previous game return here, but on the Game Boy, I found the projectile had a very limited usefulness. How limited? ONCE per a full run through the game, so twice overall, did I actually use the projectile to kill an enemy on the other side of the screen. The playfield is just too small for it to be effective, and even when you hold it, the enemies are usually right next to you and would die from the sword anyway. They probably should have come up with something else. There’s some weird decisions, like the “B” item you collect that unlocks the end of stage “BONUS ROOM” could have been hidden in a block, but instead it just floats onto the screen when you reach the end of a level. It’s basically automatic to get.
Those clouds with faces all shoot projectiles upward.
Admittedly, I lost interest in clearing every block or going for every hidden room. The blocks take too long to crumble and don’t offer a satisfying enough crunch to justify slowing the game down as much as I did in the early levels. But the combat more than makes up for it, and when the blocks are utilized as part of the challenge instead of something to smash for fun, it’s usually well done. Ganso!! Yancha-Maru isn’t a masterpiece by any means. It’s just a good, solid action game that probably could have found an audience in the United States. I’m going to guess the NES Kid Niki didn’t do too hot in sales, because I can’t figure out any other reason why such a quality, on-trend (at least in 1991) game would be skipped over. Probably the best thing I could say about the Game Boy version of Kid Niki: it was at this point I realized doing this Definitive Review wasn’t a waste of time. There’s SOMETHING here. See, everything about July 11 is awesome! Verdict: YES! $5 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 2: Karakuri Land Platform: Famicom Released August 30, 1991 Developed by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Kid Niki 2 has an overworld map, but it doesn’t benefit from it. This is the level you’re placed onto for the map at the start of a new game, and it’s themed around everything being miniaturized. That’s a mid-game trope, and makes ZERO sense for an opening level. It doesn’t have to be the starting point, but who is going to click anything else? Totally nonsensical design. I know people liked Super Mario 3 but not every game requires an overworld map.
The first of two Famicom-exclusive sequels to Kid Niki, Yancha Maru 2 gives the graphics a super-deformed makeover and adds a slew of new abilities. In addition to now being able to swing your sword above or do a downward strike while jumping, you can find items that grant you the ability to temporarily transform into three animals. While transforming into an elephant was an idea decades ahead of its time, I didn’t really find a use for it. On the other hand, there’s plenty of times I had to use the ability to transform into a frog or a hawk to navigate levels. You can’t attack with either and both come with major control issues. The frog moves too loosely and the hawk flies too heavily, but they’re used sparingly to great effect. Since there’s a few areas where they’re necessary to make progress, I sort of think they shouldn’t take points to use, especially since I didn’t want to be them when I didn’t have to be, but otherwise, it’s a nice idea that works wonderfully.
The frog can jump up and reach that extra life, or extra-life like thing.
Now here’s the bad news: even though the animation for the twirly sword attack is basically unchanged, poor sound design and tacky enemy sprites make it feel flimsy and lightweight here. That nice crunchiness to it is gone. Now it’s safe to say Kid Niki 2 is much more platforming-focused than the previous NES game, but there’s still a wide variety of enemies and bosses. It’s just such a shame that it’s no longer fun to fight basic baddies anymore. Some of the designs are downright silly, like miniature enemies in the first stage in the game, which made me giggle with embarrassment. The bosses are fairly generic too.
This is grasping at straws for boss ideas.
And the sequel is a MUCH easier game. Not quite as easy as the Game Boy title, but pretty easy. It’ll take you maybe twenty-to-thirty minutes to finish and offers zero replay value because it’s just kind of bland, but in a way that’s at least worth a look once. For the first time, Kid Niki offers hit points to start every level, which allowed me to cheese nearly every boss in the game. I won most boss fights with a single hit point left, but the fights themselves lasted around ten seconds. I can’t remember a single basic enemy that posed a threat. The only time I died was in the “maze” level, and my death came via lethal moving blocks. When tiny, half-the-size-of-you moving blocks are a bigger threat than even the last boss, the game might have a big problem.
The final level is a brief boss rush made up of a few bosses from the first game, including Death Breath, seen here.
And yet, I didn’t get bored in my first run through Kid Niki 2. Oh, I was ready to be done about a minute into my second playthrough. Again, once you finish this, it has nothing left to offer. So, I guess I understand why this wasn’t released as Kid Niki 2 in America. See though, that’s the beauty of a retro collection. Yancha Maru 2 can’t really stand on its own, unless you can get it for $2, which is the value I’m giving it. But as a +1 for a retro set? Yeah, it’s going to be fine. The coin-op and Game Boy title together will justify the set’s existence, and this is a nice little bonus. I don’t know why they didn’t do better with the combat, which was the main thing Kid Niki had going for it, but the level design is fine and the animal power-ups are cool.
You have to whack bells with your sword to gain power-up points and free-lives. As you can see, the sword sprite is basically unchanged, and that’s the right call. The next sequel didn’t make that call, and it just plain doesn’t feel like a Kid Niki sequel because of it. And I have no idea if that’s supposed to be real Hershey product placement or not.
There’s a couple other power-ups, including the ability to fire a large energy wave that you will need to use a couple times and an overpowered shield that wrecks the already easy to fight baddies. I’m not going to argue that Kid Niki 2 is a lost treasure or that Americans missed out on a big game. This is pretty dang bland, but it controls fine, has decent level design, and doesn’t require a massive time investment to experience. Games can be bland and still be a net gain, in the right circumstances. Retro collections need games like Kid Niki 2. Little twenty-to-thirty minute time wasters that aren’t the main attraction, but worth a look nonetheless. Verdict: YES! $2 in value added to Kid Niki: Radical Collection
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3: Taiketsu! Zouringen Platform: Famicom Released March 30, 1993 Developed by Micronics Published by Irem Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Spoiler: Dr. Wily is the last boss. Okay, it’s NOT Dr. Wily and this is not Mega Man, but it’s trying so desperately to be. It’s really sad, actually. It’s so flagrantly, shamelessly copying the gameplay that it kind of feels a little childish.
Wow. Okay, so, this is a Kid Niki sequel in name only, and a game you might have already played. This is more famous for being a bootleg, specifically a ROM hacked bootleg called Super Mario 14. It’s a genuinely baffling choice to turn this into a Mario hack when it’s a direct rip off of Mega Man. I really wasn’t being sarcastic in the above picture. This wants to be Mega Man with some lite ninja-like flipping, and it is, but in a way that fails like few games have ever failed. Katana Twirly is dead, and in his place is a dude with a stick who fires a little sonic energy wave at enemies, making this a platform-shooter, just like Mega Man. The bosses are mostly fought in basic, square-shaped chambers, just like Mega Man, and have attack patterns just like Mega Man’s bosses. Here’s some examples: Fire Man, Water Man, Wood Man, and, uh, Music Tornado Man, I guess? The last one shoots music notes but also turns into a tornado.
Pathetic! PA-THETIC! And it’s not even a good rip-off. This is the Asylum version of a Mega Man game: same premise, but none of the good parts. The #1 thing that made Mega Man famous and stick out from countless hop ‘n pop games, IE stealing items from bosses? Kid Niki 3 doesn’t do that. Instead, the main hook is it rips off the pogo-stick from DuckTales along with the worst wall jump I’ve experienced in quite a while. You have to sword-strike the wall, then jump, but it’s really sluggish. All the movement is clunky, and the frame rate is REALLY bad. The game feels like it’s constantly chugging, which really makes no sense. The graphics and sound are just not good enough to justify how badly the game performs from a technical point of view.
It’s not going to be a total wash, either. There’s moments I would have been inclined to like, like this maze based around these tracks. There’s some good ideas in here, but they’re dead on arrival with these controls and combat design.
Yancha Maru 3 is made by notorious NES developer Micronics, who made such “classics” as Super Pitfall! and the NES ports of 1942, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, Ikari Warriors, and more. It explains a lot, because this is really badly made. The level design is almost entirely based around the wall jump, but in a way where it’s deliberately barely working at all because that would be more challenging. It’s certainly not intuitive, even though it should be. The wall-jump is a fixed jump that gives you the same distance every time. Yet, I never got a feel for it. It wasn’t ninja-like, that’s for sure. It’s like the polar opposite of 2024 NES indie Storied Sword, which had one of the greatest 8-bit wall jumps ever. When you take away the responsiveness, you get Kid Niki 3, where even late in the game, I found myself needing multiple attempts to do even the most basic wall jump sequences. My body’s responsiveness is suspect these days, so I had to have the kids test it to make sure it wasn’t me. They couldn’t get a feel for it either.
Fittingly, the best aspects of Kid Niki 3 are the ones that aren’t a Mega Man rip-off. The main progression is done by finding keys to open locked doors. It’s not the worst idea, and thankfully there’s only a couple spots where you have to travel far away from a locked door. But with the poor physics and uninspired, lightweight shooting combat, it doesn’t matter because it’s just not a very fun game to play. Sometimes, the levels would have risen to the level of good IF the mechanics had been faster paced and more responsive. There’s set-pieces in Kid Niki 3, including paddling a boat up a waterfall that work as intended.
The frustrating thing is, Kid Niki 3 does the type stuff you want a game to do: break up the core gameplay with fresh-but-suitable one-off mechanics. Like paddling this boat up a waterfall. That’s fine! It works as a set-piece. This part is okay, and it’s welcome because the core gameplay is so boring that anything is better in comparison.
But then there’s some of the worst swimming mechanics on God’s Green Earth and horribly scaled boss fights. Seriously, the first boss was so much harder than any of the bosses that followed except the very last one. The levels themselves have a difficulty curve that resembles a heart monitor. It occurs to me that Micronics seems to understand what goes into a game, but not the why part. There’s no other way to explain how bad the game scales, or controls, or why the basic enemies just aren’t fun to face-off against. It’s like they played Mega Man games and enjoyed Mega Man games, but never asked themselves why they were having so much fun. So something like this:
Works pretty good, because it’s hard to screw up the classic circular platform. Hell, that chained platform to the left of me is a great idea. You have to whack it with your stick to get it moving. But then you have this game’s version of the Sniper Joes from Mega Man, and they have a quirky sprite of a mouse hiding in a freezer with a tommy gun. Adorkable, except you can’t kill them, or at least, I was never able to. Once you realize that, and players are just avoiding them, well the charm isn’t just lowered, but lost altogether. Do you know why *I* think Mega Man games lasted through the ages? It’s not just the bosses. Every game has bosses, and in the case of Mega Man games, especially on the NES, most of them are beaten in just a couple seconds, if that, assuming you have the right weapon. No, I think the secret sauce with Mega Is that the combat is always so goddamned satisfying that you want to shoot everything you can. It’s rare in those games that avoiding enemies is preferable. Enemies have nice sound design and a cathartic crunching pop when you finally kill them. This game has none of that.
I think that’s why Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3 felt like such a childish effort at copying Mega Man. It does everything that Mega Man does, only with none of the stuff that made Mega Man stand out in the first place, in basically every single aspect, mechanically and aesthetically The graphics are ugly, especially the character sprites. The gameplay is choppy. The controls are unresponsive. The settings are boring. The sound design is lacking entirely. It made me appreciate how Mega Man games manage to be greater than the sum of their highly polished parts. This is so much less. The previous game was bland, but bland within the acceptable parameters of decency. This is bland to the point of exhausting. Even if the mechanics had been perfect, I still think it would have gotten a NO! Kid Niki 3 is a game based around dull level design, boring settings, and derivative gameplay that’s occasionally interrupted by an idea so good that you’ll wish it was in a better game.
This is a post-SNES release, too. Look how damn bland that looks. And it really is. There’s a couple moments that are handled cleverly, but for the most part, level layouts are just arbitrary and ho-hum. I still say that the early SNES era was also a secret golden age for the NES/Famicom, but this is not an example of that.
I have no idea why Irem agreed to allow Micronics of all studios to make a sequel to Kid Niki in the first place, but why make it nothing at all like Kid Niki? Presumably, a franchise that lasts long enough to get a fourth new game like this has to be pretty successful on some level, right? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the series made it to this game being commissioned based entirely on the satisfying Katana Twirly mechanics. So why the hell would you do something as foolhardy as removing that attack entirely? Because that’s ALL Kid Niki really had going for it. I assume they figured if Doki Doki Panic can be repackaged as Super Mario Bros. 2 and still be a runaway success, they could do something similar with Kid Niki. That makes no sense, though, because they allowed Mario to be different right out of the starting gate. As the second game, really it just showed that Mario could be anything. Same with Zelda II, for that matter. But with Kid Niki, they had multiple games that established what the combat should look like. Not that keeping it would make a difference in this game. This has so many more problems. What irks me is Irem allowed a perfectly good B-list franchise to be killed off here, in a game that doesn’t resemble the franchise. It would be like if the Mario franchise died after Mario is Missing was released. Verdict: NO!
FINAL TOTAL
YES!: 3 NO!: 2 Total Game Value: $12 Bonus Value: $1 Projected Price: $19.99 to $29.99 Final Value with Fully Loaded Emulator/Bonuses: $23
Kid Niki: Radical Collection did make it over the low-end price hurdle, but it’s going to be close. Anything less than the $10 bonus that comes with a fully-loaded emulator and it’s unlikely that including basic bonus features like boxes, instruction books, or ads would make up the missing value. It would require extensive, Digital Eclipse-like behind the scenes interviews, and Kid Niki isn’t ever going to get THAT kind of collection. But I’m not worried about the emulator. ININ proved to me with their IGC-approved Parasol Stars release they’re more than capable of going all-out with that. The same emulator used in that release wins Kid Niki: Radical Collection a YES! But they also can’t lose a single YES! game except maybe Kid Niki 2. Drop the Game Boy title from the lineup? There’s close to zero chance the bonus features can make up for the missing $5. Or if they use the basic Arcade Archives style emulator for the coin-op, that game drops to a NO! and the set can’t win. Since I know they’re reading, hey ININ gang, you should do this set, but you absolutely cannot half-ass it. You need to have cheating options up the wazoo. You need extra features, and you need a sick emulator. But I have faith in you.
The Legend of Zelda aka Zelda no Densetsu: The Hyrule Fantasy (Japan) Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System First Released February 21, 1986 Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka Developed by Nintendo Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard) Listing at Zelda Wiki
There should be a law that any game where you swing a sword must have a multi-headed dragon. Actually I’m fine with that law being for any video game. Madden would be at least 3% better if a multi-headed dragon interrupted field goal attempts, with the percentage going up depending on the number of heads, naturally.
For this review, I played Legend of Zelda between sessions of Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on my Switch 2, and two things stuck out to me. The first is that I couldn’t forget that the gap between Zelda 1 and Wind Waker is five years shorter than the gap between Wind Waker and right now, today. That’s insane! Like, where did my youth go? Wind Waker released when I was 13 and it was one of those benchmark games of my childhood. I was a HUGE Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask fan and I couldn’t wait for Wind Waker. I didn’t give a squirt if they changed the graphics style because *I* thought it looked really cool and was confident I would love the game, and I did. But the 2D Zeldas seemed different enough that they might as well have been a separate series to me. At the age of 13, the first Zelda game was so old and primitive that it might as well have happened in the stone age. Like so many Nintendo milestones, I didn’t play it until years later when it was on a GBA cart. You can imagine my surprise that I really enjoyed it a lot. Zelda 1 is right up there with Super Mario 2 and Castlevania as far as NES games I’ve played the most times.
From the time I launched IGC in 2011 and continuing to the present day, the average age of my readers is around ten years older than me. It’s actually closer to seven-to-eight years older now, but amazingly, even though I’m now 36 years old, they’re still older than me. Well, this summer I’ve done a ton of games from the childhoods of my readers, with only WarioWare being a pivotal game of my own youth, and I don’t think anyone would call that a major milestone game. So, one of my next reviews will be for Wind Waker, which I first played at the age of 13, because MY childhood matters too, dammit! By the way, I used to make fun of people who used their shiny new $500 game consoles to play retro games and now I’m one of them. Remember kids, you will grow up to be that which you mock now, so try to mock lovingly. You’ll feel like less of a horse’s ass in the future.
The second thing that stood out was how, of all the NES games that serve as launching points for franchises, the first game in the Legend of Zelda series is easily the title that aged the best. Playing it now, in 2025, I admit I was a little surprised by how much of the core Zelda formula has remained unchanged from this first game. The overworld format with distinct areas like lakes, deserts, graveyards, coastlines, forests, mountains, rivers, etc? It all started here. Really, the only major area not debuting is any form of a town. The dungeon format is in the same boat. The map, compass, enemy pacing, and goal of finding the key items and slaying a boss to collect the macguffin? It all started here too. A lot of the enemies that would be Zelda staples are introduced here, as well. Mummies? Here. The centaurs that are major characters in Breath of the Wild? They debuted all the way back here. So did Octoroks, Moblins, Zoras, Tektites, Wizzrobes, and Darknuts. Some have evolved more than others, so maybe the roster isn’t as close to modern counterparts as, say, a Mario game, but they all feel kin to their modern counterparts. For a series as complex as Zelda, that’s pretty remarkable.
Actually, the weakest enemy to battle with in all of the original Zelda is easily Ganon himself. The gimmick with him is he becomes invisible and teleports around the room, and the only way to beat him is to just mash the attack at NOTHING and hope he eventually teleports his intestines into your sword, then after the fourth hit (assuming you have the magic sword), you have to finish him off with a silver arrow. That part is fine, especially since the silver arrow is hidden within the final dungeon itself. But the fight up until the killing blow? What were they thinking? Who the hell wants a final boss that’s beaten by stabbing blindly at air? Ganon, as generically evil as he is, is still one of my favorite gaming villains and he would eventually go on to become a great final boss (Ganon > Ganondorf IMO, the human version of him is TOO generic), but his debut is one of the very worst boss battles Nintendo ever did. Actually, I think it might be at the bottom. A terrible idea executed horribly.
I played both the first and second quests of Zelda 1 for this review, and in the case of the second quest, I had never played it past a few minutes. It really was like a brand new experience, and it was refreshing given what happened in the first game. In the first quest, I had doubled my hearts from three to six and acquired every item you could get out of the overworld or purchase in shops (except the Magic Sword and two heart containers) before I ever played the first dungeon. You can’t exactly tackle the levels in ANY order because one requires the raft to reach and others require the ladder to win (assuming you’re not using glitches), but there’s still a lack of tightness of design. Really, the modern Zelda format as seen in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom feels closer to this original game than the Zeldas of my childhood, in that both lean into a sense of overwhelming vastness.
LOOK AT THAT ARTWORK! I want an anime that looks like that! Now, I grew up in the tail-end of the instruction book era, BUT I STILL READ THEM! Instruction books have since gone the way of corded controllers and game rentals. Mention instruction books to my nieces and nephew and they’ll sort of cock their heads to the side and say “in….truck…..shun…… books? What’s a book?” Kids these days, I swear to God. But I checked and if you bought this game for the NES back in the day, the book would give you pointers to get to the first level and then a map of where the second level was, but THAT WAS IT. While researching this feature, I also found out that Nintendo published a pocket-sized guide to Zelda called “Tips & Tactics” that also says “instruction book” on it. I’m not sure if this was sold separately, bundled with the game, or originally sold separately but then bundled with later pressings. If you had Tips & Tactics, let me know in the comments! I want to hear if you remember how you got it! I’ve mostly heard from readers that they got their Zelda maps from Nintendo Power or the precursor to Nintendo Power, the Nintendo Fun Club Newsletter. So, I went through those. The third issue of the newsletter has a complete overworld map and maps for the first four levels. The fourth issue has a guide to the bosses. NOTHING offered a complete walkthrough, though the first issue of Nintendo Power did include complete maps for the second quest’s first six levels and the overworld. If you truly got stuck, you had to call a 900 number to have someone walk you through it. “What’s a 900 number?” Kids these days.
On the other hand, nobody can bitch about Zelda 1 getting off to a slow start. My Wind Waker review will probably contain a lot of complaining about how damn long it takes for the game to feel like you’ve actually finished the tutorial section and are now playing the game properly. Seriously, it could take hours. Zelda 1 just kind of drops you off into the world with no real direction on what to do or where to go. In the above caption, you can see the lengths gamers had to go to in order to find help with Zelda. If you didn’t have access to those things, well, you’re on your own. I only played the first quest as well as I did because this was like the fourth or fifth time I beat the game. The first time? Oh, it’s overwhelming. But, that loose structure also opens up the possibility to make a mockery of the developer’s intent.
In the Famicom Disk original build of Zelda, you can use this heart container, combined with the whistle, to max out your health early. By blowing the whistling and summoning the whirlwind while standing next to this heart, you’ll collect it, but when you return, it’ll be back. I SHOULD have played the FDS build but instead I played the US game, where the only glitch I activated was the famous Level 1 door glitch.
This especially extends to the dungeons. You can purchase keys for locked doors within the dungeons in the overworld’s shops. That’s weird enough on its own since the dungeons provide more than enough keys that nobody should have to search too far to find one, which was a mechanic MY era’s Zeldas leaned heavily into. In playing Wind Waker, I realized the small keys play a larger role in maintaining the game’s tempo than I initially realized. When you get a key in that game, or any of the future Zelda games, it’s a MOMENT. That is not the case in Zelda 1 at all. The original game might have incentivized exploration, but it didn’t put a premium on maximizing the real estate. You actually don’t need to fully explore the overworld OR the dungeons. When I did the second quest, I realized there were large parts of the game, especially in the upper left-hand corner of the overworld’s map, that I had never been to in any of my previous play sessions.
Amazing how many icons of the franchise are in Zelda 1 and FEEL like prototypes for the ones I played as a kid. Gohma, who is the first boss in both Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker, debuted in Zelda 1 and is probably the scariest villain. A gigantic one-eyed crab that spits fireballs? Jeez, that’s nightmare fuel.
The keys show off this haphazard use of space the most. By the second level of the first quest, there are so many alternative routes within dungeons that you can completely circumvent MOST of the locked doors. As a result, I had collected so many keys that went unused that I decided to not grab the magic key in Level 8. I had eighteen keys going into Death Mountain and was curious if I could still beat Death Mountain, and if so, how many would I have when I rescued Zelda? Would I need to use ten keys? Five? Would I finish with a dozen keys? Because surely Death Mountain won’t drop keys when a magical unlock-all key is one of level eight’s items. Well, to my surprise Death Mountain also drops normal keys, and like any other level, it had pathways I didn’t need to take. I ended up finishing +1 over what I had when I entered the level and beat Zelda with nineteen total unused keys (having bought none in stores). It’s safe to say that what evolved in Zelda wasn’t so much the sublime combat or the format as it was the tightness of design.
Zelda is probably wondering who the f*ck is this locksmith that rescued her. I assume the keys in the shop thing was some kind of holdover from an earlier build that was put into the game as a means to prevent a soft-lock if a player (1) used every key as soon as they found it and (2) picked the wrong sequence of locked doors. Perhaps at some point, it was possible to pick the wrong door to unlock and end up with no option but the shop. But given the layouts of the final game, with the sheer amount of destructible walls, I can’t imagine it’s possible to do that now. Even if you somehow found yourself stuck or missing a key, it’d be quicker and cheaper to grind Moblins until one drops a bomb pick-up than it would be to spend $100 on a key.
Don’t get me wrong: most of Zelda’s play mechanics hold up to the test of time. It might have the best offensive mechanics in the entire NES library. The sword is VERY satisfying and the concept that it shoots a laser out when you have full health is both bonkers and inspired. Unlike the majority of classic gaming tropes where you say to yourself “someone WOULD have come up with something like this eventually” I don’t think the laser-shooting sword is the type of idea that was inevitable, you know? And honestly, I still think the NES version of it is the best one in the franchise. It’s kind of weak in future games, but here, it feels powerful and cathartic, with perfect sound design and that little explosion it makes at the end being the chef’s kiss.
In the second quest, these things that you can grease with one arrow show up long before you get the bow. In the Famicom Disk version, you can blow into the microphone to kill them. In Zelda’s second quest, you have to just hack at them with a sword for a few hours until they croak. HAVE FUN!
To go with the excellent sword, the enemies are generally well made. Probably the best roster of enemies of any early NES game, if not the best overall roster on the entire platform. Given the limitations and the overall experimental nature of the game, the cast is HUGE, but the enemies do feel distinct. Okay, so the mummies are kind of just the skeletons with more hit points (well, at least until the second quest) and the bosses are a little too cinchy. Actually, with the exception of the multi-headed dragon, I found the Wizzrobes and Darknuts to be worse to deal with than ANY boss. Like, they certainly overuse the dinosaurs and the four-headed Manhandla. Uh, this thing:
Overused or not, one-shotting it with a bomb is one of those “stand up and cheer!” moments.
But they utilize the enemies in a way that gives both the dungeons and especially the overworld personality. Zoras always show up in the water to give those areas a sense of menace. The moblins rule the forests, while the centaurs control the mountains, and the spider-like Tektites only appear where it’s rocky. Forty years later and Hyrule STILL feels like a real, living world because of where they put the enemies. It’s just so smart. The Legend of Zelda’s offensive game gives you everything you would want in combat with no real downside besides not getting the best out of the roster of enemies (see the below caption). Nearly forty years later and the combat STILL isn’t boring. What else can you say at that point?
I don’t think they maximized the potential of the roster at all. There’s a lot of repeat bosses, some of which are just baffling. The dragon that’s at the end of the first level also shows up as the boss of the seventh level, but without being buffed-up. By that point, he might die in two shots. Why not replace him with one of these things, called Patras, that are only found in Death Mountain? I get that they wanted that level to feel climatic by having some dangerous creatures, but the Patra feels like a boss. Hell, there’s even two types of them, one of which has the orbiting eyeballs curve differently. There’s also fast moving, dangerous worms called Lanmolas that feel like bosses that are exclusive to Death Mountain. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that they intended for these creatures to show up earlier and then lost their nerve because they didn’t want the game to be too hard.
However, Zelda’s defensive game isn’t as strong. It feels arbitrary when the magic shield works or not. Like, it’ll shield you from the blasts of the Zoras in the water but not from identical looking blasts from bosses. So frustrating, especially since hearing that PING of a shot successfully deflected is just delightful. Also, the difficulty scaling is pretty bad in general. Level seven could have easily been level three for how much of a cinch it is. I assume they placed it near the end on the assumption players would be hard up for the cash to buy the enemy bait since it’s the only time you NEED it in the first quest. Meanwhile, levels five and six feel like they could be bumped up a slot or two.
“Hey bats, if you have a moment I’d like to have a word with you about our lord and savior Jesus Christ.” “Ugh, someone hit me with a boomerang, already.“
They also ran out of ideas for useful items to fill out the stages. The magic wand and book are just about the most useless items in any Zelda game. One of those “sh*t, we gotta put SOMETHING here for the players to find!” And there were other options. Hide the letter to the lady in a level! Hide the arrows! Hide the ability to carry bombs in a level! Hide the power bracelet in a level! That one really befuddles me. It’s found in some arbitrary spot on the map under one of the statues that comes to life in both quests. It’s so subdued for such an important item. Except, it’s not really important. All the power bracelet does is make it so you can shove rocks that reveal warp zones, at least in the first quest. They could have changed it so you need the bracelet to shove anything in the overworld, making it essential towards getting the magic sword out of the graveyard. My point is, they had better options and the wand sucks. But Legend of Zelda doesn’t suck. It’s one of the best 8 bit games ever, to this day.
The second quest doesn’t f*ck around. Yes, you permanently lose a heart container if you choose the first option.
Even with the rough pacing, sloppy difficulty scaling, and somewhat underwhelming boss roster, it goes without saying that Zelda is a masterpiece that leaves the test of time laying dead with a sword through its heart. There’s nothing I can say that you’ve not already heard before, and the world certainly wasn’t aching to hear what Cathy Vice thinks of the first Zelda game. Finding something unique to talk about was tricky. And then I beat the game, saw that Link was now holding up a sword, and I remembered that Zelda had a second quest that rearranged a lot of the locations and order of the items and upped the difficulty. This is so underplayed that the famous wiki Zelda Dungeon doesn’t even have a walkthrough for it. Until I started this review, I genuinely don’t remember hearing anyone really talk about the meat of the second quest in features or casual conversation. Even the GOAT of NES coverage, Jeremy Parish, pretty much glosses over it. So let’s talk about it!
Famously, you can also enter “ZELDA” as your name and skip right to the second quest. If you’ve never done it, trust me, it’s worth a look.
The second quest of Zelda is a completely different beast. Of the nine dungeons, only the first one remains in the same location. The other eight? They’re somewhere out in the world. Good luck! Some are where dungeons were already previously located, though in different orders. Level four in the first quest is still a dungeon, only now it’s level five. Other levels are in such arbitrary locations that I would never have found them without a guide. Level eight especially is insanely well hidden. The starting sword, white sword, a couple of the heart containers (including the ladder one and the raft one), the bracelet, and some of the burnable bushes are the same. But, the item order is totally different. The bow? You don’t get it until the fifth level. The whistle you normally got in the fifth level? It’s now in the second level, and there’s a LOT more hidden stuff to uncover with it in the overworld, in places you wouldn’t normally think to look. You don’t even get the ladder until the sixth level, and it’s impossible to grind-up heart containers and get the white sword before you start gathering the Triforce pieces.
Even the letter from the old lady that you need to buy medicine isn’t found until VERY late in the game. It was literally the last thing I found before entering the new Death Mountain. In the first quest, it’s in the above door, but it ain’t there anymore. Instead, this is just a shop now. I did manage to grind up enough money to get the Blue Ring before playing the first stage. The shop that sells it I found by accident, as it had previously been a location of a high-yielding coin drop.
And then there’s the dungeons, which have an entirely different vibe to them. They’re MUCH more maze-like this time and some are pretty hard to find their way through. That’s not just because a lot of them put tougher enemies much earlier than you previously encountered them, either. It’s how you find your way through them. Instead of just having a ton of bombable walls (dear auto-correct: bombable is a word, dagnabit), you might have to just walk THROUGH the walls, like this:
The design logic dives really hard into the invisible doors. In fact, a key item is hidden in one of the levels BEHIND the Triforce piece. The second quest’s progression is based more around confusing players after the first quest and having no real rules or flow to the progress, though it mostly works. Mostly, but the level design itself can be problematic. The layouts of the first five stages spell out the word E-A-L-D-Z. I have no clue why the letters are not in the correct order. I assume they were at some point in development and it was changed due to the difficulty, but either way, the third level, the “L” is probably the single worst dungeon in the entire history of the franchise. Hell, it doesn’t even climax with a boss battle. You know those things that throw boomerangs? The big finale to the third stage is a room full of them.
The locked door? It’s the Triforce room. Yes, really! The room on the right directly across from the Triforce room on the map contains the blue boomerang, and you have to use the enemy bait to get it. So these things are the bosses. They’re not even the tougher blue versions! I thought this was supposed to be the harder second quest?! She said after already dying once.
Okay, so when the second quest is bad, it’s REALLY bad, but it never gets worse than that third stage. Other levels have several clever twists to them. The skeletons? Their swords shoot lasers now, just like Link’s does when you have full health. Full sized bosses appear more frequently in dungeons (in fairness, that happened in the first quest too, but not to this degree). There’s red herring keys laying around that there’s hypothetically no way to get since you won’t have the ladder yet. I mean, unless you return to the dungeon at some later point in the game to collect them. It feels like the second quest’s main objective is to trick players and take away any sense of predictability. Some of the staircases might send you to a room that doesn’t have a return staircase, and it becomes easy to get lost or go around in circles.
The “staircase drops you off in a room without a return staircase” gag that I found hugely annoying is paid off in a big way during the game’s climax. It’s actually the key to solving Death Mountain in the second quest.
While some aspects of the second quest can be taken out of order (for example, I beat level four before level three), it’s a lot harder to cheese by getting the sword upgrades or other key items before the game wants you to have them. It wasn’t long into the second quest that I started to wonder if some of the locations and dungeons were actually the original concepts for the main quest that were moved to the bonus after-game content because they were too hard. Like the mechanic with the bubbles in the caption below? That just feels like something that was meant to be in the game all along. It’s too elaborate to have been an afterthought. The same with the walking through the walls bit. While the Z-E-L-D-A shaped dungeons probably weren’t part of the main design, I think most of the gameplay mechanics from the second quest likely were. Maybe. The story behind the second quest is kind of one of those “spilled mold into bacteria and it killed” moments.
Like (like) I’m pretty sure I can’t reach this key yet. I think they did these things to send players on wild goose chases.
Because of how the memory on the NES worked, all the Zelda maps had to be made to fit like a jigsaw puzzle on a grid, and the second quest only exists because Takashi Tezuka only used up half the available space for the nine dungeons of the first quest. Okay, fine. It was a happy accident. But I’m still willing to bet that they used the opportunity to dump gameplay ideas that were deemed “too hard” and deleted from the original build back into the game. These are just too elaborate, too thoughtful, and dare I say it, too elegant to have been throwaway bonuses that only happened because someone only used up half the memory they were supposed to.
The biggest change to the monsters is with the bubbles. In the first quest, if you touch a bubble, you temporarily lose your sword. In the second quest, bubbles come in three colors: the normal ones that shift between red and blue that temporarily take away the sword are still around. But now, there’s also ones that are always red and ones that are always blue. The always-blue ones are harmless and have no negative effect on Link besides causing him to recoil as if he’s taking damage. The always-red bubbles are by far the most dangerous and annoying things in the entire game. If you touch one, you lose your sword permanently until you do any one of the following things: (1) touch a blue bubble (2) visit a fairy fountain, and yes, the effect will linger even if you leave a dungeon (3) use a potion or (4) get a Triforce piece. This isn’t a rare thing, either. Many rooms will have multiple red bubbles and a single blue bubble, while others might have quite a journey between rooms that have red bubbles and rooms that have the blue bubbles you need to regain your sword. There’s a couple REALLY annoying rooms full of red bubbles where you have to hug the wall and there’s no room to dodge in any direction. Since the bubbles have no preset attack pattern and can change direction without any warning, they’re very, very dangerous.
And it’s not a throwaway bonus. In the second quest, there’s an undeniable method to the madness that should make it a stronger experience for veterans of the franchise. I’m SO happy I finally played it. Again, nobody needs me of all people to recommend playing one of the most famous games ever made. BUT, I suspect a lot of my readers have never tried Legend of Zelda’s second quest. It’s not just more of the same. There’s hints of that, but what the second quest really has going for it is that sense that the gameplay is what Zelda 1 would have been like all along if they didn’t have to consider how new this whole idea was. Because there had never been a game like Legend of Zelda (well, except Tower of Druaga, the NES version of which I reviewed for Namco Museum Archives Volume 1), I’m guessing they had to significantly tone back aspects of it. The speed of the darknuts. The red/blue bubbles. The skeletons shooting swords. I suspect that somewhere between the first and second quests is the definitive version Big Shiggy Style and Tezuka WOULD have made if they weren’t breaking new ground. And I think you’ll get that vibe too if you give it a try. Verdict: YES!
Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released March, 1994 Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE
It took me this long, roughly two minutes into starting a new game, to realize I was not going to be having any fun. While this isn’t REALLY a random encounter into a mini-dungeon, it’s structured to make you think it is. It’s the first of many terrible ideas in this terrible, terrible game.
Oh my God. Okay, so the first StarTropics isn’t exactly a masterpiece. After all, I called it “the absolute stupidest good game ever made” so it’s not like I was expecting to be blown away by a sequel. I didn’t even want the clunky mechanics to be fixed. I got used to them, and there’s basically no game like the first StarTropics. I didn’t mind awkwardly hopping across tiles or having too stiff of movement and rigid turning. At least it played completely uniquely. I would have settled for a glorified expansion pack with more levels, bosses, and less busy work. Well, they did try to fix the mechanics, and the end result is Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II is the embodiment of the “broke, or made better?” joke from the Simpsons. This might be the worst Nintendo-developed game ever made. At the very least, I have to believe it’s their worst sequel, and I do mean EVER. I hope so, at least. I mean, how could they have ever done worse than this?
This got me all excited thinking Zoda’s Revenge would take a break and let me ride the Haunted Mansion, but nope.
I bought StarTropics II for Virtual Console ten years ago and I never finished it. I’m not even sure I beat the Egypt stage, which is only the second level. I had no desire to go on, because everything I enjoyed about the first game is gone here. Just gone-gone, and other aspects that I didn’t enjoy so much have been made worse. The satisfying yo-yo combat? Gone, replaced with generic throwing weapons that have no speed or range. As if that’s not bad enough, the enemies seem to have had their sponginess bumped-up. Maybe it just feels like it because the combat is so much slower. Whatever the reason, the combat is NEVER fun in StarTropics II. It’s a slog. Really boring boss fights too, as none of them have the personality of the original game’s bosses.
F*cking end me.
The tile-based jumping is also gone. In this game, you can just walk across the tiles. They tried to give the level design a greater sense of exploration, including more levels with multiple floors, like in Zelda games. Except it just didn’t work for me because the themes, enemies, and mechanics aren’t as fun. Like, people who are playing a sequel presumably liked the first game, right? So why is the tile triggering mechanic from the first game no longer here? Were people complaining about that? Because if people are complaining about a primary gameplay mechanic, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do a sequel at all. In Zoda’s Revenge, when a block is a switch, it blinks when you walk on it, letting you know that you have to hop on it. If it’s supposed to help open a door or a chest, it’ll make a question mark ball appear instead of leaving a footprint on the tile and causing a button to rise up somewhere else. It’s such a massive downgrade that it almost feels like the first game’s way of doing the tiles and switches is the updated sequel-like way of handling it.
The developers did attempt to change-up the combat by giving you a psychic lightning ball. A couple enemies, including the ones pictured above, can be harmed only by it. But, while you can fire it faster, until you get the final upgrade late in the game, it’s limited in range just like the throwing weapons. Also, the wide variety of exotic special items from the first game are gone here, and the one that makes a return appearance has its range also limited. God forbid anyone have any fun with this game.
The exotic tropical setting? That’s gone too, at least until the final level which is just the exact same cave that made up the first level from the original game. Literally the same map and everything. The rest of the game has a time travel theme where you meet such famous historic figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Sherlock Holmes, and King Arthur. Wait, what? And, like so many time travel-themed games, it doesn’t really matter because the action segments do such a poor job of making you believe you’re in a different time period, especially when so many enemies keep showing up in each era. You’re looking for magical Tetris blocks, and, SPOILER, when you beat the game, the alien kids you rescued in the first game are reunited with their father, then peace-out and leave for their home planet without saying goodbye to the villagers who have taken care of them for the last year. Little pointy-eared twerps. Not that I cared or anything but, jeez, what a downer of an ending.
NOTE: MICA AND THE UNGRATEFUL ALIEN TWERPS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO THEIR HOME PLANET!
But what really sucks about StarTropics II is they completely wrecked the already janky movement physics. They tried to smooth out the stiffness, but all they did was make it easier to walk into enemies. Since ranged weapons don’t show up until the very end, this is a big problem. You can move while you jump now as well, but that REALLY crashes the gameplay. If not for the ability to rewind, I would have certainly eaten a game over from botching even the most basic jumps over pits. Or, if not that, accidentally jumping into pits while fighting enemies and bosses.
The differences in elevation actually create this really unintuitive optical illusion for jumping. It’s hard to explain but it feels like they didn’t properly express how high you are and what that means for the rest of the room.
You see, height matters a lot in StarTropics II for both platforming and enemy attack patterns. Some rooms have elevated platforms, and many enemies and even at least one boss battle require you to jump to damage them. That would be fine with the old StarTropics I physics, where you can’t jump forward unless you’re jumping to a tile or across a pit. In StarTropics II, you can move while you jump anywhere, but you can’t aim at them without also moving. That’s kind of a problem when you surround the player with instakill pits or water, and I died a ton from trying to aim at enemies with my short-range weapons and accidentally falling to my death. In exchange for all that, you can move diagonally now. Oooh, diagonal.
A whopping three boss fights take place on these automatic movement arrows. These specific ones move really fast, and your attack sprite just barely reaches the center of the screen where the boss is. The end result is one of the very worst boss fights in any Nintendo-developed game.
To make matters even worse, with the new movement style comes a much heavier emphasis on platforming. I’m not the biggest fan of top-down platforming in general, and that’s assuming the game controls well. StarTropics II, you know, doesn’t. Since jumping and collision detection is so hard to judge in Zoda’s Revenge, leaning into obstacles based around jumping with moving platforms or disappearing platforms was a recipe for disaster. Oh, and sometimes the ledges will have an invisible wall to stop you from simply walking off the side and to your death, but sometimes it doesn’t. The original StarTropics had some timing-based stuff like hopping over knives sticking out of the ground or cannonballs, but it feels like they tailored the challenge to the limitations of the physics. With Zoda’s Revenge, I get the impression they eventually just sort of shrugged and said “meh, good enough” even though it wasn’t.
It really feels like I cleared it but whatever.
As a result of all the changes, Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t really feel like a sequel so much as a really bad rip-off of StarTropics made by a completely different team. That’s sad, because it’s from the same director and artists. It’s COMPLETELY lacking in charm, and even the busy work is worse than ever. I’m pretty sure the reason I quit the first time was because a gigantic blind maze happens in the middle of the Egypt level. You have to climb these towers to get a peak of the layout, but the actual navigating has to be done without seeing the walls. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad if they don’t overdo it. But then it keeps going and refuses to stop. The one improvement over the original: you no longer have to talk to everyone to open up the actual levels. I guess they were as bored with that as I was.
Also that monkey is later revealed to be Merlin the wizard. I wish I was joking.
So the enemies are dull, the boss fights are charmless, the movement parameters are all screwed up, there’s too many basic square-shaped rooms with no frills in them, the level structure is bad, and the time travel theme is a total bust. It can’t get any worse, right? I mean, it’s not like right before the big final climax, there’s a full-roster boss rush, RIGHT? Of course there is.
At least now you have a ranged weapon for them. The last one isn’t a previous boss but rather Zoda’s head lice. Oh, but it’s evil head lice that unlocks the final battle.
For all of its many, many problems, at least StarTropics felt like it came from a place of inspiration. Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t. Zoda’s Revenge was the final NES-exclusive game developed by Nintendo. Now I’ve played several post-SNES releases for the NES that were so good that I’ve suggested the NES had a secret golden age that nobody talks about. This includes a decent Flintstones game and an even better sequel, a genuinely underrated Jetsons game, a Wacky Races platformer that should make for an excellent children’s game, a DuckTales sequel that I feel easily tops the original and might be the most underrated NES game ever, the long awaited NES port of Bonk’s Adventure, and the third and best Adventure Island game. Other companies weren’t phoning-in the NES’ swan song, so it’s just such a heartbreaker that the series finale of the NES that was made by Nintendo themselves (I’m not counting Wario Woods since that was also on the SNES) sucks so very, very much.
The last form of Zoda, who now looks more like Zorak from Space Ghost, also looks like he’s taking a wiz in the middle of our battle to the death.
It feels like someone at Nintendo said “there’s still millions of NES owners in America who would buy new software for it instead of SNES games. Who wants to make the last original NES game?” and everyone said “NOT IT!” until Genyo Takeda was the only one left. This was HIS last directed game, by the way. He’s the genius behind Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and he also made the original StarTropics. The first StarTropics was created to appeal to American gamers and never got a global release until Virtual Console came around. Hell, it’s still never gotten ANY Japanese release to this very day, even via Switch Online. Because the Macguffins are Tetris blocks and the final cinematic involves the chief of C-Island assembling them via playing Tetris, I’m guessing they can’t re-release this on Switch Online. That’s fine, by the way, because this is NOT a sequel to StarTropics. It’s barely a shadow of it. It’s fitting that the ending of Zoda’s Revenge is such a downer. It’s art imitating life. Or, wait, is it the other way around? Verdict: NO!
Once Upon a Katamari
Haunted Castle
Vampire Killer
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Donkey Kong Bananza
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja
Kid Niki: Radical Ninja
Ganso!! Yancha-Maru
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 2: Karakuri Land
Kaiketsu Yancha Maru 3: Taiketsu! Zouringen
YES
The Legend of Zelda
Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II
Indie Gamer Chick 
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