The Karate Kid (NES Review)

The Karate Kid
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released November, 1987
Developed by Atlus
Published by LJN
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

That does not look like Sensei Lawrence. Also, all the screenshots are going to look like a piece of paper that someone spilled water on thanks to the pattern in the status bar. I bet that looked nicer on old tube TVs.

This might come as an incredible shock to my readers, but as I’m typing this sentence, before rendering my verdict on The Karate Kid, vilified NES publisher LJN has a winning record at Indie Gamer Chick. The current scorecard stands at 2 YES!, 1 NO! Don’t mistake that for some kind of accomplishment, since those YES! games barely made it over the finish line while the NO! game couldn’t find the finish line if the finish line crawled up its ass. We’re not exactly talking masterpieces I played over here. The first was Jaws, back in October of 2023. A game that’s historically maligned but genuinely not horrible. It just doesn’t do enough. Then, as my Christmas 2024 feature, I looked at nearly every light gun game on a Nintendo platform, including LJN’s Gotcha! The Sport. A bland but serviceable NES Zapper game. Finally, earlier this year, I took a look at Back to the Future. Is BTTF as bad as people say? Nah. It’s just very boring, which granted, is the worst thing a game can be, but it’s not the legendary trash fire I expected. Well, I had a feeling what to expect with Karate Kid. I was wrong, too, because this is no half-assed effort.

Update: Cathy, you silly dumbass. I’ve done FOUR games by LJN. I forgot about Wolverine, which got a NO! It’s okay. Everyone else forgot about Wolverine too.

If you dare to play Karate Kid, be ready to see a lot of sprites that look like this.

For starters, unlike Jaws or Back to the Future, Karate Kid makes an earnest effort to follow the story of the first two movies. Mostly the second movie, as only the opening level has anything to do with the first flick. You start with the finale of the Karate Kid: the All Valley Tournament. You have to win four matches against sprites that look nothing like the characters from the films. Weirdly, that’s the only major disconnect from the films. After that, the game is a more platforming-focused take on Kung-Fu Master. In fact, I should have included Karate Kid in my Kung-Fu Master: The Definitive Review feature, since the gameplay is clearly inspired by that legendary game. The combat really is almost identical to the famous Irem game, at least in theory. One button for punch, one for kick, press UP to jump, with the full range of moves from Kung-Fu Master. If you’re going to copy, copy from the best, right?

There’s also three different bonus games taken directly from the films. One where you smash blocks of ice, one where you catch flies in chopsticks, and the hammer seen here. I never got good at this one. The timing is weird.

Karate Kid doesn’t just copy Kung-Fu Master, though. It tries its damnedest to one-up that game by including two special moves: the drum technique from the second film and the legendary crane kick. They’re even animated in a way where the actual attack part comes with a slight delay, but they’re pretty convincing for a 1987 NES game. The problem with them is they’re done by simply standing still and pressing the kick button for the crane kick and punch for the drum technique. It makes it way too easy to activate them accidentally. The drum punch especially seems a lot more sensitive and poorly coded than the crane kick. I was constantly accidentally using the drum even when my movement should have cancelled the activation. Since you very much want to save these special moves for boss encounters or even when two enemies are attacking you out of sync, it’s annoying how easy it is to burn through them. This is compounded by Karate Kid being yet another NES game where the SELECT button goes unused. Why not map it so SELECT + A/B activates the special moves?

Speaking of bosses, this is supposed to be Chozen, the jerk ass from Karate Kid 2 who becomes one of the coolest allies in Cobra Kai. But, it looks nothing like him! Instead, this sprite is a DEAD RINGER for John Kreese! I mean, seriously, I did a double take and everything.

Before I continue, holy crap, the Kreese thing gets weirder. The basic enemies look EXACTLY like 8-bit versions of Young Kreese from Cobra Kai.

WTF?! Actor Barrett Carnahan (Young Kreese) could use that sprite as his driver’s license photo! Mind you, “Young Kreese” didn’t debut until Season 3, episode 2 of Cobra Kai, and this game is five years older than Carnahan, so this is kind of spooky. Oh, and Young Kreese is also the best character in the series and I’ll fight you on that. I do think Young Kreese and old Kreese are two separate characters from alternative dimensions since I literally cannot believe that Young Kreese grows up to be Old Kreese. Every single time I thought they were going to finally bridge the gap between the characters of Young Kreese and Old Kreese, nope, they did something else that made me think “there is no way that guy eventually became THAT guy.”

Anyway, I thought Karate Kid was decent enough at the start. Certainly rough in terms of movement and jumping, but nothing offensive, and it had acceptable level design and decent enough graphics. This lasted until about five seconds into the second stage, when the gameplay came to a screeching halt thanks to some of the strangest damage physics I’ve experienced in any 2D platformer. When you get hit in Karate Kid, there’s a pronounced knock-back, but unlike Castlevania or Mega Man, that knock-back has no blinking with it. Naturally, Karate Kid’s default challenge is sending two enemies at you who attack just out of sync. Of course it would be that way, and thus you can get caught very easily in a juggle. Hell, the level design even seems to be tailored specifically to cause this. Look at this shot:

I had a full life bar going into this part. You really don’t want to give up the high ground because of stuff like this. So, the combat is, to say the least, frustrating. As if to cosmically square this, enemies really don’t seem to know how to navigate the terrain. When they reach a low point on the playfield like in the above screen, even though they seem mechanically capable of climbing out of it, they become too confused to do so. In later stages, enemies are so lobotomized that more of them will kill themselves via the pits than be killed by you. A few years ago I reviewed the Atari-developed Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom coin-op that had me gobsmacked by how suicidal enemies were. This game gives it a run for its money. Karate Kid’s dimwitted basic enemies are just as bad, often walking off platforms to their doom. Some even jumped willingly into the water to die by drowning. That’s hardcore. You know what? I get it. They knew they wouldn’t even get a cameo in Season Six of Cobra Kai, but come on, fellas. Maybe there’s hope for a Chozen spin-off!

But, the surviving enemies aren’t so much fun to fight as they are pests. By the end of Karate Kid, I was so bored with being used as a tetherball that I opted to leg it and run away from enemies. That’s a viable strategy if you can get in front of them, since the game can only spawn two at a time. Then the third level hit, which takes place during the typhoon sequence of the second movie. Now, again, very admirable that they tried to recreate the set-pieces of the film. You even rescue the little girl from the typhoon while fighting Kreese Chozen. Okay, so in the film Chozen isn’t part of that sequence, but it’s the thought that counts. Despite its scathing reputation, Karate Kid does a lot right. The sprites have more frames of animation than most NES games of this time frame do, which gives the combat a pretty good sense of OOMPH! Nice graphics. The game follows the movie as close as you can do in an 8-bit platformer. Karate Kid isn’t phoned-in at all.

The baddies are like “OH COME ON, EVEN THE LITTLE GIRL GETS CLOSURE IN COBRA KAI AND WE DON’T?” By the way, this stage was a slight epilepsy risk thanks to the lightning flashes, so I’ll remind everyone that I’m partnered with AbleToPlay so please support them and sign up to contribute to their database to help people like me.

It sounds so cool, but that whole typhoon level is an unimaginable clusterf*ck of sadness because the entire time the wind is pushing you backward AND crap is flying at you randomly. It’s hard to get too mad because I understand why it’s like that. Altus figured out that the game would be monotonous, so they had to do something to differentiate the stages. The same can be said about the structure of the final boss. Again, they based it on the scene from the sequel, where you fight Chozen to the death on a platform. Except, they want players to honor the spirit of the movie and allow Chozen to square-up with you because of honor or some such bullsh*t. If that’s how they wanted it, why even program him to tee himself up for players by leaping onto the platform from high above you? Because if you punch him out of the air, it’ll knock him into the water, but that’s NOT supposed to happen so they just restart the fight over and over until you allow him to land. Then, not only do you have to fight him, but you have to make sure Kumiko isn’t knocked into the water, and her hit box and movement behavior is far too sensitive.

Calling Karate Kid a disaster is just straight-up wrong. It’s not even a run-of-the-mill bad licensed game. This actually had a fighting chance to not only be a quality game, but maybe even a beloved one. It doesn’t lack for effort. Karate Kid lacks for polish. Based on what I’ve heard about motion picture licensing from the 80s, Atlus probably had a very strict deadline to bring Karate Kid from the drawing board to the manufacturing. The people granting the licenses, simply put, didn’t know there was a difference between good video games and bad ones. To them, video games were no different than action figures, and if kids think a toy is boring, that’s on the kid, not them. This screwed a LOT of talented studios, which in turn screwed a lot of game consumers.

Two of the three characters in this picture are about to drown while the third will do the heroic thing: point and laugh at them.

It speaks volumes to how talented Atlus was, even in 1987, that Karate Kid rises to the level it does. Because my hunch tells me that, when it came to gameplay concepts, they had to use whatever was the first viable (IE programmable) idea that was pitched. There was no time to weed out bad ideas. Hence the wind in level three, or the way Kumiko works in the final battle, or even the very short length of the game. Despite this, Karate Kid follows the plot better than any other movie-based NES game up to this point. Actually, it probably held that title for years afterwards. Most developers wouldn’t have bothered. That’s the thing about LJN/Atlus’s Karate Kid on the NES. I never once got a sense of cynicism or laziness out of it, like I did with Back to the Future. Karate Kid is so clearly made with the best of intentions that it breaks my heart that it’s no good.

“Uh, Mr. Miyagi, I’m being attacked by a man using his two foot long serrated penis! Any sage advice?” “Daniel San, I helped you bring down Cobra Kai. I taught you ancient martial arts passed down from father to son. But I didn’t sign up for this. You’re on your own. Miyagi getting the f*ck out of here!”

Karate Kid is a fan service game, as a movie-based game should be. Atlus just didn’t have the resources, experience, or time to clean up the janky combat. That’s all this game needs: POLISH. Okay, and maybe an extra level or two, but what’s here would need minimal fine-tuning to become an above average movie game. Atlus would eventually go on to accomplish some amazing things in gaming, and it’s not hard to see their potential in Karate Kid. I can’t give it a YES! because it’s bad and even when I know a game got a raw deal due to a licensing agreement, I show no mercy in my verdict. But, in my heart, I feel pain for Atlus and the team behind Karate Kid. I didn’t hate this game. Like Back to the Future, its reputation is largely exaggerated, but unlike Back to the Future, Karate Kid doesn’t deserve it. Back to the Future is a joke because of how little it feels like the movie. Karate Kid the NES game feels like an actual Karate Kid product. If only the gameplay was a little more refined, I think it could have gone down as an all-timer on the NES. I really do.
Verdict: NO!

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And yea, I played pacnsacdave’s Cobra Kai ROM hack. It doesn’t fix the collision or blinking issues, so there’s really not a lot to say. What Karate Kid is BEGGING for is a quality of life ROM hack. I think there’s an above average Kung-Fu Master knock-off in here somewhere that some talented ROM hacker can unlock. I’m there for it when it happens.