Donkey Kong Bananza (Nintendo Switch 2 Review)

September 25, 2025 by 1 Comment

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!

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Baseball (NES Review) Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball (Switch Review)

August 30, 2025 by 6 Comments

Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
Released December 7, 1983
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Original Platform: Arcade
Released June 19, 2020
Arcade Release: April, 1984
Originally Developed by Nintendo
Re-Release Published by Hamster
$7.99 struck out in the making of this review.

No infield fly rule. That’s just peachy.

“Seriously, Cathy?” Yep, seriously. Hey, I’m sporty! And by that I mean I watch sports. Play? Hah. I actually had to stop and think if I’ve even run once in the entire 21st century. Running? That sh*t looks positively exhausting! I used to golf. You know, the sport where you’re allowed to bypass the overwhelming majority of the “moving around” part of the game and instead drive a motorized carriage right up to the ball. Or, if you’re especially lazy, pay someone to drive the cart for you (thumbs up). Really, I’m only doing Nintendo’s 1983 baseball game because it was designed by Big Shiggy Style and it’s probably his worst game ever. I mean, it has to be, right? I’ve heard people say Baseball was good for its time. Was it, though? I wouldn’t be born for another five-and-a-half years after it came out so I’m just guessing over here, but I can’t imagine people in 1983 would be fine with how this plays. This is pretty frick’n horrendous.

Exclusively on the coin-op, the defense changes camera angles. The NES/Famicom version doesn’t do this. BTW, this is the only game I won of Vs. Baseball. Every time I scored a run, the next batter the CPU got immediately hit a dinger on the first playable pitch I gave. Okay, not every time but it felt like it.

The one thing that kinda, sorta feels okay..ish? The batting. It’s fine, really! I’m guessing the majority of video baseball games from the golden age focused on batting, and I could see how maybe in 1983, this felt like a close approximation of America’s pastime. You can scoot around the batter’s box and there’s a nice crack when you make contact. It feels appropriately impactful. So, that’s nice. Nothing else is even in the ballpark, though. Like base running? The AI runners are woefully stupid and heavily unresponsive. See these two screenshots where I got what should be an extra bases hit? Well, for whatever reason, even after the ball hit the ground, the runners tagged back to the bases during a live ball then sat there and stared like dumb sh*ts while the fielder limped to the ball, ignoring my “RUN MOTHER F*CKERS!” command that I was giving the entire time. What should have scored the runner on second base ended up instead being a double play for the other team. If players pulled that sh*t in real life, any manger would have rushed the field and murdered them with a bat. No jury would convict them.

Another example of the brain dead base running: if there’s a man on first and second and the batter hits a ball that IMMEDIATELY touches the ground in front of home plate, the runners will tag-up before running. This is a force-out situation, so why the goddamn f*ck is the first instinct of the runners to tag-up before they start to run to the next base? It’s not humanly possible to react fast enough to give the command not to do this. This is basic, BASIC baseball stuff that has to work every single time, and it doesn’t. I don’t even know why they bothered with running controls because, half the time, the runners don’t listen. They certainly don’t when it comes to sending them to specific bases. They seemed more likely to listen when I gave the “all runners advance” sign. Even then, OBVIOUS ROUTINE doubles and even triples were ignored by the base runners, or even worse: they’d literally run the other way, back to the base they were on and tag up first. Mother f*cker, it’s a base hit! RUN! Little kids playing tee-ball aren’t this inept at the sport! By the way, the CPU opponent’s runners DO NOT have this base running problem. They know when it’s safe to run. That proves it can be done, even in 1983.

There’s no cap on the amount of times the CPU can attempt to pick-off a guy on base, even if you’re not doing anything. I literally pressed no buttons, but it’s baseball and guys step off the base. You would think the arcade game would have a peppier speed, but actually, I think Vs. Baseball tries to pick off runners even more. How many times in a row? I counted nine consecutive attempts four separate times. That’s nine times where not a single button was pressed but the CPU did something besides throw the next pitch. You know Hamster, maybe you shouldn’t have included the five minute caravan mode. It’s not really suitable for it.

What’s with the points you see on the Vs. Baseball screenshots? It’s how the game decides when a player needs to pay to continue. You don’t get a full game per quarter, but instead of having you pay every three innings (which would make sense) every single action in the game (except an attempt at a pick-off) eats up points, on both offense and defense. Are you playing defense and throwing a ball to a base to prevent advancement? That’ll cost you points. On offense and swinging the bat? That takes points too. Foul balls? Yep, both offensively and defensively. So does running the bases, while you get 30 points back for scoring a runner. Then again, you lose a lot more than 30 points when the other team hits a bomb out of the park. I gave up a two-run homer and it deducted 90 points.

There’s no license but the uniforms actually match the colors of six MLB teams (NES) or six Japanese baseball teams (Famicom), including the Chunichi Dragons, who I recognize from Mr. Baseball, a genuinely underrated sports film. If you can find it, check it out. The funny thing is, I don’t LOVE baseball (it’s fine) but I love baseball movies. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told people that the ending of A League of Their Own makes zero sense. The climatic game, I mean. There’s two outs, two on, and up to the plate steps Dotty Henson, the best hitter in the league. Yeah, she gets walked. 100% of the time, especially since the Peaches’ second best hitter, Marla Hooch, got married and didn’t play in the post season. They needed to create a situation where Dotty’s sister Kit, the plucky pitcher who got traded from the Peaches, almost gave up the game to her sister. But having Dotty blast an empty-bases homer would have been better than what they actually did, because what they wrote, simply put, would NEVER HAPPEN! Dotty would never ever ever get pitched to in that situation. They would have juiced the bases to create a force-out situation at every corner. I might have wrote this review just to have an excuse to talk about that on my blog.

If you were playing this on a real cabinet, it would take about a dollar to finish, and after a certain benchmark, the points go away and it lets you finish the game. To put it in perspective how STUPID this system is, right before going to press I played one last game using Arcade Archives’ Hi-Score mode (default settings, no pausing allowed, cheating impossible). On the literal first pitch I was given, I hit an inside-the-park home run. I might have scored a run, but I still had less points (238) than I started with (250) when the first batter stepped up to the plate. Dumb.

Note: In this clip of the inside-the-park homer, you can also see the lengthy pauses at each base. I’m LITERALLY giving the go sign the entire time. The runner should never have stopped! I was waving them forward right from the start!

While the base running and unresponsiveness is enough to assure a NO! by itself, the defense would have earned it too. All the fielding is done automatically. All you have to do is throw the ball. That’s fine with me, actually. I did the same thing when I played Ken Griffey Slugfest on my N64 as a kid. But, because the field is built to scale, the fielders run like they have each foot caught in a bear trap. Okay, I get it. They’re trying to simulate their approximate location if it were a full-sized baseball diamond. I’d be fine with that if the defense was reliable. It’s not. The defense’s judgement in general is pretty bad, so even something as routine as a pop fly could be dropped. The foul line is especially dangerous, as players often have to move up and and down to line up with the ball. This is where the slow speed of the fielding really screws you. However, unlike base running, this one works both ways. The CPU drops fly balls all the time too, and when it happens, it’s almost like they lose track of where the ball is in the sky. At least the pitching is fine. There’s four pitches, all controlled with the d-pad, though I couldn’t get screwballs across the plate. I’d prefer a little more room to mess with the ball, but eh, the base running is what kills Baseball. The runners are constantly tagging-up when they don’t need to, and there is literally no basis for this in baseball. I’ve never seen any game at any level that looks like this. They could have done better, even in 1983.

For whatever reason, I hit a LOT more home runs in Vs. Baseball than I did standard NES/Famicom Baseball.

Okay, so this review MIGHT seem silly to have done. But $7.99 is not an insignificant amount of money. You can buy a LOT of games for under $8 on the eShop these days. If Hamster had bundled it with Tennis, Soccer, and maybe even Golf, that would be one thing. $8 for THIS? And one of the special modes doesn’t REALLY work because the CPU might guzzle most of the five minutes trying to catch a runner stealing. You can’t stop the runners from getting leads, so there’s really no way to prevent getting caught in an agonizing cycle of pick off attempts. Both it and hi-score mode are certainly luck-based. It’s kind of nauseating. I know that the real goal with Baseball was simply to look and play better than any home video baseball did in 1983. Okay, MAYBE mission accomplished there. For that reason, some would say it’s unfair to call this Miyamoto’s worst game. It’s not an invalid argument. And for what it’s worth, I’m not calling this Nintendo’s worst game. The batting works fine. That raises it just out of the WOAT discussion all by itself. I’d rather play THIS than Ice Climber.

In Vs. Baseball, getting beaned is labeled “DEAD.” Jeez, how hard was that ball thrown? Only one person has ever been killed by getting hit by a pitch in major league history. His name was Ray Chapman. I can’t believe I know that guy’s name off the top of my head but I can’t tell you any of my nieces or nephew’s middle names.

The only reason I think Baseball is fair game in the “worst Nintendo game” discussion is because Nintendo keeps re-releasing it, which is a constant reminder that this is a BAD game of video baseball. Slow. Unresponsive. The behavior from the CPU fielding or base running doesn’t resemble what you expect from people who are in baseball uniforms. That’s what kills it for me. I might have joked about it earlier, but all my longtime readers know I legitimately love sports. The reason is simple: I love seeing athletes compete at the highest level. For whatever reason, it captures my imagination. That’s why, for me to really enjoy video sports, I need the fundamentals perfect. The GAME doesn’t have to be perfect, but the basics do. There’s no fantasy without that. No immersion. With Nintendo’s famous Baseball? I can’t suspend my disbelief, unless I’m pretending this is a celebrity softball game played with a three drink minimum. Hell, even then I think the players ought to be able to tell the difference between a line drive base hit and a pop fly.
Verdict: NO! and NO!

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Legend of Zelda (NES Review)

August 8, 2025 by 10 Comments

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!

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Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II (NES Review)

August 3, 2025 by 2 Comments

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!

Kind of looks like Moth Man.

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Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy Review)

August 1, 2025 by 5 Comments

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3
Platform: Game Boy
First Released January 21, 1994
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE*
Listing on Mario Wiki

*I made a mistake when I first published this and said Wario Land is on Switch Online. It is not.

From here out, if there’s an option to do color versions of classic Game Boy titles (meaning more than just four Super Game Boy-like colors), I’m taking it. If home developers are going to go to all the trouble of colorizing these games, at least one person with a semi-big review platform should acknowledge them. All the color screenshots in this feature are from Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition by korxo, who did a very good job given the limitations.
Link to the Patch

The fire attack and the dash attacks don’t show up all too well in screenshots. Thankfully, I barely used the dragon hat.

Okay, I’m pretty sure this is the last game that’s officially part of the Super Mario franchise’s 8 bit and 16 bit era that I haven’t reviewed. Like Yoshi’s Island, it’s only technically part of the Super Mario franchise thanks to a subtitle and really exists to act as the starting point for its own spinoff franchise. As of this writing, there’s been eight Wario Land games (assuming you count Wario World for GameCube and Wario: Master of Disguise for Nintendo DS as “Wario Land” games, and I do), and it all started here with a game that built to the strengths of the Game Boy. It’s certainly not Mario-like. Wario Land is actually more of the spiritual successor to the legacy of Doki Doki Panic and later Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s a much, much slower action game with a focus on exploration. There’s no B-running and no fast reaction times required. Even when you’re being stalked by a killer Thwomp, the tempo is kept pretty low and the focus is on creating tension, not panic.

Actually, it does the “chase” gimmick twice, with the second time turning the Thwomp into a boat at the end.

Which isn’t to say there’s no action in Wario Land. Wario’s tackle is satisfying enough, and it’s always fun to pick up a downed enemy and throw them off their perch and to their death, hopefully involving lava. If it worked perfectly, the combat would be S-tier for 8-bits, but that’s not the case. Wario is one of the first 2D retro games I’ve reviewed where the physics are wonky to the point of being genuinely unpredictable, mostly thanks to the level layouts. If you attempt to pick up an enemy with any structure nearby, whatever you’re carrying will be knocked out of your hand, and the enemy might instead shuffle around like they’re square dancing upside-down around your sprite. There’s a roughness to Wario Land that’s obvious right from the start and sticks around until the bitter end.

This is not a traditional hop ‘n squash game. I took more damage fighting the most basic enemies than I did in all other Mario games in this marathon combined. I don’t know if a single goomba so much as nibbled at the tip of my boots in the Mario games, but these little things called Pirate Gooms got me several times. Usually because they recovered right as I was reaching them. I may or may not have lost lives to them as well. (cough) Hey, it wasn’t MY fault. It was the physics. I swear.

Thankfully, the combat takes a deep back seat to stellar level design, but even that has this undeniable roughness to it. Wario Land has one of the strangest progression structures I’ve encountered, as some early levels have multiple exits and branching paths, one of which leads to an entirely different game world that’s otherwise inaccessible. Hell, the very first level in the game takes place on a beach, and the level’s format changes after you beat the first game world and the tide comes in. It’s a great idea that had me so pumped-up to see what other wacky changes would happen to the game world.

And then, after the 23rd of 40 stages, the “multiple exits” concept is abandoned completely, never to return. In total, only five stages have hidden exits. Imagine if Super Mario World didn’t have any key holes after the halfway point. Well, Wario Land actually does that, and it’s so goddamn weird for it. The idea of changing world maps is also largely abandoned, as I’m pretty sure there’s only one instance of it with any consequence after the secret exits stop. A lot of games give off the impression of having more ambitious plans that were left on the drawing board, but with Wario Land, I really think that might be what happened. The only way I can make sense of the structure is that they ran out of time and had to delete multiple exits and possibly stages when the time came to code the game, only many earlier ones had to be left in because they stuck a game world off in the corner, where nothing else on the map can logically reach it, and there was nowhere else to hide the treasures within.

Unlike Mario World, the keys that unlock the fifteen hidden treasures are often placed away from the skull doors that hold them. Sometimes, they’re on the total opposite end of the level, and carrying the keys from Point A to Point B is a pain in the ass. In a good way, I mean. Thankfully, the keys don’t vanish if you scroll them off screen, and you can also use them to kill enemies.

The good news is that hidden doors aren’t the main thing you’re searching for in Wario Land. What you’re really trying to do is accumulate money to buy a bigger house than Mario lives in after Wario’s attempt to claim squatter’s rights in Super Mario Land 2 didn’t work out. The plan is to steal back a gold statue of Princess Peach that was stolen by Captain Syrup, the ruler of Brown Sugar Pirates (why is it always food-based names? Does Nintendo not feed their developers? It would explain a lot!). Surprisingly for a Nintendo game, Wario doesn’t intend to fetch the statue in order to court Peach. Oh no. Wario might be a greedy Mario doppelgänger, but he’s a greedy Mario doppelgänger who follows the golden rule: don’t stick your d*ck in crazy, and when the ruler of a country commissions a golden statue of themselves, it’s a safe bet they’re f*cking nuts. Go ahead and cringe, but Wario played Super Princess Peach. He knows what’s up. So he plans on ransoming the statue to raise funds to buy a castle. It’s the most petty reason to go on a harrowing adventure, and it ends with Mario stealing the statue anyway.

As luck would have it, the final boss is a genie and, once Wario has won the fight, he gets to make a wish. He probably should have made it “I hope that my action-adventure franchise doesn’t completely evaporate by the 2010s” but I’m getting ahead of myself. Because the absolute monarchy of the Mushroom Kingdom is so capitalist that even a genie needs to get a bag, to make Wario’s wish come true, you need to accumulate as much money as possible. The hidden treasures are given value in coins after you beat the genie, and I’m fairly certain that if you find all fifteen of them (and complete all forty courses as well), you will max out the coin bank and get the best ending, which is Wario getting his own planet.

Update: WRONG, you will need about 10K in coins plus the fifteen treasures plus have an all-clear for the forty courses to get Planet Wario.

Mario would later top this by getting his own galaxy. Always a bridesmaid, huh Wario?

Finding the treasures IS hugely satisfying because the game doesn’t tell you where they are. While the five stages with hidden exits are marked on the overworld map, there’s no indicators for which levels have treasures (something Virtual Boy Wario Land did). The only thing you can really use to help is the fact that the fifteen treasures have spots sequentially on the scoreboard. So if you’re missing the “G” treasure, it’s going to be found in one of the levels between where you found treasures “F” and “H.” I love this, and the only thing I wish for is that, once you found the treasures, the game told you what stages you found them in. I also wish Nintendo would build a much bigger game based around this idea. I found MOST of the treasures on my first playthrough, but the act of getting them was rarely a layup. In fact, the second-to-last one I could not find for the life of me.

When you do find the treasures, it’s a moment. It never feels anything short of great.

As a proof of concept first attempt at a new franchise, Wario Land holds up shockingly well. I don’t think it will be for everyone. The slow movement will be a major turnoff for a lot of players, as will be the clunky mechanics. It also has some exceptionally weak bosses. At one point during a boss fight, I was dodging attacks and hunkering down for a typical “three hits and your dead” type of battle. But after a few passes, nothing was happening, so I charged at the boss and it worked. When he was stunned, I picked him up and threw him in the lava and the fight was over. Curiosity got the better of me so I rewound the fight and this time, I charged as soon as I could. It worked.

Even with satisfying combat, I wouldn’t recommend playing Wario Land specifically for it. It’s just not polished enough for that. From an action perspective, it’s for sure the roughest 2D combat I can remember Nintendo doing, including Kid Icarus. But as a true treasure hunt game, I was constantly surprised by how much fun I was having. Wario Land has NO bad levels among the forty total courses, which is nothing short of remarkable given the limitations of the Game Boy. And, as I said, even the basic enemies can pose a threat, so you can’t sleepwalk through it like you can the Virtual Boy sequel that was the only Wario Land I really ever played through all the way. Okay, so the difficulty is largely thanks to the janky physics and stiff jumping, but it’s charming even when it feels like it doesn’t work the way the developers intended.

The later levels that take on maze-like characteristics are so strong that I wouldn’t have minded if EVERY level had been that way. They basically did have that mentality for the sequels.

I’m sure a lot of people will say Virtual Boy Wario Land is the superior game, but I’m not going there. Both games are vastly underrated, but once you stack the eagle helmet and dragon helmet in VB Wario Land, it’s all over but the shouting. The game becomes too damn easy, and that broke my immersion a lot more than the eye-melting red and black visuals did. While there’s a few pits that I feel are too touchy and the collision is never as good as you want it to be, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 never allows you to go on cruise control. It’s an imperfect build of the perfect 8-bit mix of platforming, action, and exploration. But even the imperfection feels like it fits Wario like a glove. What other character could get away with a game that feels this unfinished? I assume since it was 1994, they thought the Game Boy was near the end of its life cycle and they had to rush it out. Hah.
Verdict: YES!

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Donkey Kong Country (SNES Review)

July 31, 2025 by 5 Comments

Donkey Kong Country
aka Super Donkey Kong (Japan)
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released November 18, 1994
Directed by Tim Stamper and Chris Stamper
Developed by Rare Ltd.
Published by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki

Well, um, the rain still looks like rain! Or oatmeal. It kind of looks like oatmeal. But RAINING oatmeal.

I swear to God that I didn’t deliberately review this back-to-back with Super Mario Land 2 because both games were more focused on looking pretty than being mind-blowing from a gameplay perspective. Actually, I thought Donkey Kong Country had a much better chance of scoring a YES! than Super Mario Land 2 because it would still have the horsepower to pull off clever level design. And sometimes it does! Like, take a look at this:

Oof, that does not look beautiful. I bet it did in 1994, and that’s literally the only time it had to. No matter what anyone thinks, even Nintendo games (or games Nintendo paid to have made, as is the case with DKC) are ONLY made to appeal to gamers at the time of release, and if they happen to be valuable as catalog titles later, that’s just a bonus. I know people want to believe the mighty Nintendo plays 4D chess and has this big roadmap of when catalog titles will be worth money again, but they don’t. Nobody does. That’s why gaming licensing planks are so very, very one-sided and sh*tty. 

You have to hit those STOP/GO barrels to freeze the red-eyed enemies, which turn into stones. You never know how much time you get for each barrel, and they staged the level in a way where the last few only give you a split second. It’s quite exciting, and the enemies are creepy enough. I just wish there were more stages that made me sit-up like that, but that wasn’t the point of Donkey Kong Country. It was made only to be 1994’s big smash hit, and if it’s worth some scratch in the 2020s, hey, lucky us. So when people say “Donkey Kong Country doesn’t hold up” it’s okay to say “well duh!” It accomplished exactly what it set out to do in 1994: curb stomp the 3DO into oblivion while keeping Nintendo fans on the hook while they got the platform that would come to be known as Nintendo 64 ready. “Holding up to the test of time” was not on the agenda.

You can’t say that they overplayed level gimmicks. Despite the fact that the STOP/GO barrels had legs as a gimmick, they only show up in that one level. These parrots only show up once too, though they’ll be featured characters in the sequel.

So in a sense, it’s kind of remarkable that any aspect of DKC holds up at all. I think my frustration with Donkey Kong Country is that it doesn’t feel like it squeezed all the potential out of the gameplay concepts it has. Maybe they were saving-up for the inevitable sequel, but I dunno. I’m a big fan of leaving it all on the court, and Rare sure as hell didn’t do that. It’s actually one of the most conservative games I’ve reviewed lately. As a franchise builder, few first steps are rarely this enticing and leave you wanting more in a bad way. Maybe any more bold ideas were canned for being too difficult when they were trying to make a game to appeal to everyone, including very young gamers, whom I’m guessing will like DKC in 2025 more than I did. I hate to guess on these things, but Donkey Kong Country seems like a great starting title for introducing young children to platforming. From what I can remember about the sequels’ difficulty, I’m guessing I won’t be able to say that about them.

Then again, there’s moments that feel like the bottom of the barrel is being scrapped. No pun intended, but this evil barrel is my least favorite boss trope: fighting the same regular enemies you’ve been killing en masse this whole time.

Even the Stampers recognized the game was too easy, but I think that could have been fixed by adding a difficulty toggle. A hard mode wouldn’t have been too hard. Just remove a lot of the DK barrels from stages. I took plenty of damage playing DKC, but I never had to wait more than a few seconds to undo that, so there was no tension. Still, the addition of Diddy Kong was probably the smartest move. What Donkey Kong Country really does right is removing hit points in favor of having two different characters, and whoever you’re playing as is lost when you get hit, at least until you find the next DK barrel two seconds later. Being able to swap between two characters who have different skills was also inspired. Diddy Kong can cartwheel through enemies and seems to have more hangtime when you cartwheel off a ledge before he has to jump. Plus he carries barrels in front of him, which makes it easier to uncover hidden doors. Meanwhile, with Donkey Kong you can do such tactics as tagging Diddy so you can use him instead. Again, a great idea that would be utilized better in the sequels. Are you noticing a theme here?

The only time I used Donkey Kong was when I was afraid of losing Diddy. It became clear really quickly why he’s not playable in the first two sequels.

Unlike Super Mario Land 2 which, besides having a lot of pointless bonus levels, really did nothing wrong besides having too basic of level design, Donkey Kong Country did PLENTY to leave me terminally annoyed. The methodology of 100%ing the game (or 101%ing because ain’t that quirky?) is strange. Every level has K-O-N-G tokens to find, some of which are so well hidden that I couldn’t find them. Sounds great, except they don’t contribute to the final completion percentage. Instead, acing the game only requires finding every bonus room. Probably not the best way to do it since there’s too many of them and they completely bust the game’s flow. My favorite levels were usually the ones that back-loaded the bonus rooms near the end of the stages. Those tended to have above-average level design. Hell, I normally hate swimming stages, but at least none of those have bonus rooms, so they were some of the better levels.

I found myself carrying barrels and walking up against walls because I was more focused on getting 100% than I was just enjoying the boilerplate, paint-by-numbers level design.

What wrecks the game’s tempo even worse than the bonus rooms are the animal tokens. No matter what you’re doing or where you are in a stage, once you collect the third and final token of any set, you drop what you’re doing and enter that specific animal’s bonus stage. It would make so much more sense to instead bank the reward until after you beat the level. That’s a time honored gaming tradition, right? But no, it’s an interruption, and not always (or ever) a welcome one. The levels take a while to finish, and it gets worse, because sometimes after the round is finished, it takes you quite far back in the level you were playing. Maybe even to the start of the stage.

Okay, so the animal bonus rounds are fun. Well, until you have 99 lives. Then they become annoying.

I did end up 101%ing Donkey Kong Country, but the irony is, I probably would have enjoyed my time with the game a lot more if I hadn’t bothered. I mean, not enough to give Donkey Kong Country a YES!, but it would have been a lot closer. I found myself deliberately avoiding animal tokens and losing the bonus rounds as soon as they started just to make them go faster. When just the act of finding the rooms is all you need, why bother? DKC is a game where lives are so plentiful that you’ll almost certainly not game over even if you struggle with some later stages. That’s a big if, by the way. The only stage I died more than twice on was the second mine cart stage, which shows up pretty late in the game. And it’s not that I never enjoyed the exploration aspect. Actually, I was happy that, if you miss a bonus room and have to replay the level, you don’t have to finish it to get credit for the stuff you missed. As soon as you locate the bonus rooms you missed, you can pause the game and press select and return to the map with full credit.

If the game had required all the letters, I would still be playing DKC, but it didn’t, and instead I’m trying to finish up this review as fast as I can.

There are a handful of gimmicky levels to keep the experience somewhat fresh, like the above screenshot. That treadmill runs on fuel barrels that you have to collect, and it kept my attention for the full length of the stage. The mine cart stages are some of the stronger auto-scrolling types of levels I’ve experienced, and a stage where you slide up and down ropes automatically actually provided a solid, enjoyable challenge. I’d say around a third of Donkey Kong Country holds up and remains clever today. But two-thirds of the game is too basic to hold up to the test of time. You never quite shake the proof-of-concept feeling when playing it, and that makes sense because the gameplay isn’t what they had to get working. Nintendo paid for a game that looked high tech enough to buy them time for the Nintendo 64. Donkey Kong Country for the third best-selling SNES game, so they got it. But being more bold and experimental with the level design? That came later, with the sequels.

Donkey Kong Country’s bosses are all dull, but King K. Rool takes the cake. His arena is much bigger than the screen, and his attack pattern is basically adding one pass across the full length of the arena after every hit. So when he drops cannonballs across the screen, instead of an exciting pattern like dodging them for several seconds, the cannonballs drop one at a time across the length of the screen. It’s the most unimaginative way of handling any boss, let alone a final one.

As a prototype for better games to come, Donkey Kong Country is a good start. It’s never BAD from a level design point of view and the barrels that you fire out of are fun enough, though not quite barrels of fun. The controls are pretty good, and it’s easy to get a feel for how long you can roll or cartwheel off a platform and float in the air before you have to jump. But the level themes are basic and dull and there’s not a big enough cast of enemies. The bosses are REALLY bad, too, and since they take even longer to fight than enemies in Mario games, they come across as punishment for finishing a world instead of a reward.

The barrels are certainly a great idea and probably the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that I feel they didn’t hold back on. They got every molecule of gameplay out of them without being boring. I really think they’re why this ended up such a potent franchise.

The test of time is cruel, and no games have a tougher time facing that test than games based around cutting edge graphics first and gameplay second. Since the graphics were the main selling point, I figure I should mention I thought the game was pretty damn ugly. The character models are fine, I guess, but the architecture is really rough, with backgrounds often looking like Sega CD levels of splotchy. The funny thing is, after Donkey Kong Country became the last big mega hit for the SNES, Nintendo would have given anything to have Yoshi’s Island look like this game, and the only reason it didn’t happen is because it was too far in development to change the entire art direction. That’s kind of hilarious, because Yoshi’s Island still looks good in 2025 including all its cutting edge special effects. Donkey Kong Country, well, doesn’t. These days, DKC is just another middle of the road SNES platformer that looked better in 1994 than other middle of the road platformers, but it did leave a franchise with much better games in its wake, so it has that going for it. Take that, Plok.
Verdict: NO! But I want to talk about one last thing.

Donkey Kong Country: Competition Cartridge

My best score for Competition Cartridge. I couldn’t find what the highest scores were but there’s people who have scores in the 3,000s. Most of my runs also ended around the same spot, too.

There’s a version of Donkey Kong Country that acts as a spiritual successor to the 1990 Nintendo World Championships cartridge (which I reviewed in Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review’s bonus section). It’s really well made, too and actually the one aspect of Donkey Kong Country that unambiguously holds up. The timer stops during all transitions. There’s no overworld map, so finishing one stage takes you automatically to the next. They even redid what’s inside the bonus rooms to make the scoring for entering those rooms more logical, and the scoring system is, you know, fine. I actually had a lot more fun playing this than I did in anything in Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. It’s fast-paced and genuinely exciting. So, why isn’t THIS on Switch Online? Unless Blockbuster Video’s IP holders also hold the publishing rights (don’t rule this out) I can’t think of any good reason. If you get a chance it’s worth checking out, though it’s probably not worth the $5,000 it fetches on Ebay.
Verdict for Donkey Kong Country: Competition Edition: YES!

The math checks out.

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Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins (Game Boy Review)

July 30, 2025 by 4 Comments

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins
Platform: Game Boy
First Released October 21, 1992
Directed by Hiroji Kiyotake and Takehiko Hosokawa
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Mario Wiki
Color screenshots are from Super Mario Land 2 DX by toruzz
Link to the Patch

I really don’t think it’s Mario or Zelda or Kirby or Samus Aran that prove Nintendo is the Death Star of video games. It’s Wario. You know, the throwaway final boss in a Super Mario Bros. spin-off that went on to star in twenty games where his name appears in the title, and that’s not even considering that he’s one of the most popular characters in Mario Kart. Hell, Wario can even lay claim to being the star of a killer app for an entire video game platform. Okay, so it’s Virtual Boy, but it still counts. Meanwhile, Wart is like “f*cking seriously?”

I can’t imagine how mind-blowing seeing Super Mario Land 2 must have been in 1992. Mario as a Game Boy franchise went from looking like this:

To looking like this:

Cool. Nintendo set out to give players the Super Mario World experience on the Game Boy. A task that was basically impossible, but they really did give it the old college try. I suppose that’s why Mario Land 2 is maybe the weirdest game in the entire “Super Mario” franchise. Most of the rogues gallery are one-off enemies that don’t really feel like Mario baddies. This even includes things like pigs with cannons for snouts, a Kid Dracula-like vampire that shoots bats at Mario, and Jason Voorhees-like evil hockey masks complete with a f*cking knife sticking out of them. Seriously, what?

6 Golden Coins feels like it has just enough Mario staples like the mushrooms and fire flowers, Goombas and Koopa Troopas, or the right kind of destructible blocks to pass as a Mario game and not some kind of weird ROM hack. I assume this was done because turning a popular colorized 16-bit game into an 8-bit black and white game was too tall an order. If they copied too many enemies, then all they would be making is a much, much lesser version of the game everyone really liked. Which is sort of what they ended up with anyway, but I do kind of understand why they created such a large roster of new enemies and locations. Probably the best thing I can say about Mario Land 2 is it still feels pretty fresh. Instead of the typical hill stages, fire stages, ice stages, etc, you go into outer space, a graveyard, or a giant mechanical statue that Mario built to honor himself, I guess.

For seemingly no reason, here’s a stage where the ground is shaped like LEGO. It doesn’t do anything different. It’s just a floor, but, look, it’s shaped like LEGO (or Nintendo’s LEGO knock-off)!

So, uh, this is the one that gets me assassinated but I didn’t really like Mario Land 2 at all. I didn’t hate it or anything. It controls fine and has decent jumping physics, but I was just really bored playing it. I imagine a child in 1992 would be more than satisfied with this brisk, easy-going Mario game that looks great but had its potential held back by the Game Boy’s hardware limitations. While the enemy sprites might look original, they couldn’t really do anything creative with their placement or have too many on screen at once. Hell, the hockey masks are just normal Goombas that look different when you get right down to it. Granted, most enemies in Super Mario games are cannon fodder, but these ones are especially easy to deal with. Some of the indestructible underwater ones had a tight squeeze to avoid, but otherwise, there’s just not enough threats in Mario Land 2. The bosses are all pretty weak too.

Tatanga, the final boss from Mario Land 1, was the second boss I faced and the first enemy that damaged me at all. About three seconds after he got me with one of his projectiles, I nailed all three hits against him in a row because they didn’t give him hardly any invincibility frames. He basically reverse-stomped himself into my feet.

If the level design was amazing, that wouldn’t be a problem. But despite the original backdrops, I found myself listless playing the stages. Even the ones structured like mazes are too basic for their own good, and the act of exploring isn’t very rewarding because so many of the unlockable bonus stages feel samey. Only one of them provides any reward besides just an extra stage for the sake of an extra stage, and that’s a shortcut in the Macro Zone that skips two of the levels and takes you straight to the zone’s final stage. Okay, so it was cute that the moon got pissed off at me for getting the Space Zone’s bonus level, but the novelty wore off when I had to actually play the stage and it was just more of the same. I don’t mind the level count, but the bonus levels need a reason to exist. Hell, there’s even a random level in the map, the “Scenic Course” that just sort of is there for no reason besides “why not?” It does nothing. It unlocks nothing. It’s pointless. I think Nintendo was capable of better than that by 1992.

Hey, don’t look at me like that! You’re the one that only has two levels.

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of Super Mario Land 2. The rabbit ears aren’t a very fun power-up (they’re basically the racoon tail without the soaring through the sky part), the game is far too easy, and things like how carrying a turtle shell is done by balancing it on your head because they couldn’t squeeze in an animation of Mario carrying the shell thanks to the hardware limits made me cringe instead of smirk. Really, the only purpose Mario Land 2 serves today is being a reminder that ALL games are a product of their time. Most of Nintendo’s catalog holds up remarkably well to the test of time. It’s their most astonishing achievement. But the Game Boy wasn’t ever really meant to do that. It was designed to provide a lower cost portable experience that was good enough for the standards of over three decades ago.

You know, having the Three Little Pigs would have been a cute idea if I hadn’t already fought a completely different species of pig that shoots cannonballs at me. Do YOU guys shoot cannonballs? No? Then how come that thing wasn’t the boss and you are?

I actually tried to do this review back in January, when I reviewed Super Mario Land, but I got bored pretty quickly and shut it off. I gave the original game a YES! because, rough as it is, it’s a unique Mario experience unlike any other Super Mario game before or since, something you can’t really say about Mario Land 2. The two games have a lot in common. Like 6 Golden Coins, Mario Land 1 has unique-to-it locations, enemies, and themes. I guess I just like the idea of Mario exploring Ancient Egypt, Easter Island, and a world based on Chinese folklore more than lock blocks or a graveyard. But it’s not just that. Mario Land 1 feels like a one-off Mario gameplay experience. Mario Land 2’s gameplay is just the best approximation of Mario World they could muster within the limits of the Game Boy. An impressive engineering feat? Sure.

The level design just never rises above being okay. I’m happy I waited until after playing every other 80s and 90s Super Mario game to do 6 Golden Coins, because it really aged the worst out of any other game in the series. It just offers so very little that holds up. All that it really has left is a lot of personality, but hell, every Mario game has that, don’t you think?

Fated to age well? Nope, and that’s okay, because it worked for the kids of 1992. I’m happy for them. It’s just not 1992 anymore, and from the moment I booted up Mario Land 2, I couldn’t wait to be done with it. God, I really hope they don’t remake this one. Oh, Nintendo will eventually, but when it happens, I hope it’s a full reimagining with new level design and power-ups that keeps the basic frame work. The idea of Mario Land 2 is fine, but it’s a product of its time, and that product is about thirty years past its expiration date. Thanks for giving us Wario, though. I do like Wario.
Verdict: NO!

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Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance Review)

July 28, 2025 by 1 Comment

Metroid: Zero Mission
Platform: Game Boy Advance
Released February 9, 2004
Directed by Yoshio Sakamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
Listing at Metroid Wiki

ARE YOU SH*TING ME? How the heck did I miss 33% of the items? I knew I should have used a guide. Oh, and ignore my completion time, because I did rewind and use save states a lot to undo backtracking. At one point, I spent close to an hour trying to figure out how to get one super missile pick-up (this one) when I knew I had the stuff to get it, but I also wanted the best ending. I really thought I’d be further along in my Nintendo marathon, but trying to 100% every game is getting to be a pain, especially since I missed an energy tank in the first Metroid anyway (I didn’t get the one in Kraid’s chamber). For Zero Mission, I really did think I got most everything. I’m genuinely stunned I missed so much. I thought, at worst, I’d have like 90%.

It’s really not accurate to call Metroid: Zero Mission a remake of the original game that I just reviewed. There are winks to the original game, but calling this a “remake” is like saying the 2025 Superman movie is a direct remake of the old 1950s Kirk Alyn serial Atom Man vs. Superman. I mean, they’re both about Superman fighting Lex Luthor, who uses an artificially-created Kryptonite to neutralize Superman while unleashing a doomsday device on Metropolis. They’re practically identical! Except, no, they’re not really that similar at all. Zero Mission is barely even inspired by the original, and instead shares a small handful of similar rooms and a couple gags from the first game. Like, remember this GOTCHA?

I could have also done the Captain America “I understood that reference!” meme here.

But otherwise, this is basically more of a direct prequel to Super Metroid, like Nintendo said, “what if in 2004 we released what the 1986 game would have been like if we had made it in 1994 instead?” It’s Nintendo’s version of wish fulfillment. Which isn’t to say you should expect a game with as grand a scale as Super Metroid, either. I was actually surprised by how small the world of Metroid: Zero Mission is, even if you count all the Zero Suit stuff. I remembered the game being much bigger, but there really are only two “benchmark” boss fights before you tackle Mother Brain. Nintendo’s own version of Bulk & Skull, the dynamic duo of Kraid and Ridley. There’s other boss fights but not a single one of them shakes the “mini-boss” vibe, and hell, I beat Ridley in about twenty seconds. I even called my nephew and his friends over to watch the fight since they’re big Smash Bros. fans. “Hey kids, want to see me beat Ridley?” and the fight was over before the kids even finished talking about how cool a design it is.

Maybe I’m just good at fighting Ridley. I died against both Kraid and Mother Brain, but later on, I beat Robo Ridley only getting hit twice.

I guess I just expected to like Metroid: Zero Mission a lot more than I did. I was certain I’d be saying it’s one of the all-time great Game Boy Advance titles, but I’m not going there. Much like with Super Mario Bros. 3, eh, it’s fine. It just brings very little new to the table. The disappointing thing is, when it does manage to bring fresh ideas, they usually are fantastic. It’s such a small thing, but at one point you’re attacked by these annoying-as-hell space parasites. You can’t shoot them, and once they’re on you, you have to bomb them off. I kind of figured they only existed to be a tutorial for the bombs. Later in the game though, you have to deliberately infect yourself with the parasites, then lead them to these otherwise indestructible heart-shaped barriers. Apparently the parasites like them more than the taste of Samus’ armor.

Chow down, gang! Whoever eats the most will become the new Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea! (My sister read that and said “that’s not why she eats the heart. It’s to prove she’s carrying the Stallion who Mounts the World you idiot.” I feel so loved.)

It’s such wonderful world building that helps make Zebes feel like a genuinely organic, thriving ecosystem, but those moments are few and far between. Zero Mission just never successfully loses the vibe of being a lesser-version of Super Metroid. It sure doesn’t play as well. The movement and aiming is clunkier and the sense of exploration is muffled. The level design is fine, but it’s not amazing. If they were aiming for a sense of claustrophobia, great. I was kind of surprised that’s something that people craved from Metroid, but again, I got into the series through Metroid Prime. While it has plenty of moments of feeling closed-in, the thing *I* most directly associate with Metroid is the believable alien world. At the time I played Metroid Prime, I’d played a lot of first person shooters that controlled better and had better action, but it was the atmosphere and the settings (and the enemy design to a lesser degree) that immersed me like few games ever had. For a 2D game, Zero Mission does okay at that, but there’s not enough of a push towards giving it that lived-in feel.

This is the only cutscene that works, and it’s for one of my favorite game bosses. A giant one-eyed brain with spikes and tubes coming out of it that’s submerged in a giant glass jar is objectively terrifying. On the other hand, the one right before the Zero Suit section of the game was so damn silly that I chortled. It looked almost identical to the opening of the Mighty Mouse in the Great Space Chase, which a young Cathy Vice most certainly didn’t watch so much she wore out the VHS tape. I showed this joke to my parents and they both looked off into the distance like they were having flashbacks. You know, come to think of it, I “wore out” an awful lot of video tapes that my parents hated having to watch over and over again. I just gave them the stink eye, but they claim innocence. “We would never have broken your treasured video tapes, Cathy. We might have lied about our ability to find replacements, though.” Well, that’s fair.

Everything that happens until after the Mother Brain fight has the feel of going through the motions. There’s not really any new items or abilities. There’s lots of gizmos in the levels themselves that you can use to get around, but otherwise, this is just a boilerplate, paint-by-numbers Metroid adventure, and it’s good, really. It’s pretty much impossible to not enjoy Metroid once they perfected the formula. But I found myself waiting for something to happen that really made me sit up in my chair, and it just never happened. You beat Mother Brain, run away, and it feels like a decent but unspectacular game is over. Everything that happens afterward feels almost like a completely different game. I’m guessing they were aiming for an epilogue vibe. They failed badly at that.

The home stretch leading up to the battle with Mother Brain is probably the part of the game that feels most closely pulled from the original. In fact, it’s actually a safe bet to say that the only twist really is that you’re not playing the original game. It’s a little easier to dodge the bullets shot by the indestructible guns and you presumably have super missiles to make breaking through the barriers go faster. Then you get to the Mother Brain fight, and I felt it’s a massive letdown. It’s staged very poorly, with two single-block platforms and a pit of lava underneath you, with two guns continuously shooting at you AND those orange circles. This was a chance to fix one of the worst last boss fights Nintendo ever did, and they just made it SLIGHTLY more tolerable. The only new aspect is now Mother Brain’s eye must be shot, and it’s just not enough. How come Kraid and Ridley get whole new fighting styles but Mother Brain is only slightly updated? “Because she’s the last boss!” BUT SHE’S NOT! It’s a boring Robo Ridley fight that’s basically the same type of fight as Mother Brain with a small target that’s covered in glass that has to be shattered, then you have to wait for the glowing dot (an eye, if you will) to be vulnerable to shoot it with missiles. Only THAT fight doesn’t have lava and over four other things shooting at you from all angles while you balance on two small blocks. I would have preferred something truly fresh over a retread of the same old sh*t. Have the glass itself fight back, T-1000 style or something.

Yes, the Zero Suit stuff is fantastic. So fantastic that I kind of wish they had the guts to do that as the entire game. It pulls off genuinely scary stealth mechanics in 2D just about as good as a platforming-shooter can do. Okay, so it’s nowhere near as hair-raising as the evil Samus in Metroid Fusion was (the first time I realized a 2D game could be scary), but running from the Space Pirates was always exciting. Even if some of the moments chosen as the spot you run to that makes them give up and turn around made no sense at all.

“Duh, let’s see, I was right on her tail when she ran into this room, but she’s not here. All that’s here is this wall that both her and I can easily jump over. I’ll just assume she was so scared of me that all her atoms depolarized and she vanished. Good job, me! The literal brain that’s my boss would be so proud of me if she hadn’t just been killed by some blond chick wearing a superhero suit. Hey wait a second! I wonder if that blond chick wearing a different kind of superhero suit that I was just chasing knows her? Well, too late to ask, I suppose, on account of her atoms depolarizing. Hopefully when they make a game about this some day, all the little space pirates who play it won’t have their immersion completely shattered when they see how my victory over the blond girl who I’m pretty sure isn’t the same blond girl who killed Mother Brain plays out.”

Okay, so Zero Mission requires a LOT of suspension of disbelief at the ends of the chases, but most of the sneaking and running is very well done. I just wish it lasted a lot longer. Once you get the suit back, not only does the game go back to being paint-by-numbers Metroid, but the final stretch leading to the ending leans too heavily on a poorly-designed Space Jump. Metroid: Zero Mission’s jumping I think is the weakest link of the game. Even when you have the high jump, it never stops feeling too heavy to the point of being slightly uncomfortable. Oh, it’s not a deal breaker or anything. You’ll adapt to its limits and timing because they did a first-rate job of designing the levels in a way that puts a focus on the limits of your jumps. Eventually it’ll be intuitive, and that must be harder to do than it seems from a development standpoint because a lot of games where the jumping isn’t comfy never manage to recover like Zero Mission does, especially as quickly as it does. But it’s always the elephant in the room, and that elephant goes on a murderous rampage once you get the Space Jump.

This is one of those mechanics where you have to pause and shake feeling back into your hand.

Unlimited jumping WITH heavy jumping physics is a really, really bad idea, and so course it’s the primary gameplay mechanic of Metroid: Zero Mission’s climax. It’s actually exhausting to use, and in some (thankfully limited) instances, it crosses the line into outright bad game design when enemies shoot you out of the air. Since the heavy jumping leaves no elegance to the timing of when you have to press the button to jump higher, it turns what should be a fun superpower (it’s basically flying when you think about it) into a mindless button master. A chore that you have to do a lot at the end of the game. After the stellar Zero Suit stuff, it pretty much sours the finale of an otherwise perfectly decent Metroid game.

“Nice shootin’, Tex!”

So Metroid: Zero Mission blew-up what should have been a historically amazing ending to a game that already suffers from feeling more like DLC for Super Metroid with little in the way of worlds that are “new” to explore. BUT, the important stuff is all here. Zebes does feel like a living alien world at times. Instead of feeling like a series of samey platforms in a video game, it feels like you’re an intergalactic bounty hunter exploring caves and structures on a hostile planet. That’s what I want, so giving Zero Mission a YES! was easy. And yet, that Zero Suit stuff was such a tease because it worked. As silly and convoluted as it is, hell, stealth stuff in video games, even games more serious than this, are usually silly and convoluted. If I can’t deal with that sh*t, I wouldn’t like the genre at all.

I wonder if the underwhelming reaction to Metroid Fusion was the reason why Nintendo hasn’t done a full Zero Suit game in the style of Zero Mission’s finale, including using a stun gun instead of a deadly weapon. You know, Fusion had a weird suit instead of the normal one, therefore it’s not what people what. No, that’s not true though. I think people sh*t on Fusion because it’s basically a linear game, and the enemy/item format was lame as f*ck. You can learn lessons in critical failure (and Fusion didn’t fail critically. Nobody hates it or anything like that. It’s just not Metroid as we want Metroid to be) but you should never lose your willingness to experiment. I just find it hard to believe that the company that made an RPG series where the Mario cast are instead paper dolls or a Kirby game where he’s made out of yarn don’t have the balls to do a full 2D Zero Suit Samus game.

All I care about is having fun, and the Zero Suit gameplay is the highlight of Metroid: Zero Mission for the twenty to thirty minutes it lasts, if that. It’s one of the best sequences in the entire franchise regardless of whether I’m talking about two dimensions or three. Of course, the timing of when it happens is jarring and awkward. It makes it feel tacked-on, and it kind of is. The whole Chozo origin story is, too, and while the level themes when the Chozo drop awkwardly in and out of the narrative are cool (apparently the way to my heart is having hieroglyphs or petroglyphs in games) it feels shoehorned. I can’t help but wonder if they originally intended to start the game with the Zero Suit, since that would have made so much more sense, and they simply lost their nerve. I would have also been fine with a game where Samus has to abandon the suit multiple times throughout, perhaps to retrieve other times. They can come up with reasons why to do that. They’re smart. Either way, the Zero Suit deserves its own game. I think Zero Suit Samus could be a huge franchise for Nintendo. Not that they’re hurting for those, but there’s so many Mario spin-offs. Would one Samus spin-off kill them?
Verdict: YES!

“Well…… she can’t draw worth a sh*t, so I guess our experiment to create the greatest artist in the galaxy was a complete failure. I haven’t been this disappointed since that giant, spiky, one-eyed brain we created went evil. Who could have seen that coming? Well, I suppose we should toss Samus in the incinerator and start over. She does pack a mean punch though. Meh, just slap some armor on her and tell everyone to pretend like we were trying to create the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter. Also, maybe we should stop toying with mother nature.”

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, Retro Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

Metroid (NES Review)

July 27, 2025 by 7 Comments

Metroid
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom Disk System
First Released August 6, 1986
Directed by Satoru Okada
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing at Metroid Wiki

Metroid is one of the original “looks like it’s going to be fun but it ain’t” games.

Well, I reviewed Kid Icarus so I suppose I should also review the game that Nintendo thought was the better bet. They were probably right, too, though I can’t stress enough how miserable I was playing Metroid. I’m not ignorant enough to call it the worst Nintendo-developed game ever, but it certainly ranks among my least favorite games by them. Until this review, I’d never actually finished the original Metroid. Like most people my age, my first experience with the franchise was Metroid Prime, which I LOVED as a kid. It was a major milestone in my gaming life, but the larger franchise really wasn’t. I didn’t even play Fusion or Zero Mission on the GBA until many, many years later and my first experience with Super Metroid was on Virtual Console around the same time I played the GBA games. It wasn’t out of malice or anything. The funny thing is, my older readers probably couldn’t have imagined Metroid as a first person shooter, whereas myself and I imagine many people from my era couldn’t imagine it as anything else!

All credit where it’s due that they really did invent a lot of nifty ideas for how exploration could be handled in a 2D space. Metroid is a bonafide pioneer, and I’m saying that to remind the hardcore Metroid fans who do NOT like people talking smack on the original game that nothing I can say can take away from Metroid’s legacy.

I actually did own the original Metroid for my GBA. I hated it so much that I almost didn’t put Fusion and Zero Mission in my Game Boy Player. It wasn’t just the clunky, laggy mechanics either. By the way, if you’re curious why there’s lag, this is an excellent explanation video from Displaced Gamers, one of the absolute best gaming content creators on YouTube, who I discovered thanks to his video on the infamous dam stage from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, broken down into layman’s terms for dummies like me. But the movement, lag, etc? That didn’t turn me off Metroid, and hell, I think the jumping is pretty dang good, all things considered.

Since this is a largely negative review, I wanted to start off right away by saying the Morphing Ball is an inspired idea. One of the all-time great gaming concepts. It would have been really easy to just say “meh, make her crawl, whatever.” But no, she turns into a ball that even bounces when you fall. When I was a kid, I wondered “does that mean you can play basketball with Samus?” Ooh, I smell an idea for the next Camelot-developed Nintendo sports game! And while I’m on the subject, bring back Metroid Prime Pinball you bastards!

I could handle a challenge, but what I couldn’t handle was taking damage when the controls weren’t in my hands. I couldn’t handle not being able to aim in any direction but straight ahead or straight up. I couldn’t handle having no built-in map, which seems like a massive oversight even for the time period. Hell, even the original Zelda had a map. Many maps, actually, one that gives you an idea of your position in the overworld and one for each dungeon. I really couldn’t handle the repetitive level design. So, I put Metroid away, but thank goodness I plugged my nose and popped in Metroid Fusion, because THAT was the game where I became a fan of the larger franchise, and eventually I would be blown away by Super Metroid and Metroid: Zero Mission, both of which are a LOT better than Fusion was.

This and the Ice Beam are just about as far as I’d made it in any previous attempt before I was too bored and/or frustrated to continue. But a review requires a full playthrough. And morphine, but despite my pleas, my family said it would count a relapse.

After close to twenty years and probably around three or four attempts to play Metroid, I finally told myself I HAD to finish it because it was the next, logical IGC review. Then I quit after thirty minutes and booted up Zero Mission. But then I rebooted Metroid and decided, screw (attack) it, I’ll cheat. So, yeah, I’m not following the rules of my Mario Marathon, IE no rewinding, no save states, no walkthrough. I used all three for Metroid because my ultimate goal is “find the fun, by any means necessary.” Now to clarify, I rewound only to shave time off exploration. In other words, if I went the wrong direction, I rewound it instead of turning around and fighting my way back. I used save states only at the end of the game with the Metroids, and I did use a full walkthrough of the game from WikiStrategy. BUT, I wasn’t glued to it, and not just because the map was small and couldn’t be zoomed-in without making it blurry. I swear! Armed with these tools, which leaves the raw combat and gameplay, did I find the fun that I never found in Metroid before? Well, no. Because, you know, it’s not a very fun game. Hell, the last hour was spent trying to inch my way towards Mother Brain with no means of fighting back. DOES THAT SOUND FUN?!

Actually, I used a combination of save states and rewind to deal with the Metroids because I couldn’t fight the f*cking things and running away was my only option. It turns out that the first Ice Gun I picked up I got out of order. Weirdly, that part happened before I went full tilt into cheating. Later, I got the second Ice Gun THEN the Wave Gun. Well, doing it that way took away my Ice Gun(s). I didn’t know you couldn’t kill the Metroids if you didn’t have the Ice Gun! The Ice Gun I didn’t intend to trade for the Wave Gun! I figured I’d have a wavy Ice Gun! What I’m trying to tell you is that I HAD NO MEANS TO KILL THE TITLE MONSTERS OF THE GAME! WHY WOULD THEY EVEN MAKE THIS A THING THAT COULD HAPPEN? YOU SONS OF BITCHES AT NINTENDO! I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU! I HATE YOUR STINKIN’ GUTS! I HOPE YOUR OATMEAL GETS REPLACED WITH MANURE! MANURE!!!

Metroid is even higher than Little Nemo: The Dream Master on my list of NES games that I seriously do not understand how anyone can be a fan of them or justify some of the level design or mechanical choices made by its developers. There’s some VERY bad game design in Metroid. The pain of the above screenshot is still pretty fresh, literally because I think I injured my throat from all the screaming. I think I had a half-dozen rage quits before reminding myself “you’re right at the end.” I also had to remind myself that I was originally tickled pink when I realized the Ice Gun was gone. When you pick up the Ice Gun, it MURDERS the combat. You can’t turn it on or off, so from the moment you have it, it actually increases the sponge of enemies, which are seemingly not damaged from the act of being frozen, but rather only from being unfrozen. Unless you want to freeze them, jump on them, and plant a bomb on them. If I were a space marine and had to do that, I think I’d probably die because enemies would ambush me while I stared longingly at my gigantic arm cannon saying “what happened? You used to be so cool.”

Or how about this sh*t? In Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, VERY late in the game players encounter fake Bowsers in the middle of the levels, and it’s pretty awesome when it happens. I wonder if Metroid’s designers were sneaking a peek at that game’s development and saying “hey, we should do that!” Because this is a fake Kraid that uses the exact same sprite, only I encountered it well before the real one. And now I’m sparing a thought for someone who saw the Kraid statue in Brinstar, thought this WAS Kraid, beat it, then left this area and returned to the original hub world only to later realize the one they killed wasn’t the real one. IT HAD TO HAVE HAPPENED AT LEAST ONCE! There is some poor bastard out there who remembers the time they walked all the way to Mount Doom, then returned to the Shire only to realize they disposed of the mood ring they got at a flea market instead of the One Ring.

There’s been plenty of people who mention the sloppiness of getting life slapped when you enter a door by an enemy who is placed right on the other side, or the wave gun going through blocks, or the inconsistent item drops. But ignoring all those things, I think Metroid is just not that exciting of a game. There’s no elegance to the combat or the level design. Even for its era, it feels very un-Nintendo like in terms of intuitive combat or navigation. While the enemies explode with a nice crunch, there’s just not enough of them that are actually fun to kill. The lack of flexibility for the combat hurts a great deal. There’s also so many jumping corridors or areas of the game where the platforming layout feels samey. They even recycle the logic of the hidden areas. There’s a few duplicate rooms, the first of which usually has a fake-out hidden door that leads to a dead-end while the second has something in it at the same spot. And now that I really think about it, I’m guessing this is the case because it saved on memory space.

One aspect of the game I didn’t really struggle with was the bosses. Well, two out of the three of them. With autofire and the Wave Gun, I beat Ridley in a few seconds. Curiosity got the better of me and I tried the fight without it and it didn’t end so well for me. My props to anyone who actually got through this back in the day.

I already said the roster of enemies isn’t quite big enough, but you can still take steps to get the most mileage out of a limited roster by spacing them out or mixing them up the right way. Look at all the mileage Super Mario Bros. got out of its smaller roster of baddies. Or maybe I’m wrong. Hell, maybe Metroid’s enemies just have boring attack patterns and there was no actual usage to get out of them besides what we already got. None of them are implemented in a particularly clever way, or at least the ones that aren’t meant to be used as frozen platforms. Or perhaps it’s a combination of poor level layouts with inelegant enemies. The best way I can describe it is the original Metroid’s level design and enemy placement feels like the type of design you would commonly see if a game called Metroid Maker existed today. Tons of single block platforms to navigate and the same clusters of enemies spammed on them until they lose all their excitement, just like so many Mario Maker levels.

For all my bitching, the one mechanical part I don’t mind is the jumping. If Metroid’s platforming physics felt the same way Kid Icarus did, with floaty jumps and heavy momentum upon landing, Metroid would probably not be around today. This original Metroid game relies very heavily on single-block-wide platforms. They’re all over, and the big “escape the planet” finale is ONLY single-block platforms. Hell, these platforming layouts would have been tough even with Super Mario 1’s jumping physics, and that game was considered a major milestone in the history of video jumping. So, why isn’t Metroid? Because I think the jumping is reliable and solid, as long as you’re not buried in the lava. For all its problems, Metroid is a genuine step forward for Nintendo’s education on how to do perfect jumping in platform games.

An even better example of poor pacing is the locations of the items. Nintendo is good at hiding stuff in the Metroid games, but not in this one. Some of the missile upgrade locations reminded me of when I’d pester my exhausted and likely annoyed parents to re-hide easter eggs for the fifth time on Easter Sunday and they’d just lay them down around the couch, whining the whole time about how they thought I’d grow out of this by 36 years old. At one point, you can get five missile pick-ups in a span of a minute or two. I’m guessing they figured players would be overjoyed to find a treasure trove of missile upgrades. They didn’t know yet that hiding five upgrades so close together doesn’t leave any cool down time for players. By not spacing them out, they give players one exciting moment for the price of five. That’s a really lousy deal, especially when there’s plenty of dead spaces that could have been given new life by relocating four of those upgrades.

OH how I hated the whole finale. These indestructible guns combined with bubbles that just spawn from the void. I had to restart this last stretch of the game probably a dozen times just to have enough life to make it through, and it’s not like I was full of life after having no means of fighting back against the Metroids. Then Mother Brain nearly gave me a seizure at the end and I had to take a nap. Man, I hated Metroid. I really, really hated it. But, I got Metroid Prime out of it so, you know, thanks Metroid 1.

The good news is that Nintendo did get something priceless out of Metroid: experience. They also learned that gamers were very interested in the concept of fully interconnected, exploration-based space adventure. The concept was solid. This version might not have been very fun and was sure to age worse than most NES games, but as proof of concept for an entire genre, they could have done a lot worse than Metroid. It does a lot right. Shooting bubble doors to open them. The missiles. The Long Beam being an upgrade instead of the default range of your gun, which should be frustrating but instead feels like an earned moment. The Morphing Ball. Freezing enemies to use as platforms. The Screw Attack. Mother Brain. The whole vibe to this world. The Metroids themselves. And of course, Samus Aran. These are way cooler ideas than an Eggplant Wizard or building up to a climax where a character who already has had wings this entire f*cking time finally gets to fly. Metroid on the NES is one of the greatest foundations in gaming history. But I could have lived without actually playing through Metroid. Every house needs a solid foundation to build up from, but you can’t live in the foundation.
Verdict: NO!

FYI, I played the Famicom Disk version, which has less lag, apparently. I tried to give myself the best possible way of having fun. I didn’t. Sorry, Metroid fans. For what it’s worth I plan on drooling all over Super Metroid soon.

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Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island (SNES Review)

July 25, 2025 by 7 Comments

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
First Released August 5, 1995
Directed by Takashi Tezuka
and Hideki Konno
and Shigefumi Hino
AND Toshihiko Nakago
Jeez, anyone else? No? Okay then.
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listing on Mario Wiki

The phrase “oh baby” has more than one meaning with Yoshi’s Island, though for the purposes of this review, you can safely assume my “oh baby!” is in reference to how overjoyed I am to have changed my mind about reviewing this because OH BABY! What a masterpiece! By the way, like Super Mario 3, my first experience with Yoshi’s Island was on the Game Boy Advance, which has significant changes. Consider this review MOSTLY for the SNES version since I didn’t want to 100% it twice for this review. This is NOT a game you breeze through.

There’s an urban legend that Big Shiggy Style and Takashi Tezuka were ordered to make Yoshi’s Island look like the recently released “hi-tech” Donkey Kong Country, and in a fit of rebellion, they instead told their team to lean extra-extra hard into the crayon look, which got approved by Nintendo. According to the legend, Miyamoto also said Donkey Kong Country was a mediocre game in an interview he did side-by-side with Rare Ltd. founders Chris & Tim Stamper and was generally butt hurt by Donkey Kong Country’s success because it meant that all gamers cared about was pretty graphics. I’d read it myself in a book, but people I trust on the subject say it never happened. Well, the interview didn’t happen at least. As far as the graphics go, to me it sounds like someone higher-up at Nintendo merely floated the question “could you make this look more like Donkey Kong Country?” in the same way you might ask a cop if there’s any way out of a speeding ticket. In other words, they knew it was a long shot but felt they had to ask because it’d make the game more commercial or trendy. Nothing wrong with asking, but Yoshi’s Island was so far into development that it was too late to turn around.

Probably the best animation frames for any 16-bit platformer. Yoshi’s Island isn’t entirely just fun because of personality and charm, but it sure helps.

What it wasn’t too late for was to exaggerate the hand-drawn look. Talk about lucky timing. I don’t know how well the Donkey Kong Country games have aged from a gameplay perspective. I guess I should find out, hint hint. In the looks department, there’s no denying those games have a waxy appearance that doesn’t necessarily feel timeless. Yoshi’s Island is still a damn pretty game to look at even thirty years later. And it DID have a few technical achievements to marvel at. This is especially true of the bosses thanks to the Super FX 2 chip. Instead of doing the traditional “it’s really the background done in a way to make it feel like a sprite” trick, the tech had reached the point where you could do very large enemy sprites, or in the case of Mario World 2, make it appear normal-sized enemies were being transformed into gigantic ones. The twelve big-bosses of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island are some of the best in ANY game that wears the Mario label. The best boss fights shouldn’t just be challenging, but so fun that they feel like rewards for reaching progress benchmarks, and Yoshi’s Island NAILS IT!

I’m f*cked. Want to know the really embarrassing part? This is a rematch of a fight I already won because I didn’t get a red coin at some point.

But the bosses are hardly the only highlight. Yoshi’s Island features forty-eight stages spread over six worlds, plus each world has an additional level if you finish all eight of its levels with a 100% completion. To do this, you have to get five flowers and twenty red coins in each stage and then cross the finish line (or beat the boss) with all thirty stars still intact. By the way, this is a lot tougher than most modern games because all three extra goals have to be done at once, since the 100% completion is done as an end-of-level score and not as a checklist to finish whenever. If you take even a single tick of damage fighting a boss, you’ll either have to charge-up an egg so that it drops stars or start the fight over.

While exploring the levels and making progress is much slower than most Mario games, the tempo of action happenings is downright frantic and requires quick reflexes.

Finding the flowers/coins isn’t just a formality, either. They require a full exploration of the level, and some are VERY cleverly hidden. Even early in the game, I had to replay some levels to find stuff I missed. They’re not all just laying around like modern Mario games tend to do, and the hunt for them actually enhanced the game in a way that 100%ing other games in this Mario marathon I’ve been on has been. It’s certainly easier to find the red coins on the original console version of Yoshi’s Island. I was startled when I found out that, when you play the SNES version, you can actually see which coins are the red coins. They have a subtle but noticeable tint to them that wasn’t present on the Game Boy Advance port, where you have to use a magnifying glass item to make them pop out. That item is still in the SNES game, but it’s mostly useful for not having to look too hard, and for revealing hidden question mark clouds. In the two screenshots below, there’s two red coins. In the heat of battle, it can be tough to spot.

Acing every level also unlocks unlimited cracks at the end of level bonus rounds, which allows you to stockpile items. I don’t know why they did it THAT way when it makes way more sense to unlock the bonus rounds when you 100% the extra stages since those tend to be really hard. It’s also worth noting that the SNES and GBA games have different extra stages. You’ll forgive me for going off memory on the GBA versions because I figured I’d play Yoshi’s Island for a day and instead I needed three days and in the ballpark of a one hundred lives to get 100% without cheating. Some of the flowers and red coins are pains in the ass to get, but for what it’s worth, both versions have really fun bonus stages. It’s certainly worth the effort.

Before starting this review, I could have sworn that I 100%ed this on the GBA, but now I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Either way, I just 100%ed without cheating. You know, I never 100%ed Super Mario Sunshine either. Oh, and I use control scheme #2, which is where you hold the fire button to begin the aiming cursor and release to fire. I think it’s better for jumping shots.

There’s two major things that stand out to me about Yoshi’s Island. The first is that this game sort of proves the point I made when I reviewed Super Mario Bros. Wonder: you don’t need a busy-work map for a platformer if it comes at the cost of difficulty scaling. Yoshi’s Island has a relatively bland level select screen with linear progression and no branching paths. The extra stages are just that: extras. You can also replay beaten stages as many times as you want if you miss any coins or flowers, but otherwise, it’s a straight line from level 1 – 1 to level 6 – 8. Remarkably, Yoshi’s Island does a REALLY good job of scaling, to the point that I think that it’s worthy of study by would-be platform game designers. Weirdly, the only stand-out scaling problems were with the extra stages. Extra 1 and Extra 2 were far and away harder than the extra stages that followed, especially the second. Meanwhile, I beat the sixth and final extra stage with a 100 score on my first try.

YOU SON OF A BITCH!!

The second thing is that Nintendo clearly went all-in on the idea that each stage has to have its own unique vibe and personality, with plenty of set pieces that are either limited or even one-off. Even late into the game, new enemies are introduced and sometimes get entire levels built around them. You might be racing a gigantic chain chomp, inflating a gigantic balloon that you then ride, or pushing a boulder through a large portion of the map, and even if you’ve seen those mechanics before, they almost always figured out a way to make them fresh again for the next encounter.

I normally hate snow/ice levels, but they’re really well done in Yoshi’s Island. There’s a memorable skiing segment, and even the ski-lifts themselves feature some of the best moving platform design I’ve seen in 16-bits.

The game also tested the limits of its own mechanics many times by using enemy attack formations or their raw physics to introduce new gameplay concepts. Here’s an example late in the game: there’s a flower walled-off in a way where you can’t reach it, and a bandit inside the chamber with it. In order to get the flower, you have to lure the bandit over to the flippers to open them, then time it so you shoot an egg (or watermelon seed) when they open. It’s such a small thing, but there’s PLENTY of examples of how they used the enemies fourth-dimensionally for a lack of a better term.

Now, unlike Mario 3, these are not bite-sized levels. Yoshi’s Island’s stages are pretty damn big, at least relative to other games in the series up to the point this came out. The “bag of potato chips” rule is out because, if a level doesn’t work for you, you’re not seconds away from a new experience. You’re a few minutes, or more since the game actually is pretty difficult. Yoshi’s Island certainly has a slower pace than Mario 3, World, or Wonder, and in fact, I’d say they probably could have cut the level count from eight per world to six. Not that there’s two stinkers per world, because I’d dare to say there’s no “bad” levels in Yoshi’s Island. It’s because the level “types” tend to be stretched thin. In particular, the castle levels, at times, come dangerously close to feeling interchangeable. Okay, so that’s not a big deal, right? The airships were the same way in Mario 3 but there’s still unique and memorable moments in them. Sure, but when a developer is close to perfection, I kind of wish they’d go for it. Perfection is so rare, and Yoshi was within sniffing distance of it.

Yes, yes, we all laughed when Yoshi got stoned. But for all we know, that poor red Yoshi then had to spend 28 days in rehab and several months in a sober living home. #FuzziesAreGatewayDrugs

Not that Yoshi’s Island would be perfect without the vague sense of padding. The physics with Mario’s bubble can be a little unpredictable at times. At one point I shorted a jump over the big blue mouth monster, but even though I was well above the water, SOMEHOW Mario ended up under the platform I was on and in the water, like he flew the opposite direction I was hit from. Then the water monster blocked me from all directions and I didn’t have an egg. Then on top of all that, I screwed up the last-second rescue when I took damage again. I tried to rewind to get a clip of it (I laid that life down afterward so it doesn’t count as cheating) and I wasn’t able to recreate it when I tried from every angle. While experimenting after I finished the game, I realized that I might have shot Mario with an egg at the very moment I lost him while trying to shoot the monster. The egg would knock the bubble low immediately and would combine with the normal knocked-off physics to send him well out of reach. There were several “WTF” instances with the physics. The only reason I didn’t lose more lives is because I used the star items at the last second if I was on death’s door.

The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.
The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.
The word “pissed” doesn’t really do it justice.

But the level padding and the bubble physics are VERY minor complaints. Yoshi’s Island really is a fantastic video game. The use of the eggs as projectiles is so well done, and it’s especially satisfying to treat the level layouts like a billiard table and hit off-the-wall shots. The level design is consistently clever throughout. Yoshi’s Island also has a very large, very memorable roster of basic enemies, most of which are squeezed for every drop of gameplay they could get, including gimmicks with the movement physics that you just know they didn’t intend at first. This feels like a game where the people making it were saying to each-other “hey, look what I found out you can do!” a lot. Like Mario Wonder, nearly every square inch of Yoshi’s Island feels like a labor of love. There’s NOTHING cynical about Yoshi’s Island. Which is funny because half of the four directors split for Mario 64 in the middle of development. From everything I’ve read about this game, it sure seems like Nintendo didn’t have high hopes for Yoshi’s Island. And it’s one of the best games Nintendo ever made, go figure.

“Baby Mario, I failed you.” “Well Cathy, maybe you’ll be reincarnated as SOMEONE WHO CAN SHOOT STRAIGHT!”

If Yoshi’s Island counts as a “Super Mario” game (it really shouldn’t) then it’s in the discussion for the 2D G.O.A.T. of the franchise. Win or lose, there’s a legitimate case to be made that it’s better than Mario Wonder. I’d even concede the action is better, and I like a LOT of action with my platforming, but it’s also no slouch in the “games as a unique experience” category. Finally, I’d say Yoshi’s Island probably offers players more flexibility to create their own strategies with the combat, and there’s plenty of situations where using your banked items is mighty tempting. It helps that the egg-aiming, which could have turned out complicated and unwieldy in the wrong developer’s hands, is actually intuitive and easy to get the hang of.

Besides the helicopter, I didn’t love any of the Yoshi vehicles. The train was my least favorite because there’s just no excitement to it, which hurt because Yoshi’s Island is a game that usually stays pretty exciting at all other times. I hated the sub too, especially the insane recovery time when you take damage with it, but at least there’s combat and a sense of urgency. The trains don’t even successfully pull that off even with a time limit.

I’m still leaning towards Mario Wonder, which controls better, cuts a better pace, and has far more big-scale stand-out moments. Yoshi’s Island makes the most with its base engine, but Mario Wonder practically lives off the beaten path and doesn’t have to obey its engine. Again, win or lose, we have to debate it even though it’s not really a Mario game. Yoshi’s Island is a game so good it forces the debate, and it forces itself into the Mario discussion whether it makes sense or not. You know, I think that should count for something! How many games can you honestly say force themselves into the GOAT debate for a franchise they don’t even really belong to? It’s maybe a one-off achievement. If you find that whole “is it or is it not a Mario game” debate silly, first off, (blows raspberry) and second, FINE. How about “Yoshi’s Island is in the debate for best overall SNES game” and it has a VERY strong case.

“Okay, NEW PLAN! Everyone gather around. You too, chain chomps! Okay, my plan is a bit out there, but hear me out: what if, in all future encounters with Yoshi, we just make the courses and mechanics he has to travel to save the day so uninspired and boring that nobody will bother to finish the games? CAN’T LOSE TO YOSHI IF THE PLAYERS GET BORED AND QUIT!”

There’s also a sadness to Yoshi’s Island, because it’s not a real Mario game. It’s only in the debate because of the “Super Mario World 2” part, but really this is the launching point of a franchise that, frankly, has not blown my socks off. My first Yoshi game was Yoshi’s Story, which was the first game I got after Ocarina of Time. Okay, that’s a tough act to follow, but Yoshi’s Story was a game that I did not like at all as a 9 to 10 year old child. It felt like a baby’s game, and was one of the first games that made me realize not every first party Nintendo game would be one I would enjoy. It’s like the gaming version of finding out Santa isn’t real. Later, the Nintendo DS and 3DS games were VERY bland, and the two console games, Wooly World and Crafted World were just sort of okay. Thirty years later and Yoshi’s Island is the one franchise-launcher in the Nintendo catalog that still stands tall as the best game in a franchise that’s had a lot of games. Maybe retro fans will celebrate that fact, but I won’t. I think celebrating a great game for being a great game is awesome. It’s what I love most about doing this blog. But I also hate the idea that a thirty year old game might never be topped. That’s not an achievement. That’s a tragedy.
Verdict: YES!

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