Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki (Super Famicom Review)

Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki
Platform: Super Famicom
Developed by Technos Japan Corp.
First Released August 12, 1994
Never Released in the United States
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Special Note: I played the ROM Translation by KingMike

This is one of those “you want it to be so much better than it is” games. Well, actually I suppose that’s true of every bad game, but it really hurts here.

I’m currently on an “American media properties with Japanese-exclusive games” kick, having just finished reviewing New Ghostbusters II for the Famicom and Batman for the PC Engine. That’s not the only streak I’m on. Popeye: Ijiwaru Majo Seahag no Maki (“Tale of Seahag -The Wicked Witch”) is the third review in a row featuring a game I was sure after the first ten to fifteen minutes was heading towards an easy YES! and then it just stopped being fun. Hell, maybe it’s me. This Japanese exclusive Popeye is easily the best of the three games in this streak, and it’s still a mostly forgettable, mostly generic platform game starring the sailor man. There’s two things that stand out about it, the most prominent of which is the board game facade the game’s built around.

White spaces OFTEN do nothing, red spaces are always a negative thing, and blue spaces always are a positive thing. The levels each have their own themed icons. A few times, white spaces still led to a brief Bluto encounter where I had to jump over him three times before spinning again. It’s a complete waste of time.

Each of the game’s five worlds are giant board games. You spin a roulette wheel to decide how many spaces you move, anywhere between 1 and 6. The spinner is not random, and in fact, you can clock the timing of it. Even with my recent issues with reaction time, I was able to clock it, which tells me anyone should quickly be able to. You’ll need to get good at it, because you have to move the exact number of spaces you spin. Each time you move back to a previous space you already walked on, it re-adds the space to the amount of spaces you must move. Well, unless you go in a circle that includes spaces you already walked on. There are items that allow you to move around the map, but they don’t count towards landing on a space, nor do they allow you enter any encounters with the enemies that walk the map. In fact, they don’t allow you to take any shortcuts or enter caves that occupy the map, either. The object of the game is to land on all the spaces that have hearts, find the hearts within those levels, and also battle mini-bosses who may or may not have hearts. You actually don’t know until you fight then.

I really thought I’d soft-locked the game at this point. I had to knock out two more steps, but I didn’t have two new spaces to walk on, as boulders were blocking all the paths around me (and the above space would have added to my count instead of subtracting from it). But, the boulders were temporary, and if I waited a while.. quite a while.. they would eventually go away. It’s so badly handled. Stuff like that is constantly happening in Popeye SFC.

At first glance, the board game idea seems inspired, but the way navigation works is so inelegant. The above situation highlights the main problem: the board’s happenings aren’t directly tied to your own movement. Enemies move around the map whether you’re moving or not. The boats that appear as shortcuts in every level arrive and depart while you fumble through the cumbersome menu. You have to press a button to cue-up the spinner, then you have to spin it, then you have to press a button to remove the spinner from the screen before you start to move, and then you have to tuck the game in at night and read it a bedtime story. There’s also TONS of levels that have nothing to do with collecting hearts. They might have hidden shortcuts inside them that take you to a different part of the board. Sometimes, they might only move you a few spaces over. Sometimes they might take you to a level that normally has a heart, but the heart won’t be there until you land on the heart space properly, via a spin. Worst of all, the spaces stay “active” once you’ve finished them, with no actual way to tell which ones you’ve finished or if you’ve activated switches in them that change the board game map. The only exception is the HEART icons are removed from stages you collect hearts from, the hearts remain. I hope you’re paying close attention, because you’ll need to replay some levels multiple times just for the sake of progress.

I swear that, sometimes, it feels like the game is glitching out. The pathways are invisible here, and then you have to wait for time to pass if you want to exit this structure.

As for the actual level gameplay, SFC Popeye is as generic as platforming gets. Most enemies can be killed by jumping on their head, but you also use an anchor tied to a chain as a whip. It’s satisfying enough. Whips are fairly bulletproof as far as gaming weapons go. You have to really crap the bed for them to be dull. Popeye almost does that, as there’s no upgrades for the whip and ALL basic enemies that can be killed will die from only one shot anyway, be it jumping on them or hitting them with the anchor. There’s three items that temporarily change YOU that are tied to the anchor. One uses it as a helicopter and doubles as the item that lets you skip around the board. One turns you into a car, where you’re SUPPOSED to be invincible, but it’s hit and miss when it actually works. Both of these control so miserably that I found them to be more trouble than they’re worth for the platforming sections. Hell, as far as I can tell, there’s no attack at all for the helicopter, which controls like a cross between a shopping cart and a rock sitting on a medium-power air hockey table.

One of the few times I thought to use the helicopter was going backwards through a level that I knew had a heart. Only, there was no heart, because I didn’t “land” on the space. I got there via a warp from another level.

The third power-up is a frog that basically copies the Frog Suit from Super Mario Bros. 3 in that it makes swimming faster and easier, except in this case, it turns you into an actual frog. This works great for the underwater levels, of which there’s a lot. It also allows you to fit into small spaces, though most of those are in underwater levels. The downside is that, when you’re a frog, it’s one hit deaths no matter how much life you have left. Also, it seems glitchy as all hell, as sometimes the level would stop scrolling up or down while I was using the frog, and I had to turn it off (thus losing it) in order to proceed. This doesn’t seem like it was intentionally done, as there’s nothing in the level design that logically indicates I’ve reached any sort of cutoff point. It just sort of blocks you from continuing. The other power ups nuke the enemies that walk around the map, and I hate them because they TEASE a fun thing. Like one anchor says ZAP and has a lightning bolt. You think it’s going to be some kind of electric mega-charged whip that shoots sparks or something. Nope. When you activate it in a level, a little window opens up that shows a random mini-boss getting nuked. But they come back quickly, so, like, what’s the point?

Apparently in the roughly two trillion hours this game felt like it lasted, I never got a single screenshot of the frog using its tongue. Well, it uses its tongue as a weapon. It works too. What I find bonkers is the frog looks NOTHING like Popeye. Like, they couldn’t at least give it a corncob pipe? A butthole chin? SOMETHING that would have been charming?

Oh, and those mini-bosses don’t actually fight you unless you’ve already spun and removed the spinner from the screen. If you stand still on the game board, they’ll walk right by you. Since they sometimes have multiple hearts (and seriously, if you’re three or four hearts short of finishing the level, you might get them all from a single mini-boss battle) you’ll want to fight them. But, the thing is, there’s no way of telling which ones have hearts to give you and which ones are just going to drop a full health restore and a coin. Some of those mini-boss battles take FOREVER too. There’s a robot at one point who took so many hits to kill that I paused the game and loaded up a guide at GameFAQs to make sure I was actually doing damage to the damn thing. You’ll inevitably fight the same mini-bosses multiple times in a single world, and sometimes they have different attack patterns, but most of the time, it’s the same crap you’ve already done several times and it’s SO repetitive and boring.

The robot mini-boss was one of three times I actually lost a life, too, and it takes more hits to kill than any boss except the last boss. One of the most mind-numbingly dull boss fights I’ve seen.

And that’s the problem with Popeye SFC: after the first world, the game keeps repeating the same notes over and over, until the game becomes completely boring. Even the attack patterns of the bosses are variations of the same thing over and over, and the actual levels run out of ideas really quickly. There’s only a handful of tropey themes like forests, plains, houses, castles, etc, that repeat endlessly until the final credits roll. But even the specific levels start to feel repetitive and samey. There were times where I questioned if either they were recycling sections of previous levels or if the game had randomly generated stages. They’re so samey and generic, and I can’t remember a single point during any of them where I thought the layout was clever. MAYBE a section where you step on these gigantic switches that activate trap doors above you that rain enemies and/or items down, but even that gets repeated several times during the course of the game.

There’s no hidden pathways or breakable blocks. Some of the barrels take you to other places, but that’s it. Oh, and some of the levels might last as little as under ten seconds. I don’t mean in a “speed runner” type of way, but as in the start and exit are right by each other. Yes, really. I’m almost certain the developers gave up.

And it’s not even really effective as a treasure hunt game. The hearts are usually just laying around in a normal spot instead of being cleverly located. Every time I thought the game was about to do something fun, like shooting Popeye out of a cannon, it doesn’t really do anything. Using the cannon just takes you to a different spot on the map. When you take a pipe from the foreground to the background, the level isn’t cleverly designed to fully take advantage of it. Popeye SFC might have the least imaginative levels I’ve experienced on the Super NES/Super Famicom yet. The one novelty that does sort of almost work is the Seahag will occasionally curse you. This does one of two things: it either just automatically takes a hit point off you, which might be the laziest thing I’ve ever seen a game do. The other thing is the screen resolution will become heavily pixelated. It can even happen on the map screen and might be the only clever thing the game does.

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At least, it would be clever if not for the fact that it happens completely randomly. It never once interfered with me making progress. If the game had built around these kinds of effects always happening during specific sections, they could have tailored the gameplay around it. In fact, they probably did that anyway, but in the worst way possible: they kept everything predictable so that the curses don’t completely screw you. Combine this grindy repetitiveness with some spotty controls and inconsistent collision detection and you’ve got a recipe for a game that feels like it never peaks. Take a look at these screens and, mind you, I took damage in them.

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I should have comfortably been safe there. It didn’t even graze Popeye’s pixels. Now compare THAT to this moment from the final battle against Bluto, where I clipped him several times and I didn’t take any damage at all. Mind you, I didn’t even get screenshots showing my body completely covering his fists, where I couldn’t believe I didn’t get hit. The whole game is like this. You can’t use the character or enemy sprites to gauge the collision boxes at all. That lack of consistency is really frustrating. EVEN WITH THAT, I only lost three lives the entire time and finished with over sixty. I was winning prizes from the slot machine without even needing to match three. 100 coins nets you a free life, but it only takes 3 coins to bet, and I only needed to buy a health refill once. The levels are pretty generous with them.

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It’s not that Popeye is necessarily a bad game. It has a ton of personality. When you finish pinging off enough damage on bosses, they drop a can of spinach, which allows you to grab them and perform a finishing move. There’s only three of them, but still, it’s right out of the cartoon. Actually, there’s one final thing each of the last three games I’ve reviewed have in common: they’d probably make great games for young children. Popeye SFC might even be ideal as a child’s first semi-complicated game, what with all the board game stuff. But honestly, I think even little kids might get bored with this one before the end. It just runs out of ideas so quickly that it can’t overcome its sloppy collision and repetitive level design. Long before even the second world is finished, besides a couple mini-bosses, you’ve experienced the whole game. The levels are as basic and bare bones as gaming got in this era and, even as you near the end of the game, they don’t feel like they escalate in difficulty. It’s just too dang easy and too dang simple for its own good. It really has one good idea: using the anchor as a whip, and even that novelty wears off quickly. Even with all its problems, I was this close to giving it a YES!, but then I realized I was in that “barely decent” territory for more than half the game, which is really a polite way of saying I was bored. In other words, Popeye wasn’t strong to the finish. Hell, he wasn’t strong to the halfway point.
Verdict: NO!
I’d rather have had a 16-bit update of the coin-op, frankly.