The Lone Ranger (NES Review)

The Lone Ranger
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released August, 1991
Developed by Konami
Utilizes the NES Zapper (Optional)
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The Lone Ranger is a top-down action adventure that shares DNA with Metal Gear and the original Konami Ninja Turtles game. Well, sometimes.

The Lone Ranger is also an action-platformer that shares DNA with Contra and Castlevania. Well, sometimes.

The Lone Ranger is ALSO a first-person exploration game that shares DNA with the Goonies II an Operation Wolf.

Oh and it uses the Nintendo Zapper if you so wish. And sometimes it’s an auto-scrolling shmup. There’s even shooting galleries and video poker games too.

Yea, Lone Ranger on the NES is a directionless mess. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it’s Konami’s answer to Nintendo’s StarTropics. Like StarTropics, Lone Ranger was designed specifically for an American audience. The game was never released outside of the United States, and it feels like it throws everything at the wall hoping something, anything, will stick. The StarTropics comparison also applies to the sheer amount of busy work you have to do to open up the game. Like in the sixth level, there’s two towns you have to visit. The first one requires you to find an empty building where, upon leaving it, you see a note that the woman who lives there has been kidnapped. Then you have to make your way to the second town and find a room full of people sitting at tables. One of the people will tell you that the office in the previous town will tell you how to get to the mine. You then have to return to that town and find the office, which opens up the actual level for you. BUSY WORK! Even worse is that it’s not immersive at all. The dialog just plain isn’t good enough for immersion. It didn’t even matter that the side-scrolling segments that followed were by far the strongest the game had seen up to that point. I was already annoyed at all the hoops it made me jump through leading up to it.

The levels aren’t equally as engaging, either. The fifth level features the mass extermination of Native Americans followed by retrieving a magic egg as a “my bad” token of affection towards them. I’m only half-kidding, by the way, but regardless of the theme of the level, it’s just not that exciting of level design.

In fact, level six mentioned above, for all of its frustrating busy work, was the turning point in the game. Up to that point, I thought Lone Ranger was very “mid” as the kids these days say. The problem with being a “jack of all trades” is the less often said rest of that title. “Jack of all trades, master of none.” No one aspect of Lone Ranger stood out as particularly strong. Adding genres doesn’t add gameplay value if every example is average-at-best. Average is average no matter how many twists you take along the way. Easily the worst parts were the first-person segments. I found all of them to be pretty boring, even if you use a light gun. But, if you go that route, having a light gun takes the edge off the difficulty and I regret that I didn’t choose it for my full play-through.

The problem with the shootouts is that there’s only two types of them; indoors and horseback, and they repeat constantly. The enemies for the indoors shootouts attack in roughly the same positions and attack formations. The horseback ones are the same way, and after you’ve done each version once, with the exception of a lone boss battle that’s boring as hell, you’ve seen everything that gameplay style has to offer. But, each is going to repeat several times over the rest of the game.

First person segments involve the type of single-screen scrolling that games were limited to back then. As you explore, you’ll occasionally be interrupted by shoot outs. What makes it neat is even with a gun, you still need a controller since attacks happen from all sides. You get a warning light when enemies enter from one side. If you only use a controller, it’s all done by cross-hairs. While I always had enough time to pick off the enemies with the cursor, sometimes I had to switch screens before being able to pick up the loot they dropped. With the light gun, I never had that problem, and the shootouts also went quicker which is a good thing because they’re all samey. The only exception is the lone boss fight done from the first-person perspective. In that boss’s case, having a light gun makes it almost trivial.

For light gun games, I use the Sinden, which I also used in my Safari Hunt review. It’s compatible with most emulators. They’re pretty spendy and the optional foot pedals for games like Time Crisis cost a LOT extra, so I’d only recommend getting one if you’re REALLY into light gun games. There’s tutorials for most popular emulators to get them up and running, but for this review I couldn’t get it to work on RetroArch and ended up using a solo-build of Mesen for it. I used a passcode to skip to the more “exciting” first person sections. 0810 7830 3251 2 is the level select code. You have to leave the last few spots blank.

Up until the last three (of eight) worlds in the game, I would have insisted the top-down segments were the best parts in the game. The side-scrolling level design was too short and too basic up to this point, with little to no environmental hazards. Really, the problem with Lone Ranger is that it just takes too long to get going. While the game isn’t ever really bad per se, it’s often very bland. There’s not enough variety in the action. You only get one type of gun that fires two identical-looking bullets. The only thing that changes is the range: short barreled, medium barreled, or long barreled. You don’t feel a difference, even if you’re shooting longer bullets. The silver bullets do more damage and pierce through enemies, but they cost more. I’m not sure why silver bullets would be more powerful than lead bullets. Ever hear of someone dying from silver poisoning? Either way, there’s never a sense of empowerment. Also, you have to manually reload your gun, something my brain just would not remember to do. You can also buy sticks of dynamite which blow up enemies, but I can count on one hand the amount of times I actually found them more useful than just shooting my gun. There’s also no hidden walls to blast through or, as far as I could tell, any secrets at all. Despite all the mixed-up genres, Lone Ranger is a surprisingly shallow game.

The “overworld” segments don’t get beyond basic until right near the end of the game.

For the first five (of eight) levels I’d been quite annoyed by the top-down stuff leaning a little too heavily on empty “red herring” type of buildings that have nothing but enemies in them. It reminded me a lot of Konami’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game, but Lone Ranger’s red herrings are even worse than that game’s. At least in TMNT the non-essential buildings had things like valuable items or health refills in them. For Lone Ranger, they’re just fake-outs that pad the game time, and nothing more. In a game where players are often forced to talk to everyone in a village to open up progress, all these red herring buildings are especially tiresome. It got to the point where I began using save states and would just exit the structures by reloading my state to save time instead of walking back out. And ultimately, none of them ever had anything valuable in them. Not a single one. At least it was kind of predictable which ones were the decoys, since they usually have the same appearance on the inside. Eventually, I cracked open the guide at GameFAQs to shave off all the busy work. Much like with the light gun, I wish I used this from the start, since I didn’t really start having fun until I cut out all of Lone Ranger’s gristle.

Look familiar?

Even while skipping all the BS, Lone Ranger was a game I couldn’t wait to be over with. But then something happened that complicated my review. The level design got good. Really good. The side-scrolling segments went from basic hoppy-shooty-climby type of action to the type of well thought-out layouts and set pieces you would expect from Konami at their 8-bit height. And the top down stuff added things like landmines, turrets, and spikes, and the layouts became more maze-like in a way that reminded me of Sunsoft’s Blaster Master or Gremlins 2. The enemies became more than cannon fodder. The platforming was on par with the type of layouts you’d expect from Castlevania (and that franchise’s staircases are even along for the ride). This was suddenly a really fun game. The question is, did it take too long to get there?

None of the bosses are really memorable. Appearance wise, they usually don’t look that much more distinguishable from basic enemies.

Actually, yea. Taken as a whole, Lone Ranger is pretty boring. Those early levels are just such a slog to get through, and all the RPG-like “talk to the townspeople” stuff whiffed completely for me. I wasn’t invested at all. Had this come out five years later, the writing might have been better or there might have been more character-driven stuff that would justify it. All those bits did was create too big of a pause between the action, but the action that followed was very basic and very bland for over half the game. Having baddies in some of the towns helps a little, but they’re the same basic enemies with the same attack patterns. After a while, they feel like they’re working with the talking bits to do nothing more than pad out the game.

There’s a good game here, but it’s smothered to death by overindulgent world building.

If the entire game had been of the same quality as those last three levels, I think Lone Ranger would be in the discussion for the most underrated game on the NES. The action is going to become repetitive either way, but the gunplay can be satisfying enough. Enemies crouch over before blinking away when you shoot them, but there’s only so many variations you can do with that while keeping with the wild west setting. This could have really used some supernatural stuff or more anachronistic things. Machine guns show up, but only bosses get them. Turrets show up and you can take them over, at which point enemies rush onto the screen just to be mowed down by you. It’s fun for a few seconds, until you realize the enemies aren’t stopping, but YOU’VE stopped moving. Adding a bigger variety of weapons or maybe hiding stuff in the levels could have gone a long way towards making the sloggish parts more tolerable. They also underutilized Silver the horse. There’s one auto-scrolling section where you control the horse while shooting enemies (not to be confused with the horseback shootouts), but it’s bland and boring too. It would have been cool if you could ride horseback in the towns, or maybe even in some of the side-scrolling sections. Or maybe have stealth sections where you play as Tonto. For all the different gameplay types Lone Ranger throws at players, it’s insane that it still feels so lacking. This one was close, but the Konami losing streak at IGC continues.
Verdict: NO!

Robble Robble