The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (NES Review)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released February 6, 1989 (JP) August, 1989 (US)
Developed by Winkysoft
Published by SETA
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

So much for “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” because this is a sin against gaming.

There are, in fact, two Tom Sawyer NES games, but I’m not reviewing the Japanese-exclusive RPG by Square, and not even because it has some seriously questionable content. It’s Tom Sawyer. “Seriously Questionable Content” is basically the novel’s 21st century title (and also makes for a great metal band name). I just don’t want to play a Japanese RPG. In fact, I only picked this platform game because I wanted a game I could knock out in under an hour that was bad in an uncomplicated way. And hey, for once I got what I wanted with that. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is certainly not a good game. It has loose controls, unfair enemy placement, and some boring level design.

It’s so generic that it almost feels satirical.

To be honest, I’m not even sure what the point was in making a Tom Sawyer game in 1989. I know kids in my lifetime (which, granted, started in 1989) didn’t give two wet squirts about Tom Sawyer (and Huckleberry Finn was always cooler anyway), but did the generation before me care, either? I know there was a Disney movie with the kid from Home Improvement, but that was years later. I guess this exists because, for whatever reason, Tom Sawyer is popular in Japan. Who knew? But, this is as generic as a game gets. Well, with the exception of the river rafting sequence that makes up the entire second stage. It’s basically a shmup with jumping, and while the stage overstays its welcome by quite a margin, it’s also easily the highlight of the game. Well, except for how it handles jumping. When you jump, you can move around mid-air, except the raft doesn’t stay under you. I lost most of my lives on this part until I figured out to just not move mid-air at all. Otherwise, this feels like it could have been the whole game and it would have been much better off.

When you jump on the river rafting level, for god’s sake, don’t move after pressing the button until you land.

The rest of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer features boilerplate platforming gameplay from the era. You scroll. You jump. The hitch is that the game is more combat focused. You have an unlimited supply of rocks that you lob at enemies. Well, unless you pick up a slingshot, which I found to be mostly useless. Upon pick-up, your projectiles will travel straight across the screen for a limited time. Except, the enemies seem more tailored for the normal attack, so lining up to hit them is significantly harder with the item, and a couple bosses I’m pretty sure can’t be hit at all with it. Go figure. The combat is all the game has going for it. Besides that second level and a segment in the cloud section of the game where you ride the world’s worst controlling cloud, the level design couldn’t be more phoned-in. Not that I think it would be better if it changed-up the formula more. Your sprite barely “binds” to ladders when you start to climb them and falling off the sides is too easy. There’s some very mild climbing sections, but otherwise you just scroll and engage enemies, some of which spawn literally right on your sprite. Like this part:

I fully admit, I used rewind in this section.

I died the very instant a fish appeared on the screen multiple times while climbing up this waterfall. Now that’s the last level of the game, so maybe they felt the pressure to increase the difficulty in order to feel more climatic. But the actual result is this GOTCHA! crap forces players to heel-toe their way up the waterfall to “tempt” the enemies into spawning away from you. It totally ruins what should be Adventures of Tom Sawyer’s grand finale. This is level design 101 type of stuff and it shouldn’t be that hard to grasp why that type of design mentality is a terrible idea. Then again, by the third level of the game, I was already so bored with the combat that I was ignoring enemies and legging it for the finish. Maybe their play testers were too. Maybe that’s why the home stretch before the last boss does that. Wouldn’t surprise me, especially since most of the development energy seems to have been put into the boss fights, all of which feature gigantic sprites.

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They look great, but in terms of gameplay, they’re not that they’re much better. Both the first and last bosses only managed to fire off one single attack before I won. The fourth boss was a total slog that continuously summons demons you have to jump up for your rock to reach, and only when it’s lower to the ground too. The more interesting boss was a multi-tiered battle with a blimp that felt more like a shmup boss if, instead of a spaceship, you were piloting a shopping cart with a broken wheel. Please note that I didn’t say “good” but interesting. Then the game ends with Injun Joe riding the Loch Ness Monster, because at this point, f*ck it, why not? I just played through Tom Sawyer twice and my brain is already hard at work deleting my memory of it. There’s really nothing to it, and while it’s not putrid by any means, it also really doesn’t feel like it’s trying to stand out in any way. Paint by numbers levels (and a single last-pixel jump before the final boss), easy bosses, overrated graphics (it’s not ugly, but it’s not THAT amazing looking), loose controls, and even forgettable chiptunes. What was the point of this? Is there such a thing as anti-ambition? If there is, I think the Adventures of Tom Sawyer has it.
Verdict: NO!

“Oh my God! It wasn’t a dream! I performed a hate crime!”