Momotarou Densetsu II

~ MOMOTAROU DENSETSU II ~

Hudson Soft

HuCard

1990

As I'm sure anyone can surmise by looking at screenshots, MD2 is an archaic traditional-style RPG that hearkens back to the days of the first Dragon Warrior with its crude map visuals and reliance on menus for actions as simple as talking to townspeople. The adventure is a linear one: you basically trek from town to troubled town and club a trouble-making demon before moving on to the next area to repeat the process. There's much more emphasis on field travel and town business than on dungeon exploring, with most of the caves simply acting as links between continents. And as you might expect from an RPG reminiscent of Dragon Warrior, there's quite a bit of leveling up to do.

Surprisingly, MD2 is a pretty decent game. It has quite a few innovative/noteworthy/charming elements that work in its favor.

You're joined early on by three NPC animal-pals who chip in with occasional attacks and healing techniques in battle. The coolest thing about these chums is that you can have them scout out an area without having to worry about being attacked. You know how annoying it can be in RPGs when you reach a new area and just want to find the next town and save or you enter a new dungeon and just want to regain your bearings only to be troubled constantly with random battles? Here, you can just send an animal bud out for a little reconnaissance and figure out the course you'll take without entering a single fight. I wish more RPGs had such a feature.

In addition to the wildlife, you're joined by all sorts of other wacky NPCs during your travels. Consider the actual playable allies as well, and the caravan you lead can sometimes number close to two dozen. It's funny to watch this long line march across the world, especially since some of the characters look very strange, particularly a really skinny dude who's about five times taller than everyone else.

Also funny are the celebrations that are held when you lend a hand to a town in need of some help. One town shoots off fireworks, another has its denizens do the wave, and another hosts an amusing village dance.

The problems faced by these towns are sometimes pretty interesting. One village is populated by tortoises and hares who are doomed to run endlessly around a track until you defeat the evildoer who cursed them to their curcuitous fate.

The bosses causing all these troubles for the towns are large, funny-looking monsters reminiscent of the beasts in Where the Wild Things Are.

The last guy is an enormous ogre standing before a backdrop of huge flames. It's a cool-looking fight scene, and he's one tough bastard.

While the map visuals are obviously very primitive, the big, cartoony enemies (not just the bosses) actually look quite nice--better than the monsters in a lot of CD RPGs, in fact. And there are almost two hundred of 'em. After you beat the game, you get to visit a special mode where you can view the enemies and listen to the tunes.

Speaking of the tunes, while many of them are pretty plain, some of the happy town music is actually quite catchy. The music in the mazes isn't as memorable, and the caves themselves aren't too memorable either, but the last dungeon is pretty darn large and contains a number of different areas for you to battle through.

You'll need some good magic spells to get through that dungeon and some of the other tough spots. Reminiscent of Tengai Makyou, you acquire spells by visiting little huts, in which you'll deal with some magic-using old fellows. You'll have to prove yourself worthy of learning the spell on offer by fighting the old man, completing a task, or overcoming a trial.

Some of the spells you get are pretty interesting. One character can create doubles of herself that not only confuse and bait your enemies but also launch attacks of their own. And when you use the spell that warps you back to town, your characters actually run a million miles an hour over oceans and whatever else is in their way until they reach their destination. Funny stuff.

When Momotarou returns to his little home at the very end, it really does feel like you and he have experienced quite an adventure. (Good thing, too, because the game tops twenty-five hours in play time, which is pushing it for a stone-age-style RPG.) Being that it's so straightforward in concept, about 95% of it can be played through easily without any knowledge of the Japanese language. There are some tasks and puzzles that are unsolvable without a walkthrough on hand, so it's a good thing that there are many Japanese ones available.

Well, despite all the nice things the title has going for it, I know that most folks will find MD2 too archaic for their tastes and will give up on it immediately after glimpsing the old-fashioned visuals. But it's not a bad game... honest.

Monster Lair

~ MONSTER LAIR ~

Hudson Soft / Alfa System / Westone

CD-ROM

1989

Monster Lair isn't an easy game to get through. Its challenge is derived more from its length than from its combat or run-and-jump action. Taken on their own, the two-part stages (each of which contains a "hack-and-blast" section as well as a straightforward shoot-'em-up segment) aren't very difficult to get through. But with fourteen of them to conquer, players must put in practice and engage in repetition to be able to anticipate all the tricky spots.

The many weapons at your disposal comprise the game's greatest strength. Not a single one of them is a dud, but using them optimally calls for changes in strategy whenever a switch is made. And with the near-constant icon grabbing and weapon swapping that take place, you'll have plenty of on-the-fly decisions to make.

Also, it's often beneficial to alter your turbo-switch setting depending on the weapon you're using and the situation at hand. All of this injects a welcome dose of strategy into an experience that seems quite simple at its core. The only "negative" I can cite regarding the weaponry is that the missile seems a little too powerful. Most of the bosses are defenseless against it.

Actually, while I like the designs, most of the bosses don't put up much of a fight, period. Their lineup is curious: the toughest ones appear in stages six through eight. The sixth guy is like a tougher version of the very cool giant-knives guy in Psychosis, and he's always a blast to fight. The seventh-stage ice guy and the crafty eighth-stage cactus head can also be trouble.

But those are the last difficult bosses you'll encounter until the final board. The cloak-adorned bat tosser and the gambling mushroom in subsequent stages are complete pushovers, and you don't even need to move against the guy camped within a ring of flames in Round Twelve if you have a decent long-range weapon.

While almost all of the bosses are cake, if one of the tougher ones happens to kill you and deprive you of whatever good weapon was in your possession, quick additional deaths may follow. And the boss fights are basically all there is to look forward to in the shooter portions of the game. Preceding the showdowns are brief stretches reminiscent of the early segments in Gradius stages where you pound on chumpy small-fry in order to power up. Proper levels would've been nice.

Perhaps the makers of the game should've cut down on the platforming stages a bit and developed the shooter stages further. The platforming ones become thematically redundant: one slippery ice level is cliche enough, so do we really need two?

And the strips don't even become particularly challenging until the eighth, with its wily cast of vultures, scorpions, snakes, and cacti. Things do become tricky and interesting later on, especially during the eleventh stage's sequences of rising and plummeting platforms...

...but the designers could've easily kept all the good platform-based material and still lopped off four or five strips, leaving themselves time to construct proper shooter parts instead of the formalities they ultimately delivered.

The game isn't an aesthetic superstar, but as is the case with Dynastic Hero, the bright, appealing colors often make up for the general "flatness" of the visuals. Some of the tunes have an old-school flavor to them that makes me a bit nostalgic, but the cacophony in Round One makes me want to turn the game off at once.

When Monster Lair is analyzed in this manner, it doesn't seem like much of a winner, but the weapons system makes it more than simply playable, and gradually making it deeper and deeper into the lengthy quest has its rewards. Amazingly, I didn't become bored with the requisite practice sessions, mainly because there are so many things to keep in mind if you really want to play through the game perfectly. While ML isn't a favorite of mine, I definitely feel that I've gotten a lot out of it.

Night Creatures

~ NIGHT CREATURES ~

Manley & Associates / NEC

HuCard

1991

Hm, where to start with this one...

Well, I love this sidescrolling quest game, and I've played through it many, many times, but make no mistake: it is a kitsch classic through and through and NOT a quality product. You won't have fun with it unless you're willing to laugh at it and forgive it its many technical and mechanical flaws. There's a great deal of outlandishness that you'll have to tolerate...

The controls are "floaty," to be kind, and the collision detection is out-of-this-world awful. Blows that appear straight and true go right through your adversaries, allowing them to knock you around the screen, rendering you helpless as you're endlessly bobbled about. You must take ridiculously unfair deaths in stride if you're going to make it to the end of the adventure. You have to be the sort who'll find humor in a poor ungainly fellow being gang-beaten by bats and rats until he meets his doom. If you're not that sort, then don't bother with this game.

The characters are quite the goofy bunch. The main guy looks like a stooge, with his awkward gait and crimson trousers. At the bottom of the screen is a portrait of his unfortunate countenance, which gets even sillier looking as he undergoes his curse-incited transformation into a night creature. And then there's the "wise woman," who looks like a portly Aunt Jemima (as once acutely noted by VideoGames & Computer Entertainment) and gives advice in the form of laughably stilted and inarticulate blurbs.

The enemies are also ridiculous. Individual bosses can often be taken out with just one use of an item or weapon. Cerberus here ranks among the silliest game creatures in history. He initially charges at you in fierce fashion but turns tail and flees as soon as you swing your sword. Once you've completed your futile swipe, he comes at you again, only to run away again when you take another hack. So proceeds the inane affair that was supposed to make for a dramatic commencement of the final stage's boss gauntlet.

You can change into four different beasts (bear, wolf, badger, and owl), which seems cool, but unfortunately, the forms are nearly worthless. Take the badger form: there's one part in the catacombs level where you'll need it to get through a narrow opening.

That... is the only time I use the badger form in the whole game.

And let's not forget about the "eerie" three-number soundtrack. Yep, this is a quest game that has only three tunes. The "instrumentation" for said tunes is hilariously poor.

Should you be able and willing to tolerate all that stuff, you'll discover that the ending is terribly brief. If you don't find the "joke" funny, you might just find yourself pissed that you wasted twenty minutes on the affair.

Basically, if you're thinking about buying NC or giving it an honest go, you've got to decide if the above-cited items will amuse you or simply irritate you. If you're up for some lowbrow hijinks, try it!

New Zealand Story

~ THE NEW ZEALAND STORY ~

Taito

HuCard

1990

Way back in the day, before any console version of New Zealand Story had made it to America, GamePro ran a feature on the game. The article convinced me that I had to have the title in some form. The little sneaker-wearing kiwi seemed like a really cute and awesome protagonist.

And I thought it was great that he used arrows, lasers, and bombs to dispatch his foes rather than the generic hopping/spinning attacks that most "mascot-type" heroes employed back then, not to mention that he got to use those weapons against cool bosses like a giant whale who would swallow him up (leaving him no choice but to decimate the beast from the inside).

I eventually got the game in its "Kiwi Kraze" incarnation for the NES and discovered it's about more than just a cutesy style and interesting animal characters. It's a very tricky platformer, with tight balloon-flying and swimming sequences to navigate through and spikes and other such hazards placed all about the land.

Heck, when I was a kid, I regularly got my ass kicked by the second boss. (Yeah, I was HORRIBLE back then.)

I liked the game despite my struggles but eventually sold the cart with the knowledge that I was ultimately going to acquire the PCE version anyway. I was an older, wiser, better player by the time I purchased the NZS HuCard, and I fared quite a bit better with it than I had with its NES counterpart. With knowledge of what the full adventure has to offer finally in hand, I appreciate the game now more than ever. As mentioned above, it's very tricky, and some parts seem so tight at first that they make you wonder how you'll ever get past them without sacrificing lives. But this is the sort of game in which practice and experimentation go a long way. You'll eventually find yourself breezing through those tough parts and feeling great about it. Looking for the many hidden warp spots is also great fun.

So NZS certainly is a sweet little platformer, but some things about the PCE rendition bother me:

Some of the color choices and combinations just boggle my mind. I don't mind the turquoise tones of the third world so much; but even during that stage, there are plenty of "uneasy" visual moments to endure.

No version of NZS that I've experienced has boasted exemplary controls, but the balloon flying here seems even looser than in other renditions. Kiwi Kraze feels tighter than this.

I've never played the arcade original, but from what I understand, it features five full worlds. This one goes up to 4-4 and then straight to Round Final for the battle against a pathetically easy last boss. Leaving out an entire round is a pretty significant omission.

Also, the music is AWFUL. It's so shrill and terrible. Kiwi Kraze does a much better job with the main tune, which I'm very sad to say, as I think NES audio is shitty in general. But on the plus side, the playfield seems "wider" here, less cramped, than in the NES version, giving you more room to move around in, which makes a number of situations play out a lot more smoothly.

It's too bad that HuCard NZS didn't end up as excellent as it could and should have been, but the game still rules, and it makes for a great pickup despite the issues I've enumerated. And while this might be small consolation, it fares better in almost every area than the MegaDrive version, which is wretched.

Beyond Shadowgate

ICOM Simulations - 1993 - U.S.A.

Super CD-ROM

Beyond Shadowgate sucked me in right from the get go. My first time with the game I remember being extremely taken with the hand painted backdrops and the immersing audio. Playing through again for this review, I found things were even better than I remembered them.

A product from the incredibly talented team over at ICOM Simulations, Beyond Shadowgate is the second game in the Shadowgate series. Preceded by the classic Shadowgate that debuted on vintage Apple computers or perhaps more famously, the NES, I played through all three games including the classic-that-wasn’t finale Shadowgate 64 to get a better perspective on things. Beyond Shadowgate takes place a few generations after the final events in Shadowgate and stars a Prince Erik determined to expose the truth behind his father’s murder. His young sister is kidnapped in the process by a man who intends to sacrifice her in order to revive the evil Warlock Lord. It’s up to you to stop him.

Unlike its predecessor and successor, Beyond Shadowgate plays like a more or less non-linear adventure in the King’s Quest style. According to Dave Marsh (of ICOM Simulations), a Mac/PC port of Beyond Shadowgate was in development even before work began on the Turbo version. The Turbo version was ultimately based on the unreleased PC game, and as such the gameplay in Beyond Shadowgate seems almost tailor-made for a mouse. Oddly enough, the game is not compatible with the PCE mouse that already existed for the console at the time of the game’s release.

I already mentioned Beyond Shadowgate’s amazing visual presentation. The artists obviously spent a decent chunk of time on these, and it shows. Every single scene is a hand painted masterpiece that really sets Beyond Shadowgate apart from its peers. Like the first adventure, you’ll encounter plenty of strange creatures along the way. Creature design follows the precedent set by the background art-- which is to say, fantastic.

Deal with these guys swiftly or they'll deal with you.

This guy's a classic.

A common complaint about Beyond Shadowgate is the speed (or lack thereof) at which Prince Erik plods along. Personally, I find his pace a perfect fit for the game. When a game looks and sounds this good, the extra couple seconds it takes me to go from one scene to the next is less a detriment than it is a chance to revel in the game's spectacular environments. If you’re the kind of person that digs games like King’s Quest or Loom, you’ll feel right at home with the gameplay here. That said, BS is best played with a three button controller since it heavily utilizes Button III for item/icon selection. Without one, you’ll be stuck using SELECT for this stuff.

One of the strengths of the Shadowgate series is each game’s ability to create a unique atmosphere while simultaneously maintaining an air of familiarity. Beyond Shadowgate is no different, and one of its best assets is the successful melding of top-notch audio to accompany the visuals. Whether it be subtle wind blowing as you venture up icy mountain ledges, or a pleasant tune accompanied by the sounds of wildlife as you explore a forest, if you’re like me you’ll find yourself getting chills as you play.

Some fans of the TurboGrafx/PC Engine go to great lengths to pan the domestic library at every opportunity, claiming the only titles worth playing were released in Japan. Well, Beyond Shadowgate wasn’t released in Japan and it’s one of the best games on the system. I’d go so far to say must-own if it wasn’t so pricey. Like so many other US titles Beyond Shadowgate often sells for way too much. Unlike many of said titles, BS is actually usually worth it.

Failure has its consequences.