Moon Crystal (NES)

 

 Moon Crystal was released in 1992, which is very late in the Famicom's original commercial lifespan, and it definitely benefits from advancements made in that time, both in terms of what could be extracted from the hardware and in terms of game design. It's a platform game with a setting that feels like it could have been taken from a classic kids' adventure anime. Future Boy Conan, Secret of Blue Water, that kind of show. An evil count wants to exploit a magic pendant (the eponymous Moon Crystal) to raise the dead, and to aid in this endeavour, he kidnaps a scientist, Dr. Slater, and kills the scientist's family. Only Dr. Slater's son Ricky escapes, and sets out on a quest to save his dad and the world.

 

Though it doesn't come across to well in still screenshots, this game is very impressive looking, considering the host hardware. It's all in the character animation, which is incredibly smooth, and Ricky especially has a ton of frames for every action he does. The colour palettes are also worthy of note, really giving a sense of atmosphere and the time of day. 

 

The game itself is pretty good too! It's not super-complex or anything: it's basically just platforming and killing enemies with your one melee attack. Though a lot of the time, it's best to just avoid the enemies, with the emphasis being heavily on platforming challenges. This is reflected in the way Ricky controls, with him being able to grab ahold and dangle from the edges of platforms (something I always like in platform games), and in the fact that one of the power ups is a double jump that lasts until the end of your current stage or until you lose a life.

 

With such a heavy emphasis on platforming, it is slightly disappointing that each stage ends in a fairly basic (though usually still difficult) boss fight, rather than something more imaginative and fitting to the way the game's designed, like some kind of special platforming challenge. The game's designers could definitely have managed it, too: the difficulty curve is steep, but fair, and the stages really do ramp up in terms of being platforming challenges themselves, with new gimmicks being brought into every stage to liven things up, too.

 

Moon Crystal is a great game, that I definitely recommend, especially if you're interested in older systems being pushed beyond what most games get out of them. It's also highly rercommended for platform fans that really want themselves to be pushed beyond what most games expect of them in terms of precision jumping and climbing and the like.