The Violinist of Hamelin (SNES)

 
Also known as Hamelin no Violin Hiki, this is a tie-in platformer based on the anime of the same name. The anime is about a bard named Hamel who goes around a European-style fantasy world fighting evil with his adventurer friends, which is pretty much the premise of the game too, though the only friend accompanying him here is his suffering sidekick Flute. It's a little smarter than most licensed 16-bit platformers, though, and it actually uses the presence of a sidekick character as a major mechanical gimmick.

 

The way it works is that you traverse the stages mostly in a traditional platformy manner, and Flute follows you around. At the start of the game, you can also stand on top of Flute, or you can pick er up and throw her at breakable walls. You quickly start to build up a collection of costumes for her, though, and you can change her costume in the pause menu. This is where the real meat of the game's puzzles and challenges lie.

 

Each costume gives Flute different abilities, that Hamel can exploit to get around the stages (mainly by standing on her head): the frog suit lets her jump really high, the robot suit lets her walk on spikes and punch through walls, the duck suit lets her swim, and the fish suit... lets her float around in a semi-uncontrollable manner? If you remember my Kid Chameleon post from a few years ago when I said that that game was like an edgy teenage re-imagining of Super Mario Bros. 3, I guess you could consider The Violinist of Hamelin to be a combination of Super Mario Bros. 3 with the AI-controlled sidekick aspect of Sonic 2, with both concepts expanded in a significantly more cerebral direction. It's a bit unweildy, but you know what I mean, right?

 

In pretty much every respect, it's a cut above most licensed platformers in terms of quality, and I'd even go so far as to say it was the equal of the Disney games being put out by SEGA and Capcom in the early nineties. And as much as I usually dislike puzzle platformers, this game does a good enough job of balancing puzzles and action that it didn't come close to being a deal breaker for me. I recommend giving this game a try, though obviously, don't pay the £100+ that legit copies are currently selling for.

Super Bikkuriman (SNES)

 A few years ago, I reviewed a platform game for the Game Boy based on this same property, and it wasn't great. But because the character designs are interesting enough to capture my interest, and because old licensed fighting games are also interesting to me, I decided to look at this SNES adaptation. Unfortunately, it's even worse. A lot worse.

 

In single player, it takes the old pre-Street Fighter II approach of having only two playable characters facing off against a bunch of CPU opponents in a set order, though all the characters can be played in versus mode. It's also like a pre-Street Fighter II game in that you don't get any special moves. All you get is punch and kick, a slightly stronger punch and kick executed by pressing forward at the same time as the button, and a flying kick that only works sometimes. I have no problem with simple fighting, I've recently been getting obsessed with Psikyo's arcade-only martial arts fighting game Battle K-Road, which doesn't have much in the way of moves, and half its roster are headswaps of the other half, but this is an incredibly barren effort.

 

It doesn't even look good! In still screenshots, it looks like it might have fit in among fanmade X68000 games from a couple of years earlier, while in motion, it looks even worse! The characters have barely animation, and when you look at other games coming out on the SNES and Mega Drive in 1993, it stands out even more. It's a shame, since, like the Game Boy Super Bikkuriman game, the box and label art are pretty nice, and probably suckered in some unfortunate victims back when these games were first released.

 

As I played this game more, and as I was thinking about writing this review, it gradually dawned upon me the best possible way of describing it succinctly: it's anime Rise of the Robots. The terrible animation, the lack of playable characters, and the complete absence of any fun or excitement, but this time you've got knights with very long hair fighting various monsters, instead of a blue ugly robot fighting different coloured ugly robots. Just like Rise of the Robots, though, Super Bikkuriman is a game that's not worth playing at all. It's not even bad in a funny way, it's just boring.

Ushio & Tora (SNES)

 It's yet another game based on an anime, but this time it's one that I have seen: the nineties classic Ushio & Tora, which tells the story of Ushio, a teenage boy who one day accidentally frees Tora, a tiger-like demon from his dad's basement. The two then team up to fight other, worse demons, Ushio fighting using the magic spear that had previously held Tora pinned to a wall, and Tora using his claws and ability to shoot lightning from his face.

 

This game is something of an anachronism, being of a subgenre that was mostly dead by 1993: the single player boss fighter. You know, like Yie Ar Kung Fu or Metamoquester. There's some very short scrolling parts where you fight a few weak enemies, but the bulk of the game is made up of one-on-one fights against bosses who are mostly a lot bigger than you. It's a little disappointing that with only two playable characters, the movelists aren't bigger. Each character only has a few slight variations on their standard attack. 

 

The graphics also seem like a disappointment at first too, as they look a bit drab and dull. This all changed for me once I got to the second stage, a fight against a centipede-infested suit of antique samurai armour that takes place in a dusty, abandoned school building. The colour pallete, which makes heavy use of browns and greys, works really well here, and the game continues to have a grim, gloomy atmosphere appropriate for its demon-killing action for the rest of the game from this point on.

 

It's not a particularly sophisticated game, but I really enjoyed Ushio and Tora, and I think it must have made a fine accompaniment to the show at the time. And since there wasn't a videogame for the 2015 remake (it seems like only the absolute biggest anime series get videogame adaptations these days. It's a shame, in my opinion, and the blame probably lies at the feet of the vastly swollen scale and budgets of modern videogame production), it's probably worth looking into for fans of that version, too. One weird little detail is that another Ushio and Tora game came out six months later for the Famicom. Releasing a Famicom game as late as 1993 seems odd on its own, but six months after a Super Famicom version of the same series is double strange. I won't be reviewing that one though, since it's an RPG with no English translation.

The Pirates of Dark Water (SNES)

 

The Pirates of Dark Water is a cartoon from 1991 that I've never really cared for. The plot is a kind of thinly-veiled environmental-type thing, where a fantasy world is being slowly devoured by a substance called Dark Water, so some pirates set out to find some magic treasures to stop it. Well, the Dark Water part sounds like a metaphor for pollution, anyway, though the magic treasures part doesn't really fit. But anyway, the low regard I have for the show itself won't marr my opinion of this videogame adaptation, as it actually forms the basis of its greatest strength!

 

Mechanically speaking, this isn't a game with a lot of originality. The only thing it really adds to the generic beat em up formula is a strong attack button that you can use on its own, or at any point during your regular attack chain. (Wikipedia claims that there's lso a block button, though? I must have missed that.) It's not a bad game, but it's not a particularly remarkable one, either. It's obviously very heavily influenced by Capcom's arcade beat em ups, almost as much as Crest of Wolf was. It's still a decent game that's worth your time, though.

 

Why? Entirely for aesthetic reasons. Pirates of Dark Water is a game that manages to stand out from the pack just by having a different setting. If you haven't ever seen the source material, it's got a kind of Spelljammer-meets-Arabian Nights kind of look to it, that works great for a beat em up, offering various kinds of exotic locales, both inhabited and wild. It's also been rendered with a lot of skill, with really charming backgrounds and sprites, and great colour palletes. It all works together to give a feel of swashbuckling adventure as you beat up and chuck about all the enemy pirates. It might seem weird for me to say all this after earlier saying that I didn't care for the cartoon itself, but what can I say? The first time I loaded the game up, I was playing through the first stage, fighting guys in front of a sunset, while off in the distance, more enemies could be seen flying around on dragonback, and I just thought "this is really cool!"

 

Before I end the review, there's a few other things I want to mention regarding the game. First, there's an enemy that starts to appear a few stages in called the Mutarios, which is a little pug-looking monster thing that's hard to hit and continuously runs back and forth knocking you over. I hate it. Secondly, pretty late in the game, there's suddenly a bossfight that takes the form of a little shooting stage, putting you on the back of a dragon, like those guys in the background of the first stage. Unfortunately, it's not very good, mainly because the boss itself spends lots of time flying into the background or offscreen, leaving you sat twiddling your thumbs waiting for it to come back for agonisingly long seconds at a time. Also, for some reason, you don't score points for attacking or killing this boss. Weird.

 

Earlier, I compared Pirates of Dark Water to Crest of Wolf, in the respect that they're both games that borrow a lot from Capcom's various arcade beat em ups, and going back to read my 2017 review of that game, I think I can say the same thing about this one that I did about that one: that it's an okay game elevated by its interesting setting and theming. Unlike Crest of Wolf though, Pirates of Dark Water is very rare and fetches ludicrous prices for legitimate copies online. I definitely don't recommend paying hundreds of pounds for a copy of it, but if you love beat em ups, you should still find some way of playing it.

Super Chinese Fighter (SNES)

 If that title seems a little odd, don't worry: this is a fighitng game spin off from the Super Chinese series, which i think normally alternates between action games and RPGs. Or maybe action RPGs. I haven't actually played any of them. An extra bit of trivia is that characters from this series also appear as guest characters in the last couple of Hiryuu no Ken games (a series I once said I'd go back to someday, and maybe someday I will).

 

Anyway, like another game I recently covered, Ninku 2, Super Chinese Fighter places more of an emphasis on its single-player story mode than on its two player versus mode that most of its post-Street Fighter II peers focussed on. Of course, the big difference between this game and Ninku 2 is that Ninku 2 was on a low-powered handheld upon which multiplayer was expensive and inconveient, while Super Chinese Fighter was on a system where access to multiplayer was practically the default, with even some turn-based RPGs having some kind of multiplayer mode. (I am rememebering that right, right? A couple of the SNES Final Fantasies had a weird mode where you could let extra players take control of a character each during battles, didn't they?)

 

But anyway, what that means is that the developers specifically wanted to make this kind of single player fighting story game, and amazingly, the publishers allowed them to do so, even though it was a bit of an anachronism in the post-SF2 world. Rather than taking inspiration from other videogames, Super Chinese Fighter seems to take its inspiration more from TV anime, especially the original pre-Z Dragonball, and the imitators that followed in its wake. It takes place in a whimsical sci-fi martial arts world, with planets named after various Asian foodstuffs. Sounds familiar, right?

 

The plot is also pretty standard fare, that sees you travelling to those foodstuff-named planets in search of a bunch of missing martial arts scrolls, before going off to the final boss' base to fight his henchmen and then the boss himself. It's all pretty light-hearted, and the characters are all somewhat jovial goofs,  so again, if you've seen a lot of late 80s/early 90s kiddy adventure anime, it'll all feel very familiar. The only problem with all this is that the plot is told in the form of many, slow-scrolling,non-skippable dialogue boxes. A playthrough of single-player mode will take you about two hours at most, and it feels like at least half of this time is taken up by the dialogue scenes.

 

So anyway, the fighting. It's okay, but not great. Of the four face buttons on the SNES controller, you have strong and weak attacks, a button to hold so you can increase your power level, and a button for using the one-use item you equipped pre-battle, which could be a trap you place in the arena, health restoration, a bomb that explodes in a few seconds, and so on. There's special moves that are done in the manner you might expect, using d-pad commands and the attack button, though one thing I don't like is that in the single-player mode, you unlock more moves as you win fights and find the aforementioned scrolls. But that's something I hate in action games generally, as I'm sure long-time readers have probably noticed. It does kind of make up for this by giving you a cheat to input on the title screen that unlocks every character with their full movesets in the other modes, but that still feels like a solution to a problem that didn't really need to be there.

 

It's hard to summarise Super Chinese Fighter. It's a game that's not particularly good or bad, and it doesn't really have any great mechanical hook to make it an interesting curiosity, either. I guess the one thing I can say is that if you have a bit of nostalgia for the era and genre of anime to which it pays so much homage, then it's a game you might want to seek out. After this game, the series mostly seems to have petered out: there were no more entries into the main series, but there were two more fighting spin-offs, on the Game Boy an Game Boy Color, which sound interesting, just by being pre-2000 handheld fighting games.

Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai Taisen Puzzle-dama (SNES)

When looking out for more obscure material for this blog, it sometimes pops up in some strange places. In this case, for example, there's a file on textfiles.com from 1992 which lists the anime airing at that time on Japanese TV, including the times and channels, along with a short description of most of the shows. Most amusingly, Dragonball Z is described as "arcade-style beat em up", but another one that stood out to me was the description to a show I've never seen and had never previously heard of: Tsuyoshi  Shikkari Shinasai, described as "family anime with The Slap". A little bit of searching revealed that the show itself didn't look interesting at all, but that it did have a SNES game.

 

The game itself is so generic that you could almost consider it the platonic ideal of competitive puzzle games. Coloured orbs fall from the 'bove in pairs, and if three of the same colour touch, they disappear. The main tactic is to set up chains so that lots of junk blocks fill up your opponent's pit. The one unique mechanical touch is that the junk blocks take the form of the regular orbs trapped in transparent cubes. The cubes disappear when orbs are cleared next to them. As a result, any character that dumps junk blocks all in the same colour is at a massive disadvantage, since if three of the same coloured orbs get freed from junk blocks together, they'll also match up, and they'll free the ones next to them, and so on. This kind of thing can instantly change the tide of a match and destroy an opponent in one go.

 

The presentation of the game is unique in its blandness, though, which is a direct result of the license: all the characters are friendly, middle class suburbanites in jumpers. Plus a dog. It's kind of funny that some people in the west have this stereotype of all Japanese cartoons being crazy, loud action shows, when here we have an anime license that looks like it could be based on some kind of animated adaptation of a cosy BBC sitcom. 

 

There isn't really anything else to say about Tsuyoshi Shikkari Shinasai. Mechanically, it's so generic that the only reason you'd ever want to choose it over literally any other competitive puzzle game is if you're a big fan of the source material, and I can't imagine there's many readers of this blog that fit that description.

I Love Bikes! Street Racer Soul - Rider's Spirits (SNES)

 Also known as Bike Daisuki! Hashiriya Tamashii - Rider's Spirits, this game might look like one of many Mario Kart wannabes with super deformed characters and mode 7 tracks, and it pretty much is that. That is, except for one little detail: it's much more boring than most other games in this subgenre. 

 

You pick one of eight motorcyclists, including an army man, some  fairly generic girls, a character with cat ears on their helmet, a leather-clad gay stereotype, and some even more generic male motorcross guys and another one I can't remember, you race around the tracks in a grand prix arrangement with points being awarded depending on your finishing position. Of course, the CPU riders will always finish in the same order, so if you don't perform perfectly in every race, you aren't going to win the championship. 

 

There's three sets of tracks: amateur, novice, and pro. Oddly, amateur comes before novice. Unfortunately, there's no way to see the novice or pro tracks without getting first place in amateur, not even in time trial mode! After several hours of trying, the best I've been able to manage is second. So if there's a lack of variety in the screenshots, that's why. 

 

Anyway, other than the slightly wacky SD characters, this game's a lot more subdued than its genremates, and it's not a decision that works in its favour. The worst thing is the items. Firstly, there's no items to collect on the tracks, instead you can get one item per lap by going through the pit stop (though thankfully, you don't actually have to stop there). Then, when you actually use the item, it just shoots straght upwards, to descend, usually unseen and without any satusfaction, on one of the other racers. Other than that, it's a game that generally just feels slow, fiddly, and awkward at all times.

 

Obviously, I don't recommend I Love Bikes! etc, etc. Don't play it, it's rubbish. It has a translation patch, and I do kind of feel bad for the people who went out of their way to make that, but at the same time, i'm not insulting their work. It's the game itself that's bad, their translation is fine.

Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban (SNES)

 At first sight, I'd assumed that this game was going to be a clone of Kiki Kaikai, which obviously got my interest right away. As it turns out, it's more of a top-down beat em up, like the arcade game Kyros. Well, with one of the characters, at least. There's two to pick from: a Japanese guy, and a White guy, both of whom give the impression of being effeminate dandies, which is an unusual choice for a pair of action game protagonists.

 

The Japanese guy is the melee character, attacking enemies with a harisen, while the white guy throws roses at them. From this point on, assume that I'm mostly talking about playing as the Japanese guy, because the white guy's attack is so slow and weak, that playing as him solo is almost impossible. He might make more sense in the context of co-operative play, though. As well as normal attacks, you also get screen-clearing magic bomb attacks, limited by needing to collect scrolls before using them. These magic attacks are done in the form of summons, with the white guy summoning maids and butlers, and the Japanese guy summoning ninja and, for some reason, bunny girls.

 

The final skill in the dandy pair's offensive repetoire comes in the form of transformation. Sometimes enemies will drop little percentages as items. Collecting them, obviously, increases the percentage on your player HUD, and when it's over 50%, you can transform your dandy into a gigantic musclebound freak who confidently strides around destroying normal enemies in single punches and bosses in only a few more. You even get a different victory splash screen if you finish a stage in this form!

 

Aside from the unique protagonists, the game's overall aesthetic is pretty interesting, too. The graphics are generally excellent, being both detailed and well-drawn, and after the first set of stages, all set in Japan, the game goes on a bit of a world tour, with stages in China, India, Europe, and Arabia, all with their own stereotypical enemies. So there's kyonshi and martial artists in China, levitating Yogi and an elephant (complete with impressive multi-sprite trunk!) in India, knights, witches, and cherubim in Europe, and so on. Though Arabia just seemed to be another Europe-style castle stage for some reason? That was a disappointment. Still, having gone into the game expecting only Japan, it was a nice surprise.

 

Deae Tonosama Appare Ichiban is definitely a game worth playing, bringing some unusual twists to the beat em up genre, both mechanically and aesthetically, and though I haven't been able to play a co-op game, I'm pretty sure that the game was designed with that in mind, and would presumably play even better with a friend.

Sutte Hakkun (SNES)

I think I've mentioned before that I'm not very good at platform puzzle games, nor do I really enjoy playing them very much. Still, I occasionally give one a try, to see if it'll click with me. The only one I can think of that I really liked was Samurai Kid on Game Boy Color, and even that cleverly disguised itself as an action game. Sutte Hakkun is one such attempt, being a puzzle platformer released on the SNES in 1997, either through Satellaview, or through the Nintendo Power download stations, different sources seem to claim different things.

In it, you play as a flightless hummingbird/mosquito thing made of glass that has to collect multicoloured gems that are stashed away in hard-to-reach places on each stage. To get to them, you have to utilise your innate drinking/regurgitating ability. There are transparent blocks lying around, that you can drink in one location, then spit out in another. Furthermore, there's pots of coloured ink that you can drink, and then inject into the transparent blocks. Doing this makes the blocks move on their own: vertically with red ink, horizontally with blue ink, and diagonally with yellow ink.

Eventually, the game also introduces other elements, like stone statues, that make you incredibly heavy while you have them drank, or weird transparent creatures that take on various different properties when injected with coloured ink. Like all games of this type, it familiarises the player with the essential building blocks of its world, then arranges puzzles that require the expert use of those blocks, quickly requiring outside-the-box techniiques like placing a block inside a wall, so you can suck it up again from the other side, or rapidly extracting, then re-injecting the colour from a block in midair to re-set its range of movement.

It's pretty generous to the idiot player, too, allowing access to thirty stages across three areas right from the start, and unlocking more after twenty-five of them have been solved. Unfortunately, as I've already mentioned, this really isn't my kind of game, and I had to throw in the towel at twenty-three. I know it's a terrible cop-out, but as far as I can tell, if you like these kind of environment-traversing puzzle games, then this seems like it's a high-quality example of the genre, and it does have plenty of interesting and original ideas. I can't really recommend it fully myself though, as, like so many other games of this type, most of my time with it was frustrating and boring.

Dossun! Ganseki Battle (SNES)

Dossun! Ganseki Battle is a fantasy RPG-themed versus puzzle game. I wonder if the developers of Yuusha Puzzle, which was featured on the GG Series Collection cartridge for DS that I wrote about long ago had been inspired by it, because the two games have a lot in common, and not just the theming.

Like Yuusha Puzzle, your aim is to defeat various enemies by arranging the various items that fall into your pit into rows of three. Also like Yuusha Puzzle, different items have different effects: swords for physical damage, scrolls for magic damage, potions to heal, and orbs to summons monsters to fight on your behalf. Where the two games differ, though is in mechanical complexity and sophistication.

In Yuusha Puzzle, your foe was just a sprite and a health bar, while in Dossun! Ganseki Battle, they're a full-blown opponent, playing the same puzzle game as you, albeit with various advantages, like more special attacks, a longer health bar and so on. As well as this, there's a more robust chain system, whereby your attacks do more damage the later in a chain they are, and sufficently large chains (though I'm not totally sure whether this is decided by the number of stages in the chain, or the total number of items erased) will trigger a special animated attack for big damage.

It seems kind of unfair to keep comparing these two games, since Yuusha Puzzle was released well over a decade after this game, and it was a budget title/part of a compilation, while this was a full-priced standalone release. Come to think of it though, the passage of time should tilt things in YP's favour, while the circumstances of the two games releases should favour D!GB, so maybe it all evens out? Either way, this is the better game. It's better presented, it plays better, and it's just generally a higher quality game all-round.

That being said, though, is it recommended? Yeah, why not? It's decent enough. There's better puzzle games on SNES, of course, like Magical Drop 3, and Tetris Battle Gaiden, but I think this one's still good enough to be worthwhile.

Coron Land (SNES)

For a brief period in the early nineties, there was a craze of Bomberman wannabes, obviously fuelled by that series' massive popularity, that even managed to sell big expensive multitaps to people in decent numbers, too. I hesitate to call them clones, as while they were all top-down single screen action games with idiosyncratic attack methods and four player versus modes, they mostly each had their own unique gimmicks. (Though there were one or two that were literally just Bomberman knockoffs, like the ninja-themed SNES game Otoboke Ninja Colosseum).

Coron Land's gimmick is kind of snowball-themed. In story mode, you defeat enemies by shooting them a few times, turning them into pink orbs. You can then pick up these orbs and throw them at other enemies, or before doing that, you can make them bigger and more powerful by rolling them along the ground like snowballs. In the multiplayer mode, shooting just stuns your opponents, and the orbs randomly fall from the sky, but they can still be rolled and thrown and so on. It's a fun little thing, and even rolling an orb a short distance is worth doing, just for the little bit of extra damage it does, so rolling doesn't really slow the game down too much.

It probably goes without saying for a game of this type, but the multiplayer mode, even when played alone against CPU opponents, is a lot better than the singleplayer story mode. In this case it's especially so, though, since the story mode has a ludicrously steep difficulty curve, with some very hard enemy types showing up after only a few stages: enemies that can send orbs back at you, enemies that can stun, then pick up and throw you like you do to the orbs, and so on. Multiplayer is fine, I guess. A nice touch is that every player gets to be a differrent character, not just palette swaps of the same one, a feature I don't think the Bomberman series offered until about three or four games in, if I remember rightly. There's also a selection of stages, each offering a slight variation: trains that speed across the stage, running players over, a stage with bouncy walls, a stage with no walls at all, with instant death for players who fall off, and so on.

Coron Land is a decent enough game, I guess. It's not really worth playing unless you have thee friends willing to play it with you, though, and even then, it'd probably be easier to get ahold of a copy of one of the Super Bomberman series. Though having said that, this is a much faster game than Bomberman, so it does have that in its favour.