Game Review: Gal*Gun (First Impressions)

Gal*Gun (Demo)

• Publisher: Alchemist
• Developer: Inti Creates
• Release: PlayStation 3, 23 February 2012 (Japan/South Korea)
• Genre: First-person action
• Players: 1
• Rarity/Cost: Free

NB: I should note that the following text reflects not the full version of Gal*Gun, but a free demo available on the Japanese PlayStation Network store. It's possible for foreigners to create and use a PSN account, to not only buy the game but get its free demo, but it takes some doing. The late JewWario of You Can Play This has uploaded a video to instruct you on doing such, as a matter of fact, so go watch that. Oh, and the title is listed in Japanese, so search for "ぎゃる☆がん" ("Gyaru Gan").

Everyone done? Good. Now, on to the review, inasmuch as I can call it one.

A little Fun Fact about me as a gamer: I love light-gun shooters (Japanese-made ones, that is), as evidenced by the fact that I have an article tag for them. My favourite has to be the Time Crisis series by Namco, and I shall have to review them sometime. But stay in love with a genre for long enough, and sooner or later each new experience starts feeling like the last. Not to mention, a lot of these games are bloody short! Of course, that's because most of them are ports of coin-op arcade games, which are short by their nature of being designed to get players on and off as fast as possible, but still. So it's about time for some new blood in the genre, I say, and then along comes Gal*Gun, an Asian-exclusive PS3 game, providing a cute quasi-parody of the genre. Is it the new blood we need? Let's find out.

Gal*Gun started life not as an arcade game, but an XBox 360-exclusive from early 2011. However, somebody forgot to make a light-gun controller for the 360, so you have to play it with a traditional controller. Not that it's inherently a bad thing, I mean, a lot of these games have traditional controller support. Not very good traditional controller support, but hey, the spirit of inclusion is there. Besides, this version is region-locked against non-Japanese XBox 360s, and they made a patch to censor the panty shots... more on that some other time. But then along came a port for the PlayStation 3 a year later, bringing along with it Move controller support and the ability to play on non-Japanese consoles. But would you want to? Again, let's find out.

You play as Tenzou, an Ordinary High School Student who gets accidentally shot by a bunch of magical arrows by a cupid named Patako. Although according to the opening cutscene I don't think it was that unintentional. But anyway, Tenzou is blessed with super sex appeal, although he has to find true love before the magic's affect wears off, he'll be lonely for the rest of his life. Now, I actually had to find that last part off of the game's Wikipedia entry, because its story is presented visual-novel style in spoken and written text, which of course is presented entirely in Japanese. But the end result is that all the girls in Tenzou's school go crazy over him, and he has to fend them off with the use of Patako's Pheremone Gun. And I'm like, what is your problem Tenzou?  Why are you even fighting them in the first place? Aren't you supposed to find love before the day is out or whatever? Maybe you're one of the few among us who know the difference between love and lust; that's the best explanation I can manage.

Enemy "bullets", in the form of text characters, are easy to block.

But anyway, here's where you come in. You move a cursor with the Left Stick and press a button to "shoot" at girls, whereupon instead of dying they swoon with delight and disappear. It even does that Virtua Cop thing where the camera automatically zooms into certain targets. And you know how in most shooters you can deal more damage with head shots? Well to that effect Gal*Gun has "Ecstasy Shots", which are located around the front of their skirts (you know... where they hide their lady parts), and bring them down with one shot instead of the usual three or four. The girls' attacks consist primarily of launching various kana and kanji characters that drift lazily towards the screen, and you must shoot to block them or incur "damage", inasmuch as I can call it damage given the context of the story. But whatever it symbolises, if it falls to zero, it's Game Over, of course. However, unlike most shooter games, light-gun or otherwise, your Pheremone Gun has unlimited ammo; you don't even need to reload its magazine or anything. Combined with the lethargic sense of danger, and based on the demo alone, Gal*Gun shapes up to be an unfortunately boring experience. Maybe the pace picks up in the later stages of the full version, I don't know.

In addition to your health meter, there's a heart-shaped meter which you can fill up multiple times with successful hits. Once it fills at least one, you can hover your cursor over a girl and press Triangle to enter what's called "Doki-Doki Mode". As the setting shifts to a different plane of existence or something, you move your cursor between various pre-set points along the girl's body, and press the fire button/trigger to, I don't know, poke her there or something, filling up a separate meter on the left. But you have to do it before your heart meter runs out of juice and you get kicked back out to the main game. And you can't just button-mash your way to success like in the main game; as you place a hit and the girl, ahem, "reacts", you can't fire again until her animation completes. This partial denial of input makes for a truly boring, tedious diversion. So anyway, assuming you manage to complete this mini-game (don't forget to press Triangle again to deliver the, ahem, "finishing blow"), and do you want to know what the reward for all that was? A bomb, inasmuch as I can call it a bomb. All the girls on-screen, ahem, "cleared out" simultaneously. And I'm like, *why* couldn't I just launch a "bomb" instantly when I press that confounded button!?

The Doki-Doki Mode takes way too much time to get through.

If I ever purchase the full version, I'll make a part-two of this review, but the demo hasn't given me much to be excited about. Let me put it to you this way: this isn't a game that should make you buy a Move system if you don't already own one. Rather, if you don't already own a Move system, then give this a pass. The unorthodox setting is cute, either in the sexualised spirit with which it was intended, or in its camp value for attempting the former and failing. But as a game, let alone a light-gun game, it's rather boring and slow-paced. Maybe the full version ramps up the challenge something decent, but otherwise I can't quite recommend this game, inasmuch as I can call it a game.

Control: 4 Ecstasy Shots out of 5
Design: 2 Ecstasy Shots out of 5
Graphics: 5 Ecstasy Shots out of 5
Audio: 3 Ecstasy Shots out of 5
The Call: 3 Ecstasy Shots out of 5 (C)

Game Review: Initial D Special Stage

Initial D: Special Stage

• Publisher: Sega
• Developer: Sega Rosso
• Release: PlayStation 2, 26 June 2003 (Japan)
• Genre: Racing
• Players: 1
• Save: Memory Card, 230 KB
• Rarity/Cost: Uncommon, US$20-40

(This review was updated on 14 August 2013.)

With home console video games gaining so much relevance over the past decade, the only way for arcades to catch up was to employ gimmicks of all sorts. One such gimmick was employed by Sega's Initial D Arcade Stage series from the early-to-mid 2000s. These racing games let you purchase a "memory card" of sorts, a thin, cardboardy-type dealie which would save your stats and upgrades to your car. This proved to be a big draw for me once I got into it. Being a good licenced game (based on a manga and anime franchise) was only icing on the cake.  Sadly, by the time I did get into the Arcade Stage games, its popularity in America was supplanted by the The Fast and the Furious series by Raw Thrills, a spiritual successor to Crusin' USA.  While it had a similar game-save mechanic, and despite my resignations I still pumped in numerous credits to the games, I found it to be a basic, unpolished, unfulfilling alternative to Initial D once arcades started replacing it with this Americanised tripe.  The good news is that Sega saw fit to make a home version of the games, in the form of Initial D Special Stage for the PlayStation 2. The bad news... it was only released in Japan. ...Pfft, like that's gonna stop me!

Initial D started life in 1996 as a manga series written and drawn by Shuichi Shigeno. The universe of Initial D centers around Takumi Fujiwara, a teenager who develops spectacular driving skills from working for his father's tofu shop, and reluctantly enters the world of touge racing, one-on-one duels on Japan's winding mountain roads.  Through his years of driving experience, he transforms his car, a sleeper Toyota, into the stuff of legends among his friends and rivals.  In fact, the popularity of this franchise has given renewed fame to drift racing, and Takumi’s car in particular, the Sprinter-Trueno, also known by its chassis code "AE-86" or just "86", or as the Corolla in the US.

Special Stage lets you live the action in three ways. The "Legend of the Streets" mode is identical to the arcade experience. There's also the "Story Mode", a series of thirty or so scenarios which re-create scenes from the manga, and “Time Attack”, where you can run through courses without opponents or even a time limit. The other choices available from the main menu are the Replay Theatre, Koichiro’s Car Museum, which plays demos of the game’s various cars with a Japanese narration about the car, Save and Load controls, and other Options. Also, unlike in most Japanese PlayStation games, you can move forward in menus by pressing the X button as well as Circle, whereas Triangle and Square take you backwards.

I’ll start with the Arcade mode. On the first menu, you have a choice of setting up a new profile, or loading an existing profile from the garage. You get to pick your car from brands like Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mitsubishi, and others, and change body colours by pressing Up or Down. Then you get to choose an upgrade course. Playing races, win or lose, earns you upgrade points, which are used to add modifications to your car at certain milestones. These mods are mainly of the decorative variety, but it helps create a sort of bond between you and your virtual car. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I grew addicted to the arcade version, but on a home console where you're not charged a dollar a game, I have to say the impact isn't quite as profound. Once that’s done, you have to set up your name, which uses katakana symbols by default but also supports Latin letters.

Now, you get to take on challengers at your leisure. Only six courses are available in Arcade mode, and of them, only two are circuit tracks where you have to do laps. All the others are one-way courses, driven either uphill or downhill. And let me tell ya, there’s a huge difference between driving the same course up- or downhill. Not only will the turns come at you in reverse order, but your car will accelerate differently depending on whether it’s going up or down, so the limited track selection becomes less of an issue.

Not all Story missions involve straight racing.

In Story Mode, you are given a series of 30-odd missions which roughly replicate events from the manga. The missions are book-ended panels from the manga and Japanese voicovers, which you can thankfully skip over. Not all these missions require you to finish ahead of the other guy, so a little experience reading Japanese would be useful after all.  Or you could just find an FAQ online or, when all else fails, do it trial-and-error.  For example, the first mission puts you on a solo run where you have to drift in order to avoid spilling water from a cup, as depicted by an on-screen meter. And this being the first mission, of course it’s easier than it’s depicted in the comics, or in real life for that matter.

Finally, there’s Time Attack. You use the same car profiles and courses as in the Arcade mode, but you have control over what direction you want to run in, the time of day, the weather, and finally you can load a ghost of a previous run from your Memory Card. Since the events in the Arcade and Story modes utilise night and/or rain versions of the tracks, Time Attack mode is a stress-free way to practice anything that’s been giving you trouble. Sadly, there are no multiplayer offerings in this game. Unless you wanna take turns in Time Attack or something, and compete for the best time.

The controls are simple enough; X is Throttle, Square is Brake, yada-yada.  The buttons can also be manually assigned, although I’m bamboozled as to why there’s no rear-view button but there is a button to turn the headlights on and off. The racing discipline exhibited in the likes of Initial D is commonly misattributed as drift racing, but to be honest, that's not too far off the mark.  Special Stage's physics engine allows you to break into a drift rather easily. Most high-speed turns are enough to generate some smoke from the tyres, but in order to truly take on the corners without dropping precious revs, you’ll have to develop your own technique.  One method I developed is to rapidly shift down and back up, so in order to master the more technical maneuvers, get used to playing with manual transmission enabled.  Of course, you still have to brake ahead of sharper turns, so it’s better off to start out playing Gran-Turismo style and developing your skills from there. All things considered, the handling in Special Stage straddles the line between simulation and true arcade-style control.

It's easy to break into drifts.

The assortment of playable cars, predominantly composed of Japanese mid-90s models, doesn't offer a lot of variety in practice. The only statistic that has any major effect on a car's handling is whether it runs on a front-wheel, rear-wheel, or 4-wheel drive platform. On the bright side, you're not likely to screw yourself over by picking an inferior car, but anyone who's familiar with Gran Turismo should find it odd that in this game, it's entirely possible for a lowly Suzuki Cappuchino to defeat a mighty Nissan Skyline, despite a four-to-one disparity in horsepower alone.
The graphics in Special Stage pretty much reach the bar set by high-end PS2 titles from a few years prior.  It does run smoothly in 60 frames per second, but doesn't do much else of note, not that it needs to anyway. Shigeno-san's illustrations are featured in character portraits and on the loading screens; regardless of whether you like his art style, it’s nice that they worked it in, to give the game some personality. The collision model is a potential point of contention, however; depending on how you hit the other car, you may be able to slingshot past it, or him past you. Staying true to the spirit of the anime (and presumably, touge culture in general), the soundtrack is composed of licenced Eurobeat songs. As a critic I'm not supposed to account for taste, so I'll instead warn you that this high-tempo, poppy material may not be for everyone (even if it is, contrary to popular belief, sung in English).

In fact, you could make a similar argument for the game itself. It’s not just that the language barrier is a little steep; at the least, knowing the katakana letters will be a big help. Given the unique techniques one needs to learn in order to perform best in this game, and no training mode to speak of, the learning curve will come across as sharper if your racing game experience leans more toward Mario Kart than Gran Turismo. But make no mistake - Initial D Special Stage is great at what it does, and is worth putting on your list especially if you're a racing pro, or if you're looking to get your feet wet in the waters of import gaming.

Japanese: 4 kanji out of 5
Graphics: 4 stars out of 5
Sound: 4 stars out of 5
Control: 4 stars out of 5
Design: 5 stars out of 5
The Call: 85% (B+)

Game Review: Sailor Moon S

Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S: Juugai Rantou!? Shuyaku Soudatsusen

• Publisher: Angel
• Developer: Angel
• Release: December 1994 (Japan)
• Genre: Versus Fighter
• Players: 1-2 simultaneous, 1-8 alternating
• Rarity/Cost: Uncommon (US$15-30)

Have you ever watched the Sailor Moon anime and found yourself wondering why the heroes don't use more unarmed martial arts fighting?  It seems they're way more dependent on their magical finishers, amirite?  Well, as if to rectify this issue, they made a versus fighter using the Sailor Moon licence; two, in fact.  And these are only some of the Sailor Moon-licenced games to hit the Super Famicom across multiple genres.  But if you haven't guessed by the way I referred to their console, they were only sold in Japan.  If you've ever felt despair about how America hasn't shown quite enough interest to get all the Moonie goodies...  Yeah, I'm just gonna stop right there before I dig myself any deeper and start sounding like an actual fan, and instead spend my time discussing the fighting game based on Sailor Moon S.

NB: Since this is an import-only game, I suppose I should take a moment to describe how to play it on other region consoles.  The Super NES does use a software-based region lockout, but Japan and North America share the same region, so for you Western-hemisphere readers out there, this is a non-issue.  There's also a physical lockout issue, although nowhere near as debilitating as with the Famicom/NES.  American Super NES Game Paks are wider than Super Famicom Cassettes, and have two grooves cut into the back corners of the case.  These grooves fit in with two tabs built into the Super NES's cartridge bay.  Try to plug in a Super Famicom here, and the tabs will block it.  So what you can do is pull out these tabs, with a pair of pliers and/or other tools, BEING VERY CAREFUL NOT TO DAMAGE THE CARTRIDGE INPUT SLOT.  You can also get purpose-built adapters like the Honeybee, or certain after-market consoles like the Retro Duo, which come with the tabs missing and are thus ready to run import games out of the box.

Back to the game at hand.  Now, its full title is the blisteringly long Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon S: Juugai Rantou!? Shuyaku Soudatsusen, roughly translated to English as "Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon S: Street Fight!? Battle for a New Leader", so yeah, I'm just gonna stick to Sailor Moon S for short.  Be careful not to confuse it with two different block-puzzle games based on that season alone.  (NB: The cartridge label for this game is orange.)  Since it's based on the third season, where the Outer Scouts were introduced, they're playable in this game as well, except for Sailor Saturn.  She couldn't make it because... she had a little run-in with the plot.  I don't know the details.  The modes available are Story, Versus (against a human or computer opponent), Tournament (up to 8 players in a knockout ladder), and Training.  As per the title, the Story mode depicts the Scouts fighting amongst themselves to determine who should be their new leader.  ...That's it?  No monsters or anything?  You're not even gonna re-hash the show's storyline?  ...Well, that's one thing the Power Rangers game I reviewed has over this.  (A neat little Easter Egg awaits you at the title screen if you should finish the story mode with someone other than Moon.)

Not knowing Japanese, I expected more from the story.

But this game here triumphs over the Genesis MMPR fighter in many other ways.  One big example of this is the Attribute Customize System (ACS), wherein you can improve your fighter's stats before starting a game.  Since the computer uses the ACS whether or not you do, neglecting to do so can be a major handicap.  But since the whole thing's in Japanese, I'll describe the categories for you (listed clockwise from the top):

1. Elemental Strength: Increases the damage of most special attacks.
2. ?: Increases the damage of the Desperation Attack, a super-move available when you're at low health or the timer reads under 10 seconds.
3. Defense: Reduces the damage you take.
4. Playfulness: Increases the chance that your moves will fail.  Unlike the other attributes, increasing this is a handicap against you.
5. Physical Strength: Increases the damage of basic and some special attacks.
6. Life: Increases your starting health bar past 100%.

In addition, the control scheme has two settings: Manual, where you trigger special attacks with Street Fighter-style input combos, or Auto, where you hold L/R and press a face button to do so.  It feels incredibly cheap to pull off specials without having memorised the inputs, especially since there's no limit to how much you can used them.  Ever heard of the Neo-Geo series Art of Fighting?  Well, it had a cooldown meter which weakened special attacks the more they were used.  At the risk of ruining it for everyone else, I wish more fighting games implemented limits like that.

Also, whereas the Genesis MMPR game lacked character specialisation, the Sailor Scouts in this game are pleasantly distinct.  You've got balanced types like Sailors Moon and Venus, the faster/weaker Mercury, and the slower/stronger Jupiter and Uranus.  Even some of the moves are ripped straight out of Street Fighter II; apart from the clasic Hadoken input shared amongst many of the characters, Sailor Mercury also has a version of Chun-Li's Spinning Bird Kick.  And then there's Sailor Mini-Moon, who at half the height of the other characters, can dodge some attacks without even trying.  Oddjob says hi.

Some character differentiation is better than none.

The art style used in this game looks fairly true to its origins, as were many other anime-licenced or themed games from the 16-bit era.  But on a technical level, there's nothing much to get excited over; the only use of Mode 7 that I can think of off the top of my head is in the background of Sailor Pluto's stage.  The music is really sparse, light-hearted fare that I'm glad didn't get stuck in my head.  Voice clips recorded by the show's cast are also present; forgive me if I'm not well-versed enough to tell the actresses apart, but I do appreciate them going the extra mile in this regard.  I do have to give a wag of the finger to the clip Sailor Mercury says when she launches her bubble attack, made even worse since the computer has a tendency to spam that attack when playing as her.

For a versus fighter from the mid-1990s, Sailor Moon S is a pretty well-featured package.  Things like the ACS and the Auto control scheme make this accessible to any novice gamers you might be able to rope into playing with you while still adding some much-appreciated depth.  (So what if it's no good for the hardcore tournament set?)  Now, they also made a sequel to this particular game, based on the fourth season "Super S", but it's a good deal rarer and more expensive to find online, and the feature set is pretty much the same (apart from the inclusion of Sailor Saturn) besides.  If you're ready to strike out into inport gaming and have an interest in the source material, either one of the Sailor Moon versus fighters would be a good game to whet your interest with.

Japanese: 3 kanji out of 5
Graphics: 4 StarS out of 5
Audio: 3 StarS out of 5
Control: 4 StarS out of 5
Design: 3 StarS out of 5
The Call: 75% (C-)

Next Episode: Wait a minute, I've done two Sailor Moon-related entries in a row now?  Man, I need to write up some new man cards...  Let's play some Doom!

Game Review: Demon Sword

Demon Sword

• Publisher: Taito
• Developer: Taito
• Release: NES, January 1990
• Genre: Action, Platformer
• Save: Password
• Rarity/Cost: Common (US$5-10)

In the history of video games, the turn of the 1990s was the age of the ninja. Think about it: we had Ninja Gaiden, Strider, two Shinobi games, two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games, Demon Sword -- hey, wait a minute!

That guy's not a ninja! That's just some discount Conan the Barbarian! Ah, but here's the thing: in the game itself, you definitely control a ninja -- I can tell. His weapons of the trade are a sword, shuriken stars, and various types of magic. He soars from tree to tree in a bamboo forest in monster jumps. The bosses he faces, as well as the settings in which he does so, are also taken out of Japanese mythology. No, my good sirs and ladies, the cover-up will not last so long as I'm around.

Perhaps I should explain. A little while ago, it was the "norm" for media being exported from Japan to America and Europe to have any Japanese cultural elements removed or replaced with things more recognisable. This is how we get such classics as rice balls in anime being passed off as powdered donuts. Call me an otaku, but... I just don't see the point of going through the trouble. Yes, it could be to avoid assumed culture shock, but they could just as well pass it off as a new cultural experience for the kiddies to learn about... in a cool way. Fortunately, this trend seems to be over, no matter what 4Kids says. Shows in the mid-2000s, such as Power Rangers Ninja Storm (2003) and Naruto (2005) proved that you could successfully market shows to children while keeping Japanese cultural elements intact. ...Either that or the American cover artist and manual writer(s) didn't play this game themselves.

But enough about my ranting; let's talk about the game itself. Demon Sword is an unofficial sequel to The Legend of Kage (1987, NES), another ninja game. The plot stars the warrior Victar, whose titular sword must be re-assembled to its full power to slay an oppressive demon overlord. ...Or, based on what I could translate from Japanese Wikipedia, it stars the unrelated warrior Ashura, a descendant of Buddhist mythology figure Acala, who must save the Emperor's daughter from being used in a sacrifice by said overlord. Whatever; the backstory isn't really referred to in the game itself, apart from a few minor cutscenes. Victar Ashura ...ah, screw it, I'll just refer to him as "you". "Your" weapons are the titular sword (A), an endless supply of shuriken (B), and fire, lightning, and wind magic (Select). Starting out, the sword deals twice the damage of your stars, but has an abysmal range of only a few pixels in front of you. However, both the sword and stars' performances are upgradeable.

Magic and upgrades are hidden in bonus rooms.

In each of the seven levels, no matter where you go (apart from bosses or bonus rooms), you'll be assaulted by an infinite stream of enemies, and most bosses take a huge amount of hits, but it's important to take them on so you can collect items vital to survival. Red orbs fill a unit of your lifebar and black orbs extend it by one unit each, but for some reason they don't take effect until your lifebar drains. If you don't have the enclosed instruction book on hand, confusion will ensue. Keys open bonus rooms, where you fight minibosses for magic and shuriken upgrades, which reminded me of Kid Icarus. Other types of items let you survive falls into bottomless pits (which only exist on the first level...), shoot stars in four directions at once, and give you invincibility and a trail of shadow clones. Farming for items is an essential part of this game, because you get three lives, but once those are gone, your game is over, no continues, nothing. ..Or so it would seem.

Actually, there is a continue and password function in this game, but they're hidden by button codes. On the Game Over screen, hold Down and press B, A, B, and A to get your password and continue the game. To load a password from the title screen, hold Up and press A, B, A, and B. These codes may be easy to remember -- either one is basically the mirror image of the other, but the same cannot be said for the 17-character passwords. Fortunately, these passwords save your items and stats as well as position. And yes, these codes are included in the original manual, but like I said, these days you're less likely to come across them included with copies of the game itself.

You can almost leap tall buildings in a single bound.

The jumping and movement physics, while befitting of the "awesome" ninja archetype, take some getting used to from a usability standpoint. Your character's running speed is fast enough to give Sonic a worthy challenge (in some of his games, at least), and your jumping height (in case you haven't figured it out, you press the Up direction to jump) is beefed up to match. The downside of having such super-powered speed is that you run the risk of running into one of those infinitely-spawning enemies I mentioned earlier. Also something to be mindful of is that, while jumping in one direction, you can change your horizontal speed but can't turn around. This is a pinch of realism compared to the jumping mechanics of most other platform heroes, but drawing the line between realism and playability is a tricky proposition. You also have the ability to climb tree trunks and other vertical surfaces. While you still retain the ability to attack while climbing, the fact that automatically grab onto these surfaces while airborne hinders the flow of movement, in my opinion.

The Japanese release of this game is titled Fudō Myō'ō Den ("Legend of Acala") and shipped out in March 1988. Apart from the manual's backstory matching up with the game itself, there's a whole lot more content to be found compared to the American Demon Sword. There are more cutscenes with (Japanese) text, more types of magic and items, and six more levels, bringing the total level count to 13. ...Wow, that's almost half the content they ripped out of the American release, and I have to ask... Why? Granted, one of the cut levels was a graveyard, and in the 8- and 16-bit eras Nintendo vetoed the use of religious symbolism in games for their consoles, but I've seen examples getting around that. So... I've got nothing. On the other hand, the life bar from Demon Sword has been removed.  Taking one hit (without the right items to back you up) costs you a life, so even though the password system remains intact (without needing button codes to work), you'll need a lot more skill and patience to slog through this version.. While Fudō Myō'ō Den is superior for being twice as long and otherwise more fully featured, playing Famicom cassettes outside of Asia is a complicated affair, since cartridge converters are way hard to find, much less at a reasonable price. That said, don't feel too bad if you're stuck with the American version. It's still as much of a challenge as many games of the era were wont to be.

Japanese: 1 kanji out of 5 (Japanese version only)
Control: 3 missing levels out of 5
Design: 4 missing levels out of 5
Graphics: 3 missing levels out of 5
Sound: 3 missing levels out of 5
Value: 3 missing levels out of 5 (NA) / 4 missing levels out of 5 (JP)
The Call: 70% (C-)