Ripping straight out of your NES!

Didn’t even realize this game had a 2-player mode!

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 7/25/19 – 8/1/19
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
My Video: Werewolf: The Last Warrior Longplay

I’m just going to say this right away.  I think Werewolf: The Last Warrior is gonna be my favorite NES Box Art of 2019. The obvious element is the giant werewolf ripping out of the cover, but look closely and you will see that he bursts right out of an NES cart.  You can make out the gray lines and the chips on the green circuit board inside.  At this time, very few people took the carts apart to see what was inside because new carts didn’t need to have the pins cleaned. I bet this aspect of the cover was underappreciated.  Some other parts of the cover I like are the red text on yellow background for contrast and the huge claws on the werewolf.  With a box cover so awesome, the game inside has to be equally good, right?

Werewolf: The Last Warrior debuted on the NES in November 1990.  The game was developed and published by Data East, with development credit given to Sakata SAS.  The Famicom release came later in June 1991, published by Takara.  There the game was called Cho Jinro Senki Wourufu, translating to Super Werewolf Chronicle Warwolf.  Europe also saw an NES release in September 1991.

In this game, you play as Chief WarWolf.  The evil Dr. Faryan has created a bunch of bio-monsters that have imprisoned nearly everyone in the world.  Guess who is the only hope for civilization?  With the help and powers of the Great Spirit, you can become Werewolf which will give you the abilities needed to defeat Faryan and save humanity from his evil schemes.  There are five stages in the game, culminating in the final battle with Faryan. Beat all the levels to beat this game.

Most of the cutscenes involve this guy.

This is your typical platforming game with a mostly familiar control scheme. An obvious downside right off the bat is that you attack with A and jump with B.  I have no idea why developers did this as the convention of using A to jump and B to attack was the de facto standard.  I’ve played games long enough to be able to handle it no problem, but otherwise there is this artificial learning curve added for no real reason other than to be different.  The rest of the controls are fine.  Press the D-pad directions to move around.  You can duck with Down and climb ladders with Up.  The A button does a simple punch and you can punch high while standing or punch low while ducking.  You also wield a Power Ray as a charge attack by holding A to charge and letting go to unleash the attack.  Pressing B jumps normally, but you can do a higher jump if you hold Up while pressing B.  Start pauses the game.  While paused, you can press Select to show your score and number of lives remaining. 

At the start of the game, you meet the Great Spirit.  The game switches over to a brief cutscene where the Great Spirit gives you some advice.  Immediately after this you are thrown into a fight with one of Faryan’s death slaves. This enemy has a health bar displayed at the bottom and is a recurring mini-boss throughout the game.  Defeat him and he will leave behind a red W.  Collecting this item turns you into Werewolf.  Then you get another cutscene where you see his transformation.  Don’t worry, this scene only happens the first time you transform.

In Werewolf form, you have several new options available.  You maintain this form until you are at about a quarter of health remaining.  By default, your attacks are twice as strong as normal.  Your Power Ray now attacks everything on screen via a shock wave, but this deals you a lot of damage just to perform the move.  You also get four new movement abilities.  You can crawl into tunnels too big for you to enter normally. Simply walk into the tunnel to start crawling.  You can perform a backflip that makes you invincible to all attacks by pressing both A and B together.  You can climb walls in Werewolf form.  Simply jump into a wall to cling to it.  Now you can climb the wall by pressing either Up or Down.  To get off, you press the direction opposite the wall and press B to jump off.  Lastly, you can cling and hand-walk along ceilings with your claws.  Jump up to the ceiling, then hold Up and press A to dig your claws in.  Then you can use Left or Right to move across the ceiling and press Down to disembark. Getting hooked is tough.  You have to connect just as you are falling from the top of your jump so that you touch the ceiling with the tip of your claws.

This early spot is tough when you don’t know how to ceiling walk.

There is an anger meter at the bottom of the screen.  You collect these tiny, white bubbles that add a notch to your anger meter.  When the meter hits five bubbles, then you transform into Super Werewolf.  In this mode, you have all the same powers and abilities as Werewolf, but your attacks double in strength, you move faster, and you jump incredibly high.  The downside is that this mode is temporary as the bubbles gradually decrease.  (I guess they pop?)  Once you run out of bubbles, you switch back to Werewolf mode until you collect enough bubbles for another transformation.

There are several other items you can collect in this game.  Finding items is weird.  Some of them are dropped by enemies, and others you find by striking objects in the levels.  Sometimes these locations are obvious, like posts or boxes.  Other times you find items by hitting ledges or other places you might not expect.  It doesn’t hurt to attack random things just in case.  Anyway, here are the other items to look out for.  Small hearts heal one health point while large hearts are full health refills.  Little red bubbles defeat all enemies onscreen.  Big red bubbles make you invincible for a little while.  Why bubbles are so powerful in this game, I have no idea.  Hourglasses give you more time, dollar signs add points, and 1ups are obvious. Some enemies drop a bullet behind that gives you a single shot attack of your own with A.

The final item you need to watch out for are the blue W’s.  While red W’s upgrade you to Werewolf, the blue ones downgrade you.  They take you from Super Werewolf back to Werewolf, or from Werewolf back to plain War Wolf form.  If you grab one as War Wolf, it deals a significant amount of damage.  Therefore, you want to avoid these at all costs.  The game puts you in some situations where if you reveal a blue W, you are forced to pick it up to proceed.  Just be careful.  The manual suggests there is a way to somehow use both a blue W and a red W to go directly to Super Werewolf.  I have no idea how or if that works, and I didn’t find any information about that mechanic.

Knock stuff around until you find the good items.

The levels in this game are usually laid out a specific way.  Stages move from Left to Right with a few exceptions. Stages also typically have a high section and a low section.  You can find ladders to climb between sections and sometimes you can choose between the upper path or lower path all the way through the stage.  This can add some replay value if you want to try a different path and it lets you experiment to find the best way through a level.  All levels end in a boss fight with one of Faryan’s stronger creatures.

This game treats lives as continues.  When you fall into a pit or run out of health, it is Game Over.  If you have any lives remaining, then you can Continue from the Game Over screen or select End to start over.  When you run out of lives, the game puts you at the same screen only you are forced to choose End.  You start the game with three lives.  You can earn more by collecting 1up items or for every 50,000 points earned.  Every time you die your score goes back to 0, so you are incentivized to play well enough early to earn more lives for later.

This was my first time beating Werewolf: The Last Warrior.  I sort of remember testing this game out one time and playing until I died, which didn’t take too long that time.   I might have went further if I knew the controls.  I bought my cart copy of the game at a game store about an hour away from home that I have only visited one time.  I think I paid either $7 or $8 for it.  The game sells now for around $10 which I believe is the same as the going rate was when I bought mine.

Boss fights are much better as Super Werewolf

Beating this game was yet another installment in the series of “making incremental progress each playthrough.”  The first stage has at least a couple of spots that are tough to pass until you get a grip of the controls and all the moves you have available. The worst stopping point was the waterfall stage.  This is one of those two-tiered horizontal levels where the lower section is all water. Evidently, in this universe, werewolves cannot swim, so once you fall in you have to watch yourself drown.  There are leaping fish that can easily knock you in the drink, in part because you have a tough time hitting enemies in the air. Their placements are not quite consistent either.  It makes for a tough section and you can bleed your remaining lives away in a flash. Some other parts of the game aren’t much easier, but the waterfall was the worst I experienced.  I could have knocked the difficulty down a point or two if that stage were easier.  Still, completing the game in a week isn’t all that bad and it was a straightforward game to boot.

What I will remember most about Werewolf: The Last Warrior is how janky the game is.  I’ve already mentioned a few of these instances of jankiness, such as B button jumping, tricky ceiling clinging, and the seemingly random locations of hidden items. There are plenty more.  The backflip maneuver is very helpful in crossing some parts where taking damage is eminent, since you are invincible during the flip.  One downside of that is that there are two forced jumps associated with the move, and if you didn’t plan carefully, you could leap right into a pit.  Another quirk is that during a backflip, the screen does not scroll ahead.  You can backflip all the way to the right and then walk against the right side of the screen, leaving you completely defenseless to the dangers right in front of you.  Bosses soak up a lot of damage before going down and end up being very repetitive as a result.  Super Werewolf status makes them pretty manageable, but you may only build up to that state once or twice in the whole game.  If you are plain War Wolf, forget even trying to fight a boss.  Your attacks have one-fourth the power of Super Werewolf, and even if you play the fight perfectly you will probably run out of time before winning anyway.  There are still other minor nuisances that don’t even make a blip compared to these issues.

Werewolf: The Last Warrior is a game that falls short of most other NES platformers. I would say the graphics are just average.  Most of the sprites are large and detailed.  The Werewolf character has a lot of different poses and such for all the moves available. The music is pretty decent.  My favorite song is the one that plays when you are normal War Wolf, but unfortunately the more you hear that song the worse you are playing.  The controls take some getting used to with the B button jumping and handling specific moves like backflips and wall climbing.  The gameplay has some notable flaws.  The jumping is rather stiff and favors more vertical leaping than horizontal, which is tough considering most of the game is horizontal scrolling. Bosses and some enemies take way too many hits to defeat, leaving the timer as more of a threat here than in other games. You can tell that Ninja Gaiden was an inspiration for this game with things like its interstitial cutscenes and wall climbing moves.  Those are some huge shoes to fill, and in my opinion, Werewolf isn’t half as good as Ninja Gaiden.  It’s not terrible and there are sure to be some people that will go to bat for the game, but I’d rather play something else.

#131 – Werewolf: The Last Warrior

You won’t need any cat-like reflexes to get through Puss ‘N Boots.

This static title screen’s theme music has an ending.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 1/7/18
Difficulty: 2/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
Video: Puss ‘N Boots Longplay

Most people familiar with NES games know of the concept “Nintendo Hard.” Things like limited continues, unfair enemy patterns, fragile heroes, and little to no checkpoints are just some of the features of games that have this reputation. In this case, Puss ‘N Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure has virtually none of these issues. That sounds great, but what is left is a game that is super short and way too easy. I’ll spend far more time explaining the game than it took me to play it. Maybe Puss ‘N Boots is the kind of romp that you might be looking for in an NES game, so read on to see if it’s something you might want to try on for size.

You have to go way back to find the roots of this game’s character. Puss in Boots is an old European fairy tale about a cat who tricks others in order to gain power and fame. The oldest known telling of the story was from the Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola around the year 1550. The most famous version of this story was later written by French author Charles Perrault in 1697 within a collection of eight fairy tales. There were many adaptations and retellings of this fairy tale, and the one of importance here is the 1969 Japanese animated film The Wonderful World of Puss ‘n Boots by Toei Animation. In this version, the cat was named Pero after Charles Perrault and he would become the mascot for Toei Animation.

Starting off within a ghost town.

There are two games based on The Wonderful World of Puss ‘N Boots. The first is the Famicom exclusive Nagagutsu o Haita Neko: Sekai Isshu 80 Nichi Dai Boken. It was released in November 1986, published by Toei Animation and developed by Shouei System. The developer is mostly known for Fist of the North Star games in addition to Puss ‘N Boots. The NES received the sequel Puss ‘N Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure in June 1990. The games are both loosely based on Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and are quite similar in style and structure. The NES game was also developed by Shouei System but published by Electro Brain.

The story is a little bit more interesting than your typical NES game. You play the role of Pero who was ordered by Count Gruemon to get rid of a mouse in his castle. Pero befriended the mouse and helped him escape. This really upset Count Gruemon, so he enlisted the help of Dr. Gari-gari to send Pero in a time machine to the past. To make matters worse, Pero is being pursued by hitmen from the Cat Kingdom because Pero violated Cat Kingdom law by helping a mouse. Pero must travel through seven different areas all over the world in order to track down and defeat Count Gruemon and Dr. Gari-gari and take their time machine to get back home. Do this and you beat the game.

Puss ‘N Boots is a side-scrolling platformer with a typical control scheme. You use the D-Pad to walk around left and right. Press the A button to jump and press B to fire your weapon. The Start button pauses the game. While paused, you can press Left or Right to select one of Pero’s three weapons. Then press B to equip the weapon and unpause the game. Pero can squat by holding Down. If you are standing on top of a ledge, you can squat and press B to fall through the platform. I’m not sure if this even works since I didn’t need to try it.

Pero travels by steamboat in mostly calm waters.

All of Pero’s weapons have unlimited use and you can pick whichever one you want at any time. The default pistol fires a straight bullet ahead. The bomb is thrown in more of an arc. It goes upward a little bit and then falls quickly, exploding when it hits the ground. It’s useful for lower targets. The boomerang is a pretty large weapon that is thrown in a huge loop spanning most of the length and height of the screen. You can have two pistol shots on-screen at once, but only a single bomb or boomerang.

There are a bunch of vehicles you get to ride throughout the game, all with slightly different controls and capabilities. The ship floats on top of the water. All you can do it in is fire missiles straight ahead or move left and right. The underwater submarine can move in all directions and you can also raise it by holding the A button. The B button fires torpedoes that can destroy pieces of land that get in your way. The car has the same missiles as the ship, but you can jump and move similar to how Pero moves on foot. The airplane has the same movement as the submarine but is armed with a machine gun that functions similarly to the missiles, and it only faces to the right so you can’t shoot behind you. The hot air balloon is more like the submarine but uses missiles like the ship and the car.

There are some items you can find along the way. The boot makes Pero invincible briefly and awards 500 points. The hamburger is also worth 500 points and restores some of Pero’s health. The money bag is just for additional points, but you can earn either 1000 or 3000 points each. The Pero face powerup is an extra life. You can see Pero’s remaining lives, health, score, high score, and weapon selection at the bottom of the screen during play.

Just driving through the desert, no big deal.

Puss ‘N Boots has quite the variety of enemies. For the most part, the enemies are suitable for the levels they are found in. There are pirate ships on top of the water, piranhas in the water, and birds and other balloons while airborne. There are weird enemies too, such as flying horseshoes and UFO’s. Perhaps my favorite are the giant lightning bolts that you can blow up with your firepower. Puss ‘N Boots also features a few boss battles at the end of some stages. These are neat but don’t really make much sense. After the ocean stage, for instance, the boss is this giant mechanical frog. You have to hit him in the mouth while he spews out smaller frogs. Bosses have a health bar displayed below yours during these fights.

Pero begins his journey with two extra lives. I don’t think you can earn more lives with your score, just by grabbing 1ups. If you lose all your lives you may continue. There is a Continue option on the title screen that starts you off with three more lives. Either using a continue or resuming after death puts you back at the most recent checkpoint. Some levels don’t have any checkpoints and other stages have more than one part to them with a checkpoint at the start of each section. It’s a generous system. The catch is that you can only continue three times before starting over from scratch.

This was my first time playing Puss ‘N Boots. It’s not the most common game out there, but it is inexpensive. I’m pretty sure I got my copy in one of those eBay bulk lots I bought often while actively collecting. It wasn’t until after that that I learned that it is regarded as one of the easiest NES games. It did seem pretty simple when I tested my cart out but I only played a couple of minutes.

Puss ‘N Boots is also part shooter.

The game’s reputation did not disappoint. I was able to beat Puss ‘N Boots in 20 minutes on my first try. It’s such a simple game and you don’t even have to take your time in the levels to have a decent shot at getting through successfully, at least until the end of the game. Most of the experience is move to the right and defeat any enemies that approach you. The final area is a door maze that also has some sections that scroll upward. There are two bosses in this stage. The first one isn’t too bad, but the final boss is surprisingly tricky and easily the most difficult part of the game. It’s easy to have your health sucked away fast. I used up a bunch of lives here but eventually I got through. I would have given the game a 1/10 difficulty rating up until the final boss.

There is nothing notable about Puss ‘N Boots on the NES. It doesn’t look very good for a 1990 NES game. I don’t recall anything about the music. They tried to introduce some variety with the different vehicles and weapons, but everything feels roughly the same. The physics feel very unpolished. Jumping and throwing projectiles is rigid, and you move forward faster by jumping all the time. Levels are straightforward and end before they get going. It’s the brevity of it all that makes Puss ‘N Boots completely forgettable. If you are in the mood for a short, easy game or get a thrill out of beating something new, then this is definitely the game for you. Games like this are very welcome for my kind of long-term project but aren’t all that interesting otherwise. You aren’t missing anything special if you take a pass on Puss ‘N Boots.

#70 – Puss ‘N Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure

#70 – Puss ‘N Boots: Pero’s Great Adventure