Stab your way through the jungle in this action-packed movie tie-in.

This animated title screen is hard to capture properly.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 12/18/17 – 12/21/17
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
Video: Rambo Final Area and Ending

It’s time for another NES game based on a film license. John Rambo is a character ripe for a video game. He’s a tough soldier type with expertise in weaponry and hand-to-hand combat, and he gets to use his skills in the NES game to mow down enemy soldiers. Of course, he will also have to fend off snakes and birds and such because it’s a video game, but Rambo is more than up to the task. Rambo on NES is perhaps best known for its gameplay similarities to Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. Now that game may be one of the least heralded Zelda adventures, but it is still a great game that plays well. Let’s see if the NES version of Rambo can hold up to that kind of pedigree.

The Rambo series of movies began with the 1982 action movie called First Blood. It is based on the book First Blood written in 1972 by David Morrell. The film was co-written by Sylvester Stallone who also stars in the movie as John Rambo, a misunderstood Vietnam War veteran. Stallone would co-write and star in all four movies in the series. The next movie, Rambo: First Blood Part II was released in 1985 and this is the film the NES game is based on. Rambo III was released in 1988 and the simply-titled Rambo came out in 2008. The original series is effectively over as Stallone has stepped down from any future films. However, there is a Bollywood remake of Rambo slated for 2018 as well as a rumored future reboot of Rambo without Stallone.

The second Rambo film spawned three different video games. The first game is from 1985 that was released on the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum and plays as a top-down action game. The 1986 Sega Master System game plays in similar fashion even though it is a different game. The NES version of the game is a side-scrolling action-adventure game. The Famicom version was first released in December 1987, and the North American version came in May 1988. This game was developed by Pack-In-Video and published by Acclaim.

Watch out Rambo! It’s a small bird!

Rambo on NES follows close to the story of Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo is imprisoned at the end of the first film and Colonel Trautman enlists Rambo on a mission that will allow him to get out of prison. He is tasked to go back to Vietnam to take pictures of the military bases to prove to the United States that there are no more POWs in the country after the war. Rambo discovers that there are still POWs in the country and he gets captured as he attempts to rescue one. You play as Rambo as you follow these and the rest of the main events from the film, and you beat the game once you reach the ending.

The game is an exploratory side-scrolling platformer in the vein of Zelda II. There is no overworld in Rambo and everything is played in the side-scrolling view. Play scrolls either left or right as you explore, and often you can venture off either side of the screen to different areas. There are also buildings you can enter as well as entrances to parallel areas. You may also talk to people you encounter to gain clues and figure out where you should head next. For the most part, the world is open to you and you can explore almost anywhere you want, although there is a critical path that is required to proceed with the story.

You use Left or Right on the D-Pad to move Rambo around. Press the A button to jump. Rambo ducks when you hold Down. You can jump down through some ledges by holding Down when you jump. Press Up when standing in front of someone to talk to them, although you can’t talk to everyone. Sometimes you can enter doors or buildings by pressing Up. You also use Up to move to different “rooms” either north or south whenever you stand on a tile marked with either an N or an S. You attack with your weapon with the B button. The default weapon is Rambo’s combat knife and it is a strong, close range attack. You can attack while standing and you may also perform a low stab by pressing B while ducking. The Start button pauses the game. The Select button is used to choose your weapon from the weapons displayed on the top status bar. You can also switch weapons when the game is paused.

Rambo has to deal with ankle-biting fish in shallow rivers.

Most of the game takes places within the action screens, but there are some additional actions you can perform during conversations. When speaking with someone you will see their picture and text on the top half of the screen. Rambo’s dialogue is on the lower half. Press A to advance the conversation. Sometimes you must choose your own response, in which case an arrow appears so you can select your choice with A.

Press Start during conversations to bring up the Status screen. I’m glad the manual explained this to me because I wouldn’t have figured that out on my own. There is some good information on the Status screen. At the top, you see your current health, the maximum possible health, your current experience points, and the number of points needed to advance to the next experience level. The middle of the screen shows your inventory. The lower part of the screen is your mission code, or password. These are complicated 32-character passwords that may contain numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and symbols. It’s on par with The Guardian Legend as far as passwords are concerned. You can input passwords when you select Continue on the title screen.

The top status bar contains information and weapon selection. Life and experience points are the same as show on the Status screen, and then the rest of the bar is dedicated to your weapons. First is the standard knife, and underneath that you see Rambo’s current strength level. To the right of that is the throwing knife which is a short range projectile attack. Underneath the throwing knife and every other weapon is Rambo’s current ammo count for that weapon. The bow and arrow has a longer range than the throwing knife and is more powerful. Exploding arrows do twice as much damage as the regular arrows. The machine gun is a powerful weapon that shoots quickly. Next are grenades which can be thrown a short distance in an upward-looping arc. Finally, you see the medicine bottle which restores 100 health when used. Rambo can have up to 99 of all weapons except for the grenades and medicine which max out at nine each.

Go crazy and use those throwing knives.

You gain experience points as you fight enemies. Defeated enemies display the number of experience points earned when you beat them, just like in Zelda II. Gain enough experience points to level up and increase the strength of your weapons. There are seven experience levels in Rambo and you become a one-man wrecking crew by the end of the adventure.

Some enemies will give you ammo or item drops instead of experience points. Each ammo drop gives you ten shots to add to your arsenal, but medicine jars are only accrued one at a time. Here’s a tip. The same enemies always drop the same kind of item, so you can leave and come back and stock up on anything you want. There are also a couple of temporary powerups you may find when you defeat certain enemies. The S powerup lets you move faster and the J powerup lets you jump higher. These abilities only apply to the current room. You can also find item drops inside breakable boxes.

There are a few boss fights sprinkled throughout Rambo. These are more like unique enemy encounters and you need to land a lot of hits to defeat these bosses. Beating a boss drops a heart which restores all your health and adds 100 to your maximum health. It’s possible to skip some of these fights altogether if you aren’t careful, so I recommended taking the time to find and fight them.

Boss battles can be mildly frantic.

This was my first time playing Rambo. I knew that it had the resemblance to Zelda II which is a game I really like, but I didn’t give the game a real try until now. It’s a common game that’s worth about $5. I do remember that it took me some time to get a copy of the game for my collection even though it should have been easy enough to run into by chance. It’s just a weird quirk of collecting that happens sometimes. Of course, since then I’ve had 5-6 copies of the game through buying game lots.

I found Rambo to be a pretty easy game, but maybe it shouldn’t have gone that well. The biggest issue with the game is that the map can be confusing to navigate. Screen exits off either side of the screen may behave differently depending on where you are. Sometimes they go to unique screens and sometimes they loop around to the other side of the area you just tried to leave. You get in situations where you exit the screen, then go right back where you came from and end up somewhere completely different. Some areas will let you fall to a different area below. There are also the entrances that take you either north or south, and occasionally these paths are one-way only and now you have to go around a different way to get back to where you were. It’s disorienting, and there is no in-game map to tell you where you are in the world. But somehow, it is less complicated in practice than it would seem. The characters give you a general direction you need to go and that was enough for me to figure it out.

My playthrough of the game was a little unusual. I struggled some with the combat at first and died a lot. I took every path I could find just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Maybe I took a little too long. In the middle of the game, you rescue one of the POWs and have to take him to the extraction point. You are supposed to get captured again and Co breaks you out of the enemy base. The game plays out these exact scenes, only that didn’t happen for me when I played. Co said that I was too late to meet the helicopter at the extraction point. Now I still had to go there, but instead of doing the following side section as Co, I had to wander back to the next location on my own with no real idea of where to go. In a way, it’s interesting that the game allows you a different way through the game under certain circumstances, but they definitely could have handled it better. The rest of the game took a little time to figure out, but it went well enough. The final boss was the most difficult part of the game and I ended up beating it just barely on my first attempt.

The enemies at the end of the game get a bit ridiculous.

I went through the game again with the intention of recording a longplay and checking out the content I missed previously. The first time through took around four to five hours, and the second time took under two hours. This time I did the scene with Co like I was supposed to, and the flow of the game and story was more sensible. Unfortunately, my computer crashed about halfway through the game and it ate the footage I had recorded up to that point. I think I’ve played enough Rambo, so my video of the final boss and ending will have to be good enough.

There are a couple of interesting things about the ending to the game, so this is your spoiler warning. In the film, Co gets shot and killed. The same thing happens in the NES game but there is a way to avoid it. You reach a screen with Co and a waterfall background. Talking to her here triggers the scene where she is killed. If you don’t talk to her, she never dies and you can speak with her again in the ending. After beating the final boss, you get to walk around the base until you talk to Troutman. Co will be here and she and Rambo share a touching moment. The other awesome thing you can do during the ending is turn Murdock into a frog! It’s totally weird, but you can do it. Attacking on that screen in the ending causes Rambo to spew out a huge Kanji character. It stands for Ikari which means rage. Your anger toward Murdock turns him into a frog. The only explanation for that is the experience meter is referred to as the anger meter in the Japanese version of the game. Thus, you are building up your rage through your journey and you are letting it all fly out quite literally in the end.

If I had to describe Rambo in one word, it would be janky. Enemy movement is often erratic. Bosses may spam floating projectiles. It’s tough to make contact with your knife, at least early on. Sometimes breaking a box with your knife destroys the wrong tile. Good luck trying to break a specific box that you have to jump to reach, by the way. Rambo’s character portrait can only be described as derpy. The experience point balance is way off. Early enemies give a point or two while some endgame enemies give you a whopping 500 points. The game feels unpolished, but it’s not necessarily a bad game. I think the game follows the story pretty well, and the music is good too. If Pack-In-Video was earnestly trying to make a Zelda II clone, I would say they didn’t hit the mark. It’s not nearly as good of a game and it was released almost a full year later. Still, Rambo is interesting enough that it might be worth a look.

#67 – Rambo