Long neglected, but never forgotten.

Those chill nighttime vibes

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 10/8/2020 – 10/11/2020
Difficulty: 5/10
My Difficulty: 3/10
My Video: StarTropics Longplay

In my quest to beat all the NES games, there are times of great productivity and times of, well, little productivity.  I have started writing this blog post in late May, as the weather is starting to get hot.  As you can see above, I played through this game in early fall.  It feels kind of poetic to have pretty much skipped all the cold weather in between, seeing as StarTropics is very much a tropical game.  Or, on the flip side, it can be seen as a missed opportunity to celebrate some warmth when I could have used it the most.  Either way, there is no bad time of year to play through StarTropics, as it is a delightful game to play whenever you can.

StarTropics is an odd duck in terms of its history.  It was an NES-exclusive game, released in December 1990 in North America and August 1992 in Europe.  Despite being developed completely in Japan, it was never intended for Japanese release and indeed never made it officially to the Famicom.  The game was developed and published by Nintendo, specifically Nintendo’s R&D3 division.  That part of the company primarily developed hardware and peripherals from Nintendo 64 through the Wii U, and was renamed to Nintendo Integrated Research & Development Division, or IRD for short.  IRD has since merged with Nintendo System Development to become Nintendo Platform Technology Department, named PTD, who have been responsible for Nintendo Switch hardware and peripherals.  Anyway, back in the R&D3 days, they did develop a few games, namely both StarTropics games and the Punch-Out!! series, both arcade and home versions of the first two titles.  Locomotive Corporation also has development credits on this game as well its sequel.

StarTropics follows the journey of 15-year-old Mike Jones.  His Uncle Steve is a world famous archaeologist and he sends Mike a letter inviting him to come visit him at his laboratory on C-Island.  Mike arrives and meets the villagers of Coralcola, only to talk with the village elder and discover that Dr. Jones has been abducted.  Naturally, young Mike is best prepared to tackle the dangers of the islands in search of his uncle.  This adventure takes place over eight chapters spanning across multiple locations.  Clear all the chapters to beat this game.

Of course you are!

At the beginning of the game you need to set up your save file.  This file selection screen is quite reminiscent of the loading screen of The Legend of Zelda.  First, Select Register Your Name and press Start.  You then enter your name up to 8 characters, then press Select to move to End and press Start to create your file.  The Elimination Mode allows you to delete save files.  The Review Mode is an interesting feature that I completely forgot about and probably never used.  Select your file and press Up or Down to select from any available chapter, then you can press Start to play the game from the beginning of that chapter.   You can choose from any chapter reached so far.  This does not affect your save file in any way.  Just for the sake of science, I loaded up my completed save game and replayed a full chapter in the Review Mode.  When the chapter is finished you are simply sent back to the title screen.

There are two main modes of play in this game, which the manual calls Travel Mode and Battle Mode.  You start off in Travel Mode.  This is a top-down view where you move similar to an RPG.  You can explore areas, enter towns, and talk to people.  Use the D-pad to move around and press A to speak to people.  You can press Select to bring up a limited status view, displaying your current chapter, health meter, and score.  At the start of the game you are on C-Island.  You can explore the island in a limited fashion, and then proceed into the town where you will need to talk to the townspeople.  The chief in each village is who you need to speak with, but either they or something else is often blocked off until you gather more information in town.  Once you gain an audience with the chief, he explains the abduction and gives you the legendary island yo-yo, which is your default weapon for the journey.  After meeting with the island shaman, you proceed underground for your first challenge.

The other mode in this game where all the action takes place is called the Battle Mode.  This also takes place in a top-down mode but with a much larger character sprite.  Here you battle enemies while proceeding through caves or other areas room by room.  The main gimmick here, if you can call it that, is that your movement in combat is gridlocked.  It helps to think of each room overlaid with an invisible grid.  When you walk in one of the four directions, you keep moving until you lock to the next tile of that grid.  This concept does take shape in the actual game, too.  There are green squares that are raised up and you must jump on top of them.  Then, you can jump from tile to tile with A. You may also leap across water safely to another tile two spaces away.  For battling enemies, you wield your trusty yo-yo with B.  Enemies, by and large, play by the same rules you do as far as movement.  This all may seem restricting, but the game was built around the concept and it works better than you might think.

Yo-yo-ing slugs was not the vacation I had in mind.

In The Legend of Zelda, your heart-shaped life meter could be expanded by collecting Heart Containers.  StarTropics functions a lot in the same way.  Clearing each dungeon area gives you a free health refill.  At some locations, you also earn max health upgrades.  Every once in a while, you will find this game’s version of Heart Containers to extend your life.  Your health is not only important for staying alive, but it also helps you with your weapons.  There are two upgrades to your yo-yo: the Shooting Star and the Super Nova.  These not only increase the power of your attack, but also increase your range for distance attacking.  The catch is that you need a certain heart requirement to use them.  The Shooting Star activates with six hearts, while the Super Nova requires eleven hearts to wield.  At any time, if you don’t have enough health for the weapon, it drops back down to the prior level weapon.  Likewise, as you regain health, your better weapons kick back in.  Having low health once you acquire these weapons is a real double whammy.

There are lots of items along the way.  Basic items that defeated enemies drop are hearts and stars.  Hearts add one to the health meter, while stars function as sort of partial hearts.  Every five stars give you one heart.  Other types of items are available either out in the open or revealed by switches.  Those raised green tiles I mentioned earlier can reveal door switches or items when you step on them.  Better items are revealed in this way.  Clocks either freeze or slow down enemies on the current screen.  The anklet lets you jump over two spaces instead of one.  The vitamin X is an interesting item in that it fills up your health and overflows it to the max the game allows.  Over time, that excess health is eaten away bit by bit until you are back to your current max health.  The try-your-luck sign is another weird one.  In each stage you get three lives.  The try-your-luck sign can give you an extra life, sometimes two lives, but also it can remove a life from your stock.  Running out of lives forces you to restart caves from the very beginning, especially painful in some of the longer stages.

Mike also can acquire a plethora of special weapons.  There are three boxes in the status area to hold any special weapons you pick up, along with their ammo counts.  Switch weapons by pressing Select, or you can make selections while the game is paused.  Weapons are only available for the current area and cannot be transferred to other stages.  Many of these weapons, like the bolas or the flame, are simple projectile weapons.  The baseball bat is swung all around you to clear out enemies in close proximity.  The shurikens are neat.  They are double shurikens that are thrown in a straight line, and you can press B at any time to split them up, launching them sideways in opposite directions.  The spike shoes automatically toss Mike all around the screen, stepping on each enemy on screen for you.  There’s even a mirror to reflect some enemy projectiles.

You even get a submarine to traverse the islands.

There’s another category of items too, called Magic Items.  These are stored when you collect them but are activated only through the pause menu.  Press Up or Down when paused to toggle between the weapons and magic items.  Some examples of magic items are the medicine, snowman, magic rod, and the lantern.  The medicine restores five hearts of health, and there’s even a special counter for the medicine on the main status bar.  The snowman temporarily freezes all enemies.  The magic rod is used to reveal hidden enemies that exist on some screens.  This is important as some screen exits are only activated when all enemies are beaten.  The lantern lights up darkened rooms so you can see!

StarTropics also has a scoring system that isn’t often discussed.  It does not appear on the status bar or on the pause screen in the Battle Mode, but you can see it when you stop in the Travel Mode.  Points are awarded after you finish Battle Mode sections.  This isn’t mentioned in the manual, but I have learned how the scoring system works.  Each level in the game is worth a set amount of points, and behind the scenes, every enemy you kill reduces from that total.  If you are high score chasing this game, you will need to learn how to play pacifist, as much as the game allows.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the letter that comes with this game.  Retail copies of StarTropics came with a rather thick, standard size NES manual that has a folded up letter attached to it.  The letter is from Uncle Steve, inviting Mike to come to his island, beginning the adventure.  However at the bottom of the letter is a rather stern warning from Nintendo that pretty much says “don’t eat this letter, save it until the end of the game.”  That’s weird, but reasonable.  The letter is mentioned in-game as well, and when you reach a certain part of the game you are instructed to dip the letter in water, the actual letter.  If you take your unsoaked letter and do this, a secret message appears.  (I guess the invisible ink is what Nintendo is trying to protect you from.)  There is a frequency given that you must enter or you will not be allowed to complete the game.  That frequency is 747.  I might as well say it without spoiler warnings because I can’t imagine anyone playing this game for the first time with the original letter intact, and there’s no reason to make anyone brute force the answer.

Bosses can put you in hot water, so to speak.

StarTropics was a game that I owned brand new back in the day.  At some point we ordered games directly from Nintendo.  Maybe it was something from Nintendo Power, I can’t be too sure.  We bought StarTropics and Punch-Out!!, the version without Mike Tyson.  Nothing too rare, but certainly good games.  Here’s a little story about my original playthrough.  I got to wet the letter to reveal the code just as intended.  But at the time, I didn’t know the best way to do it.  I ended up running the faucet over the letter, but I did it full blast and it ended up almost destroying the letter.  I don’t think I was able to read the entire message, but I did at least see the code so that I could progress.  Funny thing is, if I had to do it over today, I bet I would end up doing the same thing.  For certain things or situations, I don’t know why, but my brain picks the least effective way to do it and I just run with it.  That drives my wife crazy, but at least it gets done I guess.
 
StarTropics is a game I’ve played many times before.  I never forgot the 747 code, I know the route through the game, and where all the major items are.  Still, I expected this game to take several hours to clear since it always takes me multiple sittings to beat the game.  This time, I finished up the game over two sessions in three hours total, about half the time I expected.  It was nothing special either, just a normal playthrough with plenty of deaths and mostly decent playing.  This is now the kind of game that if I had a block of time with nothing to do, I know I could power through it in one shot and have a pretty good time doing so.

I very much recommend StarTropics as one of the essential NES games that belongs in every collection.  The graphics are simple in spots, but everything is bright and colorful.  There are very detailed character portraits in some of the cutscenes.  The music is catchy and easy to listen to, and the boss theme is good for getting your heart pumping during some difficult fights.  The game controls very well within the constraints of the grid system.  The scenes only have a little bit of graphical variation, but the level design has some good variety with some navigation puzzles and all sorts of traps, enemies, and bosses.  There are plenty of special weapons and items that mix up the formula even more.  The game is not too easy, but not too hard, with a smooth difficulty curve over the entire game.  Best of all, this game is still affordable at around $10.  If you haven’t tried it, go check it out, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I still do.

#167 – StarTropics