NES #30: Zoda's Revenge: Star Tropics 2

So last time I was on here I was talking about the somewhat fun but ultimately lazy Rescue Rangers 2. In that post I was talking about how many of the late releases showed what the NES could do both in terms of graphics and gameplay. Well Zoda's revenge is the perfect example of this. Zoda's Revenge came out about a month after RR2, and it's one of the last three games Nintendo released for the NES. It's such a late release that they could've done a lousy job on it and nobody would have even noticed. Luckily they put a lot of time into it so that the NES could go out in style.

I feel slightly weird about the fact that this game came out right around my tenth birthday. The NES has always been such a part of my life that it's hard to believe that by the time I was 10 it was all over. They would start clearing out all the NES stock from stores, and rental places would get rid of them in favor of the 16 bits. This was something that I had a hard time dealing with way back in '94. Every kid has trouble dealing with change, and this is one that I just couldn't tolerate. I felt like my whole world was crumbling away. It caused me to be bitter at the SNES for years to come. That's probably why I have 260 NES games and about 30 SNES ones.

The commercials for this game did give me a little bit of hope however. It was advertised in the same commercial as the top loading NES. By then the price of the NES had dropped to 49.95 which just about any collector would be happy to pay today. If only we had known. The same commercial also advertised Mega Man 6, so I thought that the system was making a comeback. Little did I know that it was more of a last gasp.

Thankfully this was quite a last gasp. Zoda's Revenge is one of the best action RPGs that I've played on the NES. By this point most of the ambiguity and slow pacing that plagued earlier RPGs is gone. This game moves at a very quick, action packed pace. It has an entertaining story where Mikey is time traveling while looking for magic Tetris pieces, and it's able to unfold well while never slowing down the pace. This is something I wish modern games would be able to do. Also, unlike some games that will remain nameless, you get to go to Egypt and fight Sphinxes that shoot lasers out of their eyes.

They also tried to fix the problems from the first game. I appreciate them for trying, but some of the fixes are better than others. You get two weapons at a time in this one, and only one of them has strength based on your heart level. No matter how weak you are you will still have a good weapon to use. There also seem to be more opportunities to save your progress which is helpful in a game full of difficult dungeons. Most notably this game does away with all those green boxes. They are still there, but you can simply walk over them instead of jumping one space at a time. This is a welcome change, but it does make the jumping a little odd in this one. It was far too easy to jump to your death which was usually not a problem in the first game. You still move like you're walking on ice as well. At least they tried to fix the motion problem.

This game still has very difficult dungeons and bosses, but unlike the first game I never got overly frustrated. I'm not going to spend too much time talking about the bosses on this one, but some of them were difficult. A few of them felt like mini bosses, but I didn't really mind that so much because they came after difficult dungeon stages. The final stage is set up Mega Man style where you fight many of the old bosses over again. Zoda isn't as difficult as he was the first time around, but he's got about 8 bosses in front of him so it all balances out.

This game really feels like it was made by a group of people that were going to miss the NES as much as I did. As a result they put much more into this game than was probably required and I do appreciate that. The Nintendo suffered a long, painful death where it had to watch its younger brother rise to power. I'm happy that even in its last moments there were still people out there that cared about it.