Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II (NES Review)

Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released March, 1994
Directed by Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada
Developed by Nintendo
NO MODERN RELEASE

It took me this long, roughly two minutes into starting a new game, to realize I was not going to be having any fun. While this isn’t REALLY a random encounter into a mini-dungeon, it’s structured to make you think it is. It’s the first of many terrible ideas in this terrible, terrible game.

Oh my God. Okay, so the first StarTropics isn’t exactly a masterpiece. After all, I called it “the absolute stupidest good game ever made” so it’s not like I was expecting to be blown away by a sequel. I didn’t even want the clunky mechanics to be fixed. I got used to them, and there’s basically no game like the first StarTropics. I didn’t mind awkwardly hopping across tiles or having too stiff of movement and rigid turning. At least it played completely uniquely. I would have settled for a glorified expansion pack with more levels, bosses, and less busy work. Well, they did try to fix the mechanics, and the end result is Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II is the embodiment of the “broke, or made better?” joke from the Simpsons. This might be the worst Nintendo-developed game ever made. At the very least, I have to believe it’s their worst sequel, and I do mean EVER. I hope so, at least. I mean, how could they have ever done worse than this?

This got me all excited thinking Zoda’s Revenge would take a break and let me ride the Haunted Mansion, but nope.

I bought StarTropics II for Virtual Console ten years ago and I never finished it. I’m not even sure I beat the Egypt stage, which is only the second level. I had no desire to go on, because everything I enjoyed about the first game is gone here. Just gone-gone, and other aspects that I didn’t enjoy so much have been made worse. The satisfying yo-yo combat? Gone, replaced with generic throwing weapons that have no speed or range. As if that’s not bad enough, the enemies seem to have had their sponginess bumped-up. Maybe it just feels like it because the combat is so much slower. Whatever the reason, the combat is NEVER fun in StarTropics II. It’s a slog. Really boring boss fights too, as none of them have the personality of the original game’s bosses.

F*cking end me.

The tile-based jumping is also gone. In this game, you can just walk across the tiles. They tried to give the level design a greater sense of exploration, including more levels with multiple floors, like in Zelda games. Except it just didn’t work for me because the themes, enemies, and mechanics aren’t as fun. Like, people who are playing a sequel presumably liked the first game, right? So why is the tile triggering mechanic from the first game no longer here? Were people complaining about that? Because if people are complaining about a primary gameplay mechanic, maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do a sequel at all. In Zoda’s Revenge, when a block is a switch, it blinks when you walk on it, letting you know that you have to hop on it. If it’s supposed to help open a door or a chest, it’ll make a question mark ball appear instead of leaving a footprint on the tile and causing a button to rise up somewhere else. It’s such a massive downgrade that it almost feels like the first game’s way of doing the tiles and switches is the updated sequel-like way of handling it.

The developers did attempt to change-up the combat by giving you a psychic lightning ball. A couple enemies, including the ones pictured above, can only be harmed by it. But, while you can fire it faster, until you get the final upgrade late in the game, it’s limited in range just like the throwing weapons. Also, the wide variety of exotic special items from the first game are gone here, and the one that makes a return appearance has its range also limited. God forbid anyone have any fun with this game.

The exotic tropical setting? That’s gone too, at least until the final level which is just the exact same cave that made up the first level from the original game. Literally the same map and everything. The rest of the game has a time travel theme where you meet such famous historic figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, Sherlock Holmes, and King Arthur. Wait, what? And, like so many time travel-themed games, it doesn’t really matter because the action segments do such a poor job of making you believe you’re in a different time period, especially when so many enemies keep showing up in each era. You’re looking for magical Tetris blocks, and, SPOILER, when you beat the game, the alien kids you rescued in the first game are reunited with their father, then peace-out and leave for their home planet without saying goodbye to the villagers who have taken care of them for the last year. Little pointy-eared twerps. Not that I cared or anything but, jeez, what a downer of an ending.

NOTE: MICA AND THE UNGRATEFUL ALIEN TWERPS DIED ON THE WAY BACK TO THEIR HOME PLANET!

But what really sucks about StarTropics II is they completely wrecked the already janky movement physics. They tried to smooth out the stiffness, but all they did was make it easier to walk into enemies. Since ranged weapons don’t show up until the very end, this is a big problem. You can move while you jump now as well, but that REALLY crashes the gameplay. If not for the ability to rewind, I would have certainly eaten a game over from botching even the most basic jumps over pits. Or, if not that, accidentally jumping into pits while fighting enemies and bosses.

The differences in elevation actually create this really unintuitive optical illusion for jumping. It’s hard to explain but it feels like they didn’t properly express how high you are and what that means for the rest of the room.

You see, height matters a lot in StarTropics II for both platforming and enemy attack patterns. Some rooms have elevated platforms, and many enemies and even at least one boss battle require you to jump to damage them. That would be fine with the old StarTropics I physics, where you can’t jump forward unless you’re jumping to a tile or across a pit. In StarTropics II, you can move while you jump anywhere, but you can’t aim at them without also moving. That’s kind of a problem when you surround the player with instakill pits or water, and I died a ton from trying to aim at enemies with my short-range weapons and accidentally falling to my death. In exchange for all that, you can move diagonally now. Oooh, diagonal.

A whopping three boss fights take place on these automatic movement arrows. These specific ones move really fast, and your attack sprite just barely reaches the center of the screen where the boss is. The end result is one of the very worst boss fights in any Nintendo-developed game.

To make matters even worse, with the new movement style comes a much heavier emphasis on platforming. I’m not the biggest fan of top-down platforming in general, and that’s assuming the game controls well. StarTropics II, you know, doesn’t. Since jumping and collision detection is so hard to judge in Zoda’s Revenge, leaning into obstacles based around jumping with moving platforms or disappearing platforms was a recipe for disaster. Oh, and sometimes the ledges will have an invisible wall to stop you from simply walking off the side and to your death, but sometimes it doesn’t. The original StarTropics had some timing-based stuff like hopping over knives sticking out of the ground or cannonballs, but it feels like they tailored the challenge to the limitations of the physics. With Zoda’s Revenge, I get the impression they eventually just sort of shrugged and said “meh, good enough” even though it wasn’t.

It really feels like I cleared it but whatever.

As a result of all the changes, Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t really feel like a sequel so much as a really bad rip-off of StarTropics made by a completely different team. That’s sad, because it’s from the same director and artists. It’s COMPLETELY lacking in charm, and even the busy work is worse than ever. I’m pretty sure the reason I quit the first time was because a gigantic blind maze happens in the middle of the Egypt level. You have to climb these towers to get a peak of the layout, but the actual navigating has to be done without seeing the walls. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad if they don’t overdo it. But then it keeps going and refuses to stop. The one improvement over the original: you no longer have to talk to everyone to open up the actual levels. I guess they were as bored with that as I was.

Also that monkey is later revealed to be Merlin the wizard. I wish I was joking.

So the enemies are dull, the boss fights are charmless, the movement parameters are all screwed up, there’s too many basic square-shaped rooms with no frills in them, the level structure is bad, and the time travel theme is a total bust. It can’t get any worse, right? I mean, it’s not like right before the big final climax, there’s a full-roster boss rush, RIGHT? Of course there is.

At least now you have a ranged weapon for them. The last one isn’t a previous boss but rather Zoda’s head lice. Oh, but it’s evil head lice that unlocks the final battle.

For all of its many, many problems, at least StarTropics felt like it came from a place of inspiration. Zoda’s Revenge doesn’t. Zoda’s Revenge was the final NES-exclusive game developed by Nintendo. Now I’ve played several post-SNES releases for the NES that were so good that I’ve suggested the NES had a secret golden age that nobody talks about. This includes a decent Flintstones game and an even better sequel, a genuinely underrated Jetsons game, a Wacky Races platformer that should make for an excellent children’s game, a DuckTales sequel that I feel easily tops the original and might be the most underrated NES game ever, the long awaited NES port of Bonk’s Adventure, and the third and best Adventure Island game. Other companies weren’t phoning-in the NES’ swan song, so it’s just such a heartbreaker that the series finale of the NES that was made by Nintendo themselves (I’m not counting Wario Woods since that was also on the SNES) sucks so very, very much.

The last form of Zoda, who now looks more like Zorak from Space Ghost, also looks like he’s taking a wiz in the middle of our battle to the death.

It feels like someone at Nintendo said “there’s still millions of NES owners in America who would buy new software for it instead of SNES games. Who wants to make the last original NES game?” and everyone said “NOT IT!” until Genyo Takeda was the only one left. This was HIS last directed game, by the way. He’s the genius behind Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! and he also made the original StarTropics. The first StarTropics was created to appeal to American gamers and never got a global release until Virtual Console came around. Hell, it’s still never gotten ANY Japanese release to this very day, even via Switch Online. Because the Macguffins are Tetris blocks and the final cinematic involves the chief of C-Island assembling them via playing Tetris, I’m guessing they can’t re-release this on Switch Online. That’s fine, by the way, because this is NOT a sequel to StarTropics. It’s barely a shadow of it. It’s fitting that the ending of Zoda’s Revenge is such a downer. It’s art imitating life. Or, wait, is it the other way around?
Verdict: NO!

Kind of looks like Moth Man.