Developer: Sega
Publisher: Samsung Electronics
Release Date: 1989
Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle is the Genesis debut of a franchise that most people have never heard of. As a launch title for the Sega Genesis it could've been Alex Kidd's Mario moment. Instead the moment fizzled out and Alex Kidd was mostly forgotten. Of course there is more than one reason for this. One was that he just wasn't that interesting of a character. He had a boring design and a boring name. Another was that the Master System never did well enough to establish him as a familiar face. He had four games on the system, including one after Enchanted Castle, but most people hadn't played any of them. The main reason, though, was that the game just wasn't all that good. If he had been more popular than he might've weathered the storm, but for poor Alex there was just no way to survive this fiasco.
(You'd think a game where you can punch cars to death would be more fun)
All the problems from the previous games are in full display in this one. It's like they wanted to remake Alex Kidd in Miracle World but decided to only keep the bad parts. While the controls in Miracle World were somewhat loose Enchanted Castle is downright floaty. Every jump is a crap shoot, and the weird level design doesn't help matters. The game features almost constant jumping. So instead of hiding the game's shortcomings they decided to emphasize it. Be ready to miss a whole bunch of jumps. Much of the most dangerous jumping is reserved for collecting treasure chests. They are fun to collect, but the items you can get with the coins are almost useless. I used and item once the whole game and that was for the weird final boss. It feels like the treasures were put there mostly to put your character in more danger.
(bad underwater level alert!)
Of course if you know about Alex Kidd than you know what the biggest problem with the game is. For every boss and every attempted item collected you have to play rock, paper, scissors. It came up a few times in Miracle World, but in Enchanted castle it is everywhere. You might play a half dozen times in one level. Luckily the item collections don't kill you if you lose, but with the bosses one wrong move means instant death. There's nothing worse than when success is based purely on luck, and this is one of the prime examples. Imagine fighting your way to the end only to pick wrong and then having to start all over again. It's not a pleasant experience by any means. I was frustrated and I was playing with save states. My favorite part was letting my son pick which one to throw. At least he enjoyed watching me play it.
So this is a bit of a rough one. I liked the final level, the titular Enchanted Castle, but the rest of the game fell flat. I probably liked that last level because it was a fun maze and there weren't so many death falls. I wish the whole game was as well designed, but they hid all the quality in a place that most people would never see. If you played this game back in the day you probably died in the lousy first level and never got much further. Needless to say this game didn't make much of an impact, and age hasn't improved things. Alex Kidd has made a bit of a comeback in recent years, but this isn't the game from the series to rediscover.
I really thought this was going to end up in the red section, but it's not quite that bad. I got a little enjoyment out of it especially near the end. It's ending up near the bottom of the purple section at #62. You got lucky Alex. Your game is better than boring Atari 2600 games. That's not much of a victory, but this isn't really that much of a game.
Genesis Quality Percentage 1/2 or 50%
(Images are from mobygames.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment