#action-puzzle

The game is the debut release of future Pokémon creator, Game Freak.  Prior to this entry into the video development industry, Game Freak was simply the name of Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori's self-published video game fanzine, which began running in March of 1983.  The game was designed by Tajiri and features art by Sugimori.  The American version, of course, takes the "angry eyebrows Kirby” approach and ditches the cute Sugimori art in favor of designs with more attitude (seen in the title screen above and on the American box art), which look just terrible.

The plot, especially in the American version, is pretty bare bones, as could be expected from an NES action game.  The plot, which can be read in the manual, is your standard rescue-the-princess kind of story.  The hero, Bon-Bon, must rescue Princess Candy after her dolls come to life, cast her into an eternal sleep, and cart her off to the titular Mendel Palace.  The Japanese version provides a bit more detail and whimsy.

In this version, the characters all live in a country of dolls.  The protagonist is named Carton (with the second player character being named Parton!) and the damsel is Jenny.  The plot to capture Jenny is orchestrated by Carton’s sorceress younger sister, the titular Quinty.  After Carton and Jenny fall in love, Quinty becomes jealous of the attention she is receiving and manages to convince her and Carton’s three older brothers to kidnap her, who comply with the hopes that Quinty will pick one of them as a favorite.  I don't think Quinty or the brothers are ever named in any of the American material.  Maybe Quinty's American name is Mendel?  I guess?  Whatever, I'll be using the Japanese names because I like them better anyway.

In any case, when the game starts you off on a map screen, allowing you to play through the eight dollhouses surrounding the central palace in any order.  Upon entering any of the dollhouses, the objective is to defeat all of the dolls inside by flipping tiles in order to slide them into the walls.  In addition to regular tiles, there are also others, such as star tiles, which act as coins and give you an extra life when you collect 100; shockwave tiles, which flip all other tiles in all four cardinal directions; and the bane of my fucking existence, the portal tiles, which spawn in another enemy whenever they appear.

Each of the initial eight dollhouses feature a unique type of doll, posing various levels of challenge.  The easiest ones are the walkmen, which just pursue the player and, in later stages, split into two smaller versions if they are slid without them hitting a wall.  They aren't even really good at pursuing the player, since they cannot walk into you if you stop moving.  The others are much more challenging, such as the jumpers which cannot be slid while they are mid-jump, the mimics which move when you move and flip tiles at the same time you do, or the swimmers which quickly swim across the room and flip tiles behind them as they go. Each dollhouse contains ten rooms, the tenth of which usually contains a boss encounter (save for the walkmen dollhouse).

The bosses of the initial eight dollhouses are either extremely powered up versions of the dolls in the dollhouse or a fight with one of the brothers (though in the American release, some of the boss fights against the brothers are replaced with fights against Quinty).  The brothers simply hop over you and can typically be baited into hopping next to a wall where you can easily defeat them.  Quinty will use her magic to turn you into a doll, which allows her to slide you into walls to defeat you.  But if she turns you into a powerful type of doll such as a sumo wrestler, who can flip rows of tiles, you can turn this against her.

The central palace (Mendel Palace in the North American version) contains all eight types of dolls and ends with a fight with one of the brothers followed by a cutscene of Quinty whisking you away to her true palace in the clouds.  The palace in sky contains a ninth type of doll and ends with one last brother fight followed by a final battle against Quinty.  As mentioned before, in the Japanese version you only fight the brothers in the dollhouses, so in this version, this is the only time you fight her.

So, as you can see the game has a lot of different elements that it plays with.  Some of them seem pretty simple at first, but it quickly ratchets up the difficulty in each area with different tile configurations for each room.  A lot of the most difficult rooms feature large amounts of portal tiles, which spawn in new enemies as you defeat them, forcing you to think of ways to quickly get rid of them.  Other rooms will simply box you in with large amounts of block tiles which block your path or limit your options with large amounts of bolted tiles which you cannot flip.

However, a lot of this difficulty is sidestepped by the fact that you have infinite continues.  This allowed me to hammer through the game pretty quickly.  But now that I've beaten it and figured out strategies for a lot of the tougher points by just bashing my head into them I can see myself minimizing the continues with practice.  The game also has a secret Extra Palace mode which can be accessed by holding Start + Select and then resetting your system and consists of a linear set of 100 new, more difficult levels.  If I ever come back to this game it will be to play the extra mode.

Graphically, all of the sprites and animations in the game are very cute, which of course goes with Sugimori's art very well and clashes pretty badly with the North American art.  Quinty in particular has a really cute design, so I felt kind of bad during the ending because she is just crying in the corner of the room while Carton and Jenny have their little moment.  The music by Junichi Masuda is very catchy and reminescent of his later work with the Pokémon series.  A friend of mine pointed out while I was streaming the game that the opening of the boss battle theme sounds like it could be the fanfare that plays during the transition into a wild Pokémon encounter.

So, even though I pretty much charged through this game continues blazing, I ended up enjoying it.  I liked the cute style and all of the twists it threw in to the relatively simple formula.  The game also has co-op multiplayer which might be another reason to revisit it, on top of the extra mode.  I should point out that another new thing I did while playing this game was used the Retro Achievements website via the RetroArch multi-system emulator, which I plan to do for other games in the future where possible.  Next time I'll be playing the original Fire Emblem by Intelligent Systems.  Until then, take it easy~