There is, quite literally, nobody left on the planet who has not seen Star Wars. In fact, I'm positive that the number of times in total that Star Wars has been watched - any one of the episodes - at least triples that of the entire population of Earth. So I suppose I really don't need to explain the basic premise or even the characters - I could pretty much just mention the word "Luke" and everybody would immediately jump in their minds to Mr. Skywalker, with his glowing lightsaber and somersaulting Force jumping powers.
That being said, there are some elements out there that remain totally unknown to even the more dedicated fans of the series - nay, universe - of Star Wars. The more casual fans probably don't know, for instance, about the trilogy of novels by Timothy Zahn. The dedicated fans may or may not know about the Star Wars Life Day Special - we may never know for sure if they do or not, because I have it under relatively good authority that many fans are trying to mentally blot out the fact that it was even created, myself included (though I admit I'm not doing a very good job of it here).
But who can honestly say that they've heard of Star Wars, the 1987 Famicom game by Namco? I wouldn't blame them for not knowing - after all, it was only released in Japan. A real shame, if you ask me...because outside of Atari's wonderful vector-graphics arcade game, this is probably the best 80's video game based on Star Wars that I've played. Although in this case, "best" is only a relative term, as the game does have a good number of flaws and annoyances...not to mention, like other movie-based games of the time, it throws the movie's plot almost completely out the window. Not to mention it's ridiculously hard, even despite the game giving you the "Novice Mission" option - though it's not clear if that's an act of mercy, or an insult.
As the game begins (backed with a 2A03-powered rendition of John Williams' famous opening theme), we see Luke Skywalker crouched down next to his brand new droid R2-D2. R2 suddenly starts projecting an image of Princess Leia, who (I'm taking a wild guess here) utters her famous cry for help. In Japanese. Did I mention this game was never released in the States? I can't read any of this. I seriously need to take a Japanese language course or something. (Okay, there is a fan-translation patch available, but I choose not to play with it until I've played through the original Japanese version. Have to make sure that what I'm seeing on screen is 100% accurate, after all.)
Now, anybody who's seen the movie probably remembers that Luke bought R2-D2 from the droid-scavenging Jawas. But after Leia's grand speech, R2 is seen being carried off from Luke's place by the Jawas. So Luke has to go save him. Again. Maybe. Assuming that he saved him before by buying him from the very same Jawas that are now carrying him off. But let's not argue semantics. After R2 gets hauled off, legs kicking and everything, Luke sets out towards the Jawa sandcrawler, lightsaber in hand...um, wait, Luke's not supposed to have his lightsaber yet! He hasn't even met Obi-Wan! But ahem, moving on...
The game feels a bit like Zelda 2 in a way - Luke (wait-a-minute - Luke? Link? Bit of a close resemblance there!) can run and jump, swing his anachronistic lightsaber that he arguably shouldn't even know how to wield yet, and kill the Tatooine wildlife with impunity, because nobody ever said that a Jedi can't administer death to random desert critters without shifting over to the Dark Side - hell, remember Obi-Wan cutting off that guy's arm in the cantina? If he can justify it, so can Luke!
Luke can also use various Force powers to - among other things - make his lightsaber shoot laser bullets. I wish this were just a product of my imagination, but alas, it is not. Though I suppose it should only be fair that Luke be able to shoot laser bullets, after Darth Vader was given the same ability in - I think - Jedi Arena for the Atari, but I can't be sure. That period was all a big blur to me. It's worth noting, though, that Luke has no health bar - he dies in just one touch, whether that touch be a tiny little desert crab, or landing on a Tusken raider, or even walking into a Stormtrooper's back. It doesn't matter. He dies. Perhaps the most idiotic gameplay mechanic of the 80's manifests itself here, that of dying upon touching people. It's really got to suck for Luke, not being able to rub shoulders with Biggs and Wedge or even recieve a kiss from Leia without dying...and I'm no doctor, but crap, man, that's gotta be one hell of a heart condition!
So after Luke crosses the Tatooine desert, he stumbles upon the (silver) Jawa sandcrawler and steps aboard...to find that it's full of stormtroopers. Stormtroopers and desert critters. And, get this, once you reach the highest level of the sandcrawler, you meet Darth Vader (here referring to himself as Sasori Vader) in lightsaber combat. Except the first time you hit him, in a moment even more absurd than the giant Dolph Lundgren in the SNES's Universal Soldier, he turns into a giant fucking scorpion. Something tells me that the progression of this game was designed more for Coolness Factor than it was towards accuracy to the movie...let alone any semblance of logic whatsoever. Even with the existing suspension of disbelief that comes with Star Wars (what with jedis and lightsabers and space combat), this must be some amazing Force power to be able to transform into a damn scorpion. Of course, it could also be Luke hallucinating Darth Vader's image when he is really only fighting an ordinary, run of the mill giant fucking scorpion, but in any case, Darth Vader is not supposed to be on the Jawa sandcrawler. Then again, neither is the damn scorpion. Oh, the mental conundrums, the headaches of trying to explain video game physics! It kind of makes me glad I'm not writing this as a college science paper. Though I'll contend that the Japanese players probably expected him to turn into a scorpion from the moment they met him - after all, he does introduce himself as Sasori Vader, where Sasori translates into "scorpion" (thanks Atma!). This in no way justifies Vader's appearance on the sandcrawler, nor his arachnid transformation. (Hell, at least they didn't give him a giant fighting robot like they did with Spiderman.)
As soon as our Vader scorpion has bitten the dust (whether through VERY good reflexes, or liberal use of Force Laser Bullets), Luke finds R2 and the two Jawas that carried him off - all three of which are behind a force field. Now there's no switch nearby to turn off the force field, and attempting to walk into it will kill Luke by making him just slump over like every other time he dies. No. To turn off the force field, Luke has to hit it with his lightsaber. Then it just turns off, no explosions or anything, and he's able to save R2 and the Jawas (who appear in a resulting text box in chibi form). Then Luke gets to exit the sandcrawler.
Interestingly, you actually get to pilot Luke's landspeeder here. All you have to do is pick up an orb with a picture of the landspeeder on it, and suddenly it materializes beneath Luke. You can feel free to ram the speeder into just about any living thing (blowing Stormtroopers into puffs of smoke by touching them is fun, considering they'd do just the opposite to you without your precious landspeeder to protect you). Just don't crash into the scenery, or the landspeeder is toast, throwing Luke into the air. And heaven help you if you crash with a flying enemy directly above you - Luke's ejection from the landspeeder will invariably send him careening into said flying enemy, killing him on the spot, in midair, to boot - Luke is dead before he hits the ground. Ordinarily, Luke survives the impact without a scratch, providing he doesn't clip any birds on the way up or down. It's entirely possible to complete the level in the landspeeder with good jumping skills. It's even rather amusing to end the level by jumping on top of the cantina at the end, making the landspeeder disappear and mysteriously transform into the Millenium Falcon. Never mind that we never actually see the inside of the cantina, let alone Han or Chewy at this point - in fact, the first person that speaks to you once you have commandeered the Falcon is the voice of Obi-Wan, setting the stage for a first-person space combat sequence. I think you actually have to rescue both Han and Chewy later in the game. Damn, guys, I thought you were too good to get captured! (Oh wait, I just remembered Han being frozen in carbonite in the next movie. Never mind then, carry on!)
The space combat feels a little like Atari's Star Wars machine - you don't really have to worry about piloting, just shoot down the TIE fighters and their bombs or else the Falcon gets blown to smithereens (I love that word, "smithereens"). You have three smart-bombs you can use that theoretically blow up all the enemies on screen, but I never actually had the chance to use them, because at the start of the level I decided to start hammering the fire button, which it turns out is not the A button, but rather the B button. So my Takahashi Meijin button-mashing ended up wasting all of my bombs in less than a second, before there were any Imperial pilots on screen. Ah well, I thought. I can beat the sequence without bombs.
Then a TIE fighter crashed into me and I died.
Well, arguably I didn't die - not according to the game, after making liberal use of my emulator's Rewind function (NESTopia is awesome like that) - but my character's life had ended a few times here, despite my best attempts at preventing it. Thus, I was forced to rewind, because I had no idea how many lives were available to me (though I now know that you only get three lives and no continues), and I didn't want to get the dreaded Game Over screen before I had sufficient material to write this article. (Note: Only later did I find out that what I had been wasting was not actually a bomb at all, but a burst of the Falcon's deflector shields. This brings their usefulness to absolute nil, because I'm horrible at timed defense.)
Once this sequence had ended, I was deposited on...some mountainous planet with a lot of critters on it. Such as my number one mortal enemy, the mutant frog. My sources tell me that this planet may actually be Kessel, but given how generic it is, it could really be anything. I almost mistook it for Dagobah, myself, until I saw the second half of it. Now, the objective on Kessel is to find and bail out poor, old, defenseless Obi-Wan from the same fragile-but-deadly force fields that previously contained R2 and the Jawas. And of course, in order to reach him, you have to find and defeat the level boss, which once again is Darth Vader, except now he turns into a dragon. An irritating, flying dragon, in the finest tradition of such annoying bosses as Red Arremer. Force Laser Bullets once again come in quite handy for dealing with this pest, but since he flies, and since Luke cannot shoot up (another fine holdover from the rest of the 1980's - thanks a lot!), this is made much more difficult. I imagine most players would probably see the Game Over screen at this point, if the previous shooter sequence and Giant Fucking Scorpion didn't do so already (or hell, any of the stormtroopers in the first level). And I was no exception here.
The Game Over screen is actually a little disappointing. There's not even a little musical blurb to go with it like all the Super Mario games - we just get a tiny portrait of Darth Vader, accompanied by some NES-style creepy inhaler noises. The NES can't even try to replicate the sound of Vader's lungs, so this just makes the Game Over screen even less interesting. Of course this is before the days when developers started getting really creative with their death sequences (MGS3 and SMT Nocturne come to mind...).
But I had to keep playing, so once again I brought in my favorite secret weapon: the Rewind button. Normally I wouldn't be one to advocate cheating through a game, as that tends to remove the fun from it, but this makes the game just a little bit more tolerable.
Oh, and Kessel itself? For some reason, Namco made it look like Egypt. There are King Tut statues lying around, and pictures of Tut's famous sarcophagus on the walls of the temple that Luke later finds.
At this point I started to experiment with Luke's different Force powers. Each power requires you to have a certain amount of Force stored up (which can be boosted by picking up little diamonds dropped by enemies), or else its icon will not appear in the pause menu. Such powers include increased walking speed, the ability to stop time (which is much more useful than Castlevania's stopwatch, as it costs less and lasts much longer - but it still doesn't work on Darth Vader), levitation, and for some bizarre reason, the ability to warp Luke back to an earlier point in the level for no reason whatsoever. I suppose that could be a useful defense if, say, Luke is just a split second away from falling down a hole...but outside of that, it costs way too much Force to be worth it. I'd rather just save-state and keep the Force power for laser bullets and levitating past tricky platforming bits. Yes, I know, it's still cheating. But it's a hard game.
On a second playthrough of the Kessel level, I discovered a powerup item that I had not previously picked up: a blaster. Luke can actually arm himself with a blaster for a limited time, though this essentially has the same effect as Force Laser Bullets (except that Luke no longer swings his lightsaber in order to shoot). I should also take this moment to mention that ladders are utterly ridiculous: Luke can only seem to mount them from the top or bottom, because they block him from the sides, with only a select few noted exceptions like the floating platform room in the temple. This means that, in order to climb down a ladder that is sticking above the ground, you have to jump on top of the ladder, and then move down. And true to Castlevania form, you can't jump off of them either, and to make things worse, you can't attack from a ladder either - not even with a blaster or Force Laser Bullets. These flaws are quite plainly illustrated once you get inside the temple, as the very first ladder you find is being circled by a large fireball that - surprise, surprise - will kill Luke when he touches it. You have to time your jump just right so Luke will stand on top of the ladder and avoid the fireball's first pass, then start moving down at about the right time so that the fireball will just miss him on his way down. I died at least twice attempting this. It's the ladder's fault, I swear. Has there ever been a ladder in a video game that was actually pleasant to use?
Time to go off on a tangent here - ladders are about the most unfriendly, dangerous, and just plain irritating level design element in a game. It's a simple element, really, allowing the player to go up and down as much as is needed, allowing them to reach heights they cannot access normally. But ladders have also been my number two cause of death in the Game Boy Castlevania games, especially Legends (actually, those were ropes, but the point still stands!). While Mega Man was able to easily dismount and shoot from ladders, taking damage threw him off of them, often into pits or spikes. In modern 3D games, even the simple act of attaching oneself to a ladder can prove deadly in games like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, where it's entirely possible to miss the ladder and slam into the wall, making the Prince fall into a pit. Or some spikes. Even first-person shooters, which should be easier by all rights due to being able to see exactly where you're aiming yourself, have been plagued by ladder deaths. Half-Life is a good example: ladders in the game are tricky to mount, meaning trying to descend them could often result in falling the entire length of the ladder and making poor Dr. Freeman's shins stick out his shoulders. Or perhaps you're on a ladder, want to get off, and there is somebody shooting at you. You try to jump off, but the game physics somehow place you back on the ladder, and you're turned into creamed corn by the enemy's rocket. I could go on and on with this, but we're kind of straying from the point of this article, which is to review a damn Star Wars game, not to nitpick at every video game in the universe.
I opened the pause menu at some point to cast Force Laser Bullets again, when I noticed that the rescued friends appear in this menu as selectable options. The only one I had available to me was R2 (strangely not the Jawas that I rescued with him). Selecting him presumably contacts him by radio, a la Metal Gear...but he has nothing to say, and generates an ellipsis. Snubbed by a robot? Ouch, Luke. Very ouch.
The music in this game...well, we've all heard the Star Wars soundtrack, right? Most likely to the point where anybody could drum up an impromptu a capella version of the Imperial March if asked to do so. Well, this game doesn't disappoint in the audio accuracy bit - unfortunately, every single level has the same Rebellion theme playing in the background, to the point where you'd rather rip the speakers out than listen to it anymore. Even the boss theme, based on the usual Star Wars combat theme (whose name escapes me at the moment because it was so generic in the first place...but you'd know it if you heard it) is actually rather poorly done on the NES synth. There is only one instrument playing the actual tune, as opposed to the orchestra that performed the original - and as a result it loses a lot of its depth and makes it sound like an amateur's chip remix. In fact, I had almost led myself to believe that the tune wasn't even from Star Wars - once I realized how wrong I was, I only wished I could stay wrong, because this just sounds awful.
But even in spite of the game's (extremely frustrating) flaws, the game turns out to be much better than I seem to be making out to be. Once you can get a handle on Luke's heart-attack-prone self, and come to grips with the fact that apparently Darth Vader can transform into a gargoyle, then you'll find yourself a halfway decent platformer. Not to mention a hilarious thing to show your fellow Star Wars fans (especially Namco's one-off Fox logo parody). There is a fan translation patch available for the game as well, which enables you to understand (partially) what is being said, but even when patched, the game doesn't make much sense.
Licenced crap, or underappreciated gem? Well, you be the judge.
