I have finished
Super Wagyan Land for the Super Famicom.
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Super Wagyan Land is a 2D platformer by Namco(t), which originated on the Famicom. This game series reminds me of Alex Kidd: both are mascot platformers following in Mario's footsteps, both feature floaty jumps, one-hit deaths and mini games instead of boss fights. The levels can be super short, lasting only 15 to 20 seconds, and at other times they can become very long and quite difficult, which seems a bit weird to me. After all, this game seems to be targeted towards a young audience, but it can definitely get very difficult later on, even on normal mode.
Anyway, the main attack is some kind of shout that also shoots Japanese characters from the character's mouth! If this hits an enemy it gets stunned and can be touched or used as a stepping stone, but it will not kill an enemy. It's possible to collect the occasional power-up, that will increase the size of the attack. So at default strength the attack looks like this: ワッ wa, then with one power-up it's a small ギャ gya, with two it turns into ガ ga until it finally becomes a huge ギャ gya with three power-ups. And once four power-ups are collected, you become invincible and very fast for a while. Sounds familiar?
The game also features quite a bit of gameplay variety. Apart from the ordinary platforming levels there are also river rafting and slide levels. While rafting you can do nothing other than rowing with your paddle which will increase the speed of the raft and you have to fight against the current and try to avoid obstacles. This becomes pretty annoying in later levels, since you can potentialy become so fast that you can not react to the obstacles or enemies in time. Paired with one-hit deaths this lead to many cheap deaths. The same problem is sort of in the slide levels since you get quite fast here too. But in some instances these slide levels almost feel like autorunners, where you just have to press in one direction until you reach the goal. So while these may be nice ideas, they feel a bit underdeveloped and overly simple. What surprised me positively however were the ice levels. Usually these are among the most hated levels for many gamers, but here they are actually quite decent. This is because you have a new cool mechanic that causes your shouts to freeze in mid-air, allowing you to create passageways across huge gaps or to avoid enemies. And since the game feels already quite floaty, it doesn't get noticeably worse in the ice levels.
Now a few words regarding the presentation. The levels are visually quite varied and feature different surrounds, which is quite nice for an early SFC game. However, the quality of the graphics is extremely poor. So poor in fact, that I suspect, that this game was originally developed for the Famicom and later sort of ported and/or slightly enhanced for the SFC. Everything may look bright and cheerful, but the graphics are just so primitive! There are just two simple layers, no parralax scrolling or mode 7 shenanigans and no beautiful details either. It really baffles me how simple this game looks. And there is not much in terms of music either. There are maybe 6 or at most 7 different tracks in the game, so that you will hear the same tunes over and over again. Ugh!
But let's talk about the boss battles or the mini games. This is where shit really hits the fan! You start off with identifying scenes or characters. Here you are shown a highly pixelated version of a scene or character of the game and you have to identify the character or say where this scene takes place and what the character is doing. As time moves on the pixelated character or scene will become clearer and easier ot identify. Meanwhile a countdown is ticking down from 20 and once it reaches zero you have lost this round. So the whole point of this is to reach a certain number of points within 2 to 5 rounds. This gets really tough since your constantly in a race against the clock and you have to distinguish even the smallest details. And just as examples of what scenes you might see: e.g. a moonwalking penguin on the beach, a lion courting a female lion in a city or an armadillo throwing spears in a cave. Wtf?!? This is completely nuts and somewhat hilarious, but it also makes identifying and distinguishing these scenes very difficult! Moreover there may be slight differences such as "a walking bull that is running" or a "running bull that is walking", with the only difference being that in the former case you might eventually see two drops of sweat behind the bull. Sometimes it can get really frustrating since you see only a single moving, monochromatic dot! Another thing that absolutely boggles my mind is that there is little to no consistency with animals in real life. Because in this game snakes are red, lions have blue manes, scorpions are green and mushrooms blue. So unless you have already encountered these enemies, you will not be able to identify them. It's absolute BS and since the later challenges get extremely difficult this was a recipe for disaster. I basically had to rinse and repeat this over and over again until I memorized all the different characters and scenes, but even then it was difficult.
Then there is another game called "Shiritori". Shiritori is a Japanese game of words in which one person says a word and another person has to find another word that starts with the same syllable, with which the previous word has ended. this goes back and forth until of the people involved can no longer find a new word. Here you have to play this while choosing from different tiles showing an item or activity. Thus it is difficult to tell, what exactly a tile is depicting. In some cases it may be very easy and intuitive, while in others it is almost impossible to guess, e.g. "Spider", which in Japanese would be "kumo". however in this game it is suddenly the English loan word for spider, written like "supaidaa". So basically when you have to find a word beginning with "ku" you would instinctively pick the tile with a spider on it, until it reveals that this is actually called "Spider" in this game, i.e. a word beginning with the syllable "su". This is then registered as a mistake of yours and you will lose 5 seconds of your time! And this is just one of many egregious examples. Another one would be a picture of a missile, that is actually not a missile, but a "Patriot". Yes, it's still a kind of missile, but again, it starts with a different letter/syllable, which will cause you to get punsihed for making a wrong choice. And this shit extends all over that stupid Shiritori game. What is even worse is that the rules, or rather the names of the tiles, are suddenly changed in the final boss fight!!! This had me raging and raging. Throughout the game I accustomed to these names only to then be hit with a brick wall when suddenly the tile for "Spider" is longer read as "supaidaa", but as "kumo"! The "Patriot" becomes "missile" again and even worse, the tile for "corn" changes from the Japanese word of corn to the English loan word, written as "koon". And since this word ends with the letter "n" it somehow means that you have lost the whole game? This is fucking outrageous as the game just pulls the rug from udner your feet in the last and most difficult confrontation of the game!
And finally there is a game where cards are scattered across a board and each card has a unique number from 1 to 40 written on it. You then just have to find the card with the right number before your enemy does. This was quite easy and a welcome change of pace. The fourth and final game was agame of pairs. Just find the right images and get more correct pairs than the CPU. If the CPU didn't have to go over every single card whenever he makes a turn it would be a more enjoable game.
All in all this game is longer, more varied in its gameplay and more ambitious than the classic Alex Kid games. As such I would consider Super Wagyan Land to be decent. However, the platforming sections are usually too simple or sometimes too long with no checkpoints in between and the mini games can eventually become absolutely frustrating, because whenever you lose one of them, you have to redo the level on top of losing one life. And some of those later mini games were just gruesomely difficult and killed every bit of enjoyment I had with the game. It would potentially have been much more palatable, if they had tweaked the mini games a bit or only included them once every few levels. But as it is the game is just so, so frustating that I can not possibly recommend it. I would probably rate it a 4 out of 10 and that might be lenient of me.
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