Frankenstein: The Monster Returns

This is another Castlevania clone I'm reviewing, my first such review was on " MOD" and we will see if this one fared much better than that one, which I was not too keen on it, to say the least. One thing I need you to know before we review this game. Is that this NES game came out in 1990. At this point, all three games in the original classic Castlevania trilogy had been out, with the third game having been out half a year at this point. So keep that in mind when I talk about this game. Master of Darkness came out in 1992... Just let the release date of these games hang over the rest of this review like a sword of Damocles.
On a whole, the game is as direct of a rip-off of another game as you can imagine. It's the Castlevania formula with only a minor bit of variation here and there that I will talk about throughout the rest of this review.

Graphically and aesthetically this game is only a little less good than those Castlevania titles. In comparison to Master of Darkness, the levels in this game are much more varied and detailed. There are occasional areas that are just straight black/blue spots with no detail or color filled in like in a lot of these generic 8-bit titles, but they at least minimize the number of times they do that in this game, especially in comparison to MOD. I like the look of some levels, especially the second forest level. The ending areas go full Contra, where it has levels that look like you're exploring an 8-bit rendition of Satan's asshole. The animations on the bosses and enemies is good. I think the Medusa head in the second level is a particularly good example of this game's bosses. It's extremely well animated for its time and has very fluid movements. I also like the first boss in the level, that flying demon, it's totally nonsensically colored being half yellow and green with no respect to line work at all, but if I had played this game as a child instead of the first time being about ten years back, it would probably be something I tried to draw when I was bored at school. I really love the Frankenstein sprites in this game and the "still shots" of him in the game little cinemas. A lot of the other bosses are just straight ripoffs of Castlevania shit, like Death in the first level and Dracula later on in the game, both of which do animations and movements identical to their Castlevania representations. Every game that rips off Castlevania has a Dracula sprite that opens its cloak up and spits fire at you. Without fail, they all thought this was part of the magical formula that made those games work somehow. Even shitty MOD tried to copy it and I'll say this for Frankensense here, their ripoff of Dracula is much better than that game.
This game wasn't just content to ripoff Castlevania, it also rips off Zelda 2, in the first level at least. You can walk into doors, talk to people and a miniboss in one of those doors looks like the long-headed dragon enemy in that there Zelda game. This game has a lot of neat ideas in each level like these doors to other areas in the first one, but it doesn't really carry those ideas out into the rest of the game and build on them as a good game would.
Sub weapons don't really exist in this game. In lieu of that, the game opts to try to give you more of a feeling of progression in that your character starts out weaponless in the first level, and then your character goes on to have a sword, which gets replaced by another sword. Which presumably is more powerful but I didn't really notice a difference much in the damage it did. In some levels, enemies drop this red orb thing, which like Zelda makes it so you can fling circles of fire around until you get hit once and the power is lost. You can also get health bar increases and these things that are like "reserve tanks" in Metroid and "energy tanks" in Megaman. You press select and your health fills up. Your health bar kind of looks like the one in Megaman as well. Yellow pellets over a dark background. The attempt to make your character feel stronger through progression was a nice idea, but fundamentally even when I did playthroughs of this where I got as little of the upgrades as possible I didn't really feel much of a difference in the gameplay. Which doesn't say a whole lot about their attempts to make the player feel more powerful as the game progresses. The lack of sub-weapons also takes a big chunk of the variety and choice a player has in this kind of platformer, for all its faults MOD at least got that right about this type of game.
The game has some beatem'up like sections, where enemies are thrown at you left and right, and then the screen stops the way an action scene would in those games. Uncharacteristic for a Castlevania-like game, where the challenge is more trial and error platforming, enemy encounters, and patterns. These areas offer a tiny smidgen of challenge, but even with segments like this, the game is much easier than Castlevania 1 and 3. Also, this is a pretty short game even just in comparison to the first Castlevania. Every boss in this game has really easy-to-understand patterns to their movements and attacks. Their actions are so telegraphed to the player I thought they were sending a long-distance message for the first time overseas.
Like in Master of Darkness, stairs in this game are not that great, but unlike that game, they're mostly confined to one level and you don't have to go up many sets of them. This level also introduces much more highly detailed forward walking stairs with upward inclines later that are much easier to use and they're a concept that Castlevania itself wouldn't really do until the next generation. I'm not sure why they had those shitty inchworm line stairs every horror platformer like this has and these more graphically and realism pleasing stairs, especially when the others ones are hard to use, but they did. Remember when I said this game has good ideas but doesn't build on them?
So the stairs weren't as bad in this game, but this game had a small section in the last level that was almost just as bad as those stairs in MOD. There is a part where you have to jump from rope to rope over what looks like stomach acid. Obvious concept, if you fall into the acid your health drains. The only problem is and I didn't notice this until this section. Your jumps don't really have any momentum in this game the way they do in other platformers. So as the ropes swing and you swing forward there really isn't a way to ensure that your next jump will carry you forward enough to reach the next swinging rope. So despite numerous attempts at doing this, I just couldn't get Jumping to work the way the game wanted me to. So I ended up using the reserve tanks, to just cheese this challenge and walk through the acid. I don't really know how they screwed up something as simple as jumping, but apparently, they found a way.
The final encounter with Frankenstein, when he is that big statuesque Kraid like monster in his second form, it isn't hard but it's annoying as fuck because you have to keep shooting off parts of his body only the game has a specific order it wants you to do this in and you can't make any progress until you shoot off each sequential area. So when you get above the knee level with the monster in damage done to him, the shots you need to make become more precise and tedious to do. It didn't really make for a great final boss fight. Even the cookie monster in the first Castlevania game was a step up. This is a shame because the two different sprites for Frankenstein in this game are awesome for 8-bit renditions of the monster.
Overall the gameplay is just an easier and shorter version of the Castlevania games and with a mixed bag of new ideas and odd omissions given that the third Castlevania game had already been out at this point.

The music in this game is completely average for it's era and there aren't any real peaks and valleys in the overall sound of the game to discuss.

The story of this game is basically the same as Castlevania 1's story, but with Frankenstein instead of Dracula and he kidnaps a Girl with pink hair named Emily for... They never really explain why he kidnaps her, but I'll assume the answer was not good. Especially if you have read the Mary Shelley book and know the monster to be a horn dog, who wants a dead Frankenstein woman to live alongside his old busted dead ass. But seriously, the game doesn't say shit and doesn't give you a reason as to why this is happening. I guess Frankenstein is just a dick, who wants to waste the main character's time. This is a little fitting because the monster just taunts you throughout the game and he seems a bit childish... Why did someone bring this asshole back to life? Imagine that you're doctor Frankenstein and you could bring back freshly corpsed geniuses of your era, give life to someone who had an untimely and unfortunate death but who really deserves a second chance, and instead of doing that you bring back a guy that thinks it's funny to kidnap people and taunt those who give a shit. Has science gone too far?
Why do old games always assume I'll be motivated to save someone who is kidnapped? I probably wouldn't even be motivated to save myself in this situation, let alone do the truly heroic act of traversing hellscapes to save some person I barely know. Especially Emily... I wouldn't even leave a rose on Emily's weathered grave.
The story is a little bit more than what Castlevania gives you but not by much and what it adds makes the game more nonsensical. Sometimes in games, it is better to go with less plot and rely on raw emotions more, than try to take a simple narrative and give it depth and "reasons" for things happening that don't really add to the overall feeling of the game. Especially in simpler games like this, where the whole point is "kill that big bad guy over there." Konami themselves would make this mistake in later Castlevanias.

So as I said at the start of this review, all three Castlevania games had been out at this point and despite having prior knowledge of those games this one didn't do much to advance the formula beyond the first game. It did have some interesting ideas of its own, but as I stated earlier they were never consistently elaborated on throughout the game as much as I think they should have been and what they had didn't make up for things missing and advancements the third Castlevania, in particular, brought to that series.
Unlike Master of Darkness though, I do think this is a Castlevania clone worth playing. I don't think it will be your greatest gaming experience ever, but I feel like there is enough unique shit here to be enjoyable for one playthrough at least.