8 Eyes

This is the 8th of 8 Eyes in my series of reviews about potential Castlevania clones. I have looked through a lot of lists, suggestions, forum threads, etc about other people looking for Castlevania-likes and this is one of the ones you will most often hear cited in response to that question. It is also the one that seems to have the most amount of responses to it that are totally polarized. Some people will go as far as to say this is better than Castlevania and some will say it is the shittiest most subpar clone you can imagine. I me mi my mo me myself, don't have any history with this game. Aside from constantly seeing it for ninety-nine cents in-game stores in the '90s. It was a game I owned fairly early in my game collecting days because of that, but not one that I really enjoyed playing all that much and it wasn't even one that I thought to find the rom for again until doing this review. Has my opinion changed? Is this in fact a genuine Castlevania clone after a run of games that obviously weren't? Will our heroes survive to fight another day? Stay tuned and you just might find out.

Graphically I find this title to be a very mixed bag. First off the sprites in this game, excluding the main character look like shit. The main character and his little bird pet, are passable but nothing special. There isn't much enemy variety and almost every level has the same enemies repeated and they didn't even bother doing recolors most of the time, they just copy and paste the same enemies from one level to another, which would be bad in most games on its own, but is further lazy when most of the levels are styled after different countries and cultures. A key example, this game has an Egyptian level and they didn't even make a mummy sprite in an 8-bit horror game. I mean come on... This is the bare minimum of what I would expect. I find that the general pattern of a lack of effort with the enemies is true of every level. None of them were made to really fit the themes of any of them, they were made to be as general as possible since they were repeated so many times. The bosses look as bad as the regular enemies, all of them are just a basic human shape that is larger than you with very few accouterments tying them to the theme of the level.
I like to really go over and pinpoint why something is bad, so forgive this further elaboration I'm about to do here. Is it bad on its own to have enemies be repeated and be common throughout a whole game? No. Almost all of the classic platformers of the past in every major series do this, to the point that the common enemies are as well known as the character you play as. Castlevania itself does this throughout not just one game but the whole series. The problem with this game is again the specificity of its themes, butting heads with using common enemies and sprites for every unique area. I don't really like Super Mario Land [スーパーマリオランド] as indicated by my review where I say so, but It also has an international theme similar to this one and it stylized common Mario enemies to look like the "lands" you were playing through. It at least got that one thing right. This game on a superior system didn't. To pile it on even further this game The Simpsons: Bart vs. the World, which is undeniably worse than both of these games also got this one thing right with its theme. This isn't a high bar to reach. When even noted shovelware enthusiasts like Acclaim Entertainment can get something right, you have no excuse for getting it wrong. As a side note, I remember back in the day, we used to call them "Akklame."
The levels themselves do a little bit of a better job conveying the national aesthetics of each of their respective countries and the backgrounds do look pretty complex and nice for the era. I will say some of the "countries" like Africa had very little to no effort put into any kind of theme inspired by the continent. It's just a brown cave... I don't know what that has to do with Africa specifically. On the subject of Africa. Here is a serious question I have, did the makers of this game know Egypt is in Africa? I would like to think it takes some level of general knowledge and competence to make a game, but I can't really fathom a scenario where you include the name of a country and the continent it rests on as levels without a person just not knowing that the two can be the same thing.
I find some aspects of the levels and their backgrounds to be environmentally confusing. Like things you think you'll be able to walk over the first time are actually pits, but they look like blocks in the background. To the game's credit though, most of the time when this happens it seems at least partially intentional and these areas aren't that punishing to you as a player. There are times though when it doesn't seem intentional. This is tied into a bigger problem, sometimes the backgrounds in this game can be a little too busy and complex for their own good. I admire the ambition and attention to detail with this, but sometimes there is so much shit going on from screen to screen that I find my eyes drawn more to the background than what is in front of them. With older games like this sometimes you have to have a few areas and ideas that are left up to the imagination, not everything needs to be filled in with painstaking detail. The bigger problem though is that these backgrounds are detailed at the expense of everything else. The enemies also should have been more vibrant and detailed than the background to draw our attention to them. Maybe if they had spent less time on the backgrounds they could have animated and drawn out some better boss sprites as well.

The music in this game is ok. I can definitely hear a Castlevania inspiration to some of the tracks, but none of them quite rise to the grandeur of Castlevania tunes. Even though I can enjoy them, I should also say that like the visuals most of them don't really try to fit the theme of the area they're presenting... Again, both of those mediocre games I mentioned before at least did this.
I don't really have much to say about the sound or anything in this game, there isn't anything particularly annoying or bad and there isn't anything particularly impressive about it.

The best way to describe this game gameplay-wise is that it is indeed a clone of classic Castlevania but mixed with elements of Mega Man [ロックマン] and strangely Prince of Persia. The Castlevania stuff it apes is the aesthetics, level setup, action platforming, and music. The Mega Man (MM) aspect is the fact that you pick which level you want to play and like MM doing it in a certain order will make things much easier for you. The Prince of Persia elements come in how levels present their challenges where you need to get through traps and doors quickly, the real-life international themes and your character feels as weighted as a rotoscoped character in those early cinematic platformers. You might remember in my review of Werewolf: The Last Warrior that I thought that game also tried to mix a bunch of different games into one gumbo, only it turned all those good elements into mush with that game. I think the developers of this game did a much better job of mixing and matching the different elements of these games and getting them to work together. I think this game had some half-assed presentation, as shown above, but it has really solid gameplay.
Enemies act pretty much the way they do in a Castlevania game, although a little bit easier than most of those as none of them move all that fast or have weird patterns that you have to dodge. Because the levels are enclosed in mostly indoor areas, the fact that enemies don't move fast or have weird patterns doesn't make this game as cripplingly easy as it does in other games I have reviewed so far. Their closeness to you and their placement in levels makes them "hard enough" to be enjoyable. Even if I can't get hard enough to be enjoyable.
Bosses are a different story other than bosses like the one in Italy which just spams shit at you, almost all of them are pinatas that you can just hit repeatedly, with very little interaction from them. The main boss isn't much better. I think the main boss is a woman with a bull's skull for a hat... You know what. I don't have a lot more to say about the basic enemies and gameplay. It works exactly the way you would expect a clone of Castlevania to work, almost as good in some areas and woefully inadequate in others.
Like Megaman, this game has health and weapon energy powerups you can find hidden in levels. When you defeat a boss you get a new sword that is powerful against a specific other boss, but unlike MM, it isn't an option you can choose in a sub-menu like you can the different gun types in MM. The sword is merely switched out depending on whoever was the last boss you previously defeated. The game also doesn't indicate graphically any kind of upgrade to your sword. It merely states it for a few seconds once a level is done. Sometimes MM weapons didn't make sense on who they were strong against, but most of the time at least they followed the "elemental" logic that works in games like Pokémon [ポケットモンスター]. There is some amount of intuitive sense with them. I said all that to say none of these swords being strong against specific other countries or continents makes any kind of sense that a player could reasonably work out on their own.
In this game, all of the levels contain puzzles that require levers to unlock. Sometimes they're placed in easy-to-hit places and you can quickly get to the door and other times they aren't. It's a pretty simple concept for a puzzle to solve and it's where I think they took some of that aforementioned influence from Prince of Persia. I wanted to lay this out here so you understand what I'm talking about in the next paragraph.
This game has a sub/secondary weapon system like Castlevania's and other clones like it. Unlike those games though, most of your secondary weapons are useless or only have very marginal utility in specific situations. I found that in most of my playthroughs I pretty much forgot they existed until specific enemies on specific levels are blocking you from jumping over to the next area unless you use a sub-weapon. There is one "sub-weapon" though that you have to use a lot to solve door/level puzzles and that "weapon" is your pet bird Cutrus. There is a lot good to say about this game in terms of gameplay, but this game has one really big fucking problem and that problem is that fucking bird. I really think their implementation of him and his flight/dive bomb mechanics are really shit. It took me a while to try and figure out how this bird worked and how you can manually set how high he flies by pressing a button right as he moves up and even after the three mandatory fucking playthroughs of this game, it's still just didn't seem that natural or fun to use him to solve puzzles. I think a lot of people's hate with the game whether they want to admit it or not has to do with having to use this finicky bird to dive-bomb levers. Which you sometimes have to do while halfway up a set of stairs... This is already a bad situation because stairs always suck ass in these sorts of action platformers. I applaud them for trying something new with this bird and your character interactions with them, but if I a lifeless asshole who has played thousands of games can just barely intuit how to work this system out after three or four hours of playing... Imagine what it felt like to be a child who played this in the 80's, when they get to a door they couldn't open and couldn't figure out the bird mechanics or that you can even use the bird as a weapon... I'm sure this is the back story to how so many copies of Eight Eyes wound up being 99 cents at Funcoland. On the flip side, I also think that bird might be why some people's experience with the game is positive because a second player can play him, and actually controlling him to complete puzzles makes the game a lot more fun than it is as a single-player trying to use him as a sub-weapon. I think this one mechanic and the disparity people will feel for it depending on whether they played this with uno or dos personas account for the wide disparity of peoples differing experiences with this game.
This game steals one really fucking bad idea from a game, that game being Ghosts 'n Goblins in that it wants you to replay the game once like that game infamously does, but also a second time. Which is why I played this game three times. Which was two times too many. All, so I can get virtually the same ending spewed at me a third time and with only minor difficulty increases. Enemies move faster in the other playthroughs and in some areas there are more of them, that is about the only real big change you see. I don't think a new game+ is bad in and of itself, but in older games like this it usually wasn't worth the effort or time and really I think this game should have just had the third playthrough's difficulty by default and scrapped the new game mechanics entirely. The third playthrough's difficulty barely makes it almost as hard as the first Castlevania and in terms of bosses, it still isn't even close.
I think gameplay-wise, this game was almost great. If they had done a few more reworks of the bird's mechanics and if they had made some of the enemies better animated and adjusted the difficulty as I just stated it to be, more like the third playthroughs, I think this might be a game we actually consider to be a low tier classic, instead of a game that only ever gets mentioned as a clone of another game. There are some good ideas in this game and in the formula, it was trying to create. They were always just slightly off the mark in a way that stops me from enjoying them fully.

Let me say something here in general about the story. If all you do is play the game, there is no story at all. The full amount of story you get is the name of the game. I just wanted to say that this game puts absolutely zero effort into contextualizing anything for the player here. Which I think they could have gotten away with if this game worked on the emotional level of the series it's aping. I don't really need to know why The Belmont's want to kill Dracula and his minions in the Castlevania games. There is enough societal knowledge about Vlad Bepis and his real-life vampire exploits with Winona Ryder, as written by Bram Stroker. We know what the fuck a vampire is and why it is a threat to human life and well-being. What is an 8 Eyes? Why am I traveling the world in this game? Is there a reason I have to kill these monsters? Why do I have a pet bird? When your story isn't simple enough to rely on easy-to-understand tropes and cliches, then I have to start asking questions and if those questions aren't being answered, then what the fuck am I doing with my time? Ok, so now that you know that this game is inadequate at even answering basic questions about its own story and why we are going on this adventure let me tell you what the manual and box say about its story.
The main character in this game is named Orin and he has a pet bird, which is again named Cutrus. So this game that appears to be fantasy is actually not. It is post-apocalyptic science fiction. "The Eight Eyes," this game is named for are jewels that were formed at the center of nuclear blast zones. I have never heard of anything other than glass, dust, and radiation being formed from a nuclear explosion, but I'll take this game's word for it. I guess the nations we go to are controlled by evil factions that have these jewels. Which makes me wonder, why would an evil faction of post-apocalyptic raiders, rebuild things to be exactly like the 1800s? Why are you dressed like a fencer and relying on falconry in a world where modern technology still exists? For some "reason" these jewels are magical and contain the power to do "something."
Apparently, you need them because these jewels have that unnamed power and they banished your king somewhere and your king is a good guy or something. So you collect the jewels and you have to place them in a specific order on the alter that you go to at the end of the game. You learn the order by finding clue scrolls throughout the levels, which you wouldn't know that you'll need until you reach this fucking screen for the first time. Anyway once you place them into the slots, an evil-looking gargoyle dude tells you all is well and all that shit. Maybe I'm guessing here, but presumably, that thing is not the king you're trying to save. So how is everything back to normal? What was the point of opening that door? Where the fuck is the king? You know what... The game doesn't care about the story. So why should I?
I feel like I don't even need to say this, but the story of this game is bad and overly complicated for a game that doesn't reflect even a scintilla of the supposed post-apocalyptic lore of this game. It also doesn't connect well to the international theme, the general pre-modern aesthetic of the levels, the hero's powers and abilities, the enemies that are displayed on the screen, the music, and not even the box art of either region currently on this website.

This is the first game since the second one I reviewed in this series, that I would accurately say was labeled a Castlevania clone. Genetically though, this clone had a few chromosomes mashed into the batter by mistake. On a whole a lot of aspects of this game are bad. The gameplay is above average though, aside from the minor hangups I talked about with that. Because the gameplay is good I'm tempted to be less harsh of this game, but I think in this case the bad just buries the good in a grave of mediocrity. With some amount of tweaks, I can see a worthwhile game in here somewhere. It's not completely lost or a waste of time like the last two games I played. I can understand why this game has the polarization of opinions I described at the start. Like Tiana, it's almost there, but this ain't time for messin around. I think this game is worth one playthrough. It minorly scratches the Castlevania itch and I can imagine a person not being as bothered or discerning as I am about some of its hangups.