Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This is the 6th in a series of 666 reviews on potential clones of Castlevania and yes this game was called that especially on lists and reviews that were created before Apr 8, 2006. I'm not sure exactly why that date itself is significant, but web data suggests a peak amount of interest in this game after that point... I tried really hard to find out any information on this game or to see if anyone else had ever reviewed or talked about it and it seems to strangely have been totally ignored by the gaming public, despite what that search data suggests. So in the absence of any other information, I'm going into this one totally blind...
Alright obviously none of that is true and arguably the most famous game review of all time was made about this shit load of fuck, but I still have to evaluate it as an 8-bit horror title and as a potential clone of that there series Castlevania. I had played this game before, sporadically over the years and I had beaten it way back in the day when a famous video game reviewer... Seanbaby had mentioned it on the Digital Press site before he got big and worked for EGM, G4, and now Cracked. He didn't consider it bad enough to include it on his famous list of "The 20 Worst NES Games of All-Time," but he did consider it bad enough to offhandedly mention it. I don't know if the kids today with the hair and the clothes even know who Seanbaby is but when I was in high school I basically idolized him and desperately wanted to be a video game reviewer like him. Yeah, working for a video game magazine was my dream job in high school, so was working at a video rental store, driving a horse/buggy, and hand churning butter. I remember when I saw him on G4 the first time I really thought this would be the height of video game criticism and game journalism. I thought in all sincerity and cringieness that would be me up on that screen one day... It's funny that this particular game is heavily tied to AVGN because I really believe that him heralding the age of Youtube was the death of written game criticism in the same way that Youtube and vlogs killed blogs. It seemed like virtually overnight the entire pre-youtube history of game criticism was gone and in the blink of an eye so were all the magazines I read as a kid. I'm old enough now to say that my dreams and I are obsolete.
Obviously, AVGN didn't intend to do that and really whoever the first big video game reviewer was on the site would be the one who did this. So it was an inevitability that this would happen it almost doesn't matter who the first person was or what video site it happened on. That being said I think the nerd is a better critic than people on this site give him credit for. He definitely has a talent for describing and showing the "feel" of what playing these games was like. I think it's especially evident in his Battletoads review, the way he shows the frustration of having two players sometimes causes exactly nailed what it was like to play games with my cousins when I was young. Or his Board James reviews where each one of them captures exactly all the fun and hardships of playing board games with a friend and with each one of his friends exhibiting an archetype of a certain kind of shitty board game player. Like Mike being an ass that cheats all the time and Bootsy fucking up the board with his clumsiness. The guy has changed his style a lot and managed to adapt in a way that a lot of other dinosaurs on Youtube have not. There is a reason he is still successful and it isn't just big dick Mike, who isn't there anymore. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, this game... You know puppy dogs in France in 1951... Alright, I'll get on with the review already.
This is one of those games that I was hoping had some kind of story behind its development but other than shit people already know, like that it stole music directly from Rygar [アルゴスの戦士 はちゃめちゃ大進撃]. There really isn't anything interesting about this game aside from the fact that it has become a touchstone among reviewers. So I guess I really don't have anything else to stall with before playing this.

If I was to say this game almost had a plus it would be graphically and even then not really. It's more like Stockholm syndrome with the graphics, everything else is so bad that that the stuff that is merely mediocre seems great by comparison. The graphics are just totally below average for a game on the NES. I will admit that once you get to the part where you see all of London's buildings in the background that the game looks kind of good in that small section at least. Enemies and your character sprite just look absolutely dull and uninspired, no attempt was made to make them look interesting they look about as standard as I can imagine an NES sprite looking. Hyde is probably the height of the game's graphical prowess and you just look like a yellow blob-o-shit when you become him.
The one major plus this game has theme-wise at least is that there aren't any especially jarring enemies or environments that contradict the theme of Jekyll and Hyde. Unlike a lot of games, it did stick to the theme it was going for and most of your enemies are humans and things that are at least within the realm of possibility when it comes to the story. I'll give it a tiny amount of credit for that. Some of the stuff in the hyde section is a little bizarre but compared to other NES games even those sections seem subdued.
Something I learned at the last minute of writing this, that the US version is worse than the Japanese original graphically. They cut out stages and graphics which give a game that even in the original didn't have much going for it even less graphically.

The game has two songs, the Jekyll and Hyde songs, both of them are totally average for the game's era and time. To their slight credit, they do kind of fit the theme the game is going for. Some of the sound effects in this game get annoying really fucking fast, like the opera singer enemy that "sings" and those harp enemies in the Hyde sections. The sounds are made worse by the fact that when they play the music stops, to highlight how shitty they are.

Similar to the last game I reviewed Monster Party the first and main reason I would not consider this a Castlevania clone is it again is not a platformer. Unlike that game though I'm at a real motherfucking loss to actually categorize what this game should be labeled as. To its credit, I can't really think of many games like it. You walk towards the edge of the screen like platformers, but there is absolutely no-platforming in this game. You fight enemies in a way similar to a beat-em-up, but there aren't any action sequences and frankly, the "beating up" just isn't really enough to qualify for the title. I actually think after considering this heavily for a week that the most correct labeling of this game despite the fact that you technically have enemies to fight, is this is a 2D walking simulator. Because the main goal in this game isn't about score or beating levels, it's literally just about continuously walking to the right. A secondary goal being don't turn into Hyde, but that is only a goal because turning into Hyde makes you do the dreaded task of walking to the left. You actually don't have to kill anything and the game by accident with how shitty the controls are and how heavy your character feels incentivizes avoiding enemies and their attacks more than it does trying to kill them with your shitty cane attack. The best you can do for progress is dodge shit as much as possible and just keep walking right no matter what the game throws at you.
I feel like that fundamentally is this game's biggest flaw is a failure in concept or more accurately the failure to have a concept. I have heard some reviewers try to defend it as a game that was trying something new and to be true to the source material of the Robert Louis Stevenson book... Well for one, it just isn't that close to the book source material-wise, which I will explain more in the story section of this review, and two, I don't think the unique aspects of this came about from a conscious design philosophy so much as they came from a company trying and failing to make a standard game. This is the video game equivalent of Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered, in that people will debate forever whether the unique aspects of both were a conscious choice or an accident, but in the case of this game, I definitely believe it was by accident.
I think the way enemies work in relation to Jekyll best illustrates how this doesn't seem intentional, their patterns, attacks and actions towards Jekyll seem really unbalanced and without rhyme or reason. In better-made games enemies are a tough but fair challenge that gives you as much of an opportunity to attack them as they do you. That is not the way enemies work in this game, your attacks are totally inadequate to the task of taking them on and their attacks can hit you multiple times in succession and the bomb can nuke your health and turn you into Hyde after one single hit. With how bad the controls are and how slow Jekyll's response time makes bombs an almost insurmountable challenge in this game. I can't tell you how much trial and error went into beating this game just two times for this review because of the bombs alone. I don't think every enemy in a game like this has to be as much of a pushover as, let's say, enemies in a Mario title, but at the same time I do think players should only be asked to take on challenges that are scaled with the abilities they give you to tackle them and that just doesn't happen at all with this game. This is usually a sure-fire sign that a game is just mediocre.
Couple that with the fact that the game has no real sense of progression, varying of playstyles aside from Hyde which is a punishment and no added challenges outside of enemies tell me this was made by people who barely understood games. Even the game I considered the worst game in my little series here so far Werewolf: The Last Warrior tried to do those things I just listed above. They made an attempt. There was no "attempt," here. Attempt isn't even a word in the developer's vocabulary. I have attempted suicide more successfully than they attempted to make a game here.
I should probably explain how Hyde works. When the townsfolk and baby spiders inflict enough damage on that poor bloke Jekyll, he becomes hyde. Also, there is an anger meter or some shit like the werewolf game had but really it doesn't matter. You get hit so many times in this game that you're bound to become Hyde, so don't even bother looking at that meter it is an inevitability. When you become hyde you quickly have to kill shit to turn into Jekyll. Which you want to do because... Well you really don't because Hyde plays better, has better attacks, actually feels like a video game character, and does the Chad-walk, but the game knew people would feel this way and so they made it mandatory for you to quickly want to turn back by making it impossible for you to progress beyond the point where you made it as Jekyll. Which is why that lightning bolt comes down and kills you. This is not intuitive at all, for one because you are going the opposite direction that you were as Jekyll and nothing about the game indicates within it that you need to quickly drop being Hyde or you will die. This accounts for the immense amount of frustration most people have with the game coupled with a million other bad things the game piles on. When you kill things as Hyde they also drop coins, I used to think the coins were tied to the good ending somehow, but I seem to have gotten it without paying attention to coins. I mean maybe they are connected and I just happened to have enough, but from what I can tell the coins don't seem to do shit.
I think one of the reasons they made Hyde feel good to play and so overpowered is for a similar reason I described in that previous werewolf game review and that wolf form. They wanted to make the transformation state you go through feel as powerful as possible to incentivize you to get it. It's not that hard of a concept to understand if you have played Mario and felt the pleasure of seeing him get bigger... I mean with the mushroom tip. I mean with the mushroom. Then you understand how power-ups are supposed to work in games. When they work well the player immediately gravitates towards them and utilizes them to their fullest extent. The only problem is that Hyde feels so powerful that it comes at the expense of ever enjoying the game as Jekyll. Mario is still enjoyable as little Mario, at least that is what the ladies tell him. Nothing about this game is fun when you're in the standard state of merely being Jekyll. The Hyde parts aren't that great either, but it almost feels like a game during those short bursts. The world isn't based on alchemy and potions, tell Edward Elric to STFU, because there is no equivalent exchange between Jekyll and Hyde. This is a worse tradeoff than the one in Twins. Like all alchemical mutants, this game is disgusting.
I used to think that to some small extent the hate this garnered after AVGN's review was somewhat overblown, but the more I have had to force myself to play this game and think about it the more I think that it actually is on the level of games we consider the worst of all time tier. In a lot of ways, it has the same problems and mishaps of something like Superman. Whatever concept both games were going for wasn't a good idea, to begin with, and what we have is just pure digital misery. I want to stress just one more time in case repeating it didn't get into your head yet, that the controls in this game are horrendously fucking awful and response times make me feel like my character weighs five thousand pounds. How bad that combo of things is alone warrants the hate this title gets. Problems with controls are never acceptable in a game, it is the one thing we should never be shy to give a game a failing grade over. If the makers of a game can't even get that right then whatever other accomplishments they may have had are completely moot because our input into a game isn't even enjoyable to do.

The story of this game is that Jekyll is trying to get to a church that is about four or five miles to the right of his starting location so that he can get married. Unfortunately for him, Victorian England does not want these two people to be wed in unholy matrimony and basically the entire town of London from the outskirts to the core of the city wants to see him dead. See this is a problem with the idea that this game is trying to stay true to the source material because Hyde is evil on his own, not because of external stimuli from everyday people.
He isn't a result of the evil of other people and society that message had already been laid out Ad Nauseaum in a dozen other books. The novel was a critique of the at the time societies over-reliance on science to fix social problems and about how repressive victorian values were despite the progress they seemed to be having. Hyde was a symbol of that there repression individuals felt and he was the result of a science experiment gone wrong... Is what a lot of people who haven't read the book believe. That the transformations started and worked the way they do for Werewolves or the Hulk. That a person mistakenly or not by their own volition at the very least became some sort of hybrid creature and they can't really control their worse "half." The only problem is Jekyll actually wanted to be Hyde, he intended for this to happen. The experiment wasn't a failure and he wanted to use science as an excuse to let his real freak flag fly. Hyde is a helluva drug. The whole point of his experiment was removing his "conscious" so that he could fully indulge in his absolute worst predilections and desires. It is true that later he starts to involuntarily turn into Hyde, but that is only after he had initially done so numerous times voluntarily. See the book is much darker than our pop-cultural perception of its content. Jekyll is shit, hyde is a reflection of that shit, and the society and fake surface-level values they indulge in are shit. No one is the "good" guy in this story. So Jekyll shouldn't be getting either "good ending," the townspeople are not good faith moral actors who can rightfully criticize the shortcomings of him and if the game was true to the source material we would be indulging in Hyde as much Jekyll did. There is no way to save this game through a textual analysis not even Gorgias would feel shameless enough to give a defense of this treatise.
Unrelated to the game, but since I read the book again for this review. I'll just say that an alternative hypothesis I had about the story, was that it could be a metaphor for addiction. How you think you have a handle on something and your worst inclinations with it when in reality it is actually controlling you and slowly destroying your life. Probably not the most creative take ever and I'm sure someone else has thought of that, but I thought I would share anyway. *Sniffs audibly before moving on.*
Let's put aside that the game and most of our culture mischaracterizes the point of the book and just think about the book more broadly for a second just in case any dumb people are still left wondering. The only similarities the game and the book really share are the names of the main character and the thing he transforms into. There really isn't even a story in this game, past the title. This game is the equivalent of people who make political youtube videos based on news articles after only reading the headline. I called the town in this game "London" but the game itself never even gives us that much of a descriptor of where you are even. I would say the story in this game is bad, but it would be more accurate to say that it just doesn't exist beyond mere implication. I'm sure the instruction manual and the back of the box contextualized things a little bit, but what you have with just the game is nothing after the title screen.
This game actually has two endings. If you reach the last area as Jekyll you just see him and his future wife walk into the church. If you get to the sixth level survive and then become Hyde and jump across some rooftops, you face a secret boss. Then you see an ending that is barely better than the first one and isn't worth even half the effort it takes to see it. It adds nothing to the story and it won't help you appreciate the game any more than you already don't. At the very end, it shows Hyde holding a cross. This implies that they thought this horrible game might warrant a sequel in the future. Thankfully for once in our miserable lives, we didn't live in the worst timeline where this game followed through with that threat. We had to see all the other worst possible outcomes take place, but luckily just this one time, fate was finally on our side and this game never got and hopefully never will get a sequel.

In a funny twist of fate given the source material of this game and Castlevania with Dracula. That Dracula was probably at least partially inspired by The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It came out a few years earlier and it almost had the groundbreaking format of the Dracula novel where we see the story through documents rather than just straight through a third or first-person lens of the characters. Both of them share a similar theme in their critiques of Victorian society and values and both of them paint the rich as sadistic monsters, underneath all their feigned manners and embroidery. The games... I probably don't need to say this explicitly but for the sake of posterity, this game is not a Castlevania clone. I wish it was a clone of another game, I might have enjoyed it more. It seems to take no good ideas from other games and merely work as a facsimile of what an extremely basic sidescrolling game is supposed to be like. Like Hyde, it is an inhuman homunculus and ought to be drawn and quartered in the town square by the good people of London.
The game just isn't good, I don't know what to say other than that if all of the above didn't convince you otherwise. It's not a misunderstood game, it's not over hated, it's as bad as people say and then some. It might actually be misunderstood in the sense that people don't dislike it enough. This game is lucky that I haven't turned around and started walking left towards its ass.
Unlike Lazlow, I don't even have a face for radio, let alone a voice for video. So despite the old dream being a rotted pipe now, I still have to keep wrenching away at it. So bear with me through these reviews while I pretend to do one of the things I always wanted to do. Which when you strip away all the bullshit titles like journalist and critic, is inflecting my opinions on other people through text. The rotten desiccated corpse of my dream will become your nightmares, even I have to review every goddamn game on the site. Jekyll may have needed a potion, but this game and I were stillborn, evil, and merciless on arrival.

As a long time fan of AVGN, of course i had to play this game at some point, It is undoubtedly one of the worst games ever. The cane has to be one of the most iconic weapons in video game history as it does nothing. I literally had the exact same thing happen to me in the start of the game as AVGN in his, you spawn, you get attacked by 30 enemies and a bomb kills you, you turn into hyde and i walked 5 steps before dying and game over came onto the screen.

I wouldnt say this is the worst game ever tho. Hong kong 97 and Big rigs still stand above this but those games were released under very specific circumstances, HK97 was more of a bootleg than anything that was actually released in stores, and big rigs was a random pc game that was just unfinished which was never marketed and was pretty much obscure until the interent got a hold of it similar to HK97. This game was retailed in stores and sold thousands of copies so, i would say its the worst commercial game of all time.

There are apparently 2 endings as well but there is no way im playing this game again. This is the kind of game i tell my friends to play as a sick prank and we all have a laugh afterwards going "gee that sure was the worst fucking game ever".

I emulated the game which i didnt really want to do, i wanted to buy the actual game on the nes and play it since the game has a very famous legacy but god no im not spending 50 or more dollars on a PAL cart to play the worst commercial game of all time that took me a little over 1 hour to beat.

Stay away.