Monster Party

So this is the fifth in a series of 69 love songs that I'm writing about potential Castlevania clones... Which normally I would keep an audience in suspense on whether I think the games are similar enough or not to be a clone but if you have played this game for even five fucking minutes you would know the games are absolutely nothing alike. At least with the four other games, I have reviewed so far a cursory glance at the game might lead people to think those games could fit the definition of a Castlevania-like this is the first title where it wouldn't even meet that low of a bar of criteria. So automatically I'm hitting it with the verdict of "not a clone." So instead of evaluating that at all, let's just talk about the game itself. So it isn't at all like Castlevania but it is an 8-bit horror title.

It is also the first game among these horror-themed games whose aesthetics I think are actually consistently horror-themed but in an especially Japanese way. Yeah, despite most of these games being made by Japanese developers this is the first one that visually really feels that way with all your Junji-Ito eyeball monsters/imagery, Fish head with legs, tentacles, Japanese bikers, and magical-girl wizards. It does give the game a particularly unique flavor for its 8-bit horror. I generally like the game's Japanese horror aesthetics despite the fact that it feels the most dated graphically of all the games I have reviewed for this little series so far. I find it somewhat funny that the box art of this game shows a bunch of Universal movie monsters and yet the contents of the game are extremely Japanese and they only touch on western monsters in terms of mythology.
The backgrounds and the boss monster sprites can be very stylized despite the game's somewhat limited palette. I took a screenshot up there of the Grim Reaper in this game and I think it's a particularly badass example of the game's art style at its best. One way in which this game really fails graphically though is the man character's sprite. For a game that is otherwise so stylized and crazy, your character looks like he can be in fucking M.C. Kids. Well, my actual problem isn't that he looks normal, but more that he just doesn't seem to have the flair and expressiveness of the rest of the game. You also get this temporary drakonid form and it doesn't look that great either.
Before moving on I should say that the graphics of this game were heavily censored by Nintendo in America which happened a lot with other games so it isn't that surprising, but also in Japan which is more surprising. It was censored so much there the Japanese version was never even released. Prototypes exist and a lot of the game's more violent imagery floated around on the net for a while until a restoration project was started and completed. I don't think the prototype is that much more violent than the original and even in comparison to other games at the time like the first Splatterhouse or the even earlier Chiller it's still too kiddy to really compete with games like that. So it's a historical oddity and curiosity, but not one that personally held my attention that much while researching this.

Musically I think most of the game is just mediocre. The one exception being the music that plays when you walk into the doors that have bosses in them. That song is pretty good. The rest of the game just doesn't have music that is good or interesting enough to complement these visuals.

Gameplay-wise this game is not a platformer, which is the main reason why I would not consider it a Castlevania clone like it has been listed as such by lesser reviewers and gaming personalities. Instead, it reminds me a lot of the Crazy Castle style of game, especially the way a level is laid out and how you need to collect something to move on. It's a little bit harder than those games with enemies, but a little less environmentally confusing than those. Meaning instead of going through a bunch of different doors or stairs you only have a few doors you can go into and they all only open up to a single room. So you walk through a level trying to find those doors and the open ones can have a boss that drops a key. If the key drops, you can proceed through a level normally and use it on the last locked door to escape the level. If you reach that last door without a key you have to go back through a level and explore it again trying to find a key. Notice that I didn't use the word "backtracking" there, even though most reviewers would.
The reason that I didn't call it "backtracking" is because backtracking is a hack criticism made by people who don't really like games, but for some reason feel obligated to play them and they believe that having to spend more time in a games world is a bad thing. Which it isn't in and of itself. If I already dislike a game and its world the problem lies there and not needing to explore it more. It's a quality issue about the game's world and not whether needing to retread upon old areas is good or bad in a game. I mean it seems obvious to me that if I like a game I want to spend as much time in it as possible and if I like it enough to keep exploring its world, that won't change even if I have to do that dreaded practice that is so hated amongst game critics, "backtracking." I especially hate this criticism for RPG, Metroidvania, and Survival Horror games, where half the point or more of each of those games is exploring the world. Nothing will make me drop another reviewer faster than hearing them say this criticism without any explanation. "Backtracking" more like hacktracking, amirite?
I can somewhat understand this criticism among professional reviewers especially older magazine reviewers who were working on a set deadline and just wanted to get through some shitty games as quickly as possible. Even then I wouldn't accept the criticism as legitimate but I could at least understand their frustration. Amongst no-lifers like myself, "backtracking" should never be a problem for you. You should be more worried about backhanding when I get done with your ass. Alright, I'll calm down a bit. The point is I'm sick of lazy arguments like this used on games without any explanation or thought actually given, similar to my problem with the word "jank" that I outlined in a previous review.
So anyway, you have to find the key which once you realize this on the first level, almost everyone will know to just look and go into doors whenever they come up. So normally you don't even have to go back and look with one exception. One of the levels is a teleport maze level and I absolutely dread this fucking level and needing to find the doors with bosses in it. The biggest problem with this level is they didn't differentiate normal doors from the teleport doors, so you just have to go through all of them hoping to find the key. After beating it once before and two times legitimately for this review, I just started resetting the game and using the password when I got to this level to skip it in subsequent playthroughs. Teleport pad/door areas in games are usually never a particularly great part of a game for me, but this one is especially bad.
I didn't find any of the enemies or bosses in this game to be particularly strong or a problem. A lot of the bosses, in particular, don't even have patterns to their attacks, and if this game shares similarities to Castlevania in any way it shares the ease by which bosses can be totally cheesed like they can be in Castlevania II: Simon's Quest [ドラキュラII 呪いの封印]. Repeatedly just hitting bosses without stopping will do wonders in this game like it did in that game. One of the "bosses" is two dancing dudes that you just watch dance until they die. This reminds me of something I should say about this game that every other reviewer I watched commented on. This game is almost the gaming equivalent of a cult classic for its bizarre humor and quotability. I personally didn't really find it to be all that funny, but a lot of people who grew up with the game do.
I find the gameplay on a whole to be passable, but even if I grew up with this game I would still err on the side of thinking it's a mostly mediocre experience. There is a reason why the crazy castle "genre" and adjacent games never really took off, because the games weren't that fun. This is only mildly more fun than those.

The story of this game is that a little tyke who was at baseball practice is walking home when suddenly he sees a bright light in the sky. That bright light slowly falls down to earth and it's a monster. Which I previously described up above as a drakonid, but for non-nerds that means he is a humanoid dragon. This dragon tells the boy that his world is in peril and that the boy needs to help him stop the threat of other monsters coming like he did. Why we're supposed to trust this monster we just met as opposed to the other ones, I don't know and the game doesn't give us much time to think about that. The boy brings up the obvious fact that he is a tiny child and can't do shit against large monsters and the drakonid tells him to use his bat... The boy still isn't convinced so the dragon forces himself inside the boy. Well, I could have written that better, but what it means is that the boy can call on the power of this monster by becoming the dragon temporarily. More disgusting dragon worship and ascension, I can't escape Vinhiemers even in the past.
So the boy precedes to stomp some monster ass with his bat and his newfound dragon form and does whatever else it is we're supposed to be doing during the duration of the game. Then and I know you'll be surprised to hear this he succeeds, but success looks a lot like warts because the boy was actually dreaming of being a wonder boy in monster world, or was he? Because after fully waking up, the drakonid which is no longer inside the boy, thanks him for helping.
The main antagonist of this game "The Dark Master" which is what my subs call me, is never really explained and we're never told why he and the other monsters want to assault this world like that drakonid assaulted the boy. This seems like a pretty big omission for a story... That being the entire reason why you're doing any of this shit, but maybe I'm asking for too much here.

Everything other than the visuals in this game is bad to below-average. I can kind of understand why this game has a cult following, but this is one sex cult I won't be taking part in. I kind of wanted to like it more than I did despite its flaws, but I have to keep it 100% in these reviews and I just don't. I would still kind of recommend this game to people who are looking for "weird shit" to play specifically but don't get your hopes up a whole lot about the game outside of it being an oddity.