Werewolf: The Last Warrior

This is my third in a series of infinite reviews I plan on doing on alleged Castlevania clones. This is another one that I played through one time before this but never really dug deep into the title until I went to do this review. Despite my feelings about it now, I actually thought from my recollection that this one would be one of the better titles to return to... I was wrong, severely fucking wrong.

Graphically I think this is the most impressive of the three Castlevania-clones I have played so far. It has a lot of variety of details and colors in its 8-bt backgrounds and the sprite animations are remarkably smooth. That is one thing Data East the makers of this title was always really good at, making your character and enemies have a lot of nice detail and without much clipping. The werewolf form your character can take is fucking great looking for an NES sprite. A weird detail about this form is the character has sword hands for some reason... More on that when we talk about the "story" of this game.
This game makes no attempts at cohesion or trying to make sense of the types of environments and enemies it places against you. At some point in the game you're fighting ninjas, knock off Robotrek mechs and aliens that look like The Brood race from X-men all at the same time. Sometimes going balls-out crazy with the things in a game like this can work. Doom being the most obvious example I can think of where a game did this and worked. The difference between this game and that game is Doom wasn't trying to get us to care about the world and the character that we are, whereas this game is. As I will explain when we get to the story. So these constant immersion-breaking elements and things that seem counter to the theme of a man who can transform into a werewolf aren't helping the game at all and its lack of cohesion is a severe knock against it.
A lot of games of this era tried really hard to be Castlevania, but a lot of them also tried really hard to be Ninja Gaiden [忍者龍剣伝 [NES]]. This game really, really, realllllllllllly, wanted you to think that about it. One of the ways they try to accomplish this is mimicking the type of small cinematic sequences that game had to a T. The brilliance of those segments in NG is that I could discern what is happening in them without even needing to read the text. The problem with this game's cinematics is they don't convey much visually and the story they tell through text is completely nonsensical. So despite the high production values of the games general graphical prowess for its time a lot of its visuals are wasted and the game itself can't really capitalize on what is good about it, because as I'll explain with the rest of the review almost every other aspect of the game is weighing it down severely.

The music is substandard. The main track gets old really fast and it lacks the usual Data East charm when it comes to the music department. The music doesn't really fit the general theme of the game all that well. In fact, it sounds like one of those games that just used discarded tracks from another game and decided it was "good" enough. It sounds like off-brand Rygar music and I feel like I'm being severely unfair to Rygar by saying that. There is a "lab" part of the third level where all you hear is an annoying ass alarm-like beeping sound for minutes on end. I found in my playthroughs it was annoying enough that I tried my hardest to get through this level the fastest. The sound effects aren't that good either and this game lacks one thing that a game with a fucking werewolf should obviously have a blood-curdling howl. How you gonna make a game where I am a badass werewolf and I can't even bark at the moon?

So the level design. How to say this... Imagine an idiot was the programmer of the NES Mega Man games and the levels and enemies were designed like those games, but with horrifically unreasonable challenges and a lot of precision platforming that isn't that fun to do. Mega Man is the absolute closest parallel to this game's type of platforming and enemy design it is exactly like those games but with fewer enemies and every surface you can jump to is spread-miles-a-fucking-part. The main challenge in this game is just getting places and a lot of where you have to go is awkwardly placed between small holes that are next to ladders or really high/far jumps that require pinpoint accuracy to achieve. I would have more leeway as an architect drafting a building with accuracy than I do with this game and jumping.
I can imagine in a game like this they wanted you to feel more powerful in your wolf form than without it and there are a lot of ways a game developer can come up with to achieve this. Well, they choose to make your human form severely underpowered and lacking in mechanics like higher jumps and wall climbing that your regular human form can't do. This unfortunately makes it so some parts of a level where you can only progress as the wolf make you you have to go out of your way to re-get the werewolf upgrade. They make your human form almost worthless in some parts to the point that sometimes dying is preferable to actually try to beat a level as a human.
This game has one egregious practice it does to you over and over again and that is when you go to jump, it has enemies and random environmental hazards come out at you at that exact moment, but it isn't like other platforming games where this will happen in a pattern where you can learn to avoid it. No, it always only happens when you have already jumped, so you can't really react to anything you just have to take the hit. Which is the kind of frustrating thing, that if I wasn't a completionist nerd or reviewing this game, would make me stop playing it out of sheer frustration.
Jumping is dog shit in this game or more accurately it's wolf shit. You have the same jump and climb mechanics in this that you have in Ninja Gaiden, but without any of the momentum that games jumping and running give and you can't really jump directly off walls like you can in that game. You can but you have to slowly "inch-jump" your ass up steep inclines instead of just directly doing so. I never got used to doing this even after playing this game three times and I don't want to live in a timeline where doing this felt comfortable to me.
The wolf form can do this backflip jump, that is actually a pretty impressive animation visually, but it really only serves to have me accidentally do it and then fall into a pit and die. It just adds to the overall frustration I have with jumping in this game. On the topic of worthless upgrades, sometimes the game gifts you a "super wolf" form but it only seems to happen when it is completely useless to you as a player and it ends extremely quickly. I think the game should have had upgrades like that were more like Armor in Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts [超魔界村]. Where once you get it, you have it until you get hit. It would still be pretty useless like that, but at least with that, I would have a chance to use it for more than three seconds. I think this upgrade is tied to your "anger" not at the game, but within the game. There is an anger meter that rises and once you do you get to go super-Saiyan wolfman. If my anger at the game could be transplanted within it, I would always be a super wolf.
I think a lot of the game's environmental design was based on the fact that you have a timer. You have about three minutes to beat each level and only a few time extension drops throughout a level to try and help you beat it in time. I think levels were purposefully designed to waste your time and have dead ends and worthless areas that are just there to confuse you and try to make that timer go down while also frustrating the shit out of you. As if you weren't frustrated enough by every aspect of the game already.
The fourth level in this game combines the shitty jump and wall-climbing mechanics with random things coming out at you and environmental hazards in such a way as to turn a man into a raging beast. If I did a hackey list of the worst levels in platforming games, I think this one might be a contender for the worst level of all time. It combines all of the game's most annoying aspects and habits into one gelatinous brick of wolf-shit. Fish jump out at you whenever you go to jump which means you have to try and fake them out first to get them to reveal themselves, but even after doing that you have only mere seconds to react in order to get to the next platform because the fish will respawn and make you fall to your death in the water. The entire first two minutes of the level which becomes eight minutes because of this need to jump and get enemies to spawn first is one of the most tedious and frustrating things I have had to do in a game. Only you can't take your time, because of the aforementioned timer. Fuck this game.
Despite the frustration of the level design, enemies and bosses are surprisingly easy in this game. A lot of the bosses have easy to discern patterns that again harken back to Megaman bosses, but not nearly as memorable as any of those. The last boss is visually impressive at points but isn't really any harder than any of the previous ones.
If you want a game that offers you second to second high levels of frustration then this is the game for you. The bad level and enemy design, the awkward controls, the timer, and bad jump/climb mechanics make playing this a constant struggle that ultimately is just not worth it.

The story in this game is nonsensical even among nonsense NES stories. If you only play the game it is extremely nonsensical and they do nothing to try to explain to you what is happening and why. Well, there is kind of a reason for that with this game. Do you know how with The Cheetahmen and Bubsy they were trying to create a multimedia empire with the success of a video game character(s)? Well they were trying to do the same with this game only they made the same mistake those two aforementioned franchises made, they forgot the whole making a good game part. So there are some supplementary comics that should explain the story more and presumably they also wanted to have a cartoon eventually, but the problem is I don't have those comics and the show was never made. So here is what I can discern from just the game itself.
You're a guy that for some reason can turn into a werewolf. You have a "mentor" who can turn into a wolf too, only he looks like a shitty monkey creature when he transforms more than a wolf. He gives you advice before every level. <massive gap in the story here> The main antagonist is an evil scientist and I don't know what his evil plans are or what relationship he has to you. Seeing as he turns into a wolf when you fight him... I'm guessing he might be responsible for your strange predicament and why there are other monsters roaming around. Actually, the box and advertisements say the ability is just magical so he has no relationship to you... There isn't really a story to this game, nonsense shit happens and you have to do nonsensical confusing shit to stop it. THE END.

I think they gave the character sword hands, because from what I have seen of the comic, which is admittedly very little. They were going for a Frank Miller Ronin-type/ brown and orange Wolverine theme and aesthetic, but like with everything else they copied they didn't understand anything about these things and just copied it visually without thinking about what this means for the character or why he needed sword hands. Shouldn't a fucking werewolf use its badass claws and teeth as weapons? This is part of the overall problem of the game, for a game about a werewolf it doesn't really do anything or display any of the ferocity a werewolf should have.

This is the first of these games that I reviewed, that I would actually say is mistakenly called a Castlevania-clone, because it isn't that much like those games. To be fair to other people who have said this, it is an 8-bit game with some horror themes and aesthetics, so it has some similarities to those games. I would just say it isn't the clear rip-off of the series that the previous two titles I played Master of Darkness [イン ザ ウエイク オブ ヴァンパイア] and Frankenstein: The Monster Returns were. Also, the horror aesthetics are pretty much limited to just you being a werewolf and the minor things in the game related to that. Instead, it's like a lot of other NES games at once, but not as good as any of the games it is clearly aping. It wants to be Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, and Castlevania simultaneously, but those games mechanics don't mix well together and the developers make no attempt to get anything to gel in a way that is enjoyable. This game is just bad from start to finish. The only people I would recommend this to are furries who want to see a werewolf, but even then I would suggest they take a silver bullet to themselves and the game before they consider living another second. I'm glad history made this game's title a self-fulfilling prophecy because this should be the last of anything related to it.