Mitsume ga Tōru

The Good
One could spend a lifetime wading through the murky toilet water of videogame adaptations, but sometimes (ie, here), you find a good game! Mitsume ga Tooru is a side-scrolling platform game, based off a manga I'm not familiar with.

One of my favorite gaming memories is taking turns playing this game with my childhood friend Terrence. I'm bitching that his turn is taking too long, and he turns to me and says (in the snooty voice of the action figure collector from Toy Story 2) "YOU...CAN'T...RUSH...ART!" That just made us laugh and laugh.

The deal is this. Even if you've got a NES, an SNES, a Genesis, and stacks of all the best games for those consoles, you still might find yourself coming back to this game. It's just a rock solid game. It is the anti-Mega Man. The gameplay is simple, accessible, and not frustrating in the slightest. The controls are well-designed and well implemented. Perhaps most importantly, the game was created with small details in mind.

Mitsume ga Tooru is loaded with cute little quirks and individualistic touches. You earn coins from dead enemies that you can spend at a shop (and you can juggle these coins in mid-air with your bullets to increase their value) on a variety of items, tools, and powerups. I liked it how you could buy a giant bird that rescues you when you fall off a cliff.

The enemies and bosses are quite diverse and interesting, and they all require unique strategies to beat. One enemy in particular throws a returning boomerang and is only vulnerable for the few seconds when the boomerang is not in his hands. (I'm sure this is all stuff from the manga, I won't pretend to understand it.) The boss fights are also really damn cool, my favorite being the tentacle boss.

The graphics pretty much get the job done. They have the quasi-anime style that works so well on vintage consoles, and there are some nice effects like rain and lightning. The music rocks ass.

The Bad
When I was 11 I remember thinking it was hard, but when I recently got it on VirtuaNES I beat it in two days. The levels are pretty straightforward and the bosses are quite easy, except for the final one who is more cheap than hard (you must fight him about four times, using an really vague strategy that took me ages to figure out. That part of the game definitely did take cues from the Megaman playbook).

Collecting weapons is a drag sometimes. You buy them at a shop, and you can only enter the shop when you see a girl with a blue flag. This leads to annoying situations where you have tons of money but can't buy anything. Why? THERE ISN'T A GIRL NEARBY.

Wait, that last sentence pretty much describes my real life.

The Bottom Line
A rock solid game that understands that not everything needs to be art, not everything needs to redefine its genre, etc. Get this game, there are good odds that you will like it.