Unearthing A Classic: The Sharp X68000 (Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari)

Since this is my first post, I'll start off by saying that I'm a HUGE fan of old school video games, mostly from around the NES to PS1 era.  I also enjoy newer systems, but I find that the simplicity and nostalgic factors of the old games keep sucking me back for more.  So with that being said, I'll start out by taking a look at an old system that I just became acquainted with; the SHARP X68000 computer.

Rather than just rehashing the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_X68000), I'll just state that this was a computer released only in Japan that featured pretty much arcade perfect ports of games from around the late 80's to mid 90's.  Most of the better games for the Sharp X68K have been ported to other systems and are still being ported to systems today.  However, there are some games that were real gems on this system, and some different incarnations of classic games.  Despite my rampant googling, I really couldn't find a whole lot about game recommendations or info for this system, so I'd like to present some games that I've been playing recently and give a few short reviews.

For starters, I decided to check out the Sharp X68K after a random google search of River City Ransom (Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_City_Ransom), one of my favorite games for the NES.  I was intrigued that the Sharp X68K version has features not found in any other version yet released, such as more schools with new bosses, new techniques, and the ability to level-up techniques.  Thus began my journey into the world of Sharp X68K gaming!

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari

(Sharp Version Released 1990 according to game disc)

Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari is the story of Cunio and Riki, two high school students who are out to save a girl kidnapped by a rival at a different high school... or something like that.  My Japanese ability is pretty awful, so I can read most of the menus, but I have no clue if the story follows the same exact plot as the English version, or if there are subtle to major differences. In any case, it's a standard plot for games of the day, albeit presented in an interesting form.  In my review, I'm going to cover the extras, because that's the whole reason I wanted to play this version.

Here's the story screen if you can understand the Japanese

The game starts off pretty much exactly like River City Ransom, although the graphics are more comparable to the version released on the GBA or the PCE.  The music is in my opinion a slight improvement over the NES verison, as the Sharp X68K in general seems to have a pretty nice sound capability.

1st Screen

In this screen, Cunio is wearing his Japanese uniform and starts the game with 2000 Yen.  Pretty similar to the start of the other versions, but with a couple HUGE differences.  First, it's actually possible to enter the High School in this picture, although there's nothing there and all the extra High Schools in the game look exactly the same and pretty much the same as the final High School in River City Ransom.  Second, it's possible to head immediately left and enter a whole new area not found in RCR.  I thought this would be really exciting; after all, more RCR would be awesome right?  

But... almost ALL of the extra areas are just the same backgrounds used in the original game. Not only does this make going through them tedious, but also extremely confusing.  There doesn't seem to be any coherent thought to the map in this game, so it always feels like you're walking in circles in some crazy maze.  The areas are almost all open-ended with multiple exits, but they also all weirdly connect and loop.  I was excited to discover that it was possible to go off the screen to the right in the park areas, where the bike racks block you in RCR, but it really just lead to more chaos.

The only thing that got me through it was just going as far in one direction as I could until I looped around, then trying another direction.  It also seems to be absolutely necessary to go through this maze-hell to beat the game, as I went through the entire game the normal RCR way and couldn't open the gates to the last High School.  After I found I think SEVEN other High Schools and beat the bosses, then the gates opened.  So what's the problem with that right?  After all, the extended play was exactly why I wanted to try this out.  Welllll....

ALL of the extra High Schools also have the same exact setup; walk up a flight of stairs, defeat four enemies, fight a sub-boss, then head outside and fight a rooftop boss.  Here's an example of what the High School looks like, taken from the second to last fight with the Double Dragon Themed Twins (Randy and Andy in RCR)

High School Interior:  They're ALL The SAME

So instead of finding a wonderful new world of RCR, I wound up with the Tedious World Of Palette Swap!  In the picture above, the reason one of the twins has no head is because there's a nasty glitch in the game.  Whenever a character walks in front of a door like the one above, the door's image appears to have been layered wrong, and the character's image disappears underneath it. It's pretty awful, although it only slightly lowered my enjoyment of the game.  

An interesting part of the game was that all of the High School boss characters would speak some phrases in Japanese.  I have no idea what they said, and the sound quality was terrible, but it was kind of a cool touch.  The voice actors were all pretty awful though.  First, they all clearly sounded like adults, which didn't fit the High School theme at all.  Second, they were reading their lines in a really dry fashion, except for maybe one or two of the characters, so it was really emotionless and strange.  For some reason there was also a couple extra graphics thrown in seemingly just because, like when Cunio meets the kidnapped girl's friend.

Meeting Hasebe

It was kind of fun to see these extras, but really pretty pointless.  All in all, I was pretty disappointed with the extra areas, the voices were kind of awful, and the added graphics didn't exactly blow my mind. 

Another extra that I was looking forward to were the added skills that Cunio could learn.... but I only found one, and it was a pointless Hand Chop to replace the Stone Hands technique.  I was way too exasperated with the game to look for anymore, although I did find the extra Dojo that's touted on the wikipedia page.  It seemed to be some sort of block-breaking shop, and my character wasn't strong enough or something (despite maxing out my normal stats) because I could only do the first couple on the list, which earned me... who knows?  I couldn't figure out what the bonus was supposed to be at all.

There were some added shops also, and one item was kind of humorous; a shop was selling the X68000 computer for 369,000 Yen, or the price a real one would have been on the time.  I didn't bother collecting enough Yen to figure out if it did anything special, like in the GBA version where an item can help change all kinds of options.  Maybe for another day...

Basically to get through this game quickly I just used the Acro-Circus technique (as named in RCR) to beat two bosses (Kamijyora and Yamamoto I think) about 50 times, which leveled the technique up to a super strong level where I could kill everyone in 2-4 hits.  It also gave me enough coins to buy all the power-ups from the secret tunnel shop and Western Boots (Cowboy Boots in RCR) so my stats were maxed.

You Die!!  Over and over and over...

A couple more features that were different from the NES were the ability to have 3 enemies on screen at a time instead of 2, which could make things a little more hectic.  The game also had save files like the GBA version, which came in pretty handy since you had to start at THE FIRST FREAKING SCHOOL every time you died, which happened often, quickly, and cheaply.  The save states would start you at the screen you left off though, and with full health, so using them became a necessity.

One more feature was a Sound Test Mode that could be accessed from the first menu.  It had all of the background music from the game, plus 5 extra unused tracks.  2 were upbeat short riffs, and would probably have been used after something like a main boss fight, while 2 were downbeat short riffs, and would probably have been for dying or something like that, while there was 1 other main theme type music that was kind of odd and upbeat, maybe for another area.  None of them would have added much to the game though in my opinion, but interesting to hear.

Dubble Dragon... Nice!!

Dubble Dragon is the main theme from Double Dragon used for the fight with the twins near the end that I have pictured in a screencap above in case you're curious.  Really wonder why so many menus for this and other Sharp X68K games use so much English when this was a Japanese only system and there were already English ports available, but makes it easier for me anyway.

Finally, it's still possible to get a FREE SMILE :) just like in RCR

SUMAIRU! 0 Yen! Totomo ii desune!

Overall, I'd give this incarnation an 8.  There were a lot of boring parts, but I got to kick a lot of ass and watch coins explode from people, and that's pretty freaking sweet!  But for the boring stuff, "I say BARF!!!"