Namco Museum Archives Volume 2: The Definitive Review – Complete 11 Game Review + Ranking

Time for Volume 2. To make this quick, everything I said about Volume 1 applies here. I’m fining Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 $5 in Value for poor implementation of rewinding/save states and lack of flexibility in the options. There’s no button mapping. There’s no quick save/quick load. As for the presentation, it’s exactly the same as Volume 1. That sucks, because the games of Volume 2 are so much more complicated. Mappy-Land, Legacy of the Wizard, and Mendel Palace are loaded with items and relatively complex gameplay concepts. Yet, for a game like Legacy of the Wizard, these are the instructions players are given in their entirety:

That’s why I’m once again fining the set $5 in value for overall lazy presentation. It should be more due to the complexity of some of the games, but I’m trying to be consistent over here. I guess they expected players to open StrategyWiki or GameFAQs. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they’ll ever do another set this lazy ever again. 2020 was before prestige releases like TMNT: Cowabunga Collection and Atari 50 set the new standard.

Most of these games were not included in Evercade, but when they were, I also played their versions.

THE ULTIMATE VERDICT ON THE COLLECTION

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 is priced at $19.99, which we’ll round-up and call $20. The value for a quality NES game is set to $5, and the set earned $10 in fines. Therefore, it needs to equal $30 in value, or score six YES! verdicts. If you don’t care about the presentation or emulation extras, making up $20 in value would mean the game is worth the standard MSRP. However, the final total was:

YES!: 3 games totaling $15 in value.
NO!: 8 games.
Fines: $10 in Value
Price: $19.99
Final Value: $5

Ouch. Namco Museum Archives is the worst collection I’ve given a full Definitive Review for yet. It’s worse than Dragon’s Lair Trilogy, and that’s saying something. However, there is a small consolation prize: for the entire Namco Archives series, or at least the ones we got in the United States, three of the top five games were in Volume 2. If you can find the collection for $5, which it often goes on sale for, it really is worth it just for Mendel Palace, and whatever other fun you have is a bonus.

FINAL RANKINGS

How I determined the rankings is simple: I took the full list of games, then I said “I’m forced to play one game. Pick the one I could play the most and not get bored with.” That goes on top of the list. Then I repeat the question again with the remaining games over and over until the list is complete. Based on that simple criteria, here are the final rankings. Games above the Terminator Line received a YES! Games below it received a NO!

1. Mendel Palace
2. Mappy-Land
3. Gaplus
   **TERMINATOR LINE**
4. Dig Dug II
5. Legacy of the Wizard
6. Super Xevious: Gamp No Nazo
7. Galaga
8. Battle City
9. Dragon Buster II
10. Rolling Thunder
11. Pac-Land

GAME REVIEWS

SPECIAL NOTE: For each game that’s a port of an arcade title, which most of these games are, I included a slideshow comparing the Famicom/NES port to the arcade original. The arcade games are NOT included in Namco Museum Archives Vol 1 or Vol 2.

Galaga
First Released February 15, 1985
Unknown Director (Haruhisa Udagawa?)

Evercade: Namco Collection Volume 2

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I’ve never been a very big fan of Galaga. Of the eleven games in this set, this is one I dreaded doing the most, and since a Xevious game is coming up, that’s saying something. Another “you had to be there” type of game where the evolutionary steps it took could only be fully appreciated if they were the latest step. Having said that, I’d much rather play this than Galaxian. Enemies are smarter. The gameplay is more intense. This time around, enemies aren’t already in their marching formation at the start. They majestically fly onto the screen, and after a couple rounds, they’ll start bombing you while they’re at it. It leads to Galaga being one of the fastest-paced Space Invaders coattail riders. And of course, there’s the whole capture-a-ship/double-ship mechanic that I’m sure arcade owners loved.

The “leader” ships at the top have the ability to activate tractor beams. If they ensnare you in the beams, you either shoot your way out (your bullets will fly in all directions as you spin) or you get captured and they carry your ship around like a concubine. If you have no lives left at this point, it’s game over. But, if you shoot the alien that snags your old ship, it rejoins you and you get two ships that you move side-by-side for double the firepower. Of course, this also means you have double the surface area to dodge their bullets, or hell, the aliens might just dive right into you. To Galaga’s credit, the whole thing, from releasing your captured ship to shredding enemies with the double ship is hugely satisfying AND it’s peak risk/reward gameplay. But, it gets old quickly.

As far as the port goes, it seems true to the arcade game, at least in terms of gameplay. You seem to move a little faster, but like Mappy before it in Volume 1, that might be an illusion based on the dimensions. The sky has a lot less stars on the NES, which kind of sticks out when you play the arcade game. There’s a lot less frames of animation for the enemies, which didn’t stand out to me until I allowed the enemies to fully enter the screen and begin to “pulse” collectively. A few other enemies have less detailed sprites. Otherwise, I think fans of Galaga in the 1980s would have adored this port. Today? The arcade game is about as common as Pac-Man in Namco collections, so this only has value for the sake of completion. Did I have fun? Well, not really. I did force myself to legitimately unlock the “clear stage 19” achievement without using rewind or save states. It took me three hours to get that good, and while I wasn’t miserable, I found that Galaga just isn’t as deep or replayable as Pac-Man, King & Balloon, or others from this era.
Verdict: NO!

Battle City
First Released September 9, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Ryōichi Ōkubo, Takefumi Hyodo, & Junko Ozawa

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Battle City never officially came out in America, despite the NES being scorching hot and basically all third party software selling like hot cakes. Yet, of the hundreds of Famicom exclusives, Battle City is probably the most commonly played among American gamers. Why’s that? When I first played Battle City years ago, I learned that many of my older readers were introduced to it via bootleg NES “multicarts.” It was the strangest case of “I REMEMBER THAT!” I’ve ever experienced since I started exploring old games. Apparently Battle City was quite the staple of the Nintendo pirate scene. I got quite the chuckle out of this, because Battle City is so boring that finding it on a bootlegged 100-in-1 cart you got at a flea market feels like fitting punishment.

I mean, it’s not horrible playing or anything like that. It’s just very boring. Battle City is an update to Namco’s semi-popular 1980 coin-op Tank Battalion. Battle City hit the Famicom in 1985, and like many co-op NES games from that era, the home version was lazily converted into a coin-op for Nintendo’s Vs. System line for arcades. Five years later, another update, Tank Force, hit arcades. It was so popular that it didn’t make its Namco Museum debut until this 2017. It’s on the Nintendo Switch version of Museum. I might enjoy that version a lot more, since it added plenty of guns and upped the speed a bit. Battle City’s problem is that it created this seemingly fun premise, but the actual gameplay isn’t optimized for the formula.

The object of the game is to kill twenty tanks in every stage. Some of the tanks move faster, and others take multiple shots to kill. The combat is nice and blowing up tanks is satisfying enough. Hypothetically, Battle City should be based around defending the base. If a single bullet hits your base, it’s game over regardless of how many lives you have left. But, for the most part, enemies seem to rarely take notice of the base. They’ll aimlessly wander around, firing blindly. Both your bullets and enemy bullets break the brick walls, and if you collect enough power-up stars, you can even break the steel walls. It sounds great, and in my limited time with Tank Force, I found that the formula can work. But, it doesn’t work in Battle City because the levels weren’t created to force you to defend the base, or to peek around corners, fire a shot, and then take cover. Most of the levels feel like they drew random shapes with no gameplay logic behind them. You’ll spend a lot of time just firing through bricks just to reach the enemies and engage them. You have to, since the enemies don’t seem hardwired to attack you or your base.

Yea, that’s the really weird part. Enemies seldom chase you OR make a beeline for your base. They just wander around aimlessly for the most part. If there’s any Pac-Man-like invisible logic to their strategy, I couldn’t spot it. Consequently, there’s not enough sense of tension. It’s not that there’s no excitement. You have a tiny little brick barrier around your own base, and when that becomes exposed, Battle City finally finds its thrills. Your bullets can intercept the enemy bullets. I literally cheered when I perfectly timed one of my shots from across the far left side of the screen to catch what would have been the fatal shot on my base that traveled the full length from the top of the screen. It was so rewarding! Of course, the joy was short-lived, as the enemy who shot that bullet spotted a butterfly or something and wandered off instead of being like “hey, look! Her base is wide-open! We can win!” And that’s why Battle City is boring. Enemies don’t feel like they’re playing to win. Battle City is proof positive a good concept isn’t enough. It’s all about the execution.
Verdict: NO!

Pac-Land
First Released November 21, 1985
Famicom Exclusive
Directed by Hiroki Aoyagi

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In Pac-Land, you don’t move with the directional pad. Like in some versions of the arcade game, you have to press and hold down face buttons to move and tap them to move faster. I guess they wanted to be “true to the coin-op” and ignored the fact that the NES/Famicom was optimized to play Donkey Kong, and therefore was ideal for all platformers. Pac-Land did debut before Super Mario Bros. and, according to legend, the control scheme was created to allow Bally Midway to convert their unsold/returned Professor Pac-Man cabinets into a more desirable game. In this case, a Pac-Man game based on the hit Saturday Morning cartoon series that Hanna-Barbera produced. As a trailblazer in the platform genre, they had no clue what they were doing when they made the arcade game. How DO you turn a carton based on a video game into a game.. but like, a different type of game? FAIR ENOUGH!

There’s zero excuse why the NES version kept the horrible, unintuitive control scheme. On a game console where every other game had you pressing a d-pad, Namco stuck like glue to the asinine controls of the arcade version. You have to wonder if they saw Super Mario Bros. and were like “yea, that B-running was a good idea. How come we didn’t think of that? Maybe we need even more brain damage than we already had?” and moved on from sniffing glue to smashing their own heads into concrete blocks while giggling dementedly. It’s even harder than just pressing A and B because the movement physics are sluggish and the act of changing direction is the stuff of video nightmares. Imagine if Super Mario Bros. had controlled the way Pac-Land did. The literal exact same game, with the same maps and same secrets, but with movement mapped to A and B. Where running requires players to tap buttons, and jumping was pressing ANY direction on the D-Pad. Simply put, the NES would not have blown-up, and history would have played out differently. It would have been unplayable. It’s a mental exercise that hammers home what a colossal mistake the control scheme of Pac-Land is. It beat Super Mario to the market! Pac-Land should be remembered as a classic and THE game that put platforming on the map, but it’s not. And it’s because of the controls, in my opinion.

And mind you, this is a game where most of the levels are moving straight and hopping over a block or two. Pits or other “advanced” platforms are relatively rare. The game is broken up into “trips” where you have to make your way to a fairy, then walk back to your house. On the way back, you have an infinite double-jump. Like the rest of the control scheme, it’s not fun to use. The main obstacles are the ghosts that you have to either dodge or hop-on. The hopping-on part doesn’t kill you immediately, but if they rise up too high, you’ll die via what I have to assume is altitude sickness. There are power pellets, but there’s nowhere near enough of them. If you want to maximize them, you sort of have to walk back and forth to lure the ghosts on the screen. There’s also tons of secret items you get by pushing the blocks, where they’re shaped like a cactus or a fire hydrant. I would have been totally down for exploring, but the game runs on an absurdly fast timer. I hate it when games do that: encourage exploration and then punish you for exploring. After timing out twice, I couldn’t be bothered to keep trying.

As a reminder, Namco Museum Archives has no button remapping. Unlike ports to other platforms, or the Pac-Land that’s included in other editions of Namco Museum, you’re stuck with the button-tapping control scheme here. For that reason, Pac-Land is among the very worst NES/Famicom games I’ve had the displeasure to experience. Fans of the port will typically point out two things. (1) At the time this was developed, the genre was brand new, and Pac-Land was one of THE games that established what a side-scrolling platform game should play like, especially when it came to hidden secrets. I’ll grant you that. (2) Techniques that would expand the capabilities and file size of the NES hadn’t been developed yet, and it was impressive how much they squeezed into this tiny file size. Again, touché. Pac-Land is only 41KB of data. The concessions are evident, too. I can’t imagine how disappointed someone who played the cartoonish arcade original must have been when they booted this up for the first time. It’s one of the most ugly games by a major developer I’ve encountered. But, if you were a HUGE fan of the arcade game, I bet you’d have been really happy with this. In 1985. Assuming you hadn’t played Super Mario Bros. yet. But, this was always fated to age worse than just about any game from the decade of the 80s. I hate Pac-Land.
Verdict: NO!

Dig Dug II
First Released April 18, 1986
Unknown Director (Hiroki Aoyagi?)

Evercade: Namco Collection Volume 2
Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription

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Dig Dug has taken his crimes against nature to a whole new level. Not content to just impale helpless goggle-people and dragons with a harpoon and use compressed air to burst the insides out of them, he’s taken to destroying entire lush, tropical islands. The logic of Dig Dug II is absolutely f’n bonkers. “This remote island is infested, and I have the means to get rid of the infestation without harming the local ecosystem. BUT, wouldn’t it be fun if, instead, I harmed the ecosystem? By “harm” I of course mean completely destroy the ecosystem? Technically, that would do the job! That way, instead of using compressed air to exterminate helpless creatures, I can instead drown them! The cruelest of all deaths! I better stop now! I can only get so hard!” Dig Dug is a sadist, people. There can be no doubt about this. He’s completely unhinged, off-his-rocker, and a full-fledged psychopath. People think he should be in Smash Bros? Wrong fighting game. He was tailor-made for Mortal Kombat!

Dig Dug II retains the original game’s harpoon mechanics, including the ability to more quickly burst enemies by throwing it repeatedly instead of holding the button down. The key difference is there’s no tunneling, which means enemies can walk freely. The hook this time is you can use a drill along pressure points that’ll create cracks on the surface. If the cracks completely encompass an area and connect with other cracks, the section with the least amount of land will collapse into the water. Any enemies on that land will drown for extra points. There’s only so many pressure points in the stages, and not every stage lends itself to the destroy-the-Earth gameplay. Admittedly, it’s fun and different. Enemies will not physically walk over the cracks and instead use their “turn into faces and teleport” mechanic. The fun in Dig Dug II is wrangling as many enemies as possible into an area before collapsing it into the sea.

Dig Dug II on the Famicom/NES has more than double stages that the arcade game has, jumping from 32 to 72. Unlike many games that bulk-up the level count, the extra levels in the NES port of Dig Dug II are some of the best in the game. They’re almost all based around including tons of island-destruction opportunities. THAT’S THE GOOD STUFF! Props to the team behind this for recognizing that. But, while that’s impressive, the NES game is so sluggish compared to the coin-op version. This is especially noticeable when you use the game’s primary method of attack. In arcades, the collapsing happens so much faster. The whole game is faster paced, with quicker, more accurate movement. Since the enemies can move about freely and swarm you quickly, having responsive controls is a must. The arcade version? It nails it.

In comparison, the NES feels unresponsive, much slower, and a lot less exciting. However, even within those limitations, I managed to find a teeny tiny bit of fun. Drowning the enemies in the sea always puts a smile on my face. No, I’m not a psychopath. You are. Shut up. I did find it highly annoying that the levels didn’t take more advantage of the drilling component. I also have no clue what they were thinking when they chose to stick so close to the original Dig Dug by only having two varieties of enemies. It’s so obviously doomed to run out of steam before it runs out of levels. The Fygars (the little dragons) not being able to shoot upward makes them absurdly clockable. Why not add a third variety of enemy that shoots its fire only up and down? It’s insane to think that adding a single enemy type would have dramatically changed the game, but it would have probably saved Dig Dug II. I think I’d be inclined to give the arcade version a YES! because I enjoyed the much faster and crisper action. The slower NES version? Even at its best, it’s too slow and too boring. An otherwise solid port that just didn’t bring the excitement home. I would like to see this get a remake with more enemies, though.
Verdict: NO!

Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo
First Released September 19, 1986
Famicom Exclusive
Directed (?) by Haruhisa Udagawa

This is not an NES port of Super Xevious, the 1984 enhanced version of the original coin-op classic. No, folks, this isn’t what you think it is at all. It might actually be the most crazy idea for a shmup I’ve ever seen in my life. Get this: Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo (Mystery of Gamp) takes what sure seems like the exact same engine of the original NES port of Xevious, then combines it with the abstract “puzzle” design of Tower of Druaga. Yes, really! Each of the game’s areas has a completely unlabeled victory condition that you have to suss out, and the level will loop until you meet that condition. For example, in the first stage, there’s clouds. You have to fly into the correct part of one of the clouds to defeat the stage. In other stages, you might have to clear out enemies, bomb all ground based targets, take out the giant boss-like enemies, become trapped by specific enemies, etc, etc.

Well, points for originality, I guess, as well as points for adding power-ups. The power-ups aren’t AMAZING or anything, but the one that increases the blast radius of your bombs is much appreciated. There’s further twists too, as some stages take the bombs away from you, while others take your main gun away. Despite my general distaste for abstraction design, I found myself really enjoying this take on Xevious. I even tried playing it straight, but there’s a very serious problem with the game. If you take too long, which really isn’t all that long.. like more than two complete circuits through a level, the game punishes you for it by spamming the screen with bullets. Eventually, it’ll produce so many that you can’t survive. I had to give up on exploration and “playing it straight” and move onto using StrategyWiki, and that took a lot of fun out of it.

Even without the unstated time limit, the difficulty becomes beyond the pale in later stages. It’s not even what I’d call a “bullet hell” because the gag with those games is you can squeeze your way through bullets. In Gamp, I found myself in several situations where I’m almost certain I couldn’t have survived no matter what I did once the enemy had fired its guns. The level design seems almost entirely based on random chance of picking which side of the screen to shoot enemies at. Normally, I hate it in shmups where you can collect so many speed-ups that you have to feather the D-pad like you’re giving CPR to a ladybug just to maneuver. I would have KILLED for a speed-up in GAMP No Nazo. The overwhelming majority of my deaths were the result of being on the wrong side of the screen, by pure random chance. I can’t imagine very many people ever took the time to get good enough at this to finish it. It’s not merely overwhelming. Oh no. The odds are next to impossible, and as a result, it’s just not fun.

At first, I was wondering why Super Xevious: GAMP No Nazo was critically panned and a money loser for Namco, because I was genuinely having a really good time. Then the game decided I was taking too much time having that good time and punished me for doing the object of the game: exploring. What an asinine design choice. Seriously, it’s not like this was a f’n arcade game. Well, actually it sort of was. Like many early NES titles, an arcade port was created for the Nintendo Vs. System that’s essentially an NES you stick coins in. I’ve encountered many of these Vs. games, and Vs. Super Xevious is probably the closest to being identical to the home version I’ve played in terms of graphics and gameplay. Suddenly, the fateful decision to penalize players makes sense. It’s to bounce people off the coin-op who clear out stages but can’t figure out how to activate the next level. A choice that completely ruins the game. I hope it was worth it. Judging by the fact that GAMP’s reputation is being one of Namco’s all-time failures, it wasn’t. Then again, even if you know what you’re doing, the screen being spammed with enemies and their bullets, while using one of the least maneuverable ships in the genre, sapped any remaining fun out of it. It’s still probably the most fun I’ve had playing a Xevious game, but that’s like a quadruple amputee saying the time they had an ingrown toenail cut out was their most pleasant removal of a body part.
Verdict: NO!

Mappy-Land
First Released November 26, 1986
Developed by Tose

Included with Nintendo Switch Online Basic Subscription

I’ve never played a platformer that alternates from all-timer to unplayable nightmare for one stage and one stage only quite like Mappy-Land. Then again, Mappy-Land isn’t exactly a platformer, at least in the Super Mario sense. This could have been named Mappy 2, since the same basic concept is at play: a maze chase from a side angle where you avoid the same two types of cat pursuers from the arcade original. The object is to collect all the scattered items while using trampolines to quickly scale different floors of structures that are wider than the screen. Mappy-Land builds upon the original’s premise by removing the doors and instead giving players a wider variety of comical attacks that are scattered around the stages. Shooting the cats with cannons. Kicking them using a zip line. The “combat” of Mappy-Land is very much the highlight, as it’s always fun and satisfying to score a hit with the various props scattered about . Most importantly, it all feels true to the original.

The big twist is that the levels don’t end after you collect the final item. Once you collect six standard items, you typically have to beat-feet it to the exit. Each world features the same eight themed levels, but the level layouts and item locations change each cycle. Not only that, but the win conditions can change from cycle to cycle as well. Sometimes, a stage might require you to collect the six items and then enter another building and collect a final item before you can finish the stage. On the fourth cycle, every stage is set up this way, and by that point, the cats will be faster than you are, as they gain speed over the course of the game. If you know how to play Mappy, you should be able to jump right in. However, while the movement is similar to the original coin-op, the rules aren’t 100% the same.

In the arcade version, I’d come to rely on that teeny tiny grace period of invincibility when cats are coming off the trampoline to survive close-calls. There is no grace period in Mappy-Land. However, you have a seemingly worthless little jump that I originally believed was only good for hopping up to collect the items. My attempts to jump over the smaller cats didn’t pan out. Then, by complete accident, I figured out you COULD hop over them. It’s especially effective if you hop onto a trampoline, which grants you immunity as long as you’re on it. Of course, that it took me so long to realize jumping does work to dodge the cats tells you how picky and unreliable it is, but you need to get the hang of it. While the first cycle is fairly toothless, cycles three and four are stunningly difficult. But, in a fun way. Well.. mostly. Then you get to the jungle level, and you realize how Mappy-Land slipped through the cracks of history.

Level 4 in each cycle is a jungle theme with vines and moving trampolines. This is the only level where I found myself screaming at the controls and movement physics. Hopping on-and-off moving trampolines feels inelegant. This would be bad enough by itself, but then you also have to deal with the overly sensitive movement across the vines and some very strangely inconsistent collision boxes on the items you must collect. Further combine that with the fact that you can die from falling too far, and it makes for one of gaming’s most all-time janky stages. It’s really sloppily handled, to the point that level four feels like it’s from an entirely different game.

I also wasn’t a big fan of how the level design logic changes in the fourth cycle. The final eight stages of Mappy-Land lean heavily into the fact that falling even a single story kills you. So, they’ll do things like have dead-ends where the trampoline that would normally catch you isn’t there between the gaps anymore. Instead, it’ll be a space over. Even if you use the jump button when leaping off a ledge, your momentum will eventually hit an invisible wall and you’ll fall to your death. On the plus side, it finally gave me an excuse to start using the “distractions” that you can pick up. Cat toys that temporarily pacify the cats. They usually appear after you pick up one of the six items. Then again, there’s also areas in 4th cycle where you can GET STUCK and have no choice but to die. This is total amateur hour bullcrap, right there.

Mind you, I’m prepared to call Mappy-Land one of the most underrated titles on the NES regardless of how badly that damn 4th level or the entire fourth cycle plays out. BUT, those aspects of the game are so haphazardly programmed that it really lets the air out of what is otherwise one of 8-bit gaming’s great hidden gems. If not for them, Mappy-Land would be a contender for one of THE best games on the Nintendo Entertainment System. For 21 of 32 stages, it might actually be the best marriage of platforming and maze chasing ever made. All the excitement of close-calls and turning-the-tables that a great maze chase has are combined with the satisfaction of level progression and problem solving that a platformer can feature. Mappy-Land deserved a better fate than being a nonentity in gaming history. It’s a one-off, folks. It was completely swallowed-up historically. I blame Gen-X. Y’all should have embraced this more. For shame!

Make no mistake: Mappy-Land is tons of fun on levels 1 – 3 and 5 – 8. It really is just that fourth stage that keeps me from screaming “DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND PLAY THIS NOW!” What’s really tragic was that this completely fell by the wayside. In a just universe, Mappy-Land would have spawned its own sub-franchise that would still be thriving today.  Instead, Mappy-Land spent over thirty years buried in obscurity before being resurrected twice in the 2020s: once on a lazy, budget level classic collection, and then as a +1 to the Nintendo Switch Online NES library. Nobody really paid attention to either. Gaming really missed out when Mappy-Land failed to find an audience. Yes, it can be janky and problematic, but it also should have been the start of something amazing, and it wasn’t.
Verdict: YES!
$5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2 and a subscription to Nintendo Switch Online.

Legacy of the Wizard
A.K.A. Dragon Slayer IV Drasle Family
First Released July 17, 1987
Developed by Nihon Falcom

I didn’t finish Legacy of the Wizard, a side-scrolling action-adventure with some RPG seasoning. I beat the first two bosses and played a little bit of the third “level” and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’m not even sure why it’s in this collection. It wasn’t made by Namco, and wasn’t published by them outside of Japan. It’s part of the Dragon Slayer franchise that never really caught-on in America. Hell, even Nintendo tried to help with that, publishing spin-off game Faxanadu, and it still didn’t take. I wanted to like Legacy of the Wizard a lot more than I did. It’s a game that has insanely fun combat, an underrated soundtrack, and some of the most boring level design I’ve ever experienced in my life. Try imagining if you had an excellent home cooked meal that you had to run a lap or two on a track between each bite, and the only utensil was a spoon. That’s the Legacy of the Wizard experience.

First off, if you’re planning to play this, open StrategyWiki and at least read the character and item descriptions. Prudent information, like how the dog/monster, Pochi, isn’t damaged by basic enemies? That stuff isn’t covered in the lazy instruction screen provided in Namco Museum Archives. Legacy of the Wizard isn’t as obtuse as some games get, but it’s pretty overwhelming just to get started. You have a vast world of interconnected stages and a whopping five characters to use. The world map is secretly optimized for four of the five characters to explore and collect the game’s crowns, leading to a final battle that only the prodigal son can do. I love the idea. The execution? Not so much.

The best thing Legacy of the Wizard has going for it is the combat. With the exception of a pair of shoes that allow you to stomp enemies, platforming game-style, all the combat in Legacy of the Wizard is done by throwing projectiles. You don’t have unlimited attacks, either. Every time you fire a projectile, you use up a little bit of magic. Presumably, this was done to prevent players from spamming the attack button willy nilly. I thought this would be the part of Legacy of the Wizard that annoyed me most, but it works! It actually succeeds in adding strategy and tension to the game without taking anything off the table. And by the way, the combat is fun and satisfying. They just didn’t build the game around it.

It’s genuinely stunning how boring Legacy of the Wizard’s level design is. Clearly developers Nihon Falcom had “labyrinth-like mazes” on their mind. I get what they were aiming for, and it just didn’t work. Too much repetition is one reason why. In the above clip, they created one type of “puzzle” and then made players repeat it eleven times in a row. Other rooms might have you walking around a spiral of blocks to reach a shop in the center of the room, creating an over two-minute-long round trip just to see what’s in the shop. These days, a quality director would put the screws to that kind of mentality. Then again, a game like this today would have an onscreen map with areas you’ve been to being marked off. Legacy of the Wizard would be a much stronger game today. In 1987, very few games felt inclined to give players a sense of direction. One of the few that did, Legend of Zelda, went on to become one of the most cherished titles of all-time and the launching point of one of gaming’s most important franchises. What a coincidence the one game that really went all-in on providing maps and direction was the game that broke through while so many others didn’t.

Legacy of the Wizard has more issues. There’s too much usage of jumping up into rooms and not having anything to land on, so you have to jump up and down swapping rooms looking for a place to actually stand. This is actually the point where I just threw in the towel.

Legacy of the Wizard just doesn’t feel optimized for exploration in general. You take falling damage, and it’s not even that far you have to fall. Then the game literally forces places to take falling damage to get to the hub where the game splits off into the four distinct zones. There’s also some high concept ideas that just don’t work. For example, I started with Pochi, the family dog who turns into a pink monster. The other monsters ignore you, which is a cute gag, but when you stop and think about it, it means the zone you play using Pochi has no stakes. It’s such an absurd idea that my father accused me of using a cheat code, refusing to believe anyone, even in 1987, would design a game where it’s possible to just walk past enemies for an extended portion of the game. Then, with Pochi, I beat the first boss in a couple seconds. The second zone has you take the role of the father. With him, you have to equip a glove and manipulate blocks like the world’s worst version of Sokoban (that’s Boxxle for you old Game Boy owners). Moving the blocks is an unintuitive nightmare. Even with a fairly well made video tutorial by CMDR Sho (and seriously, give him a subscription for this), playing this section was miserable. After hours of hard work getting to the boss, I beat THAT boss after one single second of direct engagement. ONE SECOND! Why even have a boss?

I don’t remember a game that made me scream “WHY WOULD ANYONE BUILD A GAME LIKE THIS?” more than Legacy of the Wizard. A fun idea with a map so tediously laid out that it becomes exhausting. While I would love a ROM hacker to clean up the design, what Legacy of the Wizard really needs is a complete modern remake that keeps the core idea, but redoes the entire map with modern level design logic, a built-in map, and better progression. Legacy of the Wizard is so ambitious for its era, and for that, it has my respect. It just does too many annoying things. Grinding level design. Far too many random whammies in the item drops that could halt your progress since you often have no choice but to just sit and wait for them to disappear. Or not making a bigger deal of hiding items in chests. The locations they’re found don’t feel “special” like the best Metroidvanias do. “Why would they just put this item in this place in this room?” I asked more than once, which strips away that being a “moment.” Ultimately, I could have dealt with every other problem, but the level design was the fatal flaw that I couldn’t overcome. It’s one of those games where I found myself asking “did they have fun playing this?” Because I didn’t.
Verdict: NO!

Rolling Thunder
First Released March 17, 1988
Unknown Director

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And the level design hits keep coming. I’m sure Rolling Thunder was cutting edge “back in the day” but it ain’t “back in the day” anymore. Even at its best, Rolling Thunder is a very bland James Bond ripoff where you mostly walk right and shoot clones of Cobra Commander, along with animals and the occasional.. uh.. sentient fire creature? Okay. Oh and Aliens take over in the second story, which I quit after three levels. Rolling Thunder crosses the line from “we’re trying to make a fun game” to “we’re trying to dropkick you, the paying customer, in the ass. Frankly, we already got your money and we really don’t care if you have a good time while we dropkick you in the ass or not.” A boring, lifeless action game based around some of the most infuriatingly cheap enemy placement I’ve seen.

Rolling Thunder is one of those games where difficulty is created by creating the “actions” a player can do, then building the levels to not be at all compatible with those actions. In Rolling Thunder’s case, there’s three things you need to know: (1) you can’t shoot in any direction but straight ahead. (2) You can’t shoot when you jump. (3) You jump using fixed angles. By time you’re just a few levels into the game, enemies will literally rain down on you, while gaps you must jump over are built so you can’t even turn around once you land. Your pitiful life bar allows you to directly touch enemies once without dying, but bullets are always an instakill. The first five levels are boring and annoying but doable. Dull set pieces and waves of the same enemies, with the occasional attack by cheap-as-all-f*ck owls or fire monsters. All this with sluggish movement and generally unresponsive controls. Even at its best, the violence doesn’t have enough pop to it to make the action exciting, so I’d of given Rolling Thunder a NO! anyway. The worst thing an action game can be is boring, and Rolling Thunder is really boring.

After only five levels, the stages repeat, only they’ve been slightly modified. Also, the enemy placement reaches extremes so brazenly cheap I’m surprised they just didn’t drop you into a fire at the start of each level. The fixed jumping becomes the primary issue. You have to navigate a tire yard with a laser that continuously fires. You have to cross a series of single-body-length pillars with pits all around you WHILE enemies literally fly up at you from the ground. I couldn’t take it. Rolling Thunder might have impressed people in the mid-80s by having large sprites, but the gameplay is absolutely dreadful. Even if this controlled as well as, say, Mega Man, the action is so boring. And really repetitive, too. Rolling Thunder might be the most overrated gaming franchise of the era. After playing the first one, I can’t believe anyone ever wanted a sequel.
Verdict: NO!

Dragon Buster II: Yami no Fūin
First Released April 27, 1987
Famicom Exclusive
Developed by Tose

Ignore the title. Besides how the map screen works, Dragon Buster II has very little relationship to the Dragon Buster that I ranked dead last in Namco Museum Archives Volume 1. The genre is different. The primary method of attack is different. Oh, and the game is a lot better. I mean, it’s still not fun. Like, at all. Seriously, this is one of the most pointless games I’ve ever encountered. But, at least it controls well enough and isn’t an unplayable nightmare of epic proportions. Hey, an upgrade is an upgrade! It’s not a deep game by any stretch. You select a cave/forest/castle/tower on a map. This time, the action is top-down. You walk through a maze hunting enemies with a flimsy bow and arrow until you kill an enemy who has a key. Once you have the key, you have to find the door and leave. That’s it. You don’t need to search for mythical items or the magic doohickey that allows you to defeat the boss. Find a key, leave, rinse and repeat until you fight a dragon in the final tower to beat that world. Repeat this process over six agonizing worlds of pure digital boredom.

I could get behind a simple, stripped-down maze crawler like this if the combat was fun or the exploration was exciting. Neither is the case here. Inside the actual stages, you can only see so much of whatever level you’re exploring. You have to physically walk into the darkened parts of the screen to light up the next room. To Dragon Buster II’s credit, once a room is lit, it stays lit. As you scroll your character into darkened areas, they light up. You can also hear if enemies are in an unseen area and even fire upon them. It sounds fine, but besides the themes changing, the feel of each stage is so interchangeable and repetitive that it’s exhausting. They’re so bland and so limited in how they can be designed that I really thought they were randomly generated. But, that’s not the case. There’s literally no reason to explore once you have the key. If there were permanent upgrades, that would be one thing, but there ain’t. Dragon Buster II feels like a prototype that has the basics down but hasn’t added the fun parts.

And there’s the combat. This is like a sucky version of the arcade classic Berzerk. You can only fire one arrow at a time. If you miss, the arrow will ricochet. In theory, you can use this to hit enemies from a variety of angles. In practice, I never once found a situation where it made any sense to shoot an enemy from any direction but straight ahead. That’s because they’re often placed right inside the darkness of the next room. The overwhelming majority of enemy encounters start off at too close to you. This reduces the “gameplay” to walking into a room, legging it in the other direction while an enemy chases you, then turning around and firing once you’ve scratched-out a safe distance. There is NOTHING to take the edge off this besides a fairly rare and limited-usage fire arrow. Dragon Buster II repeats the same thing over and over for hours. It’s painful.

Enemies get cheaper and spongier as you go along, but combat is still the same premise: walk into a room, run away, then turn around and shoot. If you want to play bolder and try angling your arrows off the walls, keep in mind that your own ricocheting arrows can damage you. Really! In fact, I think I took more damage from missing shots than I did from enemies, even as I got deeper into the game. It’s such a boring setup. Ammo is limited, so in theory the only reason to search the caves is to find more ammo. But, I never ran short on it, and I was exiting caves as soon as I got the key and found the door without even trying to look around. The only other “items” are life restoring faeries and a brief force field. Dragon Buster II is a maze game with no reason to explore. What’s really strange is that the world maps become bigger and bigger and you have freedom to explore different paths, but again, why bother? If there were permanent upgrades, I could see doing these massive maps with tons of different locations. Sigh. What a strange game Dragon Buster II is. It’s like they wanted to keep the arcade-like simplicity and repetitiveness of the original Dragon Buster, only they wanted an entirely different experience. Why bother? There’s nothing here to alleviate the tedium.
Verdict: NO!

Mendel Palace
First Released June 27, 1989
Developed by Game Freak

I’m happy to report that Mendel Palace doesn’t just win Best in Set for Volume 2 by default. In fact, my discovery of Mendel Palace is one of the happiest moments of my gaming existence. Folks, this is a great one. An absolute NES masterpiece, the very textbook definition of a hidden gem, and an honest-to-goodness contender for most underrated 8-bit game EVER! It helps a lot that nothing resembling Mendel Palace has been attempted since. It’s the rarest of rare: an amazing game with gameplay mechanics so unique that it’s a literal one-off, and it’s INSANELY FUN! It’s also chaotic, frustrating, and maddening. But fun! Really! This is the best game in the Archives “franchise” by a landslide. The gap between this and the second best game isn’t even close.

In this single-screen action-arcader, you have to shuffle the floor underneath enemies, causing them to fall backwards. If you can get them to fall backwards into a solid surface, they explode with a satisfactory POOF. The object is simple: clear out the enemies. Mendel Palace starts non-linear with players allowed to choose any of the eight main types of what I think are supposed to be living dolls that you must do battle with. Enemy types are never mixed-up, so each stage has you dealing with only one variation of the same type of enemy. Each of the enemies has its own gimmick and matching attack style. Sumos will stomp the ground causing entire rows of panels to shuffle. Others might do nothing but chase you down at first, but eventually split into smaller enemies. There’s baddies that mimic you and mirror your actions, and others that leap before you have a chance to shuffle the panel underneath them. Swimmers shuffle the blocks they move through. If you beat all the basic enemies, you have to face off against ninjas who aggressively shuffle the panels with kicks. They’re ALL fun to do battle with. The combat in Mendel Palace is one-of-a-kind and never gets boring.

The playfield is the main highlight. The game takes place on a 7 x 5 grid of panels. The panels work like cards that you shuffle through, and might have helpful items or methods of mass attack on them or buried under other panels. Stars are the most common thing you’ll see. If you collect 100 of them, you get an extra life. There’s a randomized prize, though it’s actually not so randomized. In fact, you should be able to clock the timing and use it to score an extra life every single time, and trust me, you’ll need them. Some of the panels are portals that spawn extra enemies, and those will be the bane of your existence. Every time you kill an enemy, if a portal is on the screen, another will spawn until the max of six enemies are on the screen at once. Thankfully, a portal vanishes after a single use, but some stages might have multiple portals on each part of the grid. Some stages you can expect to take several minutes fighting endlessly respawning bad guys until the dozens of portals are all used up. As stages progress, you have to fight different-colored variations of enemies that have variations on their standard attack. They also tend to be faster and more aggressive.

Then there’s the mass-attack items. Some will shuffle the panels in four directions. There’s one that you have to time to send a single row of panels shuffling. The big one is the sun, which shuffles every panel on the playfield once in a wave that spreads across the screen. While this could lead to an instakill of every enemy, it also risks exposing more portals and enemy spawns. Then, there’s the most dreaded of all panels: the lock. Once a panel is locked, it can’t be shuffled again. The most difficult enemy type, the artist, has tons of these in their world, and it gets even worse. The artists will draw on the panels, and if you don’t interrupt them, you lose the ability to shuffle once they finish their drawing. Oh, and they might draw more enemies that come to life and begin to attack you. Their “boss fight” is drawing more copies of themselves that can then draw more copies of themselves.

There’s two types of boss fights. In some, you have to fight six max-difficulty versions of the enemies of whatever world you’re in. In normal stages, if you lose a life, the level restarts with all the progress you’ve made. So, if there’s only two enemies left instead of six, you start again with only two enemies. That’s not the case in boss battles. You either beat all of them with one life or you start over with all six. These were my favorite boss battles, as the challenge is usually just right. They make for a fitting final challenge for each world.

The other boss type sees you turned into the enemy and having to use their attacks to push the boss up against the wall. It’s not as fun as it sounds, and actually is probably the weakest aspect of the gameplay. It’s the only time when Mendel Palace feels janky. I found the swimmer was the hardest to control, as getting the panels to shuffle was overly difficult and inconsistent. Meanwhile, I beat the sumo level’s “boss” in about one second with my first attack. As much as I love Mendel Palace, it has a serious issue with the difficulty curve. It goes from infuriating to a piece of cake and back again with no buffer in-between. And what was even the f’n point of having the boss turn you into the enemy that mimics you? So dumb. At least there was a boss fight, I guess. The stage with the horned enemies only has a small cut scene where the villain kidnaps the girl. I wish every stage ended with the 6 v 1 battles. Those were always a thrill.

While the difficulty can be maddening, I adore Mendel Palace. Worth the price of admission alone? I don’t know if I’d go that far, but it’s the only game in the Namco Archives franchise that I beat solo, then beat co-op, then played the extra levels. Oh, there’s extra levels. When you first load up the game, hold down the Start and Select buttons, then enter the system menu (the save state screen) and select GAME RESET. Keep holding down start and select, and when the game reboots, the title screen lettering will be pink and it’ll have the words EXTRA above the logo. This gives you 100 extra levels of varying difficulty. It’s probably best to think of it as the “hard mode” and I loved it! It’s really rare for any game to inspire me to play through all the extra content, but I did for this one. It speaks to how amazing Mendel Palace is.

Like Legacy of the Wizard, I’m not entirely sure why it’s part of a Namco collection. It wasn’t developed by them, and it wasn’t published by them outside of Japan. But, I’m really happy it’s here. It’s one of the most unique video game experiences out there. What’s really insane is that this was the debut of Game Freak. I really wish they’d make a Pokémon game based around the mechanics of Mendel Palace. Hell, with its cast of hundreds of colorful critters, you’d think it would lend itself perfectly to Mendel Palace’s formula. It’s wishful thinking, I’m sure. But I always have faith that good ideas will eventually find their audience. Mendel Palace deserves to be a legendary game, and it’ll have to settle for being the best game in the Namco Museum Archives series.
Verdict: YES!
$5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2
WINNER: Best in Set

Gaplus
Released June 18, 2020
Developed by M2
Exclusive to Namco Museum Archives: Volume 2

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How’s this for a surprise: I enjoyed this original NES “demake” of Gaplus more than I enjoyed the demake of Pac-Man Championship Edition in Volume 1. Granted, I played the original Championship version of Pac-Man to death, but I’d never even thought twice about Gaplus before this set came out. Shame on me! Gaplus is so good that I should issue fines to all future Namco sets for every instance of including either Galaxian or Galaga without including Gaplus as well. Frankly, the inclusion of a brand spanking new port of Gaplus created just for this set is shocking. Namco has always ignored the third game in the Galaxian franchise, and I don’t get why. Because it didn’t make a gazillion dollars? So let me get this straight: an arcade game released 1984, during a downswing for arcades, didn’t make money? It wasn’t as popular as previous, less good games that came out at the peak of arcade popularity? Get out of town!

Gaplus isn’t just more of the same, either. Among other things, you can now move up and down in addition to left and right. This tiny change has massive ramifications, making the act of dodging so much more intense. And in Gaplus, you don’t have to sacrifice a life just to get a power-up anymore. This time around, when the aliens finish flying into formation, a captured ship will just blink into existence at the top of the screen. When the alien bound to the ship goes on its bombing run, if you shoot it down, you automatically catch the ship it drops and get whatever item it has. One of them sees you firing a tractor beam to capture enemy ships, just like they did to players in Galaga. You can conscript up to four enemies to multiply your firepower and breeze through the first several levels. It’s not the only item though, as you can make your gun more powerful. Another item slows the enemies down and makes them easier to ping off. There’s also a gigantic screw that I didn’t find particularly fun to use since it basically just kills enemies who fly into it. I’m almost certain they would die from flying into my bullets regardless.

Maybe I’m slightly overrating Gaplus, but I promised myself that I’d already put too much time into Volume 2 and would only play this for ONE HOUR. But, I ended up spending a whole day messing around with Gaplus anyway. It’s addictive. Hell, just the ability to move up and down like in Centipede pays off massive gameplay dividends. The one knock I have on it is, when the game gets its teeth, a great round of Gaplus turns on a dime. You can go from having plenty of lives to GAME OVER so quickly your head will spin. This has a lot to do with how fast and powerful your cannon can be. You might fly through a dozen or more waves quickly, but one mistake and you’re left with the basic weapon and enemies who can spam the screen with projectiles. Frustrating? Oh yea. Amazingly fun? For sure. Gaplus also shows that this formula can still work, in 2023, if you give the player enough options to keep the fun pumping.
Verdict: YES!
$5 in Value added to Namco Museum Archives Volume 2

FINAL NAMCO MUSEUM ARCHIVES RANKINGS

1. Mendel Palace (Vol 2)
2. Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffiti (Vol 1)
3. Gaplus (Vol 2)
4. Pac-Man: Championship Edition (Vol 1)
5. Mappy-Land (Vol 2)
6. Mappy (Vol 1)
7. Dig Dug (Vol 1)
8. Pac-Man (Vol 1)
9. Dragon Spirit: The New Legend (Vol 1)
   **TERMINATOR LINE**
10. Dig Dug II (Vol 2)
11. Legacy of the Wizard (Vol 2)
12. Super Xevious: Gamp No Nazo (Vol 2)
13. Galaga (Vol 2)
14. Battle City (Vol 2)
15. Xevious (Vol 1)
16. Dragon Buster II (Vol 2)
17. Sky Kid (Vol 1)
18. Tower of Druaga (Vol 1)
19. Galaxian (Vol 1)
20. Rolling Thunder (Vol 2)
21. Dragon Buster (Vol 1)
22. Pac-Land (Vol 2)