Keith Courage in Alpha Zones (TurboGrafx-16 Review)

Keith Courage in Alpha Zones
aka Mashin Eiyuuden Wataru
Platform: TurboGrafx-16
Developed by Advance Communication Company
Published by NEC
Released August 29, 1989
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Keith Courage looks kind of like Pidge from Voltron, doesn’t he? Oh, and fun fact: Keith Courage, and the TurboGrafx-16, came out in the US exactly fifty days after I was born.

When NEC launched the PC Engine in the United States on August 29, 1989, many people didn’t know what they were thinking when they chose Keith Courage as the pack-in game. Well, *I* know what they were thinking. They were thinking “in thirty-four years, a girl named Cathy Vice will look back on this and think we were incredibly dumb idiots, bordering on blithering.” They were soothsayers, in case you didn’t know. Incredibly dumb idiots, but genuine clairvoyants. Indeed, one has to imagine that few companies kicked themselves as hard as NEC must have in the late 80s and early 90s. Released in 1987 in Japan, the PC Engine clobbered Sega’s Mega Drive and even briefly held industrial leadership over Nintendo’s Famicom. NEC seems to have been caught off-guard by their own success and bungled the global rollout of the console us westerners know as the TurboGrafx-16 every single step of the way. They squandered a potential two year head start on Sega, who beat them to US test marketing by two weeks. Sega also had Altered Beast packed-in with their console. I don’t like Altered Beast, but I also wasn’t around. It had arcade familiarity, massive character sprites, and looked cutting edge. The TG-16 was packed with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. And it sucks.

It’s not even really called “Keith Courage.” This is based on a property in Japan known as Mashin Hero Wataru.

NEC’s test launch of the TG-16 only had four games. Along with Keith Courage, there was an arcade racer called Victory Run, a video pinball title called Alien Crush that’s often cited as among the best the genre had seen in that era, and a hugely critically acclaimed action platformer called Legendary Axe. That last one swept up several Game of the Year awards from major publications. If we pretend they couldn’t have pooled from their massive Japanese library for more software and were limited to only the four launch games, it’s arguable they picked the worst one to bundle with the hardware. The only way I could logically spin it was NEC’s US team recognized it was the worst of the four and nobody would buy it on its own, so they said “screw it” and made it the free game. What’s really strange is the three games they didn’t choose look and sound better. When your only competitive edge is the graphics, picking a game that doesn’t look particularly advanced over the NES isn’t wise. It looks more colorful. That’s about it. Being more colorful isn’t a big advantage. Just ask Sega, since that was their edge with the Sega Master System.

For a pack-in game, NEC chose a game with 100% bland level design, 50% of which is extremely slow, plodding “action.” Oh, and the part that’s slow also requires grinding, since that’s the only part of the game that currency drops, and you absolutely NEED that currency to prevent enemies in the fast-paced sections from being spongy. Holy crap, what a boring game. Since you’re going to have to grind either way, grind several thousand bucks up on the stage that drops golden cats on you. They pay off the most. Of course, you might have to wait forever for one, but the non-gold ones pay off too.

You have to slog your way through seven levels, each of which is split into two segments. The first has you walking around as a human with a little nubby sword, killing a variety of enemies to grind up money. Money can ONLY be found in human stages, along with shops that refill your health, sell you ammo for the secondary weapon, and most importantly, upgrade your sword. The level design for these stages is total amateur hour crap. Things like having you hop across lava and just accept that you have to take damage. Do I even have to say why that’s stupid? There’s no actual challenge to it. It’s an automatic life drain that isn’t hard to make it across. It just forces you to refill your health with the nurse, who is right there on the other side. Normal coins are worth $50, and a health refill from the nurse costs $400. So it’s really just an excuse to make you grind up more money. That type of design is all over the human stages of the game. Enemies fall from the sky while your movement speed and the level layout mean there’s no way to climb up a building without taking damage.

Thankfully, I found a few spots where I barely had to move. Like this spot here? The enemies continuously respawn, even if I stand still. While not every kill results in a coin drop, this spot here went even faster than the golden cat section, and for less work, too. The grinding isn’t insufferable thanks to the currency being set high enough, and the most expensive weapon is only $4,800. Well, unless you wait to buy it on the final stage. I nearly crapped myself when I saw the last sword was over $9,000. However, I then realized it was the “Alpha Sword” which I had already gotten from level 6’s shop.

By the way, the swords you buy in the human stages aren’t used in them. You don’t need them to be, since every enemy dies from one hit on these sections. Once you clear the ultra-ultra bland human stages, you move on to stages that return blandness to normalcy. In them, you transform into what looks like a hyper-deformed Gundam character. The stages with these characters feel so different that it’s almost like two completely separate games were surgically attached to each-other. Despite the fact that you’re now a relatively bad-ass looking robot, you don’t really do any robot things. It’s still a hack ‘n slash platforming game, but the action is much more satisfying. The pace quickens by a significant factor and Keith Courage turns into an average-for-the-era action platformer.

There’s only a small handful of enemies in these stages.

Honestly, I think I would have liked Keith Courage better if it had just cut out the human stages. Maybe just re-balance the enemies and remove the “grind up new swords” aspect. Or hell, reward the player with a new sword for beating the boss. Maybe the game wouldn’t have lasted as long, but it would have been preferable to having deliberately slow, deliberately dull gameplay for the sake of contrast. In the robot stages, level design is maze-like and requires you to zig-zag your way underground until you eventually reach a boss. Instead of dropping coins, enemies will drop hearts or numbers. The numbers increase how many of the sub-weapon you throw at once, while the hearts fill up your health and, seemingly completely at random, give you an extra hit point. I couldn’t figure out any reason or even logic to how they give you extra health. It just happens.

It gets so bad that the game just recycles bosses as normal level enemies. Like seriously, the final level consists almost entirely of bosses filling in as normal enemies.

Despite the fact that Keith Courage has two vastly different feeling platform “engines” at play, I was stunned by how samey each of the levels feels. The action stages, especially. They’re very repetitive, with a lack of interesting visuals and only a small handful of enemies to deal with. It makes for an exhausting experience. When the “action” stages become more sprawling, they also introduce some cheapness in the form of blind jumps with instakill spikes in the vicinity. Combine this with very forgettable bosses, and now I’m wondering if I was right that NEC anticipated nobody would want Keith Courage, which is the only reason it was given away for free. It’s really haphazardly programmed too. When the time came to fight the final boss, the f’n thing didn’t move a single inch and just stood there while I hacked it to death. It didn’t even fire a projectile at me. I found out this is a known glitch, but the thing is, it’s not even a hard one to trigger. Just hold right when you fall into the boss arena, I guess. I don’t even think I did that. I think all I did was jump into the hole that I didn’t even know yet was the hole to the final boss arena. This is the type of bug that even basic play testing should have found, and they had a full year between the Japanese and US releases to squash it.

This is it. The final “boss” and I use boss in quotation marks because it literally didn’t move. Apparently, I inadvertently triggered a known glitch.

Keith Courage is proof positive that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. I really can’t justify how anyone in charge selected this of all games to be the title that would launch their console. Maybe they thought Nintendo’s lead was insurmountable and they were happy to scratch-out a decent profit, but I call BS on that. They had soundly beaten Sega in Japan by having superior software, and they had taken a huge chunk out of Nintendo’s market share. Even if it was under-powered compared to the Sega’s Genesis, NEC should have had a lot more confidence than they showed. Bundling Keith Courage feels like a white flag of surrender, because this game, at its absolute very best, would be a lower B-tier NES title. Not exactly a flagship piece of software that signals to consumers “see! We are taking the fight straight to Nintendo! You can trust us! We have confidence in our software!” Maybe they were counting on Bonk’s Adventure as probably the best chance the TG-16 had to dethrone Nintendo, but it wasn’t ready by launch. See though, neither was Sega’s Sonic, but they still bundled Altered Beast, a game people wanted, to hold the fort for the killer app. NEC could have done that, and they had a variety of options (TG-16 knowingly bundled mediocrity, and gamers responded accordingly. Meanwhile, in an alternate reality, the TG-16 was bundled with Legendary Axe and gamers today are fighting over what’s better: the Sony PlayStation or the NEC Xbox?
Verdict: NO!