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LTTP: Startropics II: Zoda's Revenge

cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Member
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I'm a huge fan of the original(literally played it when it came out), but I never was able to find the sequel.


I've been playing my VC(via the Wii) version lately, and good god, this game is painful.

It's by no means a bad game. (Apart from some really really bad 'radical' localization...)
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It's just brutal. I have two chapters left, and I can only do one at a time if I don't want to suffer repeat migraines.

I'll get there, though.

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Boy are there some absolutely evil dungeons, Transylvania in particular was a nightmare. I shiver to think what the last one will be like.
 
If you're playing it on the original cart, the game makes quite clear that you are collecting "tetrads" or Tetris pieces. The game is one big Tetris RPG :P

Vandole said:
Actually there wasn't any localization. If I'm not mistaken, this game was made by Nintendo's American studio.
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Not exactly but close. There was no localization because the game was made in Japan by R&D3 for the American market only (same as the first). It was never released in Japan. But perhaps the original script was itself bad if the English was written in Japan.

I think it was from a really different time when all NES games had scripts out of a kid's story book though.
 
BocoDragon said:
If you're playing it on the original cart, the game makes quite clear that you are collecting "terads" or Tetris pieces. The game is one big Tetris RPG :P


Not exactly but close. There was no localization because the game was made in Japan by R&D3 for the American market only (same as the first). It was never released in Japan. But perhaps the original script was itself bad if the English was written in Japan.

I think it was from a really different time when all NES games had scripts out of a kid's story book though.
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Ah ok. I knew it was something like that. Thanks for the clarification.
 
not to be one of those guys, but hated it compared to the first, which i love, warts and all. Felt more linear and less sparkle in the moment to moment stuff
 
I prefer Zoda's Revenge to the original. The movement was more free, the time travel in elements were just fun, and the story was more zany.

At the same time, OP, I've always felt that it was significantly easier than the original. I still have my original carts for both games, as well as owning them on Wii and Wii U VC, and I've beaten both many a time. 2 has just always been easier to me. Anyway, if you love the original, just wait a little longer and you'll get an awesome throwback to the first.
 
Deadpool_X said:
I prefer Zoda's Revenge to the original. The movement was more free, the time travel in elements were just fun, and the story was more zany.

At the same time, OP, I've always felt that it was significantly easier than the original. I still have my original carts for both games, as well as owning them on Wii and Wii U VC, and I've beaten both many a time. 2 has just always been easier to me. Anyway, if you love the original, just wait a little longer and you'll get an awesome throwback to the first.
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I beat the original without breaking a sweat nowadays. Some of 2's dungeons are maddening.
 
Nowhere near as good as the original, which, by the way, everyone should play to prep themselves for Retro's E3 reveal of the STAR TROPICS reboot.

YES
 
I thought it was better in nearly every way over the original. Gameplay in particular is just like 100x better since you can move diagonally and move while jumping. The soundtrack was so awesome. Time travel was fun. It gave you a bunch of different environments this time. It wasn't just the same place the whole game.

Bakkus said:
Never played it myself but this critic video is still quite interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6BTng1lCRc&t=1s
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I'm glad he changed his name. The Happy Video Game Nerd was far more critical of good games than the Angry video game nerd was. Why is it dumb for Cleopetra to ask you to bring her a pizza? That was hilarious. This guy sucks.

Edit: And then he goes on to complain the the controls are no longer awkward, lol.
 
Rash said:
I don't like it as much as the original but damn, I do think the soundtrack is ace.
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This game's soundtrack goes SO underappreciated in most gaming circles. That said, yeah it's overall a weird game to place because I liked the idea of the grid based design of ST1, but ST2 had some interesting things going on even if I felt the game was kinda nerfed in terms of puzzles dropping the grid system.

Edit: This game has NO invul frames on hit, which was a large part of the difficulty spikes later on.
 
Nice to see a thread about Star Tropics II. I have been thinking about it a lot recently, as I have been playing the original. I find the original hard as nails, some of the dungeons are just brutal. The first has infinitely better cover art, the second cover art loses the cool ambiance and looks generic. I am surprised how cheap it's to find the sequel, considering it was released towards the end of the NES cycle, and was not very popular.

Would be interested to learn more about the development history. Potential for NES game of the month here?
 
I finally gave this the old college try this summer and kinda gave up when I went on vacation. I got to King Arthur, should pick it back up.

This game is more forgiving than the first in terms of controls but in a way that strangely makes it more difficult. It is also, somewhat unbelievably, cornier than the first.
 
BocoDragon said:
If you're playing it on the original cart, the game makes quite clear that you are collecting "tetrads" or Tetris pieces. The game is one big Tetris RPG :P
Click to expand...

And if you're NOT playing it on the original cart, the Virtual Console version replaces every text mention of "tetrad" with "block" wholesale, leaving poor Mike Jones unaware of what a block is:
IXWInyv.jpg


StarTropics 1 was the cover story of the first Nintendo Power I ever bought, so I got pretty attached to the maps from the first game, but ultimately played and bought Zoda's Revenge first and got StarTropics later on when it was on sale. I'd argue that unlocking the controls to not be tile-by-tile movement makes it a bit easier to accidentally be a few pixels off and plunge to your death while StarTropics intends your movement and jumps to be done in a more bit-by-bit, strategic manner that makes misjudgements in distance less likely.

That said, dungeon rooms with multiple heights of platforms are possible in ZR and are fun to work with. Mostly though, the lack of invulnerability frames, the traps in the stage designs, and just the movement patterns of the enemies themselves can definitely be just brutal sometimes.

For anyone that likes Zelda 1, I think that both are fun and worthwhile games in their own right, but I do think that StarTropics 1 may have aged a bit better (finding workarounds for dipping the pack-in physical letter in water for digital releases notwithstanding).

That Zoda's Revenge soundtrack, though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tLX1woaCVQ
 
Deadpool_X said:
I prefer Zoda's Revenge to the original. The movement was more free, the time travel in elements were just fun, and the story was more zany.

At the same time, OP, I've always felt that it was significantly easier than the original. I still have my original carts for both games, as well as owning them on Wii and Wii U VC, and I've beaten both many a time. 2 has just always been easier to me. Anyway, if you love the original, just wait a little longer and you'll get an awesome throwback to the first.
Click to expand...

This is one of the reasons why I prefer the original. The movement was restricted, but the game was built around it...and it works. The enhanced movement in the sequel actually hurts the game more than it helps, somehow. It's much easier to fall into pits, for example. I find Zoda's Revenge to be a really frustrating game, even though I like it.
 
Ah the Startropics games. Probably the only pair of games I was actually able to play one after the other at the time. I'm one of those guys who actually prefers the sequel for things like the better movement and music but I certainly understand why people prefer the original. Transylvania was I think the first level in a video game that REALLY made me lose my cool in a video game. Bittersweet memory that.

I had a wired glitch with my original cart. After confronting Zoda X in the Sherlock Holmes stage, my game would reset and start back to Chapter 2 (the Stone Age stage). Thought this was intentional as the Chapter ended with Zoda blasting you away. It wasn't until I tried a different Save Slot that I was able to properly finish the game.

Had no idea the VC release had to change Tetrads into Blocks. That's funny!
 
I tried to get into this one a while ago but the changes completely ruined the game for me. The free movement doesn't work because the game style was made for tile based rigid movement. Plus there was way too much story at the start and the game started off with a super difficult to navigate path full of invisible pits that you keep falling into.

The original will always be GOAT.


1upsuper said:
What the fuck? If they actually felt the need to remove "tetrad," why not change it to "tetromino?" Shitty changes like this really frustrate me.
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Because "block" is shorter than "tetromino" so it would be easy to replace the text. If you understand how old games like this worked with how strings are stored and how bytes work, making the word longer would require a lot more work and would throw off text box flow completely. But keeping it the same length or making it shorter is just as simple as replacing the characters in "tetrad" with "block" and having an extra space to work with as opposed to needing to find three extra spaces to put characters. And I'm sure Nintendo wanted to do the least amount of work required and probably didn't want to have to actually dig up and recompile the original source code. They probably paid an intern to use a HEX editor or something.
 
I am Christina Aguilera said:
That Zoda's Revenge soundtrack, though!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tLX1woaCVQ
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Oh God, this soundtrack was so fucking goooooooood.

Dungeon Theme 1
Dungeon Theme 2
Dungeon Theme 6
Puzzle Theme (One of the melodies that's stuck with me the longest from childhood to now)
Boss Battle
Zoda X-Y-Z

To be honest, Zoda's Revenge is wholly worth it to go through just for the music.

BlakeofT said:
Man I love both of those games so much. I hope that Mike Jones makes it into Smash one day.
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This has been a secret hope of mine since the possibility of a Smash sequel became a thing in my mind in 1999. Mike Jones, Takamaru and Lip have been on my shortlist forever.
 
Didn't like it nearly as much as the original. The exploration sequences felt undercooked compared to the first game (which had a bit more of a puzzle-solving element), and diagonal movement/multi-tiered environments made general movement more a chore. The boss rush at the end was also a pain.
 
1upsuper said:
What the fuck? If they actually felt the need to remove "tetrad," why not change it to "tetromino?" Shitty changes like this really frustrate me.
Click to expand...
Or just make up some other damn term. Call them quads or something.

Though the absurdity of shots like that might be worth it.
 
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