Startropics (NES) Review
~by tankMage (May 2023)
Score: 8.5/10
This game taught me you can kill giant rats with a yo-yo.
Ah, Startropics I remember you fondly. Even at the age of 13, I was something of a retrogamer. Afterall, I spent the first two weeks of that summer plowing through an NES game that was already a whopping 5 years old. That may not sound like a long time, but by then the PS1 and N64 were just around the corner (or maybe already released, I don’t remember) so 8-Bit titles seemed ancient.
Startopics was brutal and unforgiving at the time. I remember spending hours trying to clear dungeons using good old trial and error…and that was with the NES Game Atlas, which had full maps! So how did this game feel now that I’m much older and more experienced (and have access to thousands of detailed guides)? Brutal and unforgiving. That’s not to say it’s not worth playing. In fact, I walked away even more impressed by this dungeon crawler than I did when I was a teen.
The premise is fairly simple, you’re a teenager named Mike who has come to C-Island (don’t ask me why they call it that) to visit his uncle who happens to be a renowned archaeologist. Upon visiting the island village, Mike learns that his uncle has gone missing and monsters have infested the area. Naturally the village chief gives the underage Mike a yo-yo and tells him to search for his uncle in a monster filled cave. Mike’s parents probably owned C-Island after the lawsuits were settled.
Much like in Legend of Zelda (you knew this comparison was coming) Mike has to explore a series of grid based dungeons filled with hidden doors, switches, special weapons, and things that like to eat archaeologists’ nephews. The similarities kind of end there, because the action and pacing of this adventure are far different from Zelda despite the fact that Nintendo made both games.
Exploration is very linear, Mike’s biggest concern is navigating mazes and solving puzzles to enter the dungeons, not finding them or deciding the order in which they should be completed like in Legend of Zelda titles. The action is fairly stiff as well. It is difficult to explain, but moving Mike feels like pushing a chess piece from one square to the next. Controls in general feel slightly sluggish, but you get used to it and I think this was a deliberate choice on the devs part. Maybe they wanted the game to feel realistic or something.
The starting weapon is a yo-yo as I mentioned earlier. Aside from being a whacky choice for fighting giant sea creatures and ancient monstrosities, it’s a serviceable weapon that is enjoyable to use. Mike also gets upgrades for it, but he has to have a certain amount of health to use the upgraded versions of the yo-yo. Unfortunately, this sends players into a sort of death spiral if they take too much damage later in the game since the basic yo-yo is not really viable against late game foes.
Players will also find special weapons with limited ammo like bolas, baseball bats, and even lasers. These weapons were a nice addition to Mike’s arsenal, but I did not like the fact that they did not stay in Mike’s inventory between dungeons and he loses upon death. The devs really wanted to make Startropics challenging, even if it meant angering players by taking their goodies after clearing a tough dungeon. There were also a few “magical” items like the Snowman Doll which could be used to freeze enemies and a lantern that revealed invisible ghosts, but these items were not all that common. They also felt poorly implemented, especially in the case of the lantern which has limited uses and players have to use it in random places to find a ghost to kill to open doors or reveal switches.
Speaking of poorly implemented mechanics, I am not at all sure if the devs didn’t think through some facets of this game or if they just wanted to torture their audience, because Startropics can go from easy, to challenging, to unfair in a heartbeat. Once, I walked into a room and drowned with no way of knowing the room was a trap. There’s also signs in some places that can randomly add to or subtract from Mike’s total lives if he picks them up. The outcome is random, so you can innocently pick one of these things up expecting an extra life only to lose two lives. Seeing as how Mike basically loses everything when he dies, it is sometimes just better to reset after a death, so maybe the lives aren’t all that important.
If the well hidden traps and items that decrease the player’s lives weren’t bad enough, some of the puzzles are brutal. In one section of the game, Mike is told to input a password from a letter his uncle gave him. Trick is, you need a physical letter that came packed in the game box back in 1990 to get the password! Nowadays anyone can look the password up, but imagine being the guy who threw the instructions and the stupid letter out years before the internet was widely available.You better hope a friend or magazine has the answer for you. As far as I know this is the first and last time an NES game pulled such a stunt…I’m fairly certain it was due to NoA’s customer service lines being flooded with angry calls.
Startropics may have an ugly side, but it’s still fun. Somehow all the harsh mechanics and strange jokes about bananas add to its charm. The boss fights were also a highlight. Most of the bosses were huge and put up a good fight even if they weren’t all that creative. It’s also worth noting that the last boss basically vomits itself to death after you defeat it, so the game is worth playing just for that.
I also liked the story, which goes off into some unexpected places. It’s nothing groundbreaking and the humor often falls flat, but the devs weren’t afraid to tell a tale that had its own personality. I respect that.
Lastly, I almost forgot to mention the music. The dungeon theme will probably be burned into my memory for the rest of my life, which isn’t as bad as it may sound, since it’s a good song. The rest of the music is less noteworthy, but it’s still good. Once again, it’s an example of how this game wasn’t afraid to do its own thing as I’m not really sure how to describe this music aside from it sounding like something you’d hear at an 8-Bit luau. The thwonk of the yo-yop as it hit monsters was also unexpectedly satisfying, so good job Startropics sound designer person wherever you may be.
Final Thoughts
It’s a rare game that tries so hard to make me hate it, but has me loving it in the end. All things considered, Startropics should be mediocre at best. Somehow, the parts add up to be greater than the whole and the experience turns out to be pretty good overall. In fact, it’s one of the better NES dungeon crawlers, so give it a go. Worst that can happen is you go bananas…see that’s funny, because of all the dumb banana jokes the game pops.
Thanks for suffering through my review of Startropics for the Nintendo Entertainment System!
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