Game 481: Zombie Hunter (1987)

      

Zombie Hunter

Japan

Lenar (developer); Hi-Score Media Work (publisher)

Released 1987 for NES, 1988 for MSX

Date Started: 20 January 2023

Date Ended: 20 January 2023

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: 23

Ranking at Time of Posting: 208/483 (43%)

    

Zombie Hunter came up on a random roll recently and I thought I'd give it a try. It's been a while since I dipped into an NES game. This is an early one, released only in Japan, but someone named KingMike created a translation. According to some sites, Activision had planned a U.S. release under the name Zombie Master, but it never came to fruition.

   

The game is a side-scrolling action platformer in the vein of Ghosts 'n Goblins (1985), but with enough RPG elements to meet even my definitions. (Some sites trace its lineage to Zelda II, but they were released awfully close together.) You get experience points for enemies you kill; leveling up affects not just maximum health but also attack and defense scores; you find a full set of equipment to wear and wield; and you can even stop and grind. 

        

An action shot as I leap over an enemy, only narrowly missing a spike on the ceiling.

           

The backstory has the game set in the City of Palma, where the elemental forces existed in harmony, balanced by something called the Life Seeker. But Dolog, the Spirit of Earth, decided to seize power for himself and stole the Life Seeker. Ariel, the Spirit of Wind, has commissioned a hero to enter Dolog's domain and retrieve the artifact. There's nothing about zombies in the backstory, and nothing in the game really seems to be a zombie, so I don't know where the title comes from. It's not translated; it's Zombie Hunter even in the original Japanese.

      

      

Where a lot of games of this type feature a constant stream of enemies, the setup here is different. As you arrive on each screen, one or more enemies spawn. You can't move on until they're dealt with. If you successfully kill them all, you get a treasure chest with gold and occasionally an item. But if one of them (or, at least, the key one--I wasn't always sure about this) manages to flee the screen, you miss out on the gold and item. Fortunately, you can cause screens to respawn as many times as you like.

    

My understanding is that the items dropped by the enemies are fixed in the default game, but have a somewhat small probability of appearing (maybe 10 or 20 percent), so you have to fight them several times if you want to be sure of finding everything. This is good, as you have to grind to get enough strength to defeat the enemies.

      

Leveling up.

     

Enemies are tough. Every one of them has a ranged attack. (To be more specific, they only have ranged attacks, as touching them doesn't hurt you.) Many of them fly. You have to try to duck or jump to dodge their attacks while simultaneously swinging your own weapon--the very sort of multitasking at which I'm horrible. This is not the sort of game at which you want to be horrible because there's no respawning or saving. You're meant to complete it in one go with one life.

    

Equipment comes in three varieties: wearable (helms, armor, rings, gauntlets), usable (potions, food, candles), and weapons. The latter category includes both ranged and melee weapons. Each item has a power value to indicate its relative worth. My favorite weapon was the bomb, which you drop in the enemy's path like a mine. But different encounters require different weapons, and a blind player has no way to anticipate the encounter. You wander on a screen, and enemies spawn from the ground and ceiling. This is the kind of game meant to be played multiple times, for hours on end, with the player's friend or brother saying things like, "Now, remember, this screen is the one where three zombies spawn out of the ground on that platform. You'll want to drop a bomb and then jump to the right."

        

My equipment around mid-game.

      

One oddity to weapons is that everything except a regular sword degrades as you use it, ultimately disappearing. So you have to keep the best regular sword that you can find as a default weapon, switching to other weapons only when you absolutely need them.

 

I never figured out what some items did, like poison or bags. Candles let you see in the dark; all levels after the first are dark by default, which means enemies are presented only as outlines and you can't see their names or current health. But at some point, I bought a "Candle 8" that never wore out, so darkness wasn't a problem for me. 

         

No, I don't think those flying blobs are "zombies."

        

The game is organized into a series of levels, each culminating in a "boss" encounter with a dragon. To get to the dragon, you have to find a key in one of the loot drops along the way. If you make it to the door without having found the key, you have to turn around and head back. There are six total "phases," but after you defeat each dragon, you've given a choice of two paths, each with a different configuration of enemies and items. This lends a little replayability to the game.

Killing the first boss.

          

Platforming elements appear as the game goes on. There are ledges to jump on, spiked pits (and ceilings) to avoid. You can fall "down" off the level and you have to fight a bunch of monsters to get back. 

       

A Katana 5 is a good weapon but degrades fast.

      

There are occasional doors to shops that buy any excess stuff and sell a limited selection of items. The only way I could stay alive was to find a shop that sold healing potions, grind like crazy until I had enough money to fill my inventory with said potions, and then make my way to the next shop. 

   

Despite this strategy, and despite abusing save states, I nearly abandoned the game several times. I kept moving too fast, not grinding enough, and then getting myself stuck with no healing potions between groups of enemies I couldn't defeat. But every time I was on the verge of giving up, I looted a healing item at the last minute, or I found a shop. Towards the end of the game, I had more gold than I could spend, even filling my inventory with potions.

       

Shouldn't have backed me into a corner, Dolgo.

     

Dolgo himself, a large ogrish creature that I swear I've seen somewhere before, is the final boss. Like the dragons, he was considerably easier than the regular enemies just outside his door. When I defeated him, I got a message that I had restored light to the "above ground," and the game finished showing a sunny sky.

       

     

The "The End" screen showed my overall game time (02:53). I guess you're meant to try to get the lowest time. You can also replay on a harder mode ("Game B") in which items are completely randomized and the enemies are more difficult.

      

      

The game GIMLETs at 23, not bad for a console RPG of the era. It's hurt by its silly backstory (1) and a lack of NPCs (0), but I think the "combat," "equipment," and "economy" categories are all worth 3s, and I gave it a 4 in "gameplay" for being short and slightly replayable.  Despite the difficulty, I enjoyed it. I don't know, maybe I'm just in a good mood lately. I liked that the game didn't use any cutesy anime graphics. I thought the leveling system was swift and rewarding. And I appreciated any game in which you can just load up on potions to compensate for a lack of skillz.