You know you’re tough when your cursor is a damn grenade.
Ikari Warriors II – sometimes just known as Victory Road – was released to arcades in 1986, and on the NES in 1988, by SNK. They’re the folks who made the Neo Geo, and extremely cool old console that no one could afford. They also made this:
I’m assuming this is called Goofy Rollerskate Clown Battle VII and will not be looking into it further.
As with its predecessor, the protagonists of Victory Road are big, beefy men named Paul and Vince, who love blasting bad guys and hate wearing shirts. Seriously, just look at the size of this lad:
My god. Fresh of their victory in Ikari Warriors, they are sent back into the fray to battle a villain named, and I swear this part isn’t a joke, Zang Zip the War Dog. I can’t believe that’s what they went with.
This game has a handful of cool things going for it – you have a lot of firepower, including unlimited grenades, and can upgrade yourself in a handful of ways by stopping in the game’s weird shops. The enemies are also really weird, which I appreciate – you aren’t just gunning down an opposing army that looks exactly like you or whatever.
There’s more bad than good to this game, however. While the game isn’t especially long, the difficulty is absolutely through the roof – you have a miniscule health bar and just one life. It’s brutal. The best strategy in a lot of instances is to just avoid enemies, but that’s also pretty difficult due to your character’s slow movement. At least for me, this level of difficulty made it hard to want to keep bothering to try and get through it. I also spent a frustrating amount of time trying to figure out what to do at this wall (it turns out a part on the left is destructible):
The worst part of Ikari Warriors II, though, is what happens when you let the game sit on the title screen too long. If you do that, it takes you to a cutscene introducing the game’s plot. This probably doesn’t seem so bad, but the text in these cutscenes scrolls at the slowest rate of any video game I’ve ever played. There is no way to speed it up or skip it. It’s probably about one letter per second, but it feels like forever.
Thank goodness the NES has a reset button.
All of the elements of a solid run-n-gun shooter are present in Ikari Warriors II, but the end result is a game that’s more “cool” than good. It’s clunky and difficult to the point of being un-fun, and that’s a real shame. I wanted to like this one, but the good just doesn’t outweigh the bad.
If you do want to check out more games like this, SNK has a bunch of other similar games on the NES as well, including Alpha Mission and Guerrilla War. There are also a couple other Ikari games, too. They’re of similar quality to this one, though I feel obligated to note that Ikari III’s villain is named Crime Ghost. Crime Ghost!! It can’t possibly be bad (spoilers: it is).
Next week’s game is another NES shooter, from another somewhat beloved company and with a bit of a weird lineage. I hope to see you then!