Almost Hero Review – While Trying To Be Like River City Ransom, Does It Bring New Ideas to the Genre?

When I reflect back on great Beat’em Ups for the NES, there are two that stand out. One is Double Dragon 2 and the other is River City Ransom. Both were developed by Technos Japan and feature different gameplay styles. I consider them to be very high quality for different reasons.

For the latter, it’s the first beat them up with RPG elements that I ever played. So, when I saw Almost Hero on the Mega Cat Studios Collection 1 cart, I wanted to try it out since it pays homage to that classic game.

Almost Hero was released in 2017 for the NES and begins with a somewhat humorous story where you play as a wannabe ninja who needs to recover bonsai seeds for Chow Khan. He’s an online business owner who sells holiday-themed bonsai trees on Etsi. While there isn’t a lot of depth to the story, I like the absurdity of it. The premise made me want to see how the game would progress.

Gameplay

Once Almost Hero actually begins, you find yourself in a one-screen town where you can buy items from the previously mentioned business owner. Some of these include instructional tapes that teach you to improve your fighting abilities, increase your life bar, or restore your health in battle. Sadly, the town only has one person in it and there are no funny animations for when you buy stuff from the shop (both in contrast to River City Ransom). Even so, the descriptions of the goods in the store continue the silly tone of the game.

From this opening area you can access four different stages in any order. These include a sewer, dojo, the slums, and more. Each have a distinctive look with unique backgrounds and music. However, they share an extremely similar set of enemies and layouts. For the former, each screen of the stage has you fight two of the same enemy before more appear, or you are allowed to progress further. Sadly, this is where the game’s lack of depth begins to appear.

Yes, each area is unique, but the gameplay diversity of them is lacking. The hazards you face are very limited in them. I would even say they are non-existent, but the sewer has water that can drag you down the screen and kill you. For each area, you tend to just walk from left to right, defeat 2, 4, or 6 enemies, and then go to the next screen that looks almost the same. After 3 or 4 bouts of this, you reach the boss.

Following a slightly funny statement from a parody of a (usually) famous 1980’s character, you hopefully succeed in defeating him or her. If at any point you lose your life, you are transported back to town with half of your money gone but your health restored. However, if you succeed, you get a bonsai seed and make your way back to town. The enemies are still around to beat you up after the boss is defeated though, so watch out!

This is all fine, but again, the gameplay depth isn’t that great. You can punch, kick, and do two forms of a jump kick. The latter of which is actually the best move in the game until you strengthen your attacks. The reason for this is that when you attack most enemies will be able to hit you while you do the same to them. This means that your small lifebar at the beginning of the game can be depleted quite quickly. It’s possible to lose half of your life when fighting just two foes. However, if you use the jump kick, you can jump up in the air to avoid your foe’s attack, and then come down and kick them in the face.

Doing this repeatedly will usually be effective, with your foes unable to hit you back. This is because the AI is quite dumb. They take turns fighting you (so they rarely gang up on you), don’t do jump kicks, and they never use weapons.

This latter oddity is probably the worst aspect of the game’s fighting engine. While there are weapons, they’re limited and frustrating to use. They include items one would find in the 1980’s, such as a boombox, a laser disc, or a collectable toy. Each of these can be thrown across the screen with a slightly different arc for each. Yet, there are no weapons to really pummel your foes with. There’s no bats, rocks, brass knuckles, or anything like that. It’s all pick up and throw. Then if you want to use it again, you have to run over to pick it up a second time.

Because of this, I found that it was more efficient to just beat up your enemies with your regular moves. At least after you upgrade your punches or kicks. Sadly, doing so doesn’t actually change the look of your attacks. Although, such training improves your attack’s damage and seems to make it so your adversaries are stunned longer, too. In fact, once you get an upgrade you don’t need to do the jump kick nearly so much unless you want to get across the screen quickly.

When all was said and done, there’s some fun aspects to Almost Hero’s gameplay, but it also felt extremely shallow. Here’s a brief summary of why:

• There are very few weapons.
• None of them can be used repeatedly without picking them up again.
• Your foes are a decent threat, but they are also stupid because they don’t gang up on you or use weapons.
• The damage of your attacks can be increased, but they always look the same.
• And the stages are extremely basic in design with almost no hazards.

So, Is the Game Just Really Bad?

Not exactly. Even though it is seriously flawed, I still had fun playing it. Upgrading my character was kind of addictive and the short quips after defeating the enemies were funny. I quite liked the one about “My twin will avenge me!” Likewise, the bosses’ statements were also entertaining.

Also, the music was pretty good. Although I never thought that a track fit the area perfectly well, I liked many of the chiptunes. Not once did I consider turning off the music, which is a good sign.

Concerning the graphics, they were good. The big issue I had with them was the lack of depth for them. Both in regard to no parallax scrolling and how most areas had 3-4 screens that were almost identical before facing the boss.

Speaking of which, when my kids played this game in two-player mode, there was a lot of sprite flicker. Essentially, expect there to be flicker at all times when both of you are on the same horizontal plane. This will probably happen a lot. I found it pretty distracting as I watched them play.

Final Thoughts

Again, I had some fun with this game. Unfortunately, playing it also had the unintended consequence of showing just how incredible the original River City Ransom really was. Despite that, Almost Hero has its own personality that gives it some unique charm. Additionally, I did enjoy the game’s graphics and music, even if the former was a bit one note as I shared earlier.

Also, even though the gameplay has some serious issues, for much of my time with the title I strongly considered giving it a positive rating. I almost did so, but the final stage had the same issues of a boring layout as all the others. The real nail in the coffin was that the final boss was way too easy. I was able to put him in a place on the screen that allowed me to kick him repeatedly without him able to retaliate. I didn’t even have to move while beating him up! He was defeated on his first try with minimal damage being done to myself. This was anticlimactic and disappointing.

Now, let me point out that I know that this review has a significant number of negative comments about the game. Moreover, other reviews for this title tend to view it in a bad light as well. However, I don’t think it is truly a bad game. There’s fun to be had here if you give it a chance. As such, I’m giving it a Mixed rating.

Title: Almost Hero (Mega Cat Studios Page)
Genre: Beat’em Up
Year Released: 2017
Developer: Mega Cat Studios
Available On: NES and Evercade through Mega Cat Studios Collection 1
Price Paid: $2.52 or $25.18 for the Mega Cat Studios Collection 1 cartridge

Remember, we can have different opinions about the games we play. If you like something more (or less) than I do, both of our perspectives are valid.