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Game: Blue’s Journey
Platform: Arcade (Played on Nintendo Switch).
Year: 1991 (Switch release 2017).
Developer: Alpha Denshi
Genre: Action Platformer.
The arcade. One of the most interesting platforms of all of gaming, lasting from the humble beginnings to current day, the arcades have reached for many different genres and forms of gameplay, and have had a considerable impact in the memories of many gamers (and their wallets too). However, not every game can be Space Invaders, Pac Man, Donkey Kong or Metal Slug, and as such, there’s an authentic plethora of hidden gems and underrated titles that, for one reason or another, have not become well known. There are many underrated arcade gems out there, and I’m planning reviewing them as well, once they are released on proper current hardware (playing many arcade games on emulator is risky due to the rom’s possible state). And to start, I’ve decided to take advantage of the new NEO GEO releases on the Nintendo Switch and review one of the Arcade games I played the most in the past, to see if it still holds up: Blue’s Journey.
In the land of Raguy, place of splendor and peace, all beings live in harmony with nature. However, the sudden invasion of the Emperor Daruma and his armies has put the land into severe danger, polluting it as they consume the land’s resources. The people of Raguy decide to ask the hero Blue to defeat the evil emperor, rescue the princes Fa and save the land. And so the game begins. Plot-wise it’s not the most innovative game out there: saving the princes has been a common, if effective, way to create a basic narrative structure for the game to follow, and saving the environment was a very popular subject matter during the 90s, with games like Sonic the Hedgehog having somewhat environmental messages as well. Blue’s Journey is your typical side-scrolling action platformer, with more style than innovation to it. The player is supposed to cross several levels while fighting mooks and avoiding obstacles, with the occasional boss fight added from time to time. The character has three mayor powers: he can jump on top of many (but not all) enemies and throw them at other goons, change its size and use different power-ups. When in small mode, the player can fit into crevices and caves and run faster, but it can’t attack and its jump is smaller. Blue’s main form of defense is his trusty leaf dump (which the game gleefully informs us that he’s a specialist of). Once an enemy is hit, they will be paralyzed, and you will be able to pick them up and throw them at other enemies. You can even pick up multiple mooks, improving the range of the attack, something that is recommendable against the flying monsters. His regular leaf dump isn’t his only weapon, though. He can find throughout the game many other power-ups to use as weapons: a bigger leaf that can improve the leaf’s range, size and power, bombs that can blow enemies away, but you won’t be able to stack them up, and the boomerang, which returns once thrown and can be used upwards. As regular power-ups, the ferns improve movement speed, flower honey recovers life, chrysalides can give you extra lives if enough are gathered, and the mighty cabbage, that turns all enemies on the screen into flowers. And flowers are also an important part of the game too. They serve as a form of currency in this game, and if you have enough of them during certain parts of the stage, you will have the option to access many interesting options, such as a gambit game after beating a boss or secret markets which appear once the player finds a clover. Every time the player loses all of their lives, they will lose part of their flowers as punishment (if you decide to insert another coin and continue the game, that is).
The character player is not the most powerful out there, with only two hit points per life, and only three lives per each coin inserted. Though, to be fair, most of the enemies aren’t that much of a threat either. From the jumpy orange goons that accordingly to the box art are birds, to the jumpy purple hedgehogs, to the multicolor frogs and the troglodytes, chameleonic bugs… Almost all enemies fall in one hit, but the game will compensate this by combining different enemies attacking you at once, forcing the player to play more tactically. As it was typical with games of that time, the title has a problem with constantly spawning enemies at certain points, but it is never that distracting. The bomb will always be the better gun for this scenarios, with the most range of all powers, making sure the enemies stay down. That is important because, if an enemy is not picked up or hit again, it will get up and attack you twice as fast, similar to the koopas in the original Mario Bros arcade title. And also, for an environmentally friendly game, almost all of the games are just wild animals, and not mechanical or industry-related threats, which is odd. You are supposedly trying to save all of the inhabitants of the land, aren’t you? Why are you killing birds and bugs? Sonic games make you fight robotized animals, but in here most enemies aren’t really soldiers of the Daruma empire so much as aggressive wildlife. To be fair, later in the game we do find mechanical enemies, like fire-spitting lizards with tank trails or robots with bladed boomerangs, but it’s still odd to see so many regular animals fighting in favor of the Empire.
The level design is allright, nothing spectacular or ground breaking, but it’s serviceable and offers enough challenge to go around, even if they are fairly short levels. There are certain points which are somewhat unfair (some jumps on randomized logs over lakes or that Ferris wheel on the mechanical stage that has some questionable hit boxes) but it’s otherwise mostly harmless. Most of the challenge will come from the barrages of enemies that will attack you at certain points, but like I’ve said, if you have the bomb in hand, you shouldn’t have many problems (it is quite broken the more I think about it). The game offers you multiple sidequests for the player to find, something rather ambitious for a sidescroller at that time, but the way the game is structured it’s mostly certain that you will either need to get an item you can’t find anymore, or miss the sidequest entirely.
Boss fights are actually quite difficult if you’re not prepared, but after a couple of playthroughs they won’t be quite as hard. The game has a lot of fun with them in the form of dialogues. For example, the onion wizard will offer you to join the Empire, and you have the option to say yes, which will immediately gave you a game over screen. Then the game will tell you it’s a joke and send you back to the boss fight. The final boss of the game will offer to surrender to you, and if you accept his surrender, he will attack you anyway. It’s nice to have those nuggets of character for the game that at the very least show that the developers weren’t just trying to make just another platformer.
The graphics are probably the best part of the game. Considering that this was an arcade title, it’s understandable the efforts dedicated to the game for it to look as colorful and vibrant as possible, trying to catch your eye from the sea of other cabinets. Lush jungles with beautiful flora, cold mountains with an ominous sky, and industrial complexes with all sort of traps, all are wonderfully represented using an excellent pixel art style that breathes life into the world. No wonder they decided to make this game one about the environment, they displayed it with quite a level of mastery. With each playthrough including six worlds (you can branch out to other worlds in certain levels), the game has a decent variety of levels, but most of them will be either forest/jungle levels or mechanical/industry levels, which is not surprising, but it’s disappointing. Music and sound design is… allright. Many tunes are repeated throughout the game, but I like them, so I didn’t mind, but I can see them getting grating for some people. Sound bits like enemy grunts and traps are decent, but it’s clear they didn’t invest that much time in them compared to other aspects of the title.
And now we reach to a very important par. As any arcade game, the title was designed to drain the quarters of innocent players out here, so in arcade games that actually have an ending, they had to use the difficulty as a block to keep people playing. The Switch version of this game, aside from having both the Japanese and the English version (which is rather nice actually), also has an option to see how many times you’ve had a game over screen. In total, I’ve died around 50 times in my first full playthrough. Estimating the deaths, two thirds of it were in the bosses and the rest in the regular levels. I myself am not a particularly good at platformer, so I can assume the average player will have a similar amount of deaths. And the length of a full playthrough was about an hour, so people who prefer longer experiences should be aware of this, although many arcade games were considerably short due to hardware limitations and to avoid complains from the customers.
Overall, Blue’s Journey is a decent platformer with a lot of things good, but nothing that really separates it from the mountains of platformers at the time. The few bells and whistles it has are not enough to elevate it above average, although it does have a lot of charm and personality. As a personal opinion, I think there are many other arcade titles with much more value out there.
Score: 6.5/10
Last edited by Darwinianevolution - on 26 March 2018
