Game Review: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
2024-Jan-30, Tuesday 20:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
I have a confession to make--I have never seen the hit movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves starring Kevin Costner, Morgan Freeman, and Alan Rickman, but I have played the NES game based on it.
I was going to say "I don't remember how I originally found this game," but on a hunch I went to look up whether it was in Nintendo Power and, would you look at that, it got a cover on issue 26. I am not immune to advertising and was much less immune as a Nintendo-loving child. Wikipedia says:
Hey, it's still a video game.
From here we shall build our socialist redistribution scheme.
A lot of movie tie-in games were platformers because the NES was good at platforming. Consoles and arcades had side-scrolling way back in 1981, and the NES had smooth scrolling with no weird flicker or ghost images in platformers and shooters starting with Super Mario Bros, but because computers couldn't match that performance, side-scrolling platforming became the NES thing. Batman, Goonies 2, Home Alone, Godzilla, Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Little Mermaid, all of them got side-scrolling platformer tie-in games. In common with the Willow tie-in game--though even then, there was a side-scrolling platformer for arcades--Robin Hood is a top-down game with RPG elements like leveling up, experience, and stats that improve. Killing enemies increases your maximum health, your Attack and Defense stats, your movement speed, and the amount of weight you can carry. Yes, copied from PC RPGs, weight matters and not only are you limited to six inventory slots per party member, you have to account for their weight as well.
Health is restored through food and magical potions, which I somehow doubt were in the movie. You can find quivers of arrows, increase your damage by using better weapons like the ball and chain and the Locksley sword, find suits of leather armor and a suit of chainmail to equip your Merry Men. There's an equipment screen which has slots for the head and legs and feet (none of which are ever used), an eye that lets you inspect items, a mouth you use to eat bread, "take" and "drop" icons, and the items you drop remain in the world instead of vanishing forever. There's even an Ultima or Dragon Quest-style menu with Talk, Take, Look, and so on.
As I mentioned, though, there is about 33% more RPG infrastructure than is necessary. Leveling up increases your movement speed, which seems like it's great at first, but it renders the red potions (which do the same thing) as just half-effective healing potions, but in practice it means you careen around the tight corridors most of the levels are made of, bouncing off the walls and ramming into enemies. Literally half of your equipment slots are never used. There's a disguise that you have to steal that's used in literally one screen but you have to take it off on that same screen to provoke an attack anyway. You can equip armor and weapons on the rest of your party members, but their stats don't matter and are never referenced, and furthermore, they don't actually help you in any part of the game that's not mass combat. They exist to carry extra items and, in one case, to leave your party and take away a key item making the game unwinnable unless you know to watch out for it.
The impression that I get is that the designers started out with an extremely ambitious vision. It'll be an RPG, with exploration elements! And it'll have a mass battle system you can use your whole party with! And it'll have duels against the villains from the movie! And it'll have statistics and an inventory! And then as the deadline got closer, and they missed the release of the movie, and they missed the release of the Nintendo Power issue, they scaled down what they were trying to do and eventually declared the game complete and shipped it so they wouldn't miss the end-of-year sales period. Or maybe, even in 1991, they just didn't have enough memory or power to do what they wanted. What remains is still a fun game, but as is so often true in video games, you can see the seams of unfinished content.
To arms!
I mentioned mass battles, and despite making up a very small part of the game they're the part I remember when I think of the game. Every once in a while, you'll be hit with some dialogue exchange like:
None of these battles are a challenge, because even though you're outnumbered 10 to 1 or more, every single enemy dies in a single hit, which incidentally means that the choice of what weapons to equip on the rest of your party doesn't matter and the weapon you go into battle with mostly doesn't matter either. The exception is that if you have a bow equipped, you'll be able to shoot arrows, which also kill enemies in one hit. Weapon animations are based on mass battle character sprites, so most characters just have a forward thrust but Azeem has a scimitar, able to cleave through multiple enemies in a single stroke. You can swap control between the different characters, but your mass battle HP and your main game HP are linked, so the choice is generally "Do I swap to Azeem to make better use of his attacks?" or "Do I maintain control of Robin to make sure that his HP isn't squandered by the AI?" As a child, I usually swapped to Azeem to use hisglorious Damascus steel folded over 1000 timesscimitar, and as an adult I prioritized maintaining high HP on Robin. Maybe you could link this to some kind of risk vs. reward calculation that changes as you age, but I think it's just that I forgot how good the scimitar was until I wrote this paragraph and remembered how often I used it as a child. 
There's also a duel minigame that comes up whenever Robin needs to fight a named opponent, like John Little or Guy of Gisborne. The game switches to a side-scrolling scene and Robin and his opponent both lay into each other with their weapons--usually swords, but to their credit, John gets a quarterstaff. Duels are a fun change of base, but unlike an actual duel there's not a lot of tactics possible. There's no way to feint or block and reach doesn't matter, and since the NES only had two buttons they're mapped to "attack" and "jump." The way to win every duel is to be lower than your opponent, allowing you stab them in the knees while they futilely swing over your head, or, if that's impossible, just duck until there's a break in their attacks, stab them once, and then go back to ducking. It unfortunately makes the duels more and more annoying as the games goes on and it becomes obvious that there's an easy trick to beat them that would never work in any real duel.
There's a horse-racing minigame as well, but it occurs only twice times, and the second time you don't even have anyone chasing you, you're just jumping over rocks for no obvious reason. It reminded me of the horse transport in Hillsfar, where you'd have to ride between every location even when nothing was happening. I guess they were like, "Well, we have horses, we can't just use them only once!"
Just as long as you know who's in charge around here.
Despite those rough edges, the game feels much bigger than it actually is, partially because of the variety of locations and the mission structure. The game is broken into levels that you don't return to, but it doesn't feel that way because after the initial part of the game where Robin and Azeem escape the Ayyubid prison and eventually reach Sherwood Forest, it switches to the NES version of a hub-and-spoke mission system. Every time you return to the Merry Men's camp in Sherwood Forest, someone (maybe Will Scarlet? I don't know who he's supposed to be and the game doesn't name him) gives you a new mission, like robbing the Sheriff's tax wagons as they pass through the forest, or saving a village being attacked by Guy and his men, or finding a blessed spring in order to cure a flu spreading through the camp.
Speaking of that spring, it's inhabited by demonic fishmen who hurl arrows at you, the sequence of which is featured on the attract screen if you do nothing after the title. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had a scene where Robin Hood fights demonic fishmen, right? Just like how I'm sure it had a ten-foot-tall skeleton that Robin can only defeat with a magic dagger. I'm sure that's all in the movie.
Even though you can only do the missions in order, returning to the camp between them and receiving a new mission makes the game feel more expansive than it actually is. What's more, you see the camp improve as the game goes on, becoming a veritable wood elven village with houses in the trees, rope bridges connecting them, ladders leading up to them, the works. And Robin Hood already wears green, uses a bow, and ambushes people traveling through the forest, so it's a natural connection to make. That doesn't stop the Sheriff's men from setting fire to the camp, taking some of the Merry Men prisoner, and unleashing a veritable army of Celts(?), all of which apparently does happen in the movie. This triggers the endgame. But before then, you can explore the forest, seek out damp caves or hidden forest cabins for extra loot--mostly just potions and quivers, admittedly, but you can find the ball and chain in one of them--fight roughly a million of the Sheriff's men along with the occasional wolf, snake, or rat, and rob from the rich and...well, mostly keep it because despite there being a lot of gold in the game there's very little to spend it on. You need 200 gold to pay the Weapon Master when you meet him, and I've never not had that money so I have no idea what happens if you don't have it, and...I think that's the only thing I spent money on in the entire game. You can't even pay for healing back at camp. Nor do you get free healing either, but there's plenty of potions and food so I never really had to worry about my health.
Like I've said. So many systems, that are mostly implemented.
I'm sure the magical healing water was in the movie.
I've talked a lot about how much of this game is mostly finished, but I think that's part of what makes it so memorable to me. I would much rather have a game that tries to do too many things and mostly succeeds than either a game with a more limited scope that succeeds 100% or a game that tries to do too many things and fails at it. To pick another example, Master of Magic is one of the most memorable 4x games ever to the people who have played it, even though the AI is objectively terrible and there are roughly three dozen overpowered strategies that completely break the game. But the benefit of that is that sometimes the AI lucks into one of those strategies--I remember a game where the AI just spammed paladins, who are immune to magic, and I had to completely retool my strategy to beat them--and that's much more memorable than a smoothly polished experience where your choices are sharply limited. There's a reason that "All Fox, no items, Final Destination" is a derisive meme.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves tries to do too many things at once. It's a top-down game, but it's also an RPG, but it also has mass battles, but it also has dueling segments, but it also has a hub-and-spoke mission structure, and so on. But because the worst any of those parts of the game gets is "fine," I never got the sense that it was spreading itself too thin. I instead just looked at as an overly ambitious vision that fell short of its goal. The exact meaning of the slang phrase Eurojank and guess what? The game was made by Virgin Games Ltd., based in Britain. QED.
Not sure I'll ever watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at this point, but some time in the future I'll probably come back to this game.
I was going to say "I don't remember how I originally found this game," but on a hunch I went to look up whether it was in Nintendo Power and, would you look at that, it got a cover on issue 26. I am not immune to advertising and was much less immune as a Nintendo-loving child. Wikipedia says:
However, this issue was notorious for the fact that the game was not released until 4 months after the issue was releasedbut I don't remember having to deal with that. I remember getting the game and playing through it probably a dozen times, as you did back in the day when games were limited, both how many you had and how many there were in the world, and you had to stretch your enjoyment of a given game out over months because you didn't have a backlog of hundreds of games waiting that would haunt you until the day you died. And it's not like this game is particularly hard or stretchable. It's no Final Fantasy where the Marsh Cave punched me in the face until I really buckled down and ground in the swamps and won through to the rest of the game. It's about an hour and a half. This playthrough took me about that long, not counting time grinding where I put down the controller with my kindle on a button.
Hey, it's still a video game.
From here we shall build our socialist redistribution scheme.
A lot of movie tie-in games were platformers because the NES was good at platforming. Consoles and arcades had side-scrolling way back in 1981, and the NES had smooth scrolling with no weird flicker or ghost images in platformers and shooters starting with Super Mario Bros, but because computers couldn't match that performance, side-scrolling platforming became the NES thing. Batman, Goonies 2, Home Alone, Godzilla, Terminator, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Little Mermaid, all of them got side-scrolling platformer tie-in games. In common with the Willow tie-in game--though even then, there was a side-scrolling platformer for arcades--Robin Hood is a top-down game with RPG elements like leveling up, experience, and stats that improve. Killing enemies increases your maximum health, your Attack and Defense stats, your movement speed, and the amount of weight you can carry. Yes, copied from PC RPGs, weight matters and not only are you limited to six inventory slots per party member, you have to account for their weight as well.
Health is restored through food and magical potions, which I somehow doubt were in the movie. You can find quivers of arrows, increase your damage by using better weapons like the ball and chain and the Locksley sword, find suits of leather armor and a suit of chainmail to equip your Merry Men. There's an equipment screen which has slots for the head and legs and feet (none of which are ever used), an eye that lets you inspect items, a mouth you use to eat bread, "take" and "drop" icons, and the items you drop remain in the world instead of vanishing forever. There's even an Ultima or Dragon Quest-style menu with Talk, Take, Look, and so on.
As I mentioned, though, there is about 33% more RPG infrastructure than is necessary. Leveling up increases your movement speed, which seems like it's great at first, but it renders the red potions (which do the same thing) as just half-effective healing potions, but in practice it means you careen around the tight corridors most of the levels are made of, bouncing off the walls and ramming into enemies. Literally half of your equipment slots are never used. There's a disguise that you have to steal that's used in literally one screen but you have to take it off on that same screen to provoke an attack anyway. You can equip armor and weapons on the rest of your party members, but their stats don't matter and are never referenced, and furthermore, they don't actually help you in any part of the game that's not mass combat. They exist to carry extra items and, in one case, to leave your party and take away a key item making the game unwinnable unless you know to watch out for it.
The impression that I get is that the designers started out with an extremely ambitious vision. It'll be an RPG, with exploration elements! And it'll have a mass battle system you can use your whole party with! And it'll have duels against the villains from the movie! And it'll have statistics and an inventory! And then as the deadline got closer, and they missed the release of the movie, and they missed the release of the Nintendo Power issue, they scaled down what they were trying to do and eventually declared the game complete and shipped it so they wouldn't miss the end-of-year sales period. Or maybe, even in 1991, they just didn't have enough memory or power to do what they wanted. What remains is still a fun game, but as is so often true in video games, you can see the seams of unfinished content.
To arms!
I mentioned mass battles, and despite making up a very small part of the game they're the part I remember when I think of the game. Every once in a while, you'll be hit with some dialogue exchange like:
Azeem: "There are too many of them!"And then a rocking battle theme starts up and it cuts to a zoomed-out view of your area as enemy soldiers pour in and you and your party have to defeat them. This seems like it should be epic, but like most of the game it's about 80% of the way toward being amazing and lands at good and fun.
Robin: "Fight for your lives!"
None of these battles are a challenge, because even though you're outnumbered 10 to 1 or more, every single enemy dies in a single hit, which incidentally means that the choice of what weapons to equip on the rest of your party doesn't matter and the weapon you go into battle with mostly doesn't matter either. The exception is that if you have a bow equipped, you'll be able to shoot arrows, which also kill enemies in one hit. Weapon animations are based on mass battle character sprites, so most characters just have a forward thrust but Azeem has a scimitar, able to cleave through multiple enemies in a single stroke. You can swap control between the different characters, but your mass battle HP and your main game HP are linked, so the choice is generally "Do I swap to Azeem to make better use of his attacks?" or "Do I maintain control of Robin to make sure that his HP isn't squandered by the AI?" As a child, I usually swapped to Azeem to use his
There's also a duel minigame that comes up whenever Robin needs to fight a named opponent, like John Little or Guy of Gisborne. The game switches to a side-scrolling scene and Robin and his opponent both lay into each other with their weapons--usually swords, but to their credit, John gets a quarterstaff. Duels are a fun change of base, but unlike an actual duel there's not a lot of tactics possible. There's no way to feint or block and reach doesn't matter, and since the NES only had two buttons they're mapped to "attack" and "jump." The way to win every duel is to be lower than your opponent, allowing you stab them in the knees while they futilely swing over your head, or, if that's impossible, just duck until there's a break in their attacks, stab them once, and then go back to ducking. It unfortunately makes the duels more and more annoying as the games goes on and it becomes obvious that there's an easy trick to beat them that would never work in any real duel.
There's a horse-racing minigame as well, but it occurs only twice times, and the second time you don't even have anyone chasing you, you're just jumping over rocks for no obvious reason. It reminded me of the horse transport in Hillsfar, where you'd have to ride between every location even when nothing was happening. I guess they were like, "Well, we have horses, we can't just use them only once!"
Just as long as you know who's in charge around here.
Despite those rough edges, the game feels much bigger than it actually is, partially because of the variety of locations and the mission structure. The game is broken into levels that you don't return to, but it doesn't feel that way because after the initial part of the game where Robin and Azeem escape the Ayyubid prison and eventually reach Sherwood Forest, it switches to the NES version of a hub-and-spoke mission system. Every time you return to the Merry Men's camp in Sherwood Forest, someone (maybe Will Scarlet? I don't know who he's supposed to be and the game doesn't name him) gives you a new mission, like robbing the Sheriff's tax wagons as they pass through the forest, or saving a village being attacked by Guy and his men, or finding a blessed spring in order to cure a flu spreading through the camp.
Speaking of that spring, it's inhabited by demonic fishmen who hurl arrows at you, the sequence of which is featured on the attract screen if you do nothing after the title. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves had a scene where Robin Hood fights demonic fishmen, right? Just like how I'm sure it had a ten-foot-tall skeleton that Robin can only defeat with a magic dagger. I'm sure that's all in the movie.
Even though you can only do the missions in order, returning to the camp between them and receiving a new mission makes the game feel more expansive than it actually is. What's more, you see the camp improve as the game goes on, becoming a veritable wood elven village with houses in the trees, rope bridges connecting them, ladders leading up to them, the works. And Robin Hood already wears green, uses a bow, and ambushes people traveling through the forest, so it's a natural connection to make. That doesn't stop the Sheriff's men from setting fire to the camp, taking some of the Merry Men prisoner, and unleashing a veritable army of Celts(?), all of which apparently does happen in the movie. This triggers the endgame. But before then, you can explore the forest, seek out damp caves or hidden forest cabins for extra loot--mostly just potions and quivers, admittedly, but you can find the ball and chain in one of them--fight roughly a million of the Sheriff's men along with the occasional wolf, snake, or rat, and rob from the rich and...well, mostly keep it because despite there being a lot of gold in the game there's very little to spend it on. You need 200 gold to pay the Weapon Master when you meet him, and I've never not had that money so I have no idea what happens if you don't have it, and...I think that's the only thing I spent money on in the entire game. You can't even pay for healing back at camp. Nor do you get free healing either, but there's plenty of potions and food so I never really had to worry about my health.
Like I've said. So many systems, that are mostly implemented.
I'm sure the magical healing water was in the movie.
I've talked a lot about how much of this game is mostly finished, but I think that's part of what makes it so memorable to me. I would much rather have a game that tries to do too many things and mostly succeeds than either a game with a more limited scope that succeeds 100% or a game that tries to do too many things and fails at it. To pick another example, Master of Magic is one of the most memorable 4x games ever to the people who have played it, even though the AI is objectively terrible and there are roughly three dozen overpowered strategies that completely break the game. But the benefit of that is that sometimes the AI lucks into one of those strategies--I remember a game where the AI just spammed paladins, who are immune to magic, and I had to completely retool my strategy to beat them--and that's much more memorable than a smoothly polished experience where your choices are sharply limited. There's a reason that "All Fox, no items, Final Destination" is a derisive meme.
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves tries to do too many things at once. It's a top-down game, but it's also an RPG, but it also has mass battles, but it also has dueling segments, but it also has a hub-and-spoke mission structure, and so on. But because the worst any of those parts of the game gets is "fine," I never got the sense that it was spreading itself too thin. I instead just looked at as an overly ambitious vision that fell short of its goal. The exact meaning of the slang phrase Eurojank and guess what? The game was made by Virgin Games Ltd., based in Britain. QED.
Not sure I'll ever watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at this point, but some time in the future I'll probably come back to this game.
