Title: JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Saiyuuki World II – The Demon God of Heaven – & WHOMP’EM
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $7.99
Release Date: 08/06/2024

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Story

In this sequel to NMK’s Saiyuuki World, you take control of Son Goku on another quest to stop evil from corrupting the world, this time by going after six areas of evil and rescuing their elements with the power of your magic pole!

Oh, and there’s a US version where they barely edited anything but making Goku into a Native American stereotype and giving a bunch of stuff new names that lean into the racism. Needless to say, that reskin isn’t as well done as Saiyuuki World was to Monster Land.

Presentation

We have another Jalecolle reissue, and that means another snazzy remix on the start screen, this time of the opening stage. It’s rather good, and leans into the rock aspect just enough to be an energetic tune. Like always, you have your assortment of screen sizes/bonus information to toggle and mess around with in-game, and a good chunk of advertisements/box/manual scans. This one has a handy descriptor of what all your weapons do along the right side of the screen, along with an extra display on the screen showing how many gourds you need to level up your health, so you don’t need to keep pausing to see the info. You also have the returning rewind/save state options.

When it comes to the game itself, the presentation is pretty decent for a 1990 game. Crisp pixels, colorful stages, and a few very minor visual nods to the first Saiyuuki World, although they’re very easy to miss if you haven’t played the previous one. (Whether they be platforms that take turns going up like the final stage in Saiyuuki World, or a stage boss representing the same entity as the final boss of the last game, there are indeed connections!)

The music is pretty average as a whole, with a couple of stages having excellent tunes, but most of them just having generic ones. Due to some of the instrument choices and sound effect similarities, I’m pretty sure this was composed by the same person behind the Jajamaru Action RPG, though sadly the OST here isn’t nearly as good.

Lastly, we gotta talk about how uh, very bad Whomp Em is as a reskin before we cover the actual game, since both versions play the exact same, so really your version preference will depend entirely on which aesthetic you prefer, and as one who’s generally aware that most insensitive things in older games are just that way due to differing times and ignorance, Whomp Em’s native-themed reskin is just such of poor quality I can’t help but feel like it was more akin to how the 90s sold a bunch of people Native American themed stuff because it looked cool without a care of what natives would think. Heck, one of the first things I was ever gifted in my life was a Dream Catcher, which certainly feels awkward looking back.

But yeah. Goku is hastily edited to become “Soaring Eagle”, is given really bad looking facepaint and a feather on his head, and his pole is now a spear. The weapons are named differently as are the enemies, but don’t think you’re getting something that at least is semi-consistent like Saiyuuki World was to its reskin of Monster Land, since Eagle will be running into all sorts of Japanese/Chinese themed enemies with little explanation at all, and be fighting the same kind of bosses Goku fought in his story, just because they didn’t want to bother reskinning anything besides some Japanese text on exploding enemies and turning a Panda into a bear.

Whomp Em is just remarkably lazy for a reskin and I can absolutely see why some would find this offensive nowadays, and the sheer lack of polish/effort to at least keep the new theme consistent makes it even worse. I’m still glad the original US version is here for the sake of completion, but yeah, maybe do what I did and just stick with the JP version for consistency with that first game. Or not, since that’s the power of choice!

Gameplay

Starting the game off, you’re immediately thrown into an intro stage, a pretty solid place to get the grips of the general gameplay, with it being a typical jump/attack platformer. Starting off with your staff, you can strike foes with it via the attack button, or down/upthrust it while jumping ala Zelda II, and as a starting weapon it works rather well. It manages to be effective against most foes, and enemies will drop temporary powerup items ala the first game, such as a gauntlet to increase your strength, a protective helmet, and a cloak to temporary make you invisible, so there’s some of that which came back.

Upon reaching the end of the level, you’re taking to a stage select with six levels to choose from, each of which sports their own theme. You have areas like a forest, ice land, dark cave, and several others to go through, and these can be done in any order you wish. Some stages have a few spots where a certain weapon from another level may lead to a shortcut or picking up some handy items, but nothing essential, meaning that you’ll be able to just pick a level based off what you want out of it, whether that be a favorite weapon, trying to find a boss’s weakness, or just because you think it looks cool, all up to you!

Right off the bat, that makes Saiyuuki World II far more replayable than any of the Jalecolle lineup to date. While all of the games have had a time attack timer as part of the game, this one actually gives you a reason to go back and replay the game, whether that be for beating said timer, or just for the sake of having fun, so the stage select aspect is pretty enjoyable.

It also helps that the core gameplay remains solid, and the powerups you get from most of the stages are actually incredibly useful. You can break through bricks with a spinning cyclone attack, shoot fire from your pole with another, or fly around on the nimbus cloud, and these can help make subsequent stages even easier and more fun to play around with. The only weapon I found myself outright hating was the Ice one, mainly because it seemed to almost never actually work except in some very rare instances.

While exploring the stages, you can also come across a few chances to permanently upgrade parts of Goku, whether that be his staff by collecting dropped pole upgrades, or the many gourds enemies will leave behind, which will eventually give you an extra heart upon collecting enough of them. While a natural playthrough will get you a decent amount of extra hearts, you’ll absolutely be forced to grind out enemies in order to get a maximum health bar, which comes in handy for the final stage in which the difficulty ramps up significantly.

Otherwise though, the core six stages are pretty fun and worth memorizing, and the boss fights within them are all pretty darn enjoyable, with nothing before that final level really causing me to pull my hair out, and all in all Saiyuuki World II is a really fun action game.

Conclusion

In the end, Saiyuuki World II was a delightful surprise from the Jalecolle line. While Jaleco has made a few decent/good games, even the ones I like a lot like Totally Rad and Astyanax have enough rough edges to make them not worth playing for everyone. But Saiyuuki World II was much more polished than those two games, and the Mega Man-esque stage select adds a delightful amount of replay value to this otherwise typical action platformer. The stages are fun, most of the weapons are fun, and the core gameplay loop is really solid.

The only things I really have to gripe about is the final stage difficulty spike coming off as rather cruel, and well, the questionability of Whomp Em’s reskinned nature. Still, both versions play pretty much the exact same, and there’s next to no text in the game so you aren’t even getting much to deal with in subtitles if you do choose one version over the other. Either way, you have a fun hidden gem of NES platforming, and it was also pretty neat seeing how the first Saiyuuki World was referenced here in little nods. Definitely worth a play!

I give JALECOlle Famicom Ver. Saiyuuki World II – The Demon God of Heaven – & WHOMP’EM an 8 out of 10..