Addams Family Values (SNES) Playthrough
194A playthrough of Ocean's 1995 license-based action-adventure game for the Super Nintendo, Addams Family Values.
Like the NES, the Super Nintendo had three Addams Family games. The first one (https://youtu.be/0SxxqeSYhjU), based on the 1991 film, is what I consider to be the best console game Ocean ever made. The second (https://youtu.be/tVg8m_BYqcw), based on the animated TV series, was as terrible to play as it was beautiful to look at. Addams Family Values, the third, falls somewhere between those two extremes, leaning heavily toward the latter.
On the surface, Addams Family Values bears an even greater resemblance to the traditional Zelda games than Sunsoft's Fester's Quest did (https://youtu.be/rio0DbVUFTM). Baby Pubert has been kidnapped by Debbie Jelinsky, a money grubbing hussy that seeks to extort wealth and power from the Addams, and when creating the world for this to all take place in, someone clearly took notes when playing A Link to the Past (https://youtu.be/-y0H798VHqc).
Beginning near a graveyard, Fester's second quest will take him across a large overworld broken up into several distinctly themed areas, including a shadowy forest, a sunlit forest, a swamp, a desolate mountain region, an icy desolate mountain region, and an area covered in ruined ancient structures and statues. These areas are all linked by networks of caves, teleportation portals, and crumbling bridges, and most ultimately lead to underground dungeons filled with traps and puzzles.
But as eerily similar as this all sounds, Addams Family Values doesn’t live up to the billing of a Zelda clone. If A Link to the Past had been a painting, Addams Family Values would be the mimeographed reproduction that you'd have seen on a worksheet in elementary school. It vaguely captures the form of the work, but the minutiae - the technique, the care, and the nuance - that elevated the original masterwork is completely lost in translation. It misses the forest for the trees.
The world lacks any sense of cohesion. There's little rhyme or reason to how it's all structured - the massive labrynthine overworld is largely empty and has no sense of flow, you're rarely given any clues as to where you need to go or what your next objective might be, and there's no sense of progression beyond beyond the occasional upgrades made to your life gauge. The maps are simple to the point of being useless, you spend hours upon hours lost wandering in circles, and the countless times you're forced to backtrack halfway across the world to just to give someone an item makes for a game that is as infuriatingly obtuse as it is boring. Making matters worse is the game's visual design. The graphics are gorgeous, especially for an SNES game, and the game is drenched in atmosphere, but the ways it wields its perspective against you really hurt the gameplay. Enemies that you can't see constantly ambush you from behind walls, and important pathways are often obscured by tree canopies.
Much of the game's challenge is wrought from dirty tricks that force you to memorize large swathes of the vast, barren world and from the useless password system. To save, you have to talk to Cousin It who is hidden deep in the eastern swamps, and more often than not you'll get killed in a vain attempt to find him, undoing all of the hard won progress that has been made since your last visit.
Addams Family Values' incredible graphics and music nail the gothic horror vibe that the designers were so clearly aiming for, but the gameplay is the same half-baked, player-hostile garbage that we had all come to expect from Ocean.
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