Altered Beast (PC Engine CD) Playthrough [English]
1,477A playthrough of NEC Avenue's 1989 beat 'em up for the NEC PC Engine CD, Juuouki (獣王記).
The game was a Japan-only release, so for this playthrough I translated and subtitled the intro cutscene. There wasn't any other Japanese in the game aside from the title logo.
Juuouki ("The Record of the Beast King"), better known in the west as Altered Beast, arrived on the PC Engine about ten months behind its Mega Drive cousin, and there were two versions of it. The CD-ROM² version was released a week ahead of the HuCard one.
The Sega Genesis version of Altered Beast (https://youtu.be/m92JFeUVOPw) was a huge hit, and it was easily the best of the console ports of its era. NEC's offering is a huge step up from the Famicom and Master System games, but it
can't quite match the quality of Sega's own 16-bit adaptation.
The PC Engine CD game is pretty solid in its own right, though. On top of the brand new voice-acted intro, all of the levels, digitized voices, beast transformations, and enemies from the arcade game are here, as are the animated scenes that play during the attract demo. It also plays pretty well. The controls are stiff, but they're easy to handle once you get used to jumping with the up button, and the difficulty level is way up there. It's much harder than the Genesis game, and I liked that about it.
There's no 2P mode in the CD version of the game, though. It also lacks the parallax scrolling of the Genesis version, the characters look squished thanks to the change in resolution, and it's annoying how sometimes the game stops mid-level to load.
Altered Beast Turbo doesn't quite take the gold, but it puts up a respectable effort that's worth checking out if you enjoy a challenge and tacky intro cutscenes.
(If you do play it, make sure you're using System Card 1.0. The game breaks on anything higher unless you have an updated copy.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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