Back to the Future Part II & III (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
448A playthrough of LJN's 1990 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, Back to the Future Part II & III.
Over its years on the market, the NES played host to a glut of games based on Hollywood blockbusters, and while many of them were worthwhile, the great majority of them fell somewhat short of the mark.
Back to the Future Part II & III, however, falls far shorter than most. It lands squarely in the prom night dumpster, right next to the likes of Home Alone and Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure.
It's a non-linear action game that features a wide-open map to explore, similar in many ways to Rambo and Dirty Harry. Most stages have multiple exits that link them together, and each stage has three parallel versions: one set in 1985, one in 2015, and one in 1955. You explore these areas looking for artifacts that have been taken from their original time periods, and the items all have specific locations that they must be returned to.
With 30 items to find and return in the BttF2 portion of the game, that's a lot of exploring to do. Unfortunately, the level layouts rarely come across as logical, and there is no in-game map. You find a compass that will provide you the coordinates of your present location, but that's it for guidance - it's left up to players to meticulously map every inch of the game world themselves. It's a giant maze, and it's all but impossible to get anywhere without a copious amount of notetaking.
Stages have few discernable landmarks, and many require jumping between time periods to reach. While there are a couple of time-travel related "puzzles," the game never really indicates where these might be, and the only way to find all the stages is to go to each and every area, jump between all three time periods, and explore them thoroughly. It's a ton of busy work, but that's not all.
You require fuel for the DeLorean in order to time travel, but this fuel is limited. Eventually, enemies stop dropping fuel icons, and it is entirely possible to find yourself trapped with no other choice but to hit the reset button. There is one particularly nasty bit late in the game where this is likely to happen without careful planning, and it happened to me several times. Since there is no save system in place, the entire BttF2 portion of the game has to be played in a single session, so moments like this feel outright spiteful. The obnoxious enemy patterns (those birds, urgh!) don't make the exploration any less miserable, either.
And finally, the game gives you a real kick in the teeth with the penalty it gives if you try to return an item to the wrong location. It actually takes the item from you and returns it to where you originally found it. Not only might this mean twenty minutes of backtracking to find it again, but since the game never tells you which items you're carrying, you're screwed if you lose track of what you're holding.
The BttF3 portion (beginning at 2:31:40) shows much more mercy and feels even more lazily designed than the first section, but at that point you'll be well past caring. It's more of the same, which is exactly what nobody wanted.
The challenge stages are fun little diversions, but they can't save a game that is so relentlessly obtuse, poorly designed, and willfully disrespectful of the player's time. It's impossible to overstate how truly unenjoyable Back to the Future Part II & III really is. The concept had a ton of potential, and the game fulfilled none of it.
It's bad enough that it almost makes me want to play the SNES game Wolverine: Adamantium Rage. What the hell, Beam?
Really. It's that bad. I promise.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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