Ikari Warriors (NES) Playthrough
169A playthrough of SNK'S 1987 run-and-gun shooter for the NES, Ikari Warriors.
Ikari Warriors is an NES adaptation of SNK's 1986 arcade game of the same name. Ikari Warriors, known in Japan as "Ikari" (怒, lit. "Anger"), is a top-down shooter that wears its inspiration brazenly on its sleeve: the title is a direct allusion to Rambo: First Blood Part II, which is called Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu (ランボー怒りの脱出, lit. "Angry Escape") in Japan. According to Koji Obata, the game's director and designer, the game was intended to be a Rambo tie-in, but SNK wasn't able to secure the rights ahead of its release. The lack of an official license didn't seem to hurt it much, though, since the game was a huge success and went on to become SNK's first major hit in North America.
Ikari Warriors stars a pair of commandos, Paul and Vince, who "must fight for survival against a relentless onslaught of enemies" as they "invade an enemy nation" under secret orders. Upon crash landing in the jungle, Paul and Vince spring from the wreckage, ready for duty.
Fun bit of SNK trivia: Paul and Vince, originally named Ralf and Clark in the Japanese version, later went on to fight in The King of Fighters tournament (https://youtu.be/MIQYJ-orFl0) before returning to their soldiering roots as playable characters in Metal Slug 6 and 7. Ralf also starred as the hero in TNK III and its sequel, Iron Tank.
The arcade version of Ikari Warriors resembles Capcom's 1985 arcade game Commando, but it introduced some notable improvements that really made it stand out. It featured simultaneous 2P co-op gameplay, rotary joysticks that allowed players to independently control movement and aiming, and drivable tanks. The entire game also plays out over a single map instead of being partitioned into distinct stages.
In late 1986, nine months after the release of the arcade game, the Famicom adaptation arrived on Japanese shelves, and that adaptation finally made its way to the NES in 1987 (North America) and 1988 (Europe).
Not content to be a mere downgraded clone, the NES version of Ikari Warriors goes to great lengths to expand and build upon the coin-op original experience. There are three new stages (each of which are roughly the same length as the arcade game in its entirety), new enemy characters, and even a new last boss. Paul and Vince now get to fly helicopters, too!
Unfortunately, the arcade classic endured *a lot* of abuse in the move, and the NES version is utterly ruined by inexplicable design decisions and inept programming.
The controls are riddled with lag, and there wasn't much effort put into adapting to them for the NES pad. Paul and Vince move like they've got cement in their shoes, and they don't turn to face a new direction with a quick tap of the d-pad. You have to hold the d-pad down and watch as they slowly walk in a circle and eventually come about, and if you happen to oversteer as you're lining up a shot, you're stuck having to circle around again for another try. The controls are unreliable, unintuitive, and unbelievably frustrating, and coupled with the laughably poor framerate, make for an inordinately difficult game.
That's not even taking into account the way you can softlock the game by getting stuck behind a wall or glitch-teleported out of a helicopter, or how stage four's background becomes an indecipherable mess of gliched out tiles in certain versions.
And the real icing on the cake is that there's no option to continue from a game over unless you use a cheat code. It's cruel. I didn't use the code in this video, and let me assure you: the amount of practice I needed to get back to the point where I could finish the game legitimately was not worth it. It was an excruciating slog.
Ikari Warriors is a nigh-unplayable mess that ranks amongst the worst that the NES has to offer.
Micronics, I hate you. I need you to know that.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.