Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
474A playthrough of Acclaim's 1989 action-adventure game for the NES, Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II.
Ironsword is Rare's direct sequel to their hit 1987 game Wizards & Warriors, and like its predecessor, it is an exploration-based platformer starring Kuros, the chivalrous knight who has stepped straight out of medieval England to take on the evil wizard Malkil and save the day.
But for whatever reason, this one has a picture of Fabio on the box. Maybe someone at Acclaim thought that romance novel-devouring housewives might find it appealing and buy it? I have no idea. It's weird, though.
This sequel's gameplay follows a blueprint similar to the original's, but there have been a number of tweaks made to change things up. In Ironsword, rather than collecting keys, you'll need to find magical items for the giant animals that can grant you access to the second area of a stage. In the second area, since your sword is useless again the bosses, you'll have to find a spell and charge up your magic reserves before confronting them in battle.
You still collect gems, but now instead of giving them to a creature to get through a door, you spend them at shops that offer food, spells, keys, and upgraded weapons and armor. And just like in Wizards & Warriors, there are invisible doors everywhere that lead to caches of bonus items.
The graphics and sound have also seen a huge upgrade. The first game was one of the more impressive games on the NES when it came out, and Ironsword follows suit. Everything is much more stylized, cartoony, and detailed, and the animation is great - just check out that eagle in the first stage and the creepy lava face boss! David Wise's soundtrack is also on point, managing to be even more memorable than the first game's.
I'm not sure what the popular opinion is on Ironsword, but for all of the ways it improves on Wizards & Warriors, I didn't enjoy it as much due to how punishingly difficult it is. The hit boxes are really screwy (you can expect to be hit regularly by projectiles that clearly don't make contact with your character's sprites), and you'll get constantly hammered by enemies that like to either fire at you from off-screen or to spawn directly on the spot upon which you're currently standing. Pile on some frustratingly unfair jumps and a bug that prevents you from continuing once you've begun the final stage and you've got a game that sits nice and snug among Rare's most spitefully hard NES games. I've always regarded it as being about on par with Battletoads for how hard it is to finish, but in my experience, Battletoads is a much fairer game.
If it showed less interest in trying to make me throw my controller, I think I'd absolutely adore Ironsword, just like I did Wizards & Warriors. It does a lot of things well. That one glaring flaw, though. It runs deep enough to spoil the game for me. I played it a ton, but still, I far prefer the original game. Ditto for the Game Boy one. How about you guys? Did you struggle with it as much as I did?
Quite a few people have requested this one, so after what seems like endless amounts of practice, here it finally is! :)
One random question: does the music that plays after beating a boss remind anyone else a whole lot of the chorus from the old 90s song "The Way" by Fastball? It's close enough to make me wonder who in that band loved this game when they were younger.
You can find my videos of some other Wizards & Warriors games here if you're interested:
Wizards & Warriors (NES): https://youtu.be/ztxwMI2gaIo
Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear (Game Boy): https://youtu.be/LmglefWxcwQ
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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