Metal Slader Glory (NES) English Playthrough - NintendoComplete
438A playthrough of Hal's 1991 adventure game for the Nintendo Famicom, Metal Slader Glory.
Since the game was a Japanese-exclusive release, this video was recorded using the excellent English-translation patch by Stardust Crusaders, released on 8/30/18 - exactly twenty-seven years after the game's first release. If you are interested in trying the game out for yourself in English, look here: https://www.romhacking.net/translations/3755/
Though it's virtually unknown in the west, Metal Slader Glory is highly respected and well loved by its Japanese fans, and for good reason. Several, actually.
First, let's touch on the obvious. The game stretches the limits of the NES far, far beyond just about anything else ever officially produced. It's best classified as a visual novel with gameplay elements, but it's not nearly as mundane as that description makes it sound. The graphics are the stuff of legend - if you though Little Samson or Batman: Return of the Joker pushed the NES, you *need* to see this. Every scene is absolutely loaded with detail, and the use of color belies the limits of the NES's PPU. The game made heavy use of the MMC5 mapper (better known for its uses in the US Castlevania 3 and many Koei games) to pull off its presentation.
Each character's animation is actually synced to the words as they print on-screen, and all of the characters show emotion on their faces, so text isn't needed to tell you how someone reacts. Even more impressive - just look at them blink! Even something so simple gets multiple frames of animation, and if multiple characters are on-screen at once, they all blink at different rates. I know it sounds a bit stupid to be impressed by this, but it's an NES game. The attention to detail is amazing.
The backgrounds look incredible as well, with a quality that rivals what you'd see on Genesis games. The use of color is extraordinary, but I should mention that I recorded this using the blargg NTSC filter. Some nifty tricks were used in creating the illusion of a higher color depth and level of detail than were actually drawn on-screen by exploiting the artifacts produced by CRT displays. With no noise in the picture, much of the game looks stark and jagged, the colors become flat and blown out, and a lot of the implied detail is completely lost.
I was truly impressed with the moon's 3D corridor areas and the high-action combat scenes - the style and quality of the graphics here are truly unsurpassed on the NES. Of course, you'd expect something special considering how huge the cart's ROM was - it was the largest officially produced Famicom cart at a full megabyte!
The gameplay is hard to comment on - being a visual novel, there isn't much "traditional" gaming. It's more like a super-enhanced "choose your own adventure" book. But, if you enjoy text-based games, the story here is great (albeit a bit too brief for how much I enjoyed my time playing it) and frames the action nicely, and the quality of the translation is outstanding. I've played it through in Japanese a few times before, and the English version does the writing of the original justice.
It's a fantastic game that is finally available to English speakers, and any genre fans would be remiss to not try it out.
Random piece of trivia here: the game spent four years in development, and the cartridge was expensive to produce, giving the game a price tag that rivaled Koei's titles in the early 90s. HAL overextended themselves with the production and advertising costs, and so it was that the losses incurred by Metal Slader Glory bankrupted the company. At that point Nintendo stepped in and bought HAL out, bringing them under the Nintendo corporate umbrella.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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