Rambo (NES) Playthrough
339A playthrough of Acclaim's 1988 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, Rambo.
Coming a year after SNK’s Ikari Warriors (https://youtu.be/ysh16tya7nY), Pack-in-Video's Rambo was the second NES game to be based on the Rambo: First Blood Part II. Rambo follows the exploits of the eponymous Green Beret on a mission that sticks fairly close to the story beats of the 1985 film.
As the game begins, John Rambo, a decorated Vietnam War hero and font of manliness, is doing hard time in a labor camp when he's visited by his old buddy, Colonel Trautman. Trautman offers a pardon contingent on Rambo's returning to Vietnam on a mission to find POW camps, and upon accepting his terms ("But it's up to you. The game doesn’t start until you say YES"), Rambo is booted from a plane into the jungle carrying naught but a hunting knife, some throwing knifes, and a few health potions.
Drawing clear inspiration from several popular 1987 NES releases, namely Rush'n Attack (https://youtu.be/94GJbtVlui8), and Zelda II (https://youtu.be/WQuRIrnD2y4), Rambo is a stab-and-shoot platformer that incorporates semi-open level designs, NPC interactions, and a smattering of light RPG elements.
The design is ambitious for an action movie tie-in, and though it doesn’t quite stick the landing, Rambo is a reasonably well put together game, and once you've figured it out, it's one that generally tends to be fun. There are multiple viable paths through most areas, the cutscenes do a good job of directing you toward your goals, and though the general flow of the action never changes, the variety of objectives helps keep things interesting.
The controls are slippery and the collision detection feels a little off at times, but the action feels fine once once you've learned awkward timing of Rambo's overhead stab, and you're given plenty of ammo for your long-range weapons, anyway. The music is pretty catchy throughout, and the cartoony graphics are fair. It's bizarre to see Rambo clad in bright red sweatpants, wildly stabbing at tigers, apes, and flamingos in the jungle, but the sheer ridiculousness of it all works. The cutscene portraits are also pure comedic gold.
The game's only major sticking point is the counter-intuitive way the world has been laid out. If you walk off the right side of the screen and then change your mind and head back left, you'll often end up on a completely different screen than the one you started on. Or you might exit an area to the north, only to find out that it was a one-way path and that there's no clear way back south. You won't ever find yourself hopelessly lost since stages rarely span more than a dozen screens, but the disorienting layouts can sometimes turn exploration into a frustrating experience.
Rambo is an overall mediocre game, but the developers deserve props for attempting to do something outside-the-box, and the game's unique flavor does somewhat help to compensate for the flaws in its execution.
And how about that ending scene? Why does screaming the 怒 ("ikari," meaning anger) kanji at Murdoch turn him into a frog? Granted, it's a nod to the film's name in Japanese (Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutu), but a frog?
Even better is the title screen of the Japanese version which reads, in English, "Rend the feelings the heart with painful feelings." Who knew that Rambo was such a sentimental guy?
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