The Goonies II (NES) Playthrough
256A playthrough of Konami's 1987 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, The Goonies II.
The Goonies II was the third and final entry in Konami's trilogy of games based on the 1985 movie, and it was the only one that saw an international release on the NES.
You can find the first two games here:
The Goonies (Famicom) https://youtu.be/aaNhFSDRRso
The Goonies (MSX) https://youtu.be/ft5YGbHUVCY
The setup for The Goonies II is largely the same as the first game's: the Fratellis have kidnapped the Goonies, and it's your job to save them. This time, you'll be playing as Mikey as he explores the old shack and its grounds to find his six buddies and a mermaid named Annie.
The Goonies II is an action-platformer like the first two games, but it features a far heavier focus on its adventure elements. The game's world is no longer broken into individual stages: the shack and its surrounding areas are all now presented as an open-world map that has to be tackled like a jigsaw puzzle, much like what you'd find in games like Metroid, Zelda II, and Faxanadu. In many ways, it feels like it was laying the foundation for Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, which was released four months later.
The world - made up of the shack's interior spaces, the underground caves, a lake, a suspension bridge, and ice caverns - is broken up into two halves, represented as the front and back sides of your map, and the halves are connected via a series of doors that lead to sub-space passages.
The platforming sections are all about combat and exploration, while the sub-space areas, which are traversed from a first-person perspective (think Dr. Chaos or Golgo 13), are where you'll find hint-giving NPCs, important items, warp zones, and the Goonies themselves.
I had this game as a kid, and I remember being so disappointed when I got home and started playing it. I struggled to figure out what I was meant to do and never made it past finding the third Goonie, so I quickly gave up and moved on.
But when I finally came back to it years later as a teenager, it all made so much more sense to me, and once everything clicked, I found myself totally hooked and finished it within a few days. The game tells you everything you need to know, and it's not too difficult to finish as long as you take a few notes and keep track of which doors lead to which areas. It was a challenge, certainly, and the game doesn't hold your hand, but it turned out to be far less cryptic than I'd thought as a seven-year-old. I was glad that I'd decided to give it a second chance.
I also got a real kick out of its humor. The old lady screaming for help as you beat her with a hammer, the lost and confused eskimo, and the awkward ways in which your friends beg you to save them over the transceiver ("This is Stef. A shark is attacking me.") all still make me laugh now.
The Goonies II sacrifices the accessibility and simplicity of the earlier Goonies titles in its attempt to evolve, but it is a fun experiment in game design and a solid stepping stone for the Metroidvania genre. It's not the best game of its type on the NES, but it is a good one.
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