Werewolf: The Last Warrior (NES) Playthrough
480A playthrough of Data East's 1990 action-platformer for the NES, Werewolf: The Last Warrior.
Werewolf: The Last Warrior is the story of the native American Chief War Wolf. The medicine man of his village, Kinju, has held communion with the Great Spirit and has seen the coming destruction of the world. A government scientist, Dr. Faryan, has been possessed by an evil spirit and now plans to release a chemical weapon in the Earth's atmosphere.
Kinju informs War Wolf that it is time to fulfill the destiny that was foretold by the chief's boyhood vision quest, and War Wolf secludes himself in a cave to undergo a metamorphosis. He emerges four weeks later as a man forever changed, and as he casts his gaze out over the ravaged landscape, he knows what he must do. He is Werewolf, the last warrior, and Dr. Faryan must pay for what he has done.
That's the setup that we're given by the comic book that was included in the box with the game. If you'd like to read it yourself, you can find a copy at https://online.anyflip.com/nmmt/itdu/mobile/
Werewolf is an action game created specifically for the American market by SAS Sakata, Data East's go-to partner for NES game development who had previously worked on titles like BurgerTime, Karnov, and Robocop. The quality of their work was usually quite solid, but they really outdid themselves with Werewolf: The Last Warrior.
The game is made up of five lengthy stages in which our hairy hero must find and take down Faryan's supermutant henchman bosses. Each area contains multiple paths, all focusing on intricate platforming sequences that demand precise use of your Werewolf form's acrobatic skillset.
As the human Chief War Wolf, your attacks are weak and your mobility is limited, but after taking down the first enemy, you can grab a red W icon and transform. The werewolf, a hulking beast endowed with incredible agility and blades for arms, is the form you'll take for most of the game and helps to level the playing field, but you have to be careful - taking too much damage or picking up a blue W icon will force you back you back into your human form.
As a werewolf, you can scale walls, cling to overhead objects, backflip, and let loose screen-clearing blasts of energy, and the game's considerable challenge revolves around your ability to make the most of these abilities. You can also collect orbs to increase the anger gauge, and when you have five, you become the supremely powerful Super Werewolf for a limited time.
Werewolf starts out feeling like an extraordinarily difficulty game and it has moments that'll make you want to smash your controller in frustration, but it gets much easier as you come to grips with your abilities. Helpful items are hidden everywhere and the stages are deliberately designed to teach you the mechanics, but patience and practice are key here. It's like Ninja Gaiden in that respect: it'll beat you down again and again, but it's fair. You'll always know why you died, and as long as you are paying careful attention to and learning from your mistakes, you'll be able to see it through to its satisfying conclusion.
When I was in fourth grade, one of my friends gave me his old stack of NES carts when his parents bought him a shiny new Sega Genesis. Werewolf was one of those carts, and at first, I bounced off of it. I didn't have the manual and I couldn't make sense of the gameplay, so I set it aside for Solar Jetman, another game from that stack had since grabbed my attention. Months later, having had my fill of Solar Jetman, I craved a new challenge and decided to give Werewolf another shot.
Before long, I started to get it. I studied the rolling demos, experimented until I figured out the controls, and from there, I took it one stage at a time until I finally got to the end. Beating this one took me a long time, but it gave me a huge sense of accomplishment, and it's a game that I have regularly gone back to over the years.
The controls are great (most of the time - the ceiling grab can be a bit touchy), the graphics are detailed and full of Data East's off-beat sense of humor, the soundtrack is top-notch stuff, and the entire game is a real blast to play once you get over the initial hump.
I think that the slightly more complex than usual controls and the level of difficulty scare a lot of people off of Werewolf: The Last Warrior, but there's good reason to stick with it. It's a stylish, extremely well-made game that I'd personally rank among the best of the NES's action-platformer classics.
It's also a much better Wolverine game than the Wolverine game ever was.
(I stuck in a little bit of fun footage at the end showing a couple of weird glitches I came across. You can find that at 28:47)
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