WURM: Journey to the Center of the Earth (NES) Playthrough
307A playthrough of Asmik's 1991 action-adventure game for the NES, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth.
It's the dawn of the twenty-first century, and a sudden and violent increase in seismic activity now threatens the existence of all life on the earth’s surface. People are left with no choice but to plumb the depths in a desperate bid to save the planet, and so a team of experts have developed a series of highly specialized subterranean vehicles known as Vazolders ("VZRs"), or Wurms.
Things got off to a promising start, but contact has since been lost with the first four VZR teams, and time is running out. It's now up to crew of the VRZ-5 to find out what happened.
You play as Moby (the captain of the VRZ-5 and daughter of the famous scientist/captain of the VZR-3) as she conducts her search over the course of five story-driven acts, and the gameplay regularly leaps between several styles. There are vertical auto-scrolling shoot 'em up stages, horizontal free-scrolling shooter sections that let you Go, Go, Gadget! your VZR into a tank or a jet whenever you want, first-person gallery shooter-style boss battles that incorporate RPG elements, and semi-linear platformer segments, and all of these segments are bookended by cinematic cutscenes that push the story forward.
The gameplay poses Wurm as a jack-of-all-trades, and while none of the modes are fleshed out well enough to carry the game on their own, they all support one another to form a game that feels consistently cohesive, unified, and thoughtfully designed.
The different story and characters aside, Wurm: Journey to the Center of the Earth feels like the polished up sequel to Golgo-13: Top Secret Episode (https://youtu.be/qqVW5S21sAU) that The Mafat Conspiracy wanted to be (and should have been), and there's a very good reason for that: both Top Secret Mission and Wurm were created by Cyclone System under the direction of Shouichi Yoshikawa, who served as planner, director, and writer on both productions.
The games are structurally similar, but Wurm improves upon its predecessor's design in every conceivable way - the gameplay feels better on a mechanical level, and it, along with the story and the cinematic presentation, all go to great lengths to leverage the advantages of the medium to create an "experience." It doesn't feel like an action game with flashy cutscenes tossed in as an afterthought, nor does it feel like a movie shoehorned into a cartridge. It's the work of a man who had something important to say and who poured himself into his vision. In my many conversations with him, his passion for the game and what it meant to him bled through his every word, and his commitment to making something special certainly shows through in the end product.
If you happen to read this, I hope all is well with you, アンジェラさん!
It doesn't have AAA-level production values and it sports a few minor blemishes (as you'd expect from a game made by such a small team working at a company that nobody had ever heard of), but for anyone who doesn't mind sacrificing a bit of polish for substance and for a creative vision that isn't compromised by cynical corporate politicking - or for anyone who just wants a damned fun game that you'll remember long after you've finished it - I'd 100% recommend checking it out.
And if you ever picked up on Top Secret Mission's underlying tone of disdain for war and violence (especially in the message at the end that read, "Dedicated to all the children and the lost generation"), you'll instantly notice its thematic ties to Wurm. Framed like that, I personally think Golgo 13 and Wurm deserve to be held up and celebrated alongside stuff like Akira, Grave of the Fireflies, and Barefoot Gen. Not just as pieces of post-war Japanese media culture, but as authentic artistic expressions that pushed their medium in every way they knew how in order to make themselves heard.
It's kinda crazy to think that this was actually an NES game. I guess it goes to show how, with the right motivation, you can do a whole lot with very little.
(The Helen Keller joke is one of my favorite wtf NES moments. It gets me laughing every single time.)
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