MY Games #1: StarTropics

The other day, I was thinking about putting together one of those new-fangled Top Ten lists of my favorite games as filler, er, I mean, for a change of pace and to show I wasn’t totally done writing normal text entries. But the more I sat down and thought about it, I just couldn’t come up with either JUST ten favorites, or spin the list into something more along the lines of “My Top Ten Most Influential Games.” There’s also the fact that whenever I get started on a game I like enough to consider a favorite, I can’t stop talking about it. Anyone on my AIM Buddy List can probably attest to that. So, here’s what I’m gonna do- Each week, I’m going to sit here and pick one of my favorite games, and explain why exactly I loved it, and what, if anything I took away from it. So, let’s begin the process of humoring me and hopefully, some of you might be enticed to try these out if you haven’t already.

#1: StarTropics (NES)

StarTropics was one of those games that I loved to death as a kid and wound up recommending or defending to friends as better than Zelda. They either hadn’t heard of it, or didn’t get it, which is a trend that continues to this day with games that I latch onto and adore for the duration. I got this game as a eagerly-awaited birthday present and wound up playing a marathon session of it well into the night while my other friends had konked out around me. It was just so kooky that it grabbed my attention about instantly.

As a kid, I really didn’t have the attention span needed to play a game like say, Dragon Warrior ‘properly,’ that is to say, I just roamed around in the woods killing random monsters and seeing how good a weapon I could get from the shop afterwards. StarTropics was a much different beast, of course. I don’t know whether it was technically my first “RPG,” but saying so sure feels right, since it was the first game of that kind of length and scope that managed to hold my attention all the way through. Taking a normal (well, ginger) modern kid and sticking him in fantastic situations was a lot more engaging than having some pointy eared dork with a sword roam around pushing rocks. It gave things a sense of “Hey, I could totally do that!” until I got older and realized just how poorly a yo-yo fares against a normal car door, let alone mummies and space marines. It didn’t hurt that in the game, you’re trying to rescue your lost Uncle Steve, and I happen to actually HAVE an Uncle Steve. Ohhh, you aliens. It’s personal now.

StarTropics isn’t the smoothest or easiest to control. Mike moves as if he were on a grid, only up, down, left and right, and only in whole tiles. You can ‘cheat’ half tile moves if you attack in mid step, but after the attack he goes ahead and steps the rest of the way into the square. He can only jump across one space at a time without the use of a special item, and if you’re hopping from tile to tile (there are a lot of ‘find the switch’ tile hopping puzzles) that means a lot of slowly hopping, space by space, across the room. Still, you get the sense it was deliberately done rather than lazy programming- sometimes tile hopping is used to slow you up and raise the tension when you NEED to run like hell, or to emphasize how much more maneuverable some enemy types, like bats, are compared to you. The late NES sequel added diagonal movement and freer movement, but the end result just feels like well, a normal overhead action RPG. But more on Tropics 2 later. What I’m getting at is that the ‘visceral’ appeal of StarTropics stems a lot from the limitations that are there, right down to the largely text depictions of things that happen in the uh, “cut scenes.” (**YOU SHOVE BANANAS IN YOUR EARS**) It’s something I’ve noticed in other games, like Sting’s Knights in the Nightmare, there’s a point where not being able to do X stops being aggravating and you start accepting that as part of the deal, like why the hell you can’t use your hands in soccer.

The whole setting of StarTropics just seemed so original and quirky to me back then. You’re drifting from island to island (all helpfully named -cola) in a cool little mini-sub, getting into shenanigans like cross dressing and being eaten by a whale. Back when stuff like that wasn’t spelled out for us in a pre-rendered, cel-shaded spectacle, imagination had to paint the picture for you, so the more over the top the happenings, the more fun to picture. That’s what gave a game about rescuing talking dolphins from a pink octopus the edge to me over dealing with Garland and his nonsensical time loop scheme or figuring out where Dragon Quest actually intended for me to go from the starting gate. And after dealing in mysticism for so long, the endgame revelation that Uncle Steve was abducted by aliens and you needed to head into space to foil them was a genuinely surprising twist that given how bizarre everything else had been up to that point, it didn’t feel like an ass pull or a bizarre tonal shift. The icing on the cake was Mike just kind of inadvertently saving a group of alien hideaways included a cute princess, because this was Nintendo, and god damned if there wasn’t going to be one of those.

I don’t think StarTropics qualifies as terribly obscure, but it is a lesser-loved Nintendo franchise. It did well enough to merit a sequel in the NES’s waning years, dubbed Zoda’s Revenge and having Mike time traveling from era to era, encountering REAL HISTORICAL FIGURES like Sherlock Holmes while retrieving the magical Tetrads because Mica (the princess of the first game) said so. It still had some of that quirk that made the first one so fun, but between knowing from the start you’d be fighting aliens and a more traditional control scheme, it just didn’t feel quite as memorable. That and I remember there being a lot of bullshit pitfalls and traps.

In the end, I give StarTropics credit for being the first game to really hook me with its story.  To this day, I still prefer games with a sense of humor to their stories to straight up “epic” material. It had a decent amount of hidden passages to unearth for heart containers and special weapons, but there was no cash or leveling, keeping everything at a pretty brisk pace when you were ready to get the heck on with the journey. Given that my second-favorite NES RPG was Crystalis, it’s probably pretty obvious I wasn’t big on turn based combat and equipment management yet, but I think it still holds true that I want to be able to just GO when I’m ready to see what happens next in the story without taking an hour or two for item farming or level grinding. Unlike some older games, I don’t really think StarTropics would benefit much from a modern remake. The original just feels like some sort of perfect fluke that revisiting or adding onto just would mess up.