Around the time that I beat Castlevania 64 earlier this year, a friend of mine mentioned off-hand how as bad as that game was, this game, Nightmare Creatures, was even worse. Now I would describe Castlevania 64 as a not so much "awful" so much as "fairly maligned" game. Not as bad as all the hype pumps it up to be, but definitely deserving of a less than stellar reputation. Now something even more troubled than THAT, I had to see, and so I've been quietly hunting for this game ever since. I finally stumbled upon a copy recently, and so I made room in my busy schedule of playing Tales games to spend an afternoon and evening playing through it XD. It took me 5 or so hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on real hardware (albeit that real hardware was my PS3, so I wouldn't have to use a wired controller :b).

Nightmare Creature's story is mostly told through a lot of backstory in a narrated intro, but it mostly doesn't matter. Back in the mid-1600's, a cult did some evil experiments trying to make the ultimate life forms, but one of their members burned the whole thing down in 1666 (causing the Great Fire) and disappeared into history. Now it's the mid-1800's and that person's journal has resurfaced, and it's up to the two protagonists to stop the evil guy behind it all before his army of NIGHTMARE CREATURES (the game's words, not mine) takes over London (and the world too, I suppose). It's a very pulpy story, and once you actually start playing the game, it more or less totally disappears outside of little blurbs on the loading screens between levels (which actually went by so fast that I never had a chance to read them, but whether that's an issue with me playing it on a PS3 instead of a PS1 or if it's an issue with the game's quick loading times in general, I don't know and don't really care about).

The gameplay of Nightmare Creatures is a series of 20 levels (16 levels and 4 boss fights) through a London beset by the titular creatures. The levels do have secret and optional paths in them for extra goodies, but they're generally pretty linear. The controls are tank controls, and they feel AWFUL to play with on the D-pad. This game came out in '97 JUST as the first wave of dual-shock controllers were hitting store shelves (a little earlier than that, in some regions), and I pity whomever tried to play this with just the normal PS1 D-pad. Switching to analogue stick control mostly just maps the D-pad's controls onto the joysticks, but god damn does that make the game SO much more playable. It's a game whose control method takes a good deal of getting used to, and that goes especially for how your character will sometimes auto-lock onto an enemy, and sometimes they won't. Your jumping is also weirdly enough Simon Belmont-style, where moving forward ANY amount does the exact same HUGE jump forwards, while jumping from a standstill does a tiny forward hop. There isn't a large amount of platforming (mercifully), but there is at least one really annoying jump in the game, and the game would honestly be better if there were no mandatory platforming at all.

A huge part of the game is also the combat that takes place in each level. You have powerful sub-weapons which you find scattered throughout levels as well as healing items too, but your main attacks will be your heavy and light normal attacks. I played through as Nadia instead of the male character, as Nadia helps mitigate one of the game's most difficult aspects of combat: you are very slow, and your enemies are quite fast. Sub-weapons are far too rare to rely on them for standard combat, so getting good at dispatching enemies with your normal attacks is a must. It's something I stuck to so firmly that I ended up barely using any of my sub-weapons as a result ^^;. Most of combat just boils down to getting at least one hit in on an enemy, preferably when they're close to a corner, and then just pummeling them constantly to stun lock them until they die. Combat is more just a test of your ability to be a little patient with your blocking and then just bash enemies to death. It's tricky until you get the hang of it, but after the first few levels (and the horrid first boss) you probably won't be having too much trouble with combat, or at least nothing that the fairly numerous health pickups can't pave over.

The only real selling point of the game is the presentation, which is honestly pretty damn impressive for 1997. Kalypso did their own engine for this, and it's got some pretty bad texture warping problems with the environments, but the atmosphere and look of the world and monsters still holds up pretty well (at least as far as retro games are concerned). An especially cool feature is that you can slice monsters apart as you get better and better weapons, and the degree to which they fall apart dynamically as you happen to hit certain body parts (hands, heads, arms, getting outright cut in half) never fails to be really cool. It makes the janky combat feel more worth it with just how satisfying it is to slice those overly fast, clunky bastards in two XD. That said, the N64 version of the game apparently not only fixes a lot of the texture warping, but it also makes the awful platforming easier, so I would posit a guess that unless the controls map onto the N64's joystick REALLY badly, that's likely the definitive version of the game on console (but that version didn't come out in Japan TwT).

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Nightmare Creatures isn't awful, but it really probably isn't worth your time. It's not terribly interesting or difficult beyond how poorly it controls, but it does have its aesthetic going for it. The big trouble here is that it's a game that isn't very fun to play, can often be frustrating, and you'll get a lot of the aesthetic enjoyment out of just watching a Let's Play or a long play online or something. It's something I'd say certainly isn't as interesting as Castlevania 64, so I'd put it beneath that game for sure, and it's something better off left to only people very interested in janky 3D games from the 5th generation.