Random Hack #3

It's so-and-so. Most of the levels were pretty high quality, with a lot of quirky stuff going on in them. Very few levels feel the same.

However some levels were definitely not up to the same quality, to put it nicely. Mirror Ghost House stands out as one of the worst SMW levels I've played so far, despite having a unique and supposedly fun gimmick, where the screen is cut in two sections, the upper half where Mario is and platforms around but the level design is invisible and is present only in the lower half and mirrored .

Humor was so-and-so. Toilet humour in so many places... but those error messages you get while entering some pipes were actually pretty cool. Overall I recommend this hack, but with a grain of salt. Be prepared for some jank. It shows it's age a little bit.

So, this is my 1000th game I've ever beat, so for such a special occasion I decided to review it (my first "true" review, so bear with me). I had quite some fun for the most part.

Let's start with the good things. Well, if you played the NES Nekketsu counterpart of this game, this is basically the same game as before, but significantly improved. The graphics have great pixel art and have a lot of character. There's a lot more songs, most of them from previous Kunio games each having their own modernized arrangements that all sound pretty good. The story is the embodiment of charming where you can make your own OC (very cheezy but kinda fun), who is absolutely terrible in the beginning but then become a pretty reliable member, thanks to a weird mechanic where you gain stats depending on who the OC fights against. It's really fun to see so many characters just interact with each other in the story. Based on the presentation you can truly see they definitely cared about this game.

The gameplay is also still good, albeit a bit simplistic. There's still 2 racing events, one weird punching Ball game, where you climb up a pole and try to do the last hit on the ball and the Battle Royale, where you beat everyone else up (my favorite part). This game can be played up to 4 players and it's definitely more fun with others than alone.

Sadly there's some major problems with this.
Firstly, The PC port kinda sucks, because of the controls. There's no way to set keys (you're stuck with O, U and I as Player 1's buttons, out of all things) and most controllers simply don't get recognized and you have to do some workarounds (like using JoyToKey). I can't believe they put so much effort into the game and not do these basic things for PC port.

Secondly, the awards at the end of a match are far too strong. Basically they give you awards for specific athletes like which athlete accumulated the highest points or which was the "Most Technical" (which I still don't know how you can achieve it) and some that are basically just pure luck. They didn't matter so much in the NES game and it was fine there.

Sadly it wasn't super successful since Kunio was kind of a dying franchise then and River City Girls didn't release yet to help a bit with the sales. But I liked what I played and maybe you can have fun with it too if you like a more casual game with a charming story and good presentation. If you read the whole review, thank you fellow Backloggd user and good day to you!