118. Kerokerokeroppi no Daibouken 2 (Shimada Kikaku, Famicom, 1993)

A lot of time I look at lackluster platformers on the Famicom and wonder: why didn't more of them just copy Mario? Maybe they were trying, but didn't get what makes Mario so good, or maybe it's really hard to squeeze movement that feels good out of such primitive hardware, but I'm happy to say that Kerokerokeroppi no Daibouken 2 knows that great artist steals, as it's pretty much a direct mashup of the Famicom's two most popular platforming series: Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man.

This is nominally a sequel to the original Kerokerokeroppi no Daibouken, but that was a puzzle / action game that involved completing various single-screen mazes, while the second is more of a standard level-based platformer. The action unfolds over 4 themed areas, each with three platforming stages. The platforming itself is not super challenging, only in later levels does it get particularly perilous. The jumping is solid and feels like if Mega Man could jump a little bit higher. You can also croak to shoot out a projectile, which is upgrade-able to 4 levels (each larger than the last). Powering up to the fifth level gives you limited invulnerability but also moves you back to level 1 when it is over, so it's a trade-off you have to think about.

The stages and enemies are all fairly simple, but a key feature is that you can not only shoot enemies with your croak, you can also jump on top of them, and crucially, if you press jump when you land on them, you get a boost that will allow you to jump even higher. While this is initially just a fun thing you can do, the game eventually requires you to jump on enemies to access certain powerups, or later to even progress at all. Jumping on enemies in a platformer is just plain fun, even moreso when you can land on 2 or three in a row. At one point I found a warp point by falling through the floor, which was cool and felt Mario-esque.

At the end of each area is a boss, and this is where Kerokerokeroppi no Daibouken 2 takes a sharp turn for me. All of the bosses are presented as a variety of minigames, including a simple memory match game, a completely random game where you are adding two numbers, and a mashup of Three-Card Monty and Rock-Paper-Scissors. While they were interesting diversions, I think I would have rather had a generic platformer boss that I have to jump on three times or something. That said the entire game only took me about a half an hour to finish, so it's not like the bosses were torture.

4/5, a fun, simple, and most importantly short 8-bit platformer that actually learned something from its predecessors