DOWNTOWN SPECIAL: KUNIO-KUN NO JIDAIGEKI
Original Release: Technos, 1991, Famicom
Other Releases: Game Boy (1993), Game Boy Advance (in Kunio-kun Nekketsu Collection 3, 2006), assorted Japanese mobile phones (2007-2008), Wii (2009), 3DS/Wii U (2013), PC/PS4/Xbox/Switch (in Kunio-kun: The World Classics Collection, 2018)
The third Kunio adventure for the Famicom takes it back to the Tokugawa shogunate past, to run you through the Japanese mazes that suck ass. The full transliterated title is "Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki da yo - Zenin Shūgō!" which is "Kunio's Edo Period Drama" or somesuch in English, but this was probably more broadly known as "Technos Samurai" from early ROM releases
Downtown Special: Kunio-kun no Jidaigeki (Famicom, Technos, 1991)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
The setup for this one is that Samurai Kunio is sent out to find a special healer for his sick master, also before long his girlie gets kidnapped too (of course). However, neither of these things seems to matter as you're never doing anything about them. It turns out the main thrust of the game, never at all explained in-game in any way, is to track down and beat down all the roving clans of Japan to make their boss appear in standard River City Ransom style. Beat every possible boss and you win (yay).
The structure of all this is very non-linear. You're free to roam anywhere in Japan from the outset, but you'll find most of it empty at any given time. One or two clans are roaming about at any time and you'll have to go to whatever area they're in to fight their mooks. This adds a new mazelike element that wasn't present in RCR, and the whole thing is kinda like a belt-scrolling Castlevania 2 down to pressing on weird places in the background to find hidden shops (but you're fighting Joe Cool Samurai instead of Fish Man).
For the most part, you can beat the mooks of any clan right from the start. The progression gimmick is the bosses are really tough, and some will require you to power up quite a bit to hang with them. There's general leveling up, which comes from a combination of fighting (and you can adjust how EXP is distributed to your various stats) and the usual buying of the more expensive meals around and about. But some bosses have a special technique that you need to purchase either one of the moves or a particular piece of equipment to counter, at least without just overwhelming them with your sheer stats.
Other new additions to this entry include battery save, and some of the bosses will join your party and become a selectable ally back at the starting town.
It's kind of a neat evolution of the RCR formula, but it also feels like a bunch of ideas thrown into the pot without adequately testing out whether or not they would all actually work. There's simply an unacceptable amount of dead time as you have to sometimes roam very long distances to find a clan to fight, and this is compounded by the environment getting more and more mazelike the farther you go from the starting town. You practically need a map to find your way to the most outlying provinces and back without getting lost. When you're not fighting there's basically nothing else to do, and it's important to fight as often as possible as you really need to grind money. But perhaps the biggest issue is just that there's wicked slowdown and flickering whenever 4 guys are on the screen plus at least a couple throwable objects scattered about, which is often. The game just sort of bit off more technically than the humble NES was ready to chew, and whatever programming optimization they attempted just wasn't adequate to the task.
If it nevertheless sounds interesting, maybe skip the NES version in favor of the fan-made PC port that doesn't suffer from the same technical issues.
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