Whomp ‘Em (NES)

Japan seems to think that the Chinese novel “Journey to the West” is a good fit for video game adaptation, with quite a few games they’ve created borrowing from or being inspired by the journeys of Sun Wukong and crew. In the West, long time gamers have seen its influence crop up across a variety of titles, but during the fledgling years of the medium, developers were more wary about showing their Eastern influences. That is how we find ourselves with the game Whomp ‘Em, a game once called Saiyūki World 2: Tenjōkai no Majin that was adjusted to appeal more to Western audiences. Replacing Sun Wukong with a Native American character named Soaring Eagle, it might have stumbled into being one of the first games to put a Native American in a heroic starring role.

 

Whomp ‘Em, it’s name a play on wampum, keeps most of its original Eastern inspiration when it comes to the structure of the game. Power-ups like Wukong’s cloud-walking boots and samurai headdresses simply get a rename to hide their inspiration, and the Japanese influence on enemies is left in place. The game’s story isn’t really adapted to fit the change in protagonist besides some word swapping, but it hardly has one at all to speak of. Soaring Eagle just sets out to collect “totems” for his magic pouch (I use quotation marks because these “totems” are really just the Journey to the West inspired powers), each of these special powers held by a boss in a level with a different environmental theme. After an initial stage to get the player acquainted with the game, Whomp ‘Em lets the player pick the order they do the game’s six main stages in, the player unlocking the final level once they’ve completed them all. The game’s structure is a bare-faced copy of the Mega Man style of play, each boss even giving the player a special weapon upon defeat. It’s not a bad style to copy necessarily, but Whomp ‘Em mix of quality inspirations doesn’t really benefit the end product much.

Whomp ‘Em is an action platformer, little surprise considering its attempts to mimic Mega Man. Soaring Eagle’s weapon of choice on his adventure, however, is a spear which he can strike forward with or point up or down with while jumping for special strikes like a pogo bounce or stabbing enemies from below a platform. The range on the weapon is fairly limited, the weapon even requiring a short bit of time to come out. For the most part, you can strike an enemy as long as it’s not right in your face, but that time needed to strike can lead to you getting bum-rushed by an aggressive enemy who won’t give you the time to strike back. That’s much rarer than the usual simple task of striking an enemy and killing them in one or two strikes, and there are little power-ups that enemies can drop that will make your spear longer or more powerful for a short time. Other pick-ups can help with defense or refill health, but the more interesting enemy drops are the gourds and magic potions. Whomp ‘Em’s most original idea is its approach to lives. So long as you have at least one magic potion, the moment you run out of hearts, you’ll immediately get a full refill of health. Many games will have the player restart a stage after a death, but Whomp ‘Em has the lives immediately refresh themselves during play, allowing the player to take more risks and get more aggressive so long as they have the health to back up the behavior. The gourds further allow this style of play, as the more gourds you collect, the more hearts you can have per life. A Game Over will still mean starting a stage from the beginning, but that’s the only punishment for losing all your health and potions.

 

Whomp ‘Em’s stages aren’t much to get excited about. Following fairly typical video game setting choices, you can expect an ice level, water level, fire level, and so on. The levels do toy with gimmicks a bit to try and match their themes, but most ideas are only explored for the span of a screen before either reverting to standard design or moving onto the next idea. It means most things don’t get old or grow particularly annoying, but it also means the stages have little to make them stand out save some music and fairly good background art. While the game does have some particularly peppy, energetic tunes like the one in its Woods Test level, what mostly stands out are the cases where the music absolutely fails. Forest Test’s music is an obnoxious loop of loud beeps and the long Final Stage wears out its welcome with a discordant mind-numbing tune. There is a lot of verticality to the levels, many of them punctuating long horizontal stretches with shafts that you climb up or fall down. Climbing up isn’t bad at all, and while the dropping does sometimes have moments of blind faith, usually the game is kind enough not to put hazards below you. …Usually. The gimmick of the Water Test level almost seems to be blind hazardous drops, the game putting plenty of spikes you can’t anticipate below you and enemies that rise up from below with little time to react to them. Cautiously moving forward in most levels will let you avoid sudden enemy appearances, but the Water Test asks you to trust it during a fall and you’ll find, more often than not, you’ll be betrayed unless you already know where not to go.

A little bit of tricky platforming prevents the levels from being too bland, and the bosses have a bit more variety to them than the stages. Your approach to them will almost always being stabbing them when its safest to do so, but they all have different attack patterns to work around and some nifty design choices. The bagworm boss and bouncing metal ball boss are stand-outs, but even more standard designs like a man made of fire will incorporate something unique, in his case a smokey form he’ll shift to with a different attack style. The bosses are the most likely place to lead to death and they feel appropriately challenging since that risk is present, but if your health reserves are high then little strategy is required. Sadly though, while beating each boss will earn you a totem, these special weapons have very little practical use. While they can sometimes break parts of the environment to get to special spots, most of them are tied to Soaring Eagle’s limited spear range and are barely variations on his standard attack. The fire, web, ice, and spear whirlwind attacks all have such weak range that it’s hardly worth the trouble cycling through your totems to pick them, the cloud that lets you fly is finicky, and the special totem drains your health as its price for high power, making it hard to justify its use outside of a boss fight. There is a skill that lets you launch darts, giving you a projectile attack and basically making it the only skill worth bothering with during normal play. As far as I can tell as well, the bosses have no specific weaknesses to the totems, further cementing their underwhelming attempt to add variety to the gameplay.

 

All these elements make Whomp ‘Em fairly middle of the road. Nothing to get excited about, and some of the good balances out the bad. This all changes though when you reach the final stage. After muting the obnoxious din, you’ll find yourself in a sky stage that will force Soaring Eagle to jump for every second he stands on the cloudy ground. You can jump yourself, but it means there is little time to get your bearings, its hard to strike enemies, and the enemies in this stage are the meanest the game has to offer, many of them homing in on you and dealing decent damage. Once you reach the second major part of the stage though, the game ups the ante. While most of the game has avoided bottomless pits, with even damaging floor just shaving a heart off instead of killing you, this level introduces a cruel twist, where if you fall during this second part of the stage, you are sent back to the start of the level. It’s not treated as death, meaning your health remains the same, but you do get to repeat everything you did over again! This level also introduces a weird low gravity situation where your attacks can launch you left or right, but this idea is ruined by enemies that can move intelligently and without trouble in this environment and, of course, they’re gunning right for you. Make it through all this nonsense and some fairly standard platforming segments and suddenly you face a final boss with no story significance. The final boss, like the level itself, is mostly a test of your health reserves and your patience. You either make it here with enough magic potions to attack with little regard to safety, or you have to timidly whittle down his enormous health bar while babying your own. Whomp ‘Em wasn’t exactly a stellar game before this stage, but with what might be one of the worst final levels I’ve seen in a video game, it does sour the experience considerably.

THE VERDICT: Were it not for the background behind this game’s translation into English, Whomp ‘Em wouldn’t have much interesting going for it. Its platforming is run-of-the-mill, its attacks are substandard with weapons that hardly supplement it, and the final level is needlessly cruel with a sudden spike up in difficulty. The lives system is a cool approach and the bosses and environments are interesting on a visual level, but it is, on the whole fairly mediocre with some glaring issues that push it down from being tolerable.

 

And so, I give Whomp ‘Em for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Whomp ‘Em is hampered by a dearth of interesting ideas, the game scrounging around other titles like Mega Man for inspiration but failing to capture what made games of that type compelling. The platforming has very few exciting gimmicks and they’re tossed out after only exploring the basic concept of it, and the totems add so little to the experience due to their unimaginative design and limited utility. Capping the experience off with a level that is tedious and helps highlight some of Whomp ‘Em’s issues was a poor move, and had it just stuck to passable platforming it could have at least scraped Okay, although the Water Test’s blind drops, the issues with attacking, and a general lack of meaningful challenge mean it’s not the only factor leading to a lesser rating.

 

Spending more time fleshing out level concepts and making your totems more interesting additions to your repertoire would have helped Whomp ‘Em leave a mark, and it is quite possible that even the final level’s design could be salvaged so long as you were made capable enough to handle it. In its current state though, it’s no surprise Whomp ‘Em has faded into obscurity.