Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs (NES)

Developer Vic Tokai had a vision for a sidescrolling platform game, one where the players could get a power-up that allows them to throw a weapon across the screen and where levels have a few different layers to traverse. It wasn’t a particularly revolutionary concept for a platform game, but it was one they were clearly committed to, as they would spend four games iterating on it and refining the formula as they tried to figure out how to make it work. Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs was the game that kicked off their attempts to make this game design fun, but being first at bat also meant they were going into virgin territory, meaning Vic Tokai’s concept got off to an incredibly rough start.

One of the first problems encountered with Kid Kool is its time limit. The story goes that Kid Kool, a child who definitely does not look like the rad sunglasses-wearing punk from the cover, is called on by the king of Voldam after he is afflicted with an incurable disease… one that apparently DOES have a cure but at least this odd discrepancy is only present in the manual rather than the in-game cutscenes that do establish the story. Curing the king’s not-so-incurable disease requires seven special herbs, but these herbs all happen to be in enemy territory, the manual heavily implying the disease came from the Empire of Draxer since they launched an attack with their monster army right after the king becomes ill. With the promise of great rewards guiding him forward, Kid Kool sets off to gather the herbs, but the game features a time limit. Depending on how quickly the player beats the game, they’ll see different endings with different rewards, but since the King is set to die in three days (or three hours of real time) there is also an ending where you arrive too late to save him. While this could lead to a disappointing ending, it’s not the time limit itself that is the issue, but how the game designs itself to prevent you from beating it in time.

Kid Kool navigates levels in the typical platform game fashion, running and jumping to move from left to right, the end of the level waiting at the far right side of the stage. However, since there is a time crunch hanging over things, the game decides to put in some incredibly annoying traps to drag out stages. Air vents are the bane of a player’s existence, these little puffing problems constantly spitting out air that propels Kid Kool away. Once these start appearing in levels, they remain an almost constant feature until the end of the game, and for the most part they are just there to waste time. Some could be considered legitimate obstacles to overcome like the ones that try to puff you down into a deadly drop if you don’t wait for the air to briefly stop, but others appear in abundance and rarely turn off, making overcoming them more about persistence and luck than any skill. They exist solely to slow down your progress in many areas, and if a game contains deliberate nuisances, it doesn’t often bode well for the rest of the game’s design.

Kid Kool is a fragile hero, only requiring one hit to defeat. Despite this, enemies do feel a bit more reasonable than they would be in the follow up game Psycho Fox, most of Kid Kool’s foes having very slow walking speeds and maybe the odd jump they activate to try and get in your path if you try just jumping over everything. There are some more devious creatures like the fast hopping bugs, hang-gliding foes who try to drop down on you from above, and the thankfully rare cloud-riding character who fires lightning bolts down on you, but the real worry with these enemies is often less about their attack methods and more about them serving as deadly road blocks. Kid Kool unfortunately has the old platform game bugbear of having momentum derived jumps with no midair adjustment, meaning he needs a running start to perform a jump of any decent distance. Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs is constantly demanding precision of this awful jump design, the player often needing to charge forward at high speeds to clear gaps that will lead to an instant level reset if you fall short and die by dropping down a pit. Of course, if there are enemies on the other side, your speed may make you ram right into them and die anyway. If you are too slow when it’s time to take a jump, you won’t have the distance to get across, and this gets especially bothersome at points where Kid Kool finds himself stranded on a platform that is only just barely large enough to get a running start on, only for the destination platform to be equally as small and easy to overshoot if you keep running after landing.

Jumping isn’t just hurt by the speed requirements either. Levels in Kid Kool often have two or three layers, a safer high road, the middle road that features typical level design, and a dangerous low road. The problem is how you get between these different paths. Even in levels where the high road is just a platform or two, leaping up to the vertical boundary of the screen will cause the action to briefly freeze as the screen pans up to the new area. The middle road can sometimes feature platforms that rub up against the vertical limit of the screen, meaning any jump at that point will cause the brief break in action to give you a glimpse at the high road before you immediately drop back down. Timing your jumps or building speed is constantly interrupted by the sometimes unnecessary camera pan, but it’s better off then when you can drop down to a low road, the blind drop sometimes featuring instant death hazards you couldn’t have known about before you’re plummeting down towards them. Of course there are moments of mandatory leaping to the high road or dropping to the low road, so even a cautious player will hit the problems with these screen-related woes.

A different problem tied to the screen is that the left side of the screen is a rigid barrier. You can’t backtrack beyond it, and the game does have a few moments where if you move forward a little too far, you’re not going to be able to progress. This ties into the finicky water skipping mechanic mostly. With a running start, Kid Kool can bounce across bodies of water like a skipping stone, but if you don’t have the proper run up first, you instead sink like a regular rock. These skipping segments are often mandatory, and if you moved forward a little too far before spotting the water, you might not have the space to run up and skip across the water properly. Mercifully, death in Kid Kool, besides the level reset, isn’t punished too hard. Game Overs even just mean you have to continue to get back into the level you were working on, and levels even have checkpoints. The timer is likely meant to punish you since it will still keep wasted time, but if the game were played perfectly it would take about 30 minutes, and with pick ups that can freeze or remove time from the clock there is a margin for error. There are also pick ups that add time though, but most pick ups are beneficial such as brief invincibility or a straw doll that clears the screen of enemies.

The best pick up though is Wicky, a little red fuzzball Kid Kool uses as a better means of attack. Normally, to hurt enemies you bounce on their head, a few hits required to bury enemies so they’re no longer a problem. Wicky, however, can be tossed ahead, bouncing along the ground and killing any enemy he touches instantly. He even finds his way back to you perfectly afterward, his only downside being that he’s easy to lose. While you usually die in a single hit, Wicky will take the hit instead if you have him, and there is usually only one or two areas in the level where Wicky can be acquired, meaning if you lose him in a stage, he’s pretty much gone until the next. In some ways that makes a Game Over a potentially advantageous option so you can get the full level reset even after hitting an invisible checkpoint, this making the scarcity of lives a bit easier to stomach. Of course, having a more forgiving design would be preferred, but in Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs, you have to take what you can get. Picks ups like Wicky require running at speed across grass patches, but beyond Wicky, not having the speed to uncover pick ups isn’t potentially fatal like it is with the water skipping and jump momentum.

The worst pick ups though are the invisible ones floating in the air. Money bags are used to play a post-level roulette for extra lives that you’re almost never going to win, which is made even worse since you’ll probably lose plenty of lives to these deviously placed money bags. There’s no way to know where they might be besides jumping up into the air and learning the hard way, and there are many placed specifically to screw you over. Just before a gap an invisible money bag might be right above where you need to jump, meaning you might have to arrest your momentum to scout for the trap and then try to build it up again only to fail the jump. Some are placed just to slow you down, others to make trying to escape from an oncoming enemy fail, and unlike the wind vents that are meant to waste time as boring obstacles to overcome, these money bags feel downright malicious in their placement, existing solely to rob you of lives with something you would never know was there until it’s too late.

When you have Wicky and are in a level where the focus isn’t too much on precise platforming, Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs can briefly become tolerable. Areas where you can take some time, launch Wicky to clear out enemies, and work your way through the level with more low pressure jumps or with gimmicks that aren’t awful like pipes you can travel through will unfortunately always keep poor company with the other game mechanics though. The bosses are similarly bearable, and while the boss designs are reused, the fights do get marginally harder and can’t be cheesed with Wicky. These are simply about jumping on the boss or the item that damages them when the option is safe, but there is enough movement and danger to them to be acceptable if unexciting battles. Besides these small moments and the nice energetic music backing everything though, the game is mostly just a constant battle with the flaws in its movement controls and level design, the aspects that work not redeeming Kid Kool but instead just a break from an adventure otherwise full of constant woe.

THE VERDICT: A cool cover and catchy music can’t redeem the utter failure of the platform game design Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs utilizes. It’s a game that demands speed and precision but gives room for neither, platform placement playing poorly with the screen limitations so there are plenty of cases where you can’t build up the momentum needed to clear gaps, cases where you move onto a screen where you couldn’t have seen what dangers lie ahead, and instant deaths always threatening Kid Kool to drag out a game that only has a timer so that it can justify wasting your time with annoying traps like the air vents. Having Wicky to throw can only free you of a few problems, as the bad play control, invisible money bags, and other minor nuisances mean that no moment in Kid Kool’s adventure is truly enjoyable, you just end up cherishing the tolerable moments because they’re a break from the many different ways you can get screwed over.

And so, I give Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

An ATROCIOUS rating. When a game gets the bottom rating, I often ask myself if it was truly deserving of such a harsh verdict. Every time I think of a little thing that almost works in Kid Kool though, I immediately remember the awful moments surrounding it. Sure, tossing Wicky to clear out a few enemies isn’t bad itself, but those enemies are roadblocks to building up the speed necessary to clear gaps, both serving as instant kills if you don’t approach them in the precise manner expected of you. So many moments of the game deliberately placing things like the invisible money bags and the air vents not to entertain but to slow down play or screw over a player who did nothing wrong already would guarantee this game earned at least a Terrible rating, but then we have moments like the screen scrolling impeding water skipping or moving between level layers slowing down play only to blindside you with an unknown danger, and I end up wondering how I could justify giving it anything above Atrocious. When some of the best praise for a game are elements like the music or the fact the bosses are boring but bearable, there’s nothing to really save it from deserving its place at the bottom of the barrel.

Vic Tokai’s vision for a platforming game would definitely need some work, and the vague terms I use to describe what seems like the stuff they won’t give up on mainly comes from the perspective of knowing what they kept and improved on for Psycho Fox and Decap Attack further down the road. If every component of Kid Kool was part of Vic Tokai’s concept for a platform game design and they never learned what to strip away though, they would be betting on an abysmal approach that aims more to sabotage and frustrate players rather than challenge them in ways that would encourage a player to keep playing. The fact the bad ending with the king dying even exists just goes to show Vic Tokai’s first go with this particular approach to platform game design was essentially designed from the ground up to be unfulfilling.