Mendel Palace (NES)

It’s always interesting to see where a major developer got their start, and considering Game Freak would go on to create the absolutely colossal Pokémon franchise, it’s certainly intriguing to take a look back at the first game they ever made. Mendel Palace, originally known as Quinty in Japan, featured Pokémon creator Satoshi Tajiri as the game designer with Junichi Masuda providing the game’s music and Ken Sugimori designing the characters (although the concept art for those characters found in the manual and on the game box was swapped to something much stranger for the American release since it was deemed too cute). This is undeniably the starting point for what Game Freak would become, but the game that helped Game Freak get their start in game development doesn’t really line up with their most famous output.

 

In Game Freak’s first game, the action kicks off because a girl named Candy is trapped inside her dream world, her dolls apparently coming to life and squirreling her off to a place called Mendel Palace. Candy’s purple-clad best friend Bon-Bon comes to the rescue, the boy heading to the different houses that surround Mendel Palace and facing off with a different type of foe in each one before things cap off with a boss battle. Once you reach Mendel Palace itself though, all the enemies begin to work together and new, tougher foes join in as well, making that final push to get to Candy and her kidnappers a true test of how good you’ve become at the game’s main form of combat.

 

Mendel Palace is best described as an action puzzler, the main mechanic of the game involving the player dropped in a rectangular room whose floor is covered with square panels. Enemies will appear in the room who all can kill you on contact, but your way of fighting back involves pushing the floor panels about. Depending on your positioning, you can either push the panel you’re standing on or the one in front of you, any enemies standing on the moved panel getting launched a fair distance ahead. If you can launch them into a wall or block, that enemy will perish, the player able to move onto the next level once all the enemies in the room have been dealt with. You can be launched into the wall and die as well though, and bosses are tougher than regular foes so it’s not going to be a quick and easy kill like it might be for your regular foes.

That isn’t to say the regular baddies are slouches either. Each house’s trademark villain adds something different to the tile combat. The Mira enemies duplicate your inputs, meaning you have to figure out a way to trick them into the path of your panels. Wassers are swimmers who move forward in straight lines but push panels around as they do so, and since you’re almost always fighting a big group of enemies, this means you might get pushed around while trying to deal with a different Wasser. Dragon jumps around so you can’t push them with the panel until they land, and Vincis will actually use panels as a canvas to make up back-up baddies to assist them. The late game even introduces some bothersome characters who will follow behind you closely and respond to aggression with retaliatory panel kicks, meaning your shoves need to count or you could be the one who ends up dead. These enemies even get upgraded the deeper into their house you get, meaning that just as you’ve learned their gimmick, they test your ability to keep up with them as they get faster or gain some counter to the normal way of taking them out.

 

The fact each enemy has a different sort of behavior or interacts with the panels in a different way is what makes the levels in Mendel Palace so engaging. You need to figure out the best way to dispatch the group of baddies, their gimmicks usually requiring some fairly diverse approaches even though your interaction with them usually boils down to setting up how to shove the panels properly to take them out. However, the panel types ensure that the different stages feel like wholly separate arenas, the layouts complementing the enemy types and leading to much of the game’s challenge. For example, the dancing enemies aren’t as dangerous as some since they just twirl around and ricochet off walls, but their levels will have tight corridors thanks to large blocks sitting atop panels. Besides the lock panel though, you can always push a panel, and once it has been shoved, the panel beneath it will take its place, these having a set sequence they go through depending on the level. Some panels can benefit you, such as panels that add more time to the level timer that is only situationally dangerous. If you walk over enough star panels you can earn an extra life, some tiles are a roulette with prizes like an extra life to get, and others can impact the battlefield such as one that will shuffle every other panel in the stage and potentially shove every baddy about by doing so. Some panels can hurt you though if they’re left standing, the blocks that hurt navigation being fairly tame but obvious barriers while the panels that spawn in back up enemies being ones you want to shuffle away quickly if possible.

The blend of panels and enemies means the houses of Mendel Palace all put up a good fight, but there are some surprising mercies to be found considering this is an NES game made in 1989. If you die, you retry the current floor of the house you’re in but with whatever enemies you have already defeated there still dead. If you lose all your lives though, that floor will get a full reset, so while you don’t have to worry about losing your progress in somewhere difficult like the Mendel Palace itself, having extra lives means you can take out a few enemies, die, and then have fewer foes to contend with when you come back to life. This does help to ease one of the true problems with the game, and that’s the early learning period involved in figuring out where you need to be to shove a panel properly. Luckily, you can pick any of the eight normal enemy houses to start in and the top left filled with Moko-Mokos is essentially just a place to learn how to play the game as you go up against enemies who only bumble about. Here you can start to get a feel for positioning, since there are parts of a panel where pressing A or B won’t shuffle a panel while different locations on that panel can either push the one you’re on forward or push the panel in front of you instead. It’s fairly obvious you need to have Bon-Bon looking out or looking inward depending on if you want to push an adjacent panel or the one you’re standing on, so it’s more about finding out where that dead zone is where no panel pushing will occur so you can avoid it against the more agile and dangerous foes.

 

With infinite continues and the option to bring a second player along to help for a cooperative adventure, Mendel Palace is a game that can be beat with a little persistence, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. While most of the 100 levels are spread across the houses you can tackle in any order, the final stages and some of the boss fights really test your ability to stay moving and active. Its action may be a little unusual, but its clear the developers had a good hold on the concept that they explore without straining it even near the start when you’re still growing accustomed to it as a player.

THE VERDICT: The panel pushing action of Mendel Palace takes a bit to learn, but once you understand where you need to stand to make use of your simple attacking method, you find a game filled with foes and tile types that test your skill. Positioning properly is key as foes with different gimmicks must be adapted to, the player needing to adjust for panels that can hurt or help your efficiency at clearing a room of baddies. The climb in difficulty is well done despite the freedom to pick how you tackle the eight starting areas because they have self contained difficulty curves, and the mercies provided by infinite continues means you can learn to overcome even the most challenging floors. Mendel Palace has its quirks, but the elements featured in this action puzzler all play off the panel shuffling concept in fresh and interesting ways.

 

And so, I give Mendel Palace for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A GOOD rating. Once the gameplay mechanics of Mendel Palace click with a player, they can truly begin to appreciate the ways the enemies and panel types play with your rather basic means of combat. Fighting a new enemy type is first taught to you, then the panels start to add new variables to how you fight them, and then they get upgraded to make the back half of a house still feel fresh. Most of the little arenas can be cleared quickly because of the limited space though so it’s not like it had much chance to get stale, and the approach to lives and continues ensures that the harder levels can pack a punch without aggravating a player by forcing them to replay earlier levels to get back to where they were killed. Some early levels do swing too easy and later levels can be rather harsh in their difficulty, but Mendel Palace knows what it wants out of its game design and achieves it quite well, and pretty much the way the game could turn out even better would just be going even further with its simple concepts and enemy types to really test your ability to strategize and adjust on the fly.

 

Mendel Palace isn’t a phenomenal start for Game Freak, but it is still a good one that shows the creativity the company’s founders had even before their biggest hit. It’s a shame that Ken Sugimori’s cute character designs were swapped out, even though the strange and intense look of the American art has its own appeal. Mendel Palace is thankfully the kind of curiosity that is still fun to play, the reflective look at a game development juggernaut only requiring a bit of time spent learning what you’re getting into before it starts to find its stride. You can’t really see any clear connective tissue between Mendel Palace and the Pokémon titles beyond small things like sprite similarities, but it does at least show Game Freak was thinking out of the box from the start and knew how to really flesh out their quirky gameplay ideas.