Yo! Noid (NES)

In the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Japanese developers often felt overseas audiences wouldn’t buy anything with too much Japanese cultural influence on show. The game Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru (or Masked Ninja Hanamaru) not only had a very Japanese name, but it starred a ninja whose design was a reference to the Japanese television series Kamen Rider. While his 2D platforming adventure to save the children captured by ninjas at the Leisure Land theme park had potential overseas based on its gameplay, Capcom decided to reskin the game and reconfigure it into something Americans might like. Why they thought the Domino’s mascot The Noid was the perfect fit still isn’t quite clear considering the amount of hate I see for the unusual red goblin of a man, but Yo! Noid actually doesn’t feel like it’s hurt by his baffling presence either.

Retooled to be a story set in New York City, a group of pranksters who look just like the Noid but with different colored outfits are causing chaos all around town. The Noid is called upon to help the city with his incredible yo-yo fighting skills that he apparently has, the promise of a big batch of pizzas that he won’t have to steal to eat motivating this normally antagonistic mascot character to assume a heroic role and fight his way through 14 stages and multiple eating contests.

In most of those stages the Noid will be running and jumping his way forward through platforming stages that do make a good effort to change up their concepts. The first level of the game already comes out swinging with the idea of a level by the wharf, the ground rising and falling to make it dip into and emerge from the water. As you hop your way carefully across this undulating stage though, the detection for what counts as too deep in the water and what’s fair game seems a little off, meaning you can’t even stand on a piece of the pier safely if the Noid would get the bottoms of his shoes wet when the water rises. This does teach you an early lesson though as Yo! Noid isn’t playing around when it comes to difficulty, the game out to kill you and easily able to do so as the Noid dies in a singular hit and initially only has three lives to beat a stage with.

There are 3 continues though and you can rarely earn more lives or continues, but you’ll start from the beginning of the stage you died on after a Game Over. The death system is actually Yo! Noid’s biggest problem, as a lot of the level design would be enjoyable if death wasn’t so sudden or continuing wasn’t limited. Yo! Noid is about carefully approaching and respecting the upcoming area while being ready to fling your yo-yo forward to beat up any enemies coming your way. Some have attack patterns, movement styles, or sheer resilience so that the fight is a bit more of an encounter than seeing an enemy and killing it, and this makes navigating a level more interesting as you have to contend with the stage design and the enemy’s capabilities in tandem. However, many of them are designed to trick you on your first encounter with that enemy type and rob you of a life, and stage design pulls off that dirty trick fairly often as well.

When you’re in the circus level for example, the screen automatically scrolls forward and you’ll need to try and keep up while avoiding damage, but some of the platforms take the form of carousel horses that sometimes drop if you stand on them. You’ll probably lose a life to the first time the game pulls this trick, but even if you start anticipating it, Yo! Noid then shifts things up to where the horses are moving and you need to time the jump properly or you can’t reach the next platform, meaning you have to plan a few jumps ahead in a level that’s rushing you along. In the ice rink level you’ll hop between floating platforms that unfortunately have ice physics applied to them, and even if you try to account for that, it’s not always logical in how you slip so you might accidentally throw yourself off instead. Most stages you can walk backwards so sometimes retreat is the solution to a seemingly no-win scenario, but it does feel like there are some traps designed to drain your lives deliberately, undermining levels that otherwise work well when it comes to presenting new ideas.

The city skyline, streets, and sewer are all pretty much solid platforming stages where you can get a chance to engage with Yo! Noid’s systems more, and even the vertical climb near the end of the game can have some moments when you’re not essentially locked into taking a high risk run through constantly spawning dangers. In a regular level of Yo! Noid you don’t just have your yo-yo to help you out. Tiny little scrolls, a relic of the game’s ninja origins no doubt, are found floating around the area to collect, this feeding into your energy for outright magic. The Noid can find larger scrolls that he pops open with his yo-yo, these scrolls containing spells like a burst of energy that kills enemies on screen and can even eliminate spiked balls or other hazards. The speed up spell is very risky in a game where being quick on your feet often means you’ll run into trouble, but the quake spell feels like a weaker energy burst that can only cause trouble for enemies on the ground. The energy burst is certainly the most useful but also most costly, and having that out for when the enemies have you in a bind can at least assuage some of the game’s moments of cruel enemy placement.

That burst spell is actually incredibly important in one of the game’s special stage types. In two stages you’ll take flight in the ornithopter, a propeller backpack you need to keep airborne by pressing jump repeatedly. In these levels you fly forward trying to avoid enemies and stationary spike balls, the burst your only way to get rid of any of the dangers before you. These levels are actually quite well built for that balance of needing to fly carefully and having the option to clear out the hard parts with your costly magic, these two stages definitely a step above the skateboarding featured in the game’s third level. The level entirely based around riding the Noid’s HyperBoard is built with many ramps to gain power so you can ram through enemies, but if you don’t have the momentum, your other lethal option of jumping into an enemy to kill them is unreliable. You need to hit them precisely to kill them instead of dying yourself, and while approaching this level similar to the ones where the Noid platforms on foot will serve you well, it is a bit harder to slow down and some areas require speed to clear the jumps. The hit detection for your attacks is what makes this level go from a mediocre deviation to outright flawed, but considering the first two levels had the water and ice to worry about, it is almost a breather since you’re more in control of the troublesome mechanic that endangers you. There is a brief period you can hop aboard the Pizza Crusher pogo stick as well, but it has its own detection issues as well and thankfully isn’t required when it does crop up.

While Yo! Noid doesn’t have any traditional boss battles, it does have an unusual eating contest crop up at certain points where the Noid needs to overcome one of the similarly dressed troublemakers. The pizza eating contest definitely takes on an odd form where you and the opponent have a set of cards each. These can be numbered from 1 to 6 and represent how many pizzas your character intends to eat during a round, and your opponent will always have higher valued cards than you. However, you need to eat fewer pizzas to win and the later in the game you are, the enemy has to win by a wider margin to make up for how high their numbers reach. When you and the opponent both pick a card for a round, the number of pizzas will cancel each other out, meaning if your opponent plays a 2 and you play a 4, you’ll eat two pizzas that round and it will be added to your tally.

When you first see the pizza card game, eating more pizzas by picking your cards right is fairly feasible, but as the gulf between the value of your cards and the opponent’s increases, it becomes less and likely you’ll win by playing fair. There are a few tools you have that they don’t though, these picked up during the platforming stages and disappearing after use. You can double or even triple the value of a pizza card with the right pick-up, and since you always pick your card after the opponent already revealed their pick, you can really get a huge surge of points by using the multipliers at the right moment. However, when the opponent whips out a big card that wouldn’t be very profitable to try and compete with, you can deploy a pepper or red pepper card to cancel out the opponent’s card instead. These cancellation cards are key to late game wins so the point deficit doesn’t get too bad, and there’s actually a win condition where you having cards left when the opponent runs out results in you automatically winning. Using pepper once does make that possible in a round, but you’ll need to manage how many pizzas the opponent successfully eats before running out of cards or they might still win. Those victories do require a bit of strategy and planning to pull off properly and makes for an interesting deviation from the action, but the bid to run your opponent’s cards out that becomes practically necessary later on would make this tedious if it was given more focus.

The commentary given during the pizza eating contest is interesting for how it doesn’t always seem to recognize what’s going on, saying you barely won when you multiplied four pizzas into twelve against the opponent’s 2 for example. However, many of the aesthetic choices in Yo! Noid are surprisingly solid. While the Noid isn’t the most attractive mascot, he’s well realized in the story scenes and his sprite is expressive. The music is perhaps the bigger standout, surprisingly catchy and giving a bouncy energy to the adventure that often includes goofy enemy types like hockey-playing polar bears and a rat that waits inside a pail before throwing bottles at you. The Domino’s branding is surprisingly absent, the Noid not even eating at one for the pizza eating contest and the front cover not even mentioning what pizza its promised $1 coupon applies to. Yo! Noid is certainly a curious thing to look at, but with areas like its music and fairer stages, it actually threatened to be quite good.

THE VERDICT: Yo! Noid is a good game buried under a bad approach to difficulty. The lively soundtrack, the pizza eating contests, and the stages that play fair all show the promise the game had to be an NES classic despite its odd choice in branding, but the one-hit kills that the game throws at you with no illusion of fairness exist to make experiencing the better moments harder. The game opens with a few levels with little problems like unusual ice physics and odd hit detection, and moments like the falling carousel horses at the autoscrolling circus are practically pranks on the player even after they’ve learned to play carefully to try and enjoy the solid platforming and enemy design featured elsewhere. Ornithopter stages add to the game’s surprising level of variety, but Yo! Noid put too much thought into cheap kills to let the other ideas shine.

And so, I give Yo! Noid for the Nintendo Entertainment System…

A BAD rating. Having a few instant deaths like when you miss a platform or even hit certain hazard types isn’t a fatal flaw, but the fact everything dangerous in Yo! Noid will instantly kill you on contact really drags the experience down. The skateboarding level could be inoffensive if trying to kill an enemy there wasn’t a gamble on whether the game approves of your landing angle when trying to squash them, and the vertical stage near the end could have gotten away with its hard to time sprints through small attack openings if you could take a hit or two before croaking. It wouldn’t make some of the game’s cheap tactics fair, the ice physics need tidying up and certain tricks meant to kill you should be adjusted to at least have some clue you could spot in advance, but when you throw even reasonable instant kills in with every enemy and attack in the game also being able to kill you, the meager life and continue amount makes getting through the game difficult for the wrong reasons. Yo! Noid does have plenty of glimmers of a good game, the enemies varied and potentially a good fit for a platformer where the hero doesn’t die to everything, and while pizza eating doesn’t have incredible depth, its limited focus like the ornithopter stages lets it provide an interesting gameplay change that doesn’t stick around long enough to get old.

Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru is mostly the same game save for a few different songs and a different look, and surprisingly it even still features the skateboarding stage. With most of its gameplay components working the same, it’s hard to say if Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru would have been the bigger hit if Capcom took a chance on giving America a ninja game instead, but Yo! Noid’s inexplicable existence also makes it more fascinating than if it was just a bad ninja game. While the Domino’s mascot could have put a few people off the game or even lead them to dismiss it for such an odd license, Yo! Noid did contain surprising potential and a good amount of creativity, but it seems it would rather be hard than good, and bowing to greater difficulty means Yo! Noid misses out on making good use of all the things it did right.