50 Years of Video Games: Alex Kidd in Miracle World (Master System)
While Sega’s early years were defined by their arcade output, a slump in the market in the early 80s lead to them turning their attention to home hardware. Their first system, the SG-1000, failed to make a splash, the device even ignored quite often when Sega routinely plumbs their company history for nostalgic game releases. After a few revisions though Sega would eventually produce the Sega Mark III, a system they were confident enough in to repackage as the Sega Master System for overseas sales. However, its release in 1986 meant it was a year later to the U.S. market than the NES, Nintendo’s system not only having a good foothold but their platforming mascot Mario was quickly becoming the face of the company. To try and compete in the same platform game space, Sega decided to have many of the Master System consoles come with a game built in that would introduce their own mascot. Alex Kidd in Miracle World wouldn’t go on to reach the same heights nor would Alex Kidd himself really work out as a mascot, but the big-eared boy and his first video game adventure have pretty much become the face of Sega’s early attempts to enter the home hardware market before Sonic and the Genesis would propel them to greater heights down the road.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World’s manual actually has a lot of story to set up, the game taking place on a planet called Aries where our hero Alex Kidd has spent years practicing atop Mt. Eternal to learn Shellcore, a martial art that allows you to enlarge your fist and shatter stones with ease. However, after coming across a dying man, he learns of a city called Radactian whose king has disappeared and the Princess Lora has been captured by a man named Janken the Great. Apparently an Emperor from another planet content with settling in and ruling Radactian, Janken’s forces have spread out through Miracle World to assure his reign so Alex leaves his mountain home to try and set things right.
Alex’s sidescrolling platform adventure is immediately inviting with its bright colorful world and jaunty music, but as this seemingly appealing adventure begins you’ll immediately notice Alex doesn’t control as well as you might like. While the jump and punch button might be swapped depending on the version you play, this is something you can adjust to over time while a few other things always feel a little awkward. Alex’s punch is his means of destroying the many rocks and blocks that occupy levels, although sometimes if it’s not lined up just so it can struggle to break certain aerial blocks. This can be more dangerous with enemies where the actual fist must be properly touching them to work and sometimes you might instead have Alex get clipped as you try to get in close enough to actually hit with your surprisingly small giant fist. Jumping can have its odd moments as well as the space between lightly moving forward and traveling a fair distance can be hard to nail, meaning you can undershoot or overshoot jumps in a game that routinely asks for you to land on Alex-sized blocks floating over deadly hazards. Alex’s height can also lead to a little confusion, the young boy seemingly the same size as a block but he can’t fit through spaces that are a block high.
The moments of small ambiguity can be introduced early on so you know to be careful when they matter, but while taking your time with a single jump over a pit is usually possible, areas later in the game start to get really cruel in the precise action demanded. Swimming crops up occasionally and is usually fairly easy to manage despite how much Alex moves with each stroke but a segment where you need to swim precisely between a whole room of spikes feels outright unfair. Similarly, a room in Janken’s castle with fireballs and a frog placed just so that you need to perfectly weave through the fire, punch the frog, and land on the small block it was on strains platforming controls that aren’t fit for such tight action. Alex dies in one hit to anything which can exacerbate the danger posed by a lot of the trials ahead, but while it has many egregious moments where the platforming or area construction fails pretty hard, most of the adventure is at least made up of milder challenges.
Save for levels like the jungle where monkeys are constantly hurling objects at you, you can usually accommodate Alex’s flaws as you press forward and in some levels it hardly even matters that your jumps are a bit imperfect. The first stage is a good example as you descend down Mt. Eternal and start smashing blocks and punching enemies that move in a predictable manner. Some of the rocks and blocks scattered around levels need to be destroyed carefully so you have ground to jump around on and others can contain goodies or dangers. Star blocks contain cash that Alex will be able to use at a few stores that pop up during the adventure, Skull blocks will briefly stun Alex if hit but sometimes breaking them can open up helpful paths, pink boxes have special effects, and pink boxes with skulls will unleash an evil ghost if touched that will chase you down and kill you. Breaking your way through a level’s obstacles can be a bit satisfying, but there is one more block type: the question block. Besides a few stores and the rare item out in the open, question blocks are the only place in the game where you can find extra lives, the game starting you off with a paltry three which would still feel inadequate even if not for some of the less fair moments. A question block can contain an extra life, an bracelet that lets Alex shoot burst of energy from his hand to make killing enemies so much easier and manageable… or a ghost, who will likely kill you since you can’t hurt them and the only way to lose them is to get them off-screen before they can grab you even though dashing ahead is often just as likely to be fatal in a game that often requires careful progress.
The question blocks will always contain the same item every run so you can conceivably learn which ones are safe or dangerous through experimentation, but there is far too much experimentation in Alex Kidd when it comes to the bosses as well. While some bosses are simple fights, Janken and his three generals all want to start off their fights by playing rock-paper-scissors with you. In a best of three game you need to pick the right hand shape to defeat theirs, and while Janken’s generals all have heads resembling the hand shapes for rock, paper, and scissors, that isn’t actually a clue to what they’ll throw out. In fact, there is initially no clue to help you, beating them initially up to chance. If you lose the rock-paper-scissors game, you die and have to try again. Similar to question blocks you’ll find that they remain consistent through playthroughs so you can take notes on the picks these bosses make, but there are 7 of these throughout the adventure and 4 of these also have a traditional boss fight after with foes who have some pretty speedy attacks that can catch you unaware before you learn their pattern. You can pick up an item in the lava level that lets you see the thoughts of these bosses so you can try to counter their picks, but what they’re thinking will change a few times before they throw out their choice, sometimes waiting until the last second to truly pick and thus the player might be too slow in changing to accommodate that. So even with what amounts to a cheat on your side, Alex Kidd in Miracle World still tries to pull one over on you for a cheap death.
Alex Kidd makes dying far too easy and sometimes you don’t really have a fair shot of avoiding it unless you have done multiple playthroughs of the game to memorize it. Even if you do have all that information through trial and error on hand though, you can also completely miss out on the solution to the final puzzle of the game if you just happen to take the wrong turn in a level. Alex Kidd’s platforming stages come in a few different flavors, a few vertical drops, earlier stages prioritizing levels where you travel horizontally from one end of the level to the other to beat it, and a few more involved levels crop up later on where you navigate a large interconnected castle interior. The first of these has a letter that tells you the combination for the final puzzle, but if you accidentally enter the boss room instead of finding it first, you can’t exit and go look for it, meaning that final puzzle will be all guess work. If you input a wrong symbol for that puzzle a ghost will appear, and while you can input three correct answers to make any ghosts around disappear, this means you have to slowly work to try and brute force the combination if you accidentally stumbled into the boss fight earlier in the game. Some castles even have traps you can stumble into that are impossible to escape once they’ve fully activated, the window for realizing you’re in trouble often too small to make it and so you must learn once again via dying to something in a game that doesn’t give you the room to learn through failure.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World’s worst ideas and moments really stand out, but there were definitely some ideas with potential. At the shops in some levels you can buy things like a motorcycle or flying device called the Peticopter to change how stages are played. The bike can break through enemies and most blocks with ease, but it can still fall into pits and will break if it hits something too solid so you do need to use it somewhat intelligently or it can end up being an accidental waste of cash. The Peticopter is a more interesting change of pace though, Alex able to fly through the air and fire projectiles at his enemies. Much more capable than Alex’s usual approach to a level, it is fragile but holding onto it isn’t ever truly required and it is often so much nicer than trying to traverse on foot.
Some regular items can also ease up the danger of normal play or those rougher moments during the adventure, although they are usually priced so that a lot of money collecting will be required to purchase them. Still, being able to whip out temporary invincibility when you need it can help you push through some of the worst moments, a magical cane will let you fly over the level briefly, you can grant yourself the ability to take an extra hit before dying, and that helpful bracelet that lets you launch projectiles can be found in shops and last until you die. While you can only carry one item of each type at a time and the shops aren’t so common they can be quickly replaced, these can briefly patch over the worst moments of Alex Kidd’s issues provided you’ve held onto it until that moment. In a way though they just add another memorization requirement to the experience though as you need to remember to hold onto these lest you reach the incredibly hard parts of the castles without your tools for invalidating their issues.
THE VERDICT: While helpful items and the player-lead pace of Alex Kidd in Miracle World means the slightly sloppy controls can be accommodated for, the stretches of decent platforming and rock-breaking are completely overshadowed by terrible decisions which are designed to force you to replay the game over and over to memorize dangers you can’t see coming. The rock-paper-scissors bosses not only at first require memorization but even start to counter your mind-reading item, certain enemy and hazard placement practically demand you have an item to overcome them since the precision required to get around them reliably just isn’t there, and even the mundane enemies and dangers can instantly kill Alex with a simple touch. With your short-range punch often your means of fighting back you might accidentally end up the one hit instead trying to get it to work, but even if you adjust to a lot of the shortcomings, the demanding moments of the adventure simply aren’t supported with anything substantial enough to excuse the work you need to put into the game to actually complete it.
And so, I give Alex Kidd in Miracle World for the Sega Master System…
A TERRIBLE rating. For such a bright and cute game, Alex Kidd in Miracle World really isn’t as inviting as it seems. Alex is incredibly fragile on top of having slight movement issues, but even once you’ve come to accept his issues and work around them, you then come to parts where the game either demands too much from you or hinges progress purely on trial and error. The fact things unfold in the same way in the rock-paper-scissors games technically doesn’t make them luck based, but until you have the extra knowledge of their choices you are just guessing and hoping you don’t die. With the main game already ready to kill you for small slip-ups, losing it all to a moment that just involves guesswork makes replaying Alex Kidd in Miracle World less and less appealing each time it happens. The fact the head shapes mean nothing and the mind-reading orb still doesn’t guarantee wins just shows that these weren’t really designed to be figured out so much as eventually learned. Regular stage navigation can often be decent enough, but then some small part jeopardizes your ability to safely progress as a trap springs or the window for success is so small you either need to have held onto your limited items for that long to get out of it or accept that you’re about to die again before you’ve got things fully figured out.
If you string together the moments of normal play where memorization isn’t at play or your platforming is asked to do things it isn’t ill-equipped for, Alex Kidd in Miracle World would be a decent game. Breaking your way through stages, facing some simple but still dangerous enemies, and exploring the castles could have almost made an acceptable if fairly plain experience, but rather than truly exploring its better ideas like the Peticopter, it instead leans heavily into artificially extending the experience by having moments where the player can get screwed over by things they couldn’t really anticipate until they’ve died to it previously in a game with no continues. Some remakes and rereleases have helped alleviate some of the problems with continues that aren’t hidden codes that cost a large amount of in-game currency to execute and adjustments to how the action plays, but playing the original version of Alex Kidd in Miracle World really shows the little guy didn’t have much of a chance becoming the next big platforming mascot.