Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Developed by Advance Communications Company and published by Toho in Japan, and Bandai in North America for the NES, this is a very unfortunate title, based on the famous Robert Louis Stevenson novella of 1886. But it obviously has nothing to do with the novel at all despite being based on it.

So this is the plot: in Victorian London, Dr. Henry Jekyll makes a potion that has separated the good and evil aspects of his personality. He is also on his way to the church to marry Miss Millicent, but the townspeople, animals, and obstacles wants him dead. Should he get too stressed out from it, he becomes... MISTER HYDE!! and fights monsters in the world of demons. The game has two endings:

After Mister Edward Hyde kills all the monsters in the world of demons, he reaches the church, morphs back into Dr. Jekyll, and the townspeople, animals, and obstacles have disappeared. Jekyll eventually marries Miss Millicent (both slowly walk) as an 8-bit version of "The Wedding March" by Felix Mendelssohn starts playing and a wordmark saying "END" appears. Then, the screen fades to black and a lightning bolt, along with a dark picture of Hyde with a Christian cross on his back appear, and the music stops.

But after Jekyll avoids the townspeople, animals, and obstacles, makes his way to church, where he eventually marries Miss Millicent as an 8-bit version of "The Wedding March" by Felix Mendelssohn starts playing, and then the same END wordmark appears.

First things first, the graphics are fugly, for example, as the details look awful, especially the trees which not to mention are poorly detailed, the colors look dull and unpleasant as they look like vomit, the animations are incredibly stiff and lame, and to many of the characters never change their animation and are the same, the character designs look ugly and uneven, especially Dr. Jekyll himself, since in his evil version he looks more like a poor fat man instead of a monster, what which is very unforgivable since it's worth mentioning that this game came out in 1988 and even by NES standards. Background design can often make levels more grueling when it comes to bullets due to the hideous color palette. For example, in the graveyard level there are crows pooping at you, and the poop gets too confused with the trees in the background, making it harder for you to dodge them.

Dr. Jekyll's cane is useless except for killing bees and defusing bombs; trying to hit anything else with the cane only increases his stress. Also, using Jekyll's cane on Elena makes him instantly turn into Hyde. When Jekyll becomes Edward Hyde he's able to punch and use the "psycho-wave" to kill enemies and get his stress down. However this projectile fires out in an unpredictable pattern, making it difficult to hit anything with, plus, Dr. Jekyll moves and jumps incredibly slow, making the game tedious to play. The game also has poor and sluggish controls even worse than the ones from A Nightmare on Elm Street, making it very hard to hit enemies with Mr. Hyde's punch and also hard to dodge multiple enemies at once, especially without getting hit.

The Jekyll/Hyde mechanic in fact isn't the least bit intuitive and will make players wonder why they keep dying almost as soon as the game starts until they realise how it works. The further into the level you are as Jekyll, the more space you have to get rid of your stress as Hyde, since when Hyde reaches the position where Jekyll transformed, he will be struck by lightning and die instantly (the manual says this is because evil is not supposed to overcome good).

The only helpful NPC in the game (when you enter her house she restores your meter and gives you a huge amount of coins) was removed from the US version due to it being a reference to prostitution. This is hypocritical, since Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link also had woman NPC's who restores your health, and that was from a game published by Nintendo. Coins can only be collected when playing as Hyde (at least in the US version) and their only purpose in the game is to bribe the tone deaf Elena McCowen to shut up. (She is described as such in the manual, explaining why her singing causes Jekyll stress). And speaking of the US version, it has fewer levels (two levels removed from the Japanese version were replaced with repeats of earlier levels) and the level order was shuffled around.

Every other seemingly innocent character in the game is out to kill Dr. Jekyll (given a weak justification that the slingshot kid named Billy Pones is also in love with Jekyll's wife-to-be and is jealous of him), the worst being a man dressed in purple simply named "The Bomb Maniac" who constantly rushes past you and drops deadly bombs.

The blast radius of the bombs and how much damage/stress they give to Jekyll seems almost completely random. You can be on the other side of the screen and still take damage; in order to avoid this, run away from the bomb when it's dropped, then jump just before the bomb detonates. The barrels in level 6 are also completely random with little if any logical purpose.

The bad ending only shows a scene of the church with the word END appearing. The good ending, however shows Jekyll and the bride walking into the church and then kissing and that's it, the end. To get the good ending you have to become Hyde in the final level (his final level is completely different to the level you play as Jekyll) and fight a boss, after which Jekyll has to also walk through the final level which is now free of enemies.

Michiharu Hasuya did a great job at fitting the soundtrack into the tone of this game:

• The Wise Man's Chamber theme from Rygar returns here as the title screen theme, only in G major instead of A major. It's composed by the same person.
• The intentionally awful Elena McCowen singing.
• Hyde's theme has many long, very high-pitched, loud synth notes.

Don't even bother. This game is not worth playing.