As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #24, May 2006.

Sometimes games come along that take a well known genre and go an entirely different way with it.  Such is the case with Fantasy Zone, flapping into arcades in 1986.  While shooting games had existed for years and were an early staple of video gaming as a whole, Fantasy Zone bucked the traditional high tech laser-equiped starship role the player was usually relegated to.  Instead you control Opa-opa, an egg-shaped living spaceship that uses wings for propulsion and can sprout legs to walk along the ground.  As Opa-opa it's up to you to rid the Fantasy Zone of an army of alien creatures by first wiping out an armada of ships that constantly generate enemies.  Although there are many enemies on each stage, only the larger enemy creating ships must be destroyed which leads to a boss battle.  Defeat the boss and it all begins again except on a more exotic and more heavily enemy infested world.

When it comes to Fantasy Zone on home consoles there were more than a couple versions.  In 1986 the first home port of Fantasy Zone appeared on Sega's home console of the era, the Master System.  The Master System version was, without a doubt, the closest to the arcade experience on an 8 bit console.  It wasn't perfect, but the control was spot on and the colors were bright and vibrant just as in the arcade.  A year later Sunsoft released their port of Fantasy Zone on the Japanese counterpart to the NES, the Famicom.  While very much playable, the Famicom version looked nowhere as nice as the Master System port from a year earlier.  One year after that a beautiful version Fantasy Zone appeared on the PC Engine, known as the TurboGrafx-16 in North America, and made good use of the enhanced 16 bit graphics technology to create a solid port.  Well one year later, in 1989, Tengen took up the task of creating an NES alternative to the Master System release of three years earlier.  Instead of simply porting the Famicom version Sunsoft created in 1987 onto the NES, they would program their own port with decidedly mixed results.

What the gaming world was then left with is the lackluster NES version of Fantasy Zone.  While the entire game is still there, it stands as an empty shell of the cutesy and surreal frenzy that made the arcade game such a blast to play.  To begin with, the graphics are downright disappointing, drab washed out colors replace the psychedelic backdrops of the arcade.  The shop balloons are missing their strings and the Parts Shop menu doesn't scroll left and right, instead it simply jumps from one screen of six items to the next.  Boss encounters take place on separate, plain, single color backgrounds instead of scrolling along the current stage as in the arcade.  There is a healthy amount of flicker but on most stages it remains at an acceptable level and doesn't hurt the gameplay.

While the music sounds nice and is the same as what is heard in the arcade, it is in a constant battle with the sound effects.  Things get to the point where the background music is so garbled by the sounds of firing and explosions that the whole audio package turns into a mess of bleeps and bloops.  Thankfully the control is still good with the directional pad controlling movement, B for firing and A for dropping bombs.  Yet the scrolling feels lazy compared to the arcade version which can sometimes lead to cheap deaths.  Insult is added to injury in that the paths the enemies follow are nowhere near how they were in the arcade, so any arcade experience is worthless.  Additionally there simply aren't all the enemies that are seen in the arcade version.  It's almost as if the NES port is "Fantasy Zone Light."  To round things out, two player support was removed which makes no sense since players would take turns anyway.

Obviously Tengen set out to make a nice port of an arcade game that gained a ton of popularity on the Master System.  Not a rush job by any means but it simply cannot compare to the arcade original or the Master System offering.  If Tengen was looking to make a quick buck they most certainly would have attempted a localization of the Famicom version but at the end of the day neither of them do the original justice.  While Sunsoft would later on do right by the Famicom with a very nice version of Fantasy Zone II, NES owners were left out in the cold.  Once again another popular Sega game was left without a solid conversion on the NES.  This is also one of the games that fell victim to terrible Tengen cover art which I'm sure didn't help sales any.

Be sure to check back next month for the final installment of The Titles of Tengen - it'll be a true classic, Gauntlet.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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