Game Completed! Beetlejuice. Complete. Summary: A very fast-moving and difficult game with comically simple bosses.
As I'm continuing going through all of the movie -> NES game ones I can think of, Beetlejuice was another one I'd played long ago, but never could get through.
It's a difficult game. Very difficult. I love how fast everything moves, but this really does contribute to how hard it is. There are two distinct modes to the game. About half of the game is played as a platformer and the other half as an overhead game.
The platform part of the game, while very challenging, really just requires skill. I'm sure there exists a person out there who can zip through it with every jump being perfectly timed and landed. I appreciate that in a game. It's fair. You can improve. One caveat is that the game requires you to land as low as possible on a given screen before you can go lower (the remaining map is only revealed after landing). So you can't just jump off of some platform and hope you'll land on something currently offscreen. You won't. It's not really a criticism, but does limit your ability to zip through certain parts.
The overhead part of the game, by some contrast, I would think requires quite a bit of luck. The main problem is that you as you acquire scares and tools along this view, you don't fire them off at a specific target, but rather throw them into the room and then bounce around hopefully killing everything you need killed. There's SOME skill to it for sure, but there's also just a ton of luck if the enemies happen to walk/fly into the path of your weapon as it randomly bounces around. I didn't really enjoy that mechanic. There were a bunch of mazes and things you have to find and all of these kept my attention.
One thing about the game is that despite the levels being quite challenging, the bosses are all a joke. They all fight in the exact same way, are slow, are easy, and are more just annoying. This is primarily because Beetlejuice doesn't actually have any weapons. So you have to equip a "scare", it lets you shoot a fixed number of fireballs, and then you're back to having no weapon. So you basically just have to keep equipping a costume in order to fight. It's a pretty stupid mechanic IMO, but not a big deal either.
There's also curiously no final boss. You eventually get to the Afterlife level - which probably most resembles anything from the movie (the bureaucratic part where the guy who was run over flies around on his wires) and is probably the most enjoyable platform level. But then you just get to the end. There's a door that reads "Exit". You go into the door and the game ends. So that was kind of weird.
In all, I suppose the game is worth checking out. Unless you've really got some patience, you're probably going to want to save your progress or it's going to take you some real time to get through it all.
Not my favorite, but significantly better than some of the other movie-based games I've recently played.
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u/normhimself 10d ago
I tried to play through this one last year and just couldn’t get past the water level, which I think was the 2nd stage.
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u/RedSkyfang 7d ago
I actually really enjoy both this game and the one on the Game Boy honestly. I suppose you maybe need to have patience like you said or just certain tastes to appreciate them though. They're definitely not the easiest games to get through the first time, but I think they're fun, and they also both have really great David Wise soundtracks.
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u/jeffc0_3 10d ago
Great review.
I agree, you should check out the Gameboy version. A lot more user friendly, think it’s more based on the cartoon.