@MacGamer420 Cant disagree there. I only read and play video games. I think last time I was in a movie theater was 20 yrs ago, I havent owned a TV in about that long either. If I want to watch some moving pictures I watch youtube.
One thing to remember if you're trying to understand Thexder's popularity is that it was one of the first scrolling platformers *period*, hitting months before Ghosts n' Goblins and Super Mario World.
8:00 "All I can guess is someone at Tokuma really, _really_ had it out for bugs." 😂 The script this week was especially hilarious. I’ll miss this subseries.
Thexder is weird, it feels like it historically should have made a bigger impact in the West than it actually did. But wasn't it one of the influences for Turrican? So, by that extension, it kinda did.
A neat thing about Exed Exes is that it was one of two games that Tokuma Shouten ran a contest for where you would get a special replacement label for the cartridge depending on how well you could score. Cartridges with these replacement labels are insanely rare and IIRC only one copy with the platinum sticker is known to exist. Which is better than the other game to have this contest where no copies of the platinum sticker are known to exist.
Thexder is one of those games that tends to come up unreasonably often when I'm reading about vintage games, even though I never saw nor played it back in its "prime."
It was a pretty reasonably fun and unique game for its time, though its sequel, Fire Hawk, is where it's at. Fire Hawk is an OUTSTANDING game, showing up its predecessor in every conceivable way, and still holding up to this very day. It's so good, it kind of retroactively makes the original Thexder more noteworthy.
For 1985 it wasn't such a bad game. I got it on my very first cartridge 18 in 1 among other early games like Circus Charlie, Bomberman, Lunar Ball, Excitebike and Tetris and to me it was the highlight of that pirate collection, although admittedly I could never go far into the game because of how impossibly difficult it was for the young me. But I certainly tried a lot. Also the music kinda slaps.
I always enjoy some Itano Circus to go with my obscure game commentary. Poor Nausicaa, a not great MSX game to go with the original Warriors of the Wind hack-job. But at least you have the Nausicaans in "Tapestry", one of the best Star Trek The Next Generation episodes (yes, TNG writers loved anime). Looking forward to Penguin Wars next time.
I would've thought that the blanking of the background in Exed Exes was done so that the appearing objects could be tiles, instead of sprites, preventing the need for flickering. Alas.
Miyazaki might have liked Nausicaa - the Game - better as a visual novel / adventure title. Lots of world building in the manga. But I don’t blame the contract developer for “Well, here’s what I can do in the time you’re giving me…” though it is funny to contrast Miyazaki breaking his back to advance the kinds of stories that can be told with animation and then the game version turns out as a brain dead knock off.
The reason why Capcom outsourced Exed Exes to Tokuma Shoten was due Nintendo restrictions about the number of games that every publisher or company could develop or lunch per year; Capcom reached the quota or number of games (3 titles per year), therefore they couldn´t handle the port of Exed Exes to Famicom, and so they outsourced to Tokuma. Yoshiki Okamoto, former designer at Capcom, explained that and also another and pretty interesting stories about the development of Exed Exes in the follow video in his official channel: th-cam.com/video/M70dP8acnb0/w-d-xo.htmlv=M70dP8acnb0&t=1109s
Exed Exes reminds me a lot of a game called Cyber Core that I used to play on the Turbo Grafix-16 when I was kid. Cyber Core was also a overhead vertical scrolling shooter game in which the player killing bugs, with the first boss of the game being rather blatantly based on the Ohmu from Nausicaa. The game was made by Alfa System who would go on to make Elemental Gearbolt & Gunparade March for the PS1, as well as the Shikigami no Shiro/Castle of Shikigami games.
Thexder was a BIG deal in the computer scene because it was the first all-original game made for use on NEC's new-and-improved PC-8801 model, the "mkIISR", which launched in January '85. This added a new graphics mode called "V2" that could draw and update the screen much faster than the previous models, to address one of the PC-88's biggest criticisms, its sluggish performance in comparison to its closest competitors: the X1 and FM-7. It also increased the total possible colors to 512, though it could still only display 8 simultaneously. The first game software to be released for V2 mode was actually an upgraded re-release of the OG Thunder Force, in March '85, but April's Thexder was the first game created from the ground up with this mode in mind. It very quickly became THE killer app for the platform, with the urban legend (almost certainly an exaggeration) claiming that almost every SR user at the time bought a copy of Thexder to go with it. It's even thought to have played a small role in V2 mode catching on and eventually becoming the de facto standard for games in the PC-88's later years, leaving the older, incompatible models behind. (In contrast, Sharp and Fujitsu's comparable evolutions of their machines, the X1turbo and the FM-77AV respectively, did not catch on too well, instead suffering largely the same fate as the Commodore 128. Rather than split the user base, developers mainly kept making software compatible with ALL models, not just the newer ones.) Even with the improved hardware, getting performance THIS fast and fluid out of a platform with no sprites or hardware scrolling is quite an achievement, and Game Arts received a great deal of attention and praise for their technical prowess and programming wizardry. The PC-88 just wasn't made for arcade-y action games, but at the very least, Thexder is an easy example to point to for why there's NO excuse for Super Mario Bros. Special being as god-awful as it is. The Famicom port, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. In addition to the problems you mentioned here, it was also whittled down to a mere 5 stages, compared to 16 in the original. Almost 70% of the game's content was left on the cutting room floor. Some compromises were probably unavoidable in converting a disk-based game to cartridge... but compare it to the MSX port, handled by Compile. Not only does that version preserve the homing laser of the original, but also squeezes TEN stages into a tiny 32 kilobyte ROM cart - smaller even than the Famicom version. That's the difference a talented developer handling the conversion can make, and not surprisingly this port was very well-regarded. As for Square, between their Famicom debut being an disappointing downgrade of a game widely considered a masterpiece, and their follow-up effort in King's Knight not being much better, they quickly earned a reputation as a "kusoge-maker" in Japan in their early days. A stigma that they weren't able to fully shake off until Final Fantasy hit and completely turned their fortunes around.
Thexder was a very impressive game on the original platform it was released on, the PC-88, and also when it was released. It was a pretty solid game with a lot of depth, and interesting wide open levels. It might have been very tough, especially since it's a game where if you die you go straight back into the title screen. All that said though it was just a super innovative game for its hardware that was mostly filled with poor arcade conversions with awful scrolling, in comparison to Thexder pretty smooth one. The game would be followed by an amazing sequel that improved on everything the first game did, on the same hardware no less. But of course before the sequel Square released the Famicom port that was inferior to the original version of the game in so many ways. The sound is the only thing about this port that stacked up well to the PC-88 version, but everything else like making the robot's attack be these puny little laser balls that miss the enemies all the time, were really not necessary. And the graphics took a hit as well, the sprites were much smaller, and the animation had less frames as well. It's a shame how this port turned out, it really could have been a lot better, if it had been done by different devs.
Right! I ignore the arcade conversions but it seems half the games on a system were arcade ports or knockoffs. So anything original and quality is going to have a lot of attention. also - PC-88 = floppies = piracy! If a game sold 500k on the original hardware, then it was clearly a smash
@@johnsimon8457 A major reason it sold so well PC-88 is because of how well it used the new 1985 model's upgraded graphics & FM-synth sound. It was NEC's system seller & a strong start for Game Arts. Before that, while the PC-88 had its slate of disappointing conversions, it mostly had original adventure, puzzle, & strategy games in droves, plus backwards compatibility with PC-8001 software from earlier years.
Very good information here in your research... basically Nintendo of America's early mid 80s staff worked very closely with Nintendo Japanese headquarters in creating the innovative and highly revolutionary concept of selling videogame guide books here in the U.S.A. and therefore North America which led to further expansion in making more guide books or "strategy guides" and eventually the development of Nintendo Power Magazine from a mere newsletter fanclub which was a welcome gem that Nintendo of America's staff worked together with Nintendo Japanese headquarters to make happen and here in this video is the very beginnings of it. By the way I feel even by 1985 that third party developers would not be that skilled at running code on the FamiCom to the same level as Nintendo or the few other elite coder studios. I brings to perspective that by 85 the FamiCom was in it's second full year since launch in Japan which is very similar to how every successive hardware generation relates to third party dev skills and efforts as the more years, the higher the chances (sometimes) that game dev studios may have more knowledge of the hardware provided they were coding on it from the launch or decided to make a first party like effort which often reflected in the videogames quality and that also is a lesson as to why multi platform parity is so dangerous and detrimental as well as is holding back successive generation game software from evolving as well as certain companies wanting to launch next gen hardware prematurely in the past which often never ended well and apparently Nintendo knew this but the others always saw that as a target to prevent Nintendo from reaching past four to five years of game development which by relation also targeted third parties... especially since all the classic games were established on the FamiCom and NES after 1985.
Fun fact about Exed Exes: Depending on your score, a password would appear on the Game Over screen. You could mail a letter with this password to Tokuma Soft, and you'd get a special label to put on your cartridge. There were various different ones, including Silver, Gold. and Platinum, but if you were somehow able to score 9,000,000 points, you would get a cart label made of solid 24 karat gold. There's only 2 pictures of it on the Internet, but it must be worth a fortune nowadays.
Yashichis appear in Vulgus, too! Kind of surprising to see them coming after you with murder on their minds when nearly every Capcom AFTER Exed Exes makes them friendly and hugely beneficial.
I played Thexder on the Amiga and hated it. There were tons of enemies and every single one of them took way too long to kill. If there was a swarm of them, you had no hope of killing them all before they hit you. You could transform into the jet at will, but you'd never intentionally transform back into the robot. That's because you would automatically change back to robot form when you hit something and there was room enough to do so, usually at the worst possible time. Combine that with lots of narrow pathways that were a royal pain in the ass to get through, areas that you needed the robot's auto-targeting laser for, but which the robot wouldn't fit into, and all the areas that you went into blind, only to find yourself in the middle of 20-30 enemies, and you have a recipe for pure frustration.
1985 is such a wild year for Famicom. So many of these games are "terrible, but somehow sold 500K/1M copies" because there was way more demand for Famicom games than there was supply of good ones. Thexder, Spelunker, Ikki...I think even Jajamaru-kun was a pretty big success for Jaleco. Many dreams were started here by selling mediocre products to the hungry masses.
It was also a totally different market back then. Go rewatch the SG-1000 series and compare these games to those, remembering that many came out in the same year as these, and a good few even in 1986. Releases like Thexder and Exed Exes might be absolute trash by FamiCom standards, but aren't all that far behind even the better games the competition had to offer. Really helps you appreciate why arcades were so popular at the time lol
1984 must have been the year that 3rd parties saw famicom as a hit, decided to produce for the system, hired staff, secured licenses, trained staff, and then had titles ready to go by 85. While Nintendo is all “Oh our arcade conversions are old crap from 1982. We’re working on super Mario, now.”
@@johnsimon8457 Yeah, and since it was all their first title they were all understandably terrible, but as the other comment pointed out, even something as miserable as Exed Exes still compares favorably to a lot of the STGs on SG-1000, so it's no surprise a lot of people bought it even though there were already better choices on Famicom.
Ah, I see another case of Sierra doing the official US port of a Japanese game. It did work well for them in the early 80s (Frogger's floppy disk version is considered by many to be the better port musically for home computers at the time) while the bigger projects of building a decent graphic adventure game engine that could support the beefier 16 bit CPUs and 16 color displays as seen in the early "Quest" franchises.
I'm not gonna lie, that Thexder footage on PC with the lasers and the blinky red and green makes my eyes bleed. That game _must_ have cause some photosensitive episodes.
Today I learned that Miyazaki was upset at Mushihimesama not only being a proposed Nausicaa adaptation but also because it he went through the same thing more than once
in defense of whoever at tokuma shoten opted for a console conversion of exed exes, the actual arcade game is quite good if you can get into that kind of vibe and atmosphere, this micronix on famicom joint obviously doesn't do it justice but that's the expected result
Interesting that they couldn't make the Thexder beam work, other games managed tile based rotating lasers just fine. Maybe the devs couldn't think of the solution?
I keep hearing about thexder but never thought to check it out, maybe I should (but perhaps one of the PC versions with the proper laser effect) exed exes I've played a few rounds of on capcom's various collections. it's alright but it's definitely no xevious. although how the famicom port wound up looking worse than 1942... actually it's micronics I think that says it all there, good lord.
Okay, that's certainly a C at a glance. The romaji-zation is Teguza, so how we ended up with Thexder spelled Chexder is a bit puzzling. Ah well. Early Square.
In interviews with Thexder's creators, they mentioned pronouncing it as "tex-der" w/o a th sound, even though they thought of it as a Western-style word.
The first time a Japanese dev told me "Tegza" was an influence on their work in an interview, I had to do a bit of footwork to figure out what they meant.
Sherlock Hound. Miyazaki directed a few episodes, so it seemed germane to the discussion in addition to be a contemporary broadcast with the games covered here. Just got a U.S. release on Blu-ray!
I had no clue there was a Famicom version of Thexder, huh... But yeah, trying to imagine a janky Famicom conversion of Cruise Chaser Blasty in my head is kinda funny, to be honest. Honestly, I feel like it took until Final Fantasy 3, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Rad Racer 2 for Square to REALLY Find their famicom stride after Nasir ended up REALLY getting used to things, since 3D world Runner is not exactly what I'd call a fun game and Final Fantasy is a JANKY MESS... or rather, they had enough cash from Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy 2 at that point to really put that spit-shine polish on their games that they'd eventually become known for.
Wow Jeremy, you sure had a lot to say about and apparently terrible game 😂 As a fan of the arcade game, I actually don’t find the family comp conversion of exed exes as wretched as some people do. I honestly think it’s one of the better micronics efforts. Yes it’s ugly, but the core gameplay isn’t terrible. I feel the same way about the NES conversion of tiger Heli.
UGH, what a crap! 1985 was the absolute year of trash for the Famicom if we talk about third party software releases: for what I know (I am european), in 1985 and 1986 the US press talked about these crappy japanese game releases in some newspapers, using titles such as "Nintendo is near to a new Atari effect" or something like that. After some months, the Nintendo World got gems like Castlevania...that says everything.
I haven't played either of these games, but from what I see her it feels like Thexder is the biggest disappointment- from a game of such potential and promise to... that? Big letdown. Whereas Exed Exes feels like a fairly typical shmup which just happened to get a lousy conversion. Not a big loss.
Thexdexexedexes. I’ll say thexder looks at least ambitious (just too much so for 1985 famicom technology). A 1990 ish release when mappers were megaman caliber might have made a more interesting release. (There’s not much to be said about a micronics shooter of this vintage)
"Video games were a mistake" - Hayao Miyazaki 1985
@@hobbified you must be fun at parties
"Cinema was a mistake" - Me 2022 (literature is 1000% better)
@MacGamer420
Cant disagree there. I only read and play video games. I think last time I was in a movie theater was 20 yrs ago, I havent owned a TV in about that long either. If I want to watch some moving pictures I watch youtube.
I can't say I blame Miyazaki for coming to that decision.
I wasn't expecting you here! Love your stuff!
i had thexder on my Apple IIGS and loved it. Was an interesting, albeit very difficult game.
Fond memories of the DOS version as a kid. Thanks for the coverage!
Love that Ken Williams brought this and other classics like Silpheed and Sorcerian to the west back then. He had some good taste in games ^-^
One thing to remember if you're trying to understand Thexder's popularity is that it was one of the first scrolling platformers *period*, hitting months before Ghosts n' Goblins and Super Mario World.
8:00 "All I can guess is someone at Tokuma really, _really_ had it out for bugs." 😂 The script this week was especially hilarious. I’ll miss this subseries.
Yay. Love seeing Thexder get love. The game was ahead of its time if you were in that moment
Thexder is weird, it feels like it historically should have made a bigger impact in the West than it actually did.
But wasn't it one of the influences for Turrican? So, by that extension, it kinda did.
A neat thing about Exed Exes is that it was one of two games that Tokuma Shouten ran a contest for where you would get a special replacement label for the cartridge depending on how well you could score. Cartridges with these replacement labels are insanely rare and IIRC only one copy with the platinum sticker is known to exist. Which is better than the other game to have this contest where no copies of the platinum sticker are known to exist.
You’re spoiling next week’s episode!!
Thexder is one of those games that tends to come up unreasonably often when I'm reading about vintage games, even though I never saw nor played it back in its "prime."
It was ported to basically every computer available in the mid-80s, and action games on 8-bit computers got judged on a very generous curve.
It was a pretty reasonably fun and unique game for its time, though its sequel, Fire Hawk, is where it's at. Fire Hawk is an OUTSTANDING game, showing up its predecessor in every conceivable way, and still holding up to this very day. It's so good, it kind of retroactively makes the original Thexder more noteworthy.
@@Wyrdwad Not to mention Silpheed, also from Game Arts and also published in the US by Sierra, with its unique pseudo-3D graphics.
It was a much better title in DOS. The console ports are very meh.
For 1985 it wasn't such a bad game. I got it on my very first cartridge 18 in 1 among other early games like Circus Charlie, Bomberman, Lunar Ball, Excitebike and Tetris and to me it was the highlight of that pirate collection, although admittedly I could never go far into the game because of how impossibly difficult it was for the young me. But I certainly tried a lot. Also the music kinda slaps.
Ah, Thexder. I turned the Robotech theme on repeat while I played it on my Mac lol
Square and Capcom ... if only we knew then what we know now
the original thexder really looks like an amazing premise
Another fantastic episode. God dammit, at 6:39 I burst into tears. I love that movie so much…
Thexder was maybe the first computer game I really noticed.
It was running on a comp at the computer shop my mom worked at.
I always enjoy some Itano Circus to go with my obscure game commentary. Poor Nausicaa, a not great MSX game to go with the original Warriors of the Wind hack-job. But at least you have the Nausicaans in "Tapestry", one of the best Star Trek The Next Generation episodes (yes, TNG writers loved anime). Looking forward to Penguin Wars next time.
I would've thought that the blanking of the background in Exed Exes was done so that the appearing objects could be tiles, instead of sprites, preventing the need for flickering.
Alas.
7:50 Random dog bark! It occurs to me how well-edited Jeremy's videos must be that I had no idea he had a dog!
Well... I don't have a dog. I'm not sure what you're hearing, but it's not a dog.
@@JeremyParish ... well shoot. It sounds for all the world like a small dog's bark. Possible rogue The Geddup Noise cameo?
Miyazaki might have liked Nausicaa - the Game - better as a visual novel / adventure title. Lots of world building in the manga.
But I don’t blame the contract developer for “Well, here’s what I can do in the time you’re giving me…” though it is funny to contrast Miyazaki breaking his back to advance the kinds of stories that can be told with animation and then the game version turns out as a brain dead knock off.
The reason why Capcom outsourced Exed Exes to Tokuma Shoten was due Nintendo restrictions about the number of games that every publisher or company could develop or lunch per year; Capcom reached the quota or number of games (3 titles per year), therefore they couldn´t handle the port of Exed Exes to Famicom, and so they outsourced to Tokuma. Yoshiki Okamoto, former designer at Capcom, explained that and also another and pretty interesting stories about the development of Exed Exes in the follow video in his official channel: th-cam.com/video/M70dP8acnb0/w-d-xo.htmlv=M70dP8acnb0&t=1109s
but they only had one game out that year...
Exed Exes reminds me a lot of a game called Cyber Core that I used to play on the Turbo Grafix-16 when I was kid. Cyber Core was also a overhead vertical scrolling shooter game in which the player killing bugs, with the first boss of the game being rather blatantly based on the Ohmu from Nausicaa. The game was made by Alfa System who would go on to make Elemental Gearbolt & Gunparade March for the PS1, as well as the Shikigami no Shiro/Castle of Shikigami games.
Thexder was a BIG deal in the computer scene because it was the first all-original game made for use on NEC's new-and-improved PC-8801 model, the "mkIISR", which launched in January '85. This added a new graphics mode called "V2" that could draw and update the screen much faster than the previous models, to address one of the PC-88's biggest criticisms, its sluggish performance in comparison to its closest competitors: the X1 and FM-7. It also increased the total possible colors to 512, though it could still only display 8 simultaneously.
The first game software to be released for V2 mode was actually an upgraded re-release of the OG Thunder Force, in March '85, but April's Thexder was the first game created from the ground up with this mode in mind. It very quickly became THE killer app for the platform, with the urban legend (almost certainly an exaggeration) claiming that almost every SR user at the time bought a copy of Thexder to go with it. It's even thought to have played a small role in V2 mode catching on and eventually becoming the de facto standard for games in the PC-88's later years, leaving the older, incompatible models behind. (In contrast, Sharp and Fujitsu's comparable evolutions of their machines, the X1turbo and the FM-77AV respectively, did not catch on too well, instead suffering largely the same fate as the Commodore 128. Rather than split the user base, developers mainly kept making software compatible with ALL models, not just the newer ones.)
Even with the improved hardware, getting performance THIS fast and fluid out of a platform with no sprites or hardware scrolling is quite an achievement, and Game Arts received a great deal of attention and praise for their technical prowess and programming wizardry. The PC-88 just wasn't made for arcade-y action games, but at the very least, Thexder is an easy example to point to for why there's NO excuse for Super Mario Bros. Special being as god-awful as it is.
The Famicom port, on the other hand, is pretty terrible. In addition to the problems you mentioned here, it was also whittled down to a mere 5 stages, compared to 16 in the original. Almost 70% of the game's content was left on the cutting room floor. Some compromises were probably unavoidable in converting a disk-based game to cartridge... but compare it to the MSX port, handled by Compile. Not only does that version preserve the homing laser of the original, but also squeezes TEN stages into a tiny 32 kilobyte ROM cart - smaller even than the Famicom version. That's the difference a talented developer handling the conversion can make, and not surprisingly this port was very well-regarded.
As for Square, between their Famicom debut being an disappointing downgrade of a game widely considered a masterpiece, and their follow-up effort in King's Knight not being much better, they quickly earned a reputation as a "kusoge-maker" in Japan in their early days. A stigma that they weren't able to fully shake off until Final Fantasy hit and completely turned their fortunes around.
Super interesting context, thank you.
radracer/highway star helped
4:10 - now I know what D.O.G. stands for on my two copies of 3D World Runner for the FDS lol
Merry Christmas 🎅 🎄 to this channel. 😀👍🎅
Thexder was a very impressive game on the original platform it was released on, the PC-88, and also when it was released. It was a pretty solid game with a lot of depth, and interesting wide open levels. It might have been very tough, especially since it's a game where if you die you go straight back into the title screen. All that said though it was just a super innovative game for its hardware that was mostly filled with poor arcade conversions with awful scrolling, in comparison to Thexder pretty smooth one.
The game would be followed by an amazing sequel that improved on everything the first game did, on the same hardware no less.
But of course before the sequel Square released the Famicom port that was inferior to the original version of the game in so many ways. The sound is the only thing about this port that stacked up well to the PC-88 version, but everything else like making the robot's attack be these puny little laser balls that miss the enemies all the time, were really not necessary. And the graphics took a hit as well, the sprites were much smaller, and the animation had less frames as well.
It's a shame how this port turned out, it really could have been a lot better, if it had been done by different devs.
Right! I ignore the arcade conversions but it seems half the games on a system were arcade ports or knockoffs. So anything original and quality is going to have a lot of attention.
also - PC-88 = floppies = piracy! If a game sold 500k on the original hardware, then it was clearly a smash
@@johnsimon8457 A major reason it sold so well PC-88 is because of how well it used the new 1985 model's upgraded graphics & FM-synth sound. It was NEC's system seller & a strong start for Game Arts. Before that, while the PC-88 had its slate of disappointing conversions, it mostly had original adventure, puzzle, & strategy games in droves, plus backwards compatibility with PC-8001 software from earlier years.
i played it on PC XT maybe around 1990.
I had Thexder on PC when I was a kid. 1 - I had no idea anyone else has ever heard of it. 2 - I had no idea it was also an NES game.
Very good information here in your research... basically Nintendo of America's early mid 80s staff worked very closely with Nintendo Japanese headquarters in creating the innovative and highly revolutionary concept of selling videogame guide books here in the U.S.A. and therefore North America which led to further expansion in making more guide books or "strategy guides" and eventually the development of Nintendo Power Magazine from a mere newsletter fanclub which was a welcome gem that Nintendo of America's staff worked together with Nintendo Japanese headquarters to make happen and here in this video is the very beginnings of it.
By the way I feel even by 1985 that third party developers would not be that skilled at running code on the FamiCom to the same level as Nintendo or the few other elite coder studios. I brings to perspective that by 85 the FamiCom was in it's second full year since launch in Japan which is very similar to how every successive hardware generation relates to third party dev skills and efforts as the more years, the higher the chances (sometimes) that game dev studios may have more knowledge of the hardware provided they were coding on it from the launch or decided to make a first party like effort which often reflected in the videogames quality and that also is a lesson as to why multi platform parity is so dangerous and detrimental as well as is holding back successive generation game software from evolving as well as certain companies wanting to launch next gen hardware prematurely in the past which often never ended well and apparently Nintendo knew this but the others always saw that as a target to prevent Nintendo from reaching past four to five years of game development which by relation also targeted third parties... especially since all the classic games were established on the FamiCom and NES after 1985.
Fun fact about Exed Exes: Depending on your score, a password would appear on the Game Over screen. You could mail a letter with this password to Tokuma Soft, and you'd get a special label to put on your cartridge. There were various different ones, including Silver, Gold. and Platinum, but if you were somehow able to score 9,000,000 points, you would get a cart label made of solid 24 karat gold. There's only 2 pictures of it on the Internet, but it must be worth a fortune nowadays.
Yep, I covered that in the... Lot Lot episode? One of those Tokuma Shoten games.
@@JeremyParish Thanks!
It looks to me like the thing the player is piloting in the Nausicaa game is the yellow two-seater gunship from the castle.
Yashichis appear in Vulgus, too! Kind of surprising to see them coming after you with murder on their minds when nearly every Capcom AFTER Exed Exes makes them friendly and hugely beneficial.
I played Thexder on the Amiga and hated it. There were tons of enemies and every single one of them took way too long to kill. If there was a swarm of them, you had no hope of killing them all before they hit you. You could transform into the jet at will, but you'd never intentionally transform back into the robot. That's because you would automatically change back to robot form when you hit something and there was room enough to do so, usually at the worst possible time. Combine that with lots of narrow pathways that were a royal pain in the ass to get through, areas that you needed the robot's auto-targeting laser for, but which the robot wouldn't fit into, and all the areas that you went into blind, only to find yourself in the middle of 20-30 enemies, and you have a recipe for pure frustration.
1985 is such a wild year for Famicom. So many of these games are "terrible, but somehow sold 500K/1M copies" because there was way more demand for Famicom games than there was supply of good ones. Thexder, Spelunker, Ikki...I think even Jajamaru-kun was a pretty big success for Jaleco. Many dreams were started here by selling mediocre products to the hungry masses.
It was also a totally different market back then. Go rewatch the SG-1000 series and compare these games to those, remembering that many came out in the same year as these, and a good few even in 1986. Releases like Thexder and Exed Exes might be absolute trash by FamiCom standards, but aren't all that far behind even the better games the competition had to offer.
Really helps you appreciate why arcades were so popular at the time lol
@@ValkyrieTiara It will, and why we didn't leave 'em quickly.
1984 must have been the year that 3rd parties saw famicom as a hit, decided to produce for the system, hired staff, secured licenses, trained staff, and then had titles ready to go by 85. While Nintendo is all “Oh our arcade conversions are old crap from 1982. We’re working on super Mario, now.”
@@johnsimon8457 Yeah, and since it was all their first title they were all understandably terrible, but as the other comment pointed out, even something as miserable as Exed Exes still compares favorably to a lot of the STGs on SG-1000, so it's no surprise a lot of people bought it even though there were already better choices on Famicom.
Jajamaru was big 5 games on the fc
Ah, I see another case of Sierra doing the official US port of a Japanese game. It did work well for them in the early 80s (Frogger's floppy disk version is considered by many to be the better port musically for home computers at the time) while the bigger projects of building a decent graphic adventure game engine that could support the beefier 16 bit CPUs and 16 color displays as seen in the early "Quest" franchises.
I'm not gonna lie, that Thexder footage on PC with the lasers and the blinky red and green makes my eyes bleed. That game _must_ have cause some photosensitive episodes.
Exxed Eyes in the arcade was an odd shooter, but it had a good two player cooperation mode.
This is last ever Gaiden episode? Really enjoyed this series and would have loved to see more.
Nope, and that question is answered in the episode...
Ah, the introduction (in arcades at least) of the famous Capcom "Pow" icon. I wonder if they got the idea from Mario Bros' POW block?
I had Thexder on my CC. It was my favorite game on the computer, even with the absolute garbage tier controller I had.
I only knew Thexder through the DOS port on my friend's computer, I'm a bit saddened to see how lacking it is on the NES heh.
If 1985 is ending with Penguin-Kun Wars, then at least it'll be ending on a more positive note than this.
I always wondered where the Yashiji originated from on other Capcom games now I know
so Thexder got that DOG in him is what you're saying
Thank God that those two games did not get released.
Toasty Frog!
Today I learned that Miyazaki was upset at Mushihimesama not only being a proposed Nausicaa adaptation but also because it he went through the same thing more than once
in defense of whoever at tokuma shoten opted for a console conversion of exed exes, the actual arcade game is quite good if you can get into that kind of vibe and atmosphere, this micronix on famicom joint obviously doesn't do it justice but that's the expected result
square was just square at this point square soft was years out
Interesting that they couldn't make the Thexder beam work, other games managed tile based rotating lasers just fine. Maybe the devs couldn't think of the solution?
I keep hearing about thexder but never thought to check it out, maybe I should (but perhaps one of the PC versions with the proper laser effect) exed exes I've played a few rounds of on capcom's various collections. it's alright but it's definitely no xevious. although how the famicom port wound up looking worse than 1942... actually it's micronics I think that says it all there, good lord.
Okay, that's certainly a C at a glance. The romaji-zation is Teguza, so how we ended up with Thexder spelled Chexder is a bit puzzling.
Ah well. Early Square.
In interviews with Thexder's creators, they mentioned pronouncing it as "tex-der" w/o a th sound, even though they thought of it as a Western-style word.
@DragoonEnRegalia that it isn't just Techzer, or TekZer is a small miracle I guess.
Fun stuff.
The first time a Japanese dev told me "Tegza" was an influence on their work in an interview, I had to do a bit of footwork to figure out what they meant.
@@DragoonEnRegalia Well, Japan.
What is the name of the anime used in the bumper? Looks cool.
Sherlock Hound. Miyazaki directed a few episodes, so it seemed germane to the discussion in addition to be a contemporary broadcast with the games covered here. Just got a U.S. release on Blu-ray!
@@JeremyParish Thanks Jeremy! Hope you have a great holiday and look forward NES Works Gaiden Endgame: Part 2
Thexder Neo for PS3 runs perfectly on Steam Deck if you're a sicko like me
I had no clue there was a Famicom version of Thexder, huh...
But yeah, trying to imagine a janky Famicom conversion of Cruise Chaser Blasty in my head is kinda funny, to be honest. Honestly, I feel like it took until Final Fantasy 3, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Rad Racer 2 for Square to REALLY Find their famicom stride after Nasir ended up REALLY getting used to things, since 3D world Runner is not exactly what I'd call a fun game and Final Fantasy is a JANKY MESS... or rather, they had enough cash from Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy 2 at that point to really put that spit-shine polish on their games that they'd eventually become known for.
wow, a Nausicaa game that gets the point wrong... yeah, I can see why Miyazaki is cynical about game publishers using his creations.
I guess I'm not alone in hating FC Thexder. Clumsy, PITA game.
gkids now has the rights to ghibl films
I can't not see "Theides" or "THE IDES" at the title screen
Guys I am his biggest fan
Wow Jeremy, you sure had a lot to say about and apparently terrible game 😂
As a fan of the arcade game, I actually don’t find the family comp conversion of exed exes as wretched as some people do. I honestly think it’s one of the better micronics efforts. Yes it’s ugly, but the core gameplay isn’t terrible. I feel the same way about the NES conversion of tiger Heli.
It's definitely cheap as chips. My copies of Exed Exes and Thexder were $1.02 each.
My mom brought home Thexder when it came out on DOS. I thought it was the coolest shit to ever ever. In retrospect, it sucked. 😅
UGH, what a crap! 1985 was the absolute year of trash for the Famicom if we talk about third party software releases: for what I know (I am european), in 1985 and 1986 the US press talked about these crappy japanese game releases in some newspapers, using titles such as "Nintendo is near to a new Atari effect" or something like that.
After some months, the Nintendo World got gems like Castlevania...that says everything.
I haven't played either of these games, but from what I see her it feels like Thexder is the biggest disappointment- from a game of such potential and promise to... that? Big letdown. Whereas Exed Exes feels like a fairly typical shmup which just happened to get a lousy conversion. Not a big loss.
Thexdexexedexes.
I’ll say thexder looks at least ambitious (just too much so for 1985 famicom technology). A 1990 ish release when mappers were megaman caliber might have made a more interesting release.
(There’s not much to be said about a micronics shooter of this vintage)