Fun fact(not sure if it was mentioned in the comments already), apparently, Takeshi did get Jon's letter and wanted to write back, but because Jon didn't put a return address on the letter, Takeshi didn't know where to send it
"Fun" fact: Unless you beat him up right away, the old man that gives the map will follow the salaryman up to the island and kill him once he reaches the treasure (resulting in a game over just before the finish line). "Fun" fact 2: If you spend a few minutes on the ending screen, the game will eventually call you out on taking this "crappy game" seriously enough to actually finish it through.
Fun fact 4: there's another way to replenish health, by drinking tequila, specifically. "Fun" fact 5: if you choose to stare at the map, and wait for an hour, the screen goes black. Three more hours, an old-styled "no signal" screen appears. Yet another hour, a "good morning" message appears, and the game resumes. "Fun" fact 6: you can pay the barber to cut you.
Fun fact 7: if you lose all your hearts, pressing A+B 3 times during the death animation will revive you. Fun fact 8: there's a secret mechanic where you can talk with any bystander with the microphone, and you can change the tone of voice from "formal" to "irritated" on the pause screen. All regular NOCs have one out of four "tempers", which means that, after talking with them a specific amount of times in the correct voice tones, they will say a special message, and these messages are usually legit hints that tell you what to do in the game to properly proceed.
Fun fact 9: pressing up on a very specific spot inside the huts lets you return to the resort island. Fun fact 10: if you stay in front of the first tree from the left in the forest location and press up, you reveal a heart. "Fun" fact 11: if you stand after the 23rd tree from the left in the same forest area and press up, you'll enter a Japanese base in the South Pacific with soldiers attacking you.
Last "fun" fact from me, I swear: despite the seemingly broad selection of songs at the karaoke bar, only four are available. Plus, the crowd prefers a certain musical genre (Enka music), and there's only one available song in that genre, the one we see in the video. It's actually called "Rain of a New Frontier".
From what I've heard, Kitano actually hated video games. He didn't just happen to make an impossible game. It was specifically designed to be impossible.
@@sethgibson5148 Grumpy old man syndrome. The video by Kim Justice goes more into it, but he hates many things modern and have any involvement in a video game ever again after this until Yakuza 6 where he gave an amazing performance as one of the characters.
@@sethgibson5148 Guy had a tough life, video games were still relatively new and maybe to someone from his background who had struggled for pretty much everything, creating something that just create struggles for yourself for the purpose of struggling but no actual goal might not have sit well. Who knows, you would have to ask him. Either way looking into a lot of what he said when he elaborated why he didn't like a lot of modern stuff, yeah, some of it is because he is old you could say that but again, it's also due to how he grew up, when he talked about Twitter he mentioned how it was alright for "horsing around" and you only need to watch a bit of TV and look to the streets if you want news and that is to some degree true, I know people who understand more about what is going on in the US for example than they do in our home country or even local town.
You still have to watch other hysterically funny Jontron videos like "my sister is a werewolf" "Dark Dungeons" "Titanic the animated movie". These are the best ones, and of course Starcade, and my favorite "Birdemic"
I don't know too much about Takeshi Kitano except from some apparitions on tv shows, but I love him for being the biggest troll when creating this game XD.
Fun fact Takeshi was in Battle Royale, one of the most violent films that is rated nc15. I am so shocked he designed a video game. Making it hard to beat on purpose is so troll like
If anyone wants an answer to why this game was this bad...well...Ya know how some reviewers say words like "Why make a game like this, do they just hate gamers?"...WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL....Buddy...This is one of those rare cases where the answer is YES!....Beat Takeshi himself HATED video games and gamers alike...If that was the case, then why didn't he just refuse when someone asked to make a game based off of him or one of his movies...Easy, he simply wanted to piss off gamers...He honestly believed that video games were the WORST waste of time ever and that we would be better off skipping rocks in the water or chain smoking, HIS WORDS!...He would prefer us to do drugs over playing video games...No joke...To quote a certain nerd..."Wow, What an asshole!"
The reason games were "Nintendo Hard" Back in the day was due to it actually being "Arcade Hard". The thing is the only other video games we had at the time were also Atari games, and Arcades, and arcades had to be challenging yet fun, so they could draw players into using more of their quarters and packing away more money. Early NES felt that it needed to be hard, that way it gave players a longer chance at playing their difficult games, and in turn you got your money's worth out of the play time.
Games in that era were made purposely hard as a way to combat the movie/game rental industry that was huge back then. They wanted the games too hard to beat in the couple of days you could rent it for, so that way you had to buy the game to beat it. It was all about game publishers trying to force you to give them your money instead of renting.
People like J. Tron and me understand the "WHY" anyone play this games! Challenge! You can't go to the end on this game. Yes we can!!! Whit insanity in the end but we can do it.
Born in the mid 80's and my first console was an NES so I can remember growing up in the early 90's with that thing and yes back then MANY games were difficult. I personally think it had a lot to do with keeping people playing because otherwise games could be short..look at pro speed runners for NES Mario Bros..they got that shit down to sub 5 minutes..at this point they've just about optimized that game to the point where it's at the human limit of ability..only TAS can do it faster..and not by much iirc. One of the ones from my childhood that was a ball buster was Ghosts and Goblins..the NES forerunner to the more widely known Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Both are notoriously difficult and you have to run them both TWICE in one sitting to get the true ending. Also I think another reason is that the companies were still running on "arcade" logic where games were designed to be hard as balls to suck up quarters and make lots of money..so when some got ported to NES they didn't decrease the difficulty.
I've heard a theory before that they were made so hard, because games were so short, so if you took forever to beat it, it didn't have to be long or full of content, as if it would cover for being a short experience by you taking a long time to finish it, and by the time you do, you would feel you got your monies worth. Not sure if that worked for anyone, but I suppose I could see them making that connection.
It's the equivalent of art house movies and I'm glad such games exist. They offer a different experience. In Jon's case that experience made him learn Japanese so he could write a letter to Takeshi Kitano to ask him what the hell he was thinking when making the game. That is my interpretation of the review and from that perspective it looks like a game I'd like to play. It's like watching David Lynch movies. You're not going to be entertained like when watching an action blockbuster.
It’s because most oldschool games were arcade based and only got portable/ home playable versions later so they try to capitalize on making you play as many quarters as possible because as soon as you beat the game theres nothing left to do but play again
Still waiting for the reaction video for his review of the animated Titanic movie. For me that one's on my top 3 list with 'Goop' and the 'Real Life Exorcism' videos. Though this one is up there with the great ones too.
Back then the games were hard and unforgiving because developers only knew the Arcade game style. Hard games that eat quarters. There was no formula for home video games yet. That's why we still got Continues and Scores even when they were pointless. It slowly changed over time. But this game... It's a pointless waste of cartridges and time.
And just remember, you have to sit there for 5 minutes and cry into the mic or let the controller sit for an hour every time you need the map. I think Takeshi was somewhat self aware of how terrible the hang gliding part was, you have to cry to get back there faster.
Neat fact about the famicom in the original zelda game you had to make a loud noise into it to kill a specific enemy and in the us nes version the manual still says it can be killed this way despite the nes not having a speaker
A lot of NES games back in the day were so hard because they didn't actually have a lot of content, given they had so little space to work with. So to prevent you from finishing a game in half an hour and returning it cause you feel cheated, they made them crushingly hard to keep you playing for hours doing the same sections over and over again.
Kinda funny that he mentioned the Shin Megami Tensei games, spoiler alert by the way, in Persona 5 Royal if you don't hang out with Sumire, Maruki and Akechi and get their confidants up to a certain level before November , you won't be able to get the REAL real final fight and ending. And if you choose to agree to live i the reality that Maruki made, you get one of the bad endings. So yeah crazy that there are some games that actually do that whole oh if you do this or that you pretty much screwed yourself.
The NES did not have a separate memory chip to be able so save you're games progress that's why most of them you had to restart or use a password screen, most of the time it did feel though that game developers secretly just hated children, there are some truely great NES titles though, just look at anything published by Konami, Capcom, Natsumi, data east and Hudson soft to name a few
The games back then were difficult because of the arcades. And the arcades were difficult because the harder the game, the more money people spend. So in the beginning they just ported over the games onto the home consoles. And for a while the devs only knew how to make ultra challenging games until it shifted to now where Dark Souls is something special (back when it came out) because it was harder than most things on the market.
Shoot, Skyrim does that. I've been unable to beat parts of the game simply because some npc that is needed for the storyline (yet not set as essential) got killed during a dragon attack. -_-
Games back then where designed much different because the wjole industry was different. There were games coming out maybe every few month. Games where hard because they needed to make you play for a long time while the game itself was more on the short side (because of the small memory space). Today games can be everything and can last virtualy forever so games need to be more engaging and have a better Time-to-Value scaling.
So since suggesting this worked so well, I'll repeat my recommendation for some Angry Video Game Nerd. Namely, Hong Kong 97 or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Fun fact(not sure if it was mentioned in the comments already), apparently, Takeshi did get Jon's letter and wanted to write back, but because Jon didn't put a return address on the letter, Takeshi didn't know where to send it
😱 WAIT REALLY.
I know this comment's a year old, but did he ever reply on social media or something?
@@emeraldkoala2 I honestly can't remember. I just remember seeing someone mention that Takeshi did get the letter.
"Fun" fact: Unless you beat him up right away, the old man that gives the map will follow the salaryman up to the island and kill him once he reaches the treasure (resulting in a game over just before the finish line).
"Fun" fact 2: If you spend a few minutes on the ending screen, the game will eventually call you out on taking this "crappy game" seriously enough to actually finish it through.
''fun'' fact 3: warp to the end. at the start just punch for 2 minutes and warp to cave. :)
Fun fact 4: there's another way to replenish health, by drinking tequila, specifically.
"Fun" fact 5: if you choose to stare at the map, and wait for an hour, the screen goes black. Three more hours, an old-styled "no signal" screen appears. Yet another hour, a "good morning" message appears, and the game resumes.
"Fun" fact 6: you can pay the barber to cut you.
Fun fact 7: if you lose all your hearts, pressing A+B 3 times during the death animation will revive you.
Fun fact 8: there's a secret mechanic where you can talk with any bystander with the microphone, and you can change the tone of voice from "formal" to "irritated" on the pause screen. All regular NOCs have one out of four "tempers", which means that, after talking with them a specific amount of times in the correct voice tones, they will say a special message, and these messages are usually legit hints that tell you what to do in the game to properly proceed.
Fun fact 9: pressing up on a very specific spot inside the huts lets you return to the resort island.
Fun fact 10: if you stay in front of the first tree from the left in the forest location and press up, you reveal a heart.
"Fun" fact 11: if you stand after the 23rd tree from the left in the same forest area and press up, you'll enter a Japanese base in the South Pacific with soldiers attacking you.
Last "fun" fact from me, I swear: despite the seemingly broad selection of songs at the karaoke bar, only four are available. Plus, the crowd prefers a certain musical genre (Enka music), and there's only one available song in that genre, the one we see in the video. It's actually called "Rain of a New Frontier".
From what I've heard, Kitano actually hated video games.
He didn't just happen to make an impossible game. It was specifically designed to be impossible.
Did he say why he hated video games?
@@sethgibson5148 probably because most games at the time truly did suck major ass
@@sethgibson5148 Grumpy old man syndrome. The video by Kim Justice goes more into it, but he hates many things modern and have any involvement in a video game ever again after this until Yakuza 6 where he gave an amazing performance as one of the characters.
Yeah I'm pretty sure he's fine with video games now.
@@sethgibson5148 Guy had a tough life, video games were still relatively new and maybe to someone from his background who had struggled for pretty much everything, creating something that just create struggles for yourself for the purpose of struggling but no actual goal might not have sit well. Who knows, you would have to ask him. Either way looking into a lot of what he said when he elaborated why he didn't like a lot of modern stuff, yeah, some of it is because he is old you could say that but again, it's also due to how he grew up, when he talked about Twitter he mentioned how it was alright for "horsing around" and you only need to watch a bit of TV and look to the streets if you want news and that is to some degree true, I know people who understand more about what is going on in the US for example than they do in our home country or even local town.
Dad: Are you winning son?
Son: Yeah I just divorced my wife!
Dad: Funny that you mention that...
@@TealVelvet NOOOOOOOO
Friend playing Total Recall: Amateur
Fact: Takeshi was one of the best character in yakuza series
True dat brother
Yeah he is.
He was Hirose iirc
That ending rant before the Japanese bit was made almost entirely from Beat Takeshi quotes :D
Already one of my favorite reaction channels
Funny that Chad said he wondered if they have an exorcist on set and this is the video where Jon does the "Outta this house! Outta this house!" bit.
You still have to watch other hysterically funny Jontron videos like "my sister is a werewolf" "Dark Dungeons" "Titanic the animated movie". These are the best ones, and of course Starcade, and my favorite "Birdemic"
I don't know too much about Takeshi Kitano except from some apparitions on tv shows, but I love him for being the biggest troll when creating this game XD.
Fun fact Takeshi was in Battle Royale, one of the most violent films that is rated nc15. I am so shocked he designed a video game. Making it hard to beat on purpose is so troll like
I keep coming back to yours' Jontron reaction videos, its like an addiction, then I end up binge-watching them all
Its time to watch takeshis castle. the best show ever made. Thats what the west knows him for the most,nut i think it had a different name in america
aww shorty is a good boy :)
If anyone wants an answer to why this game was this bad...well...Ya know how some reviewers say words like "Why make a game like this, do they just hate gamers?"...WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL....Buddy...This is one of those rare cases where the answer is YES!....Beat Takeshi himself HATED video games and gamers alike...If that was the case, then why didn't he just refuse when someone asked to make a game based off of him or one of his movies...Easy, he simply wanted to piss off gamers...He honestly believed that video games were the WORST waste of time ever and that we would be better off skipping rocks in the water or chain smoking, HIS WORDS!...He would prefer us to do drugs over playing video games...No joke...To quote a certain nerd..."Wow, What an asshole!"
The reason games were "Nintendo Hard" Back in the day was due to it actually being "Arcade Hard". The thing is the only other video games we had at the time were also Atari games, and Arcades, and arcades had to be challenging yet fun, so they could draw players into using more of their quarters and packing away more money. Early NES felt that it needed to be hard, that way it gave players a longer chance at playing their difficult games, and in turn you got your money's worth out of the play time.
Grilled Mormons
Games in that era were made purposely hard as a way to combat the movie/game rental industry that was huge back then. They wanted the games too hard to beat in the couple of days you could rent it for, so that way you had to buy the game to beat it. It was all about game publishers trying to force you to give them your money instead of renting.
13:16 That line only gets funnier with every passing year😂
People like J. Tron and me understand the "WHY" anyone play this games! Challenge! You can't go to the end on this game. Yes we can!!! Whit insanity in the end but we can do it.
i knew there was a jontron video reaction you guys were missing haha i love this vid
Born in the mid 80's and my first console was an NES so I can remember growing up in the early 90's with that thing and yes back then MANY games were difficult. I personally think it had a lot to do with keeping people playing because otherwise games could be short..look at pro speed runners for NES Mario Bros..they got that shit down to sub 5 minutes..at this point they've just about optimized that game to the point where it's at the human limit of ability..only TAS can do it faster..and not by much iirc. One of the ones from my childhood that was a ball buster was Ghosts and Goblins..the NES forerunner to the more widely known Super Ghouls and Ghosts. Both are notoriously difficult and you have to run them both TWICE in one sitting to get the true ending. Also I think another reason is that the companies were still running on "arcade" logic where games were designed to be hard as balls to suck up quarters and make lots of money..so when some got ported to NES they didn't decrease the difficulty.
But perhaps Beat Takeshi's greatest accomplishment... doing a TV interview with legitimate real world supervillain Shoko Asahara.
I want to see Nikki react to Jotron's Steven Seagal vid. It's one of his greatest videos 😅
I've heard a theory before that they were made so hard, because games were so short, so if you took forever to beat it, it didn't have to be long or full of content, as if it would cover for being a short experience by you taking a long time to finish it, and by the time you do, you would feel you got your monies worth. Not sure if that worked for anyone, but I suppose I could see them making that connection.
It's the equivalent of art house movies and I'm glad such games exist. They offer a different experience. In Jon's case that experience made him learn Japanese so he could write a letter to Takeshi Kitano to ask him what the hell he was thinking when making the game. That is my interpretation of the review and from that perspective it looks like a game I'd like to play. It's like watching David Lynch movies. You're not going to be entertained like when watching an action blockbuster.
It’s because most oldschool games were arcade based and only got portable/ home playable versions later so they try to capitalize on making you play as many quarters as possible because as soon as you beat the game theres nothing left to do but play again
I live for you guy's simultaneous double takes in these things
Still waiting for the reaction video for his review of the animated Titanic movie. For me that one's on my top 3 list with 'Goop' and the 'Real Life Exorcism' videos. Though this one is up there with the great ones too.
Back then the games were hard and unforgiving because developers only knew the Arcade game style. Hard games that eat quarters. There was no formula for home video games yet. That's why we still got Continues and Scores even when they were pointless. It slowly changed over time.
But this game... It's a pointless waste of cartridges and time.
Love your accents, and your taste in vids! All the best from Little England.
7:00 You called the exorcism!
Chad, I'm already subscribed. I've been subbed since Nate asked a couple of months ago.
And just remember, you have to sit there for 5 minutes and cry into the mic or let the controller sit for an hour every time you need the map. I think Takeshi was somewhat self aware of how terrible the hang gliding part was, you have to cry to get back there faster.
Neat fact about the famicom in the original zelda game you had to make a loud noise into it to kill a specific enemy and in the us nes version the manual still says it can be killed this way despite the nes not having a speaker
Games like that is a test,
A true test of patients
A lot of NES games back in the day were so hard because they didn't actually have a lot of content, given they had so little space to work with. So to prevent you from finishing a game in half an hour and returning it cause you feel cheated, they made them crushingly hard to keep you playing for hours doing the same sections over and over again.
This was one of the older Jontron videos, Nikki. The review came out in 2014, so it would've taken him 2 years to do that review.
Kinda funny that he mentioned the Shin Megami Tensei games, spoiler alert by the way, in Persona 5 Royal if you don't hang out with Sumire, Maruki and Akechi and get their confidants up to a certain level before November , you won't be able to get the REAL real final fight and ending. And if you choose to agree to live i the reality that Maruki made, you get one of the bad endings. So yeah crazy that there are some games that actually do that whole oh if you do this or that you pretty much screwed yourself.
some quality stuff ngl
The NES did not have a separate memory chip to be able so save you're games progress that's why most of them you had to restart or use a password screen, most of the time it did feel though that game developers secretly just hated children, there are some truely great NES titles though, just look at anything published by Konami, Capcom, Natsumi, data east and Hudson soft to name a few
I really do want to see you attempt this game on the channel
2:05 "Throughout history mankind has faced challenges far and wide, building the Great Wall of China, combating China and even escaping China"
Well 1 videogame from the 2000s actually did have divorce be a plot point in it. Chibi Robo. A niche game that came out the GameCube.
The games back then were difficult because of the arcades. And the arcades were difficult because the harder the game, the more money people spend. So in the beginning they just ported over the games onto the home consoles. And for a while the devs only knew how to make ultra challenging games until it shifted to now where Dark Souls is something special (back when it came out) because it was harder than most things on the market.
Shoot, Skyrim does that. I've been unable to beat parts of the game simply because some npc that is needed for the storyline (yet not set as essential) got killed during a dragon attack. -_-
Just a question: Are you guys planning to react to any more Absolute Mad Lads by Count Dankula?
Yes
I don't know why, but I just HAD to leave a like this time! 🤔
Games back then where designed much different because the wjole industry was different.
There were games coming out maybe every few month. Games where hard because they needed to make you play for a long time while the game itself was more on the short side (because of the small memory space).
Today games can be everything and can last virtualy forever so games need to be more engaging and have a better Time-to-Value scaling.
Japan.
Don't change.
So since suggesting this worked so well, I'll repeat my recommendation for some Angry Video Game Nerd. Namely, Hong Kong 97 or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing
Morrowind is the 5th elderscrols game
nope, it was the third game
@@irvplotnik89 Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, Redguard and then Morrowind
You guys should check out civie11 Channel he's is hilarious