There were a lot of contributing factors to my decision to purchase a Wii back in 2007. I was super into the gameplay possibilities that motion control, as much as it often didn’t work as intended, it was the place where I was going to be able to play the new Mario and Zelda games and the fact that I was able to keep my Gamecube favorites around for a little while didn’t hurt either. It would even end up being the only home console I bought that entire generation and still ranks as one of my best times with a game console ever. But the most important thing to me was the birth of the Virtual Console. Around the time the Wii was dominating sales charts, I was making my foray into the world of the internet for the first time, specifically gaming sites like GameTrailers and early YouTube. As a result, I was discovering all these games that came out before my time that I really wanted to play. So the idea of a digital service where I could buy these games very easily was a must have to me, especially since this was way before I discovered emulation. Today’s subject is one of the first I ever bought, a classic NES title, though unfortunately not the same version that most people remember, Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream.
You gotta love the NES era of gaming where only, like, three games had stories total and the rest just threw you straight into the middle of everything and said ‘figure it out yourself’. Punch-Out!! is very much in this vain, though it’s not like the game is very hard to figure out. It’s your traditional boxing story. Young, fresh-faced kid with dreams of being the best. Old former champ breaking his retirement to train this kid because he believes. A series of bigger, stronger and more antagonistic opponents to fight. It’s formulaic, yes, but it’s a good formula. In Punch-Out’s specific case, you play as a young boxer by the name of Little Mac, an exceptionally short individual who dreams of conquering the World Video Boxing Association for his chance to battle the infamous Mike Tyson and/or Mr. Dream. Along the way he’ll have to defeat a series of colorful and increasingly stereotypical characters that all have very specific ways of fighting that Mac needs to learn in order to overcome them. It’s both a battle of wits and fists.
So, normally I’d go into my thoughts on the story or dive straight into the mechanics, but I want to do this a little differently this time. Punch-Out!! is one of the most famous NES games of all time. It has stood the test of time for being a challenging and rewarding fighting/puzzle game hybrid that is unlike anything to be released before it or to be released since. I fully understand and respect why people love this game. In fact, before I played the Wii reboot of Punch-Out!!, I loved this game too. I’ve probably played Punch-Out!! from the beginning hundreds of times in my attempts to beat it and I used to have a blast with it. But time and my opinions of what a good game should be have passed since then and I can now say, without a doubt, I hate the original Punch-Out!! And I feel to fully discuss why, we need to delve more into my personal playthrough than just discussing the game as a whole. And I want to also make it clear right now that I’m not trying to say that Punch-Out!! is objectively a bad game or anything. I’m the minority here. All I’m trying to do is establish why I think it’s not a good game.
I’m going to spare you discussing each boxer individually as for the first half of the game they’re pretty inoffensive. The first five boxers are just pathetically easy and Great Tiger, while he can be tricky for newcomers because he’s, you know, literal magic, he’s pretty simple once you learn him. Instead, I’m going to talk about the ridiculous spike in difficulty that happens in the Major Circuit title bout against one Bald Bull. Bald Bull throws punches at random that you can’t hope to learn how to block and dodge on your first playthrough. Bald Bull has an endless series of ramming punches that you need to learn very specific timing in order to stop, or else let yourself get hit by it so you can go back to the vague pattern that he does have. Bald Bull is everything wrong with the back half of this game and why I grew to loathe it as much as I do. I want to preface my rant by saying that part of this is definitely me. I’m terrible at video games and the setup I was playing with isn’t the setup Punch-Out was designed with. I have a great deal of inconsistent input lag to deal with playing on a rerelease on the WiiU on an HD TV vs. a NES on a CRT as the game was designed with in mind.
Here’s the thing about that though. I’ve played the original Punch-Out!! on original hardware on a CRT even. And I don’t believe the controls are tight enough to justify this kind of game. The dodging and especially blocking has always felt a little too slow and unresponsive in my opinion. I don’t feel like my timing ever really matters because the same timing in the same scenario has often produced random results. The Bald Bull fight is a perfect example of this. Bald Bull’s ramming punches, the ‘Bull Charge’ has a brief moment where you can counter it and get an easy knockdown. I have done the counter timing the exact same way dozens of times on various versions with maybe a 30% success rate. It might be aging, it might be me being slightly off, but the frequency with which it happens leads me to believe that it’s an issue with the tightness of this game.
Furthermore, I don’t agree with artificially skewed difficulty in any sense. I feel a lot of NES game have aged very poorly because of how their difficulty is increased to justify purchase, as without difficulty, many of them are roughly 1-3 hours long and could be beaten by rental. And I get that, totally. I just don’t like how it has endured as some sort of standard for how games should be in terms of difficulty. I don’t enjoy the way a lot of classic games also spike in difficulty, especially when they had a fair sense of progression up to that point. It doesn’t feel fun or rewarding to me to play a game with this kind of skewed difficulty. Though that’s definitely me being a younger gamer who grew up spoiled on easier games, so I don’t begrudge you for feeling like I’m just whining or if you disagree with me.
But really, all of this would be ignorable if I was having any amount of fun with the game. I mean, I don’t necessarily like the way Platinum Studios makes games but I still have a ton of fun with Bayonetta. And this is the issue. I don’t have fun with the original Punch-Out!! It feels like kind of a slog to get through. I can’t fully put my finger on why that is, just ‘not having fun’ is something that’s hard to describe in detail. But that’s what I’ve felt about it for years now. I don’t enjoy this game and quite honestly I’m glad to have beaten it so I never have to play it again.
Look, I’m not the person to ask about Punch-Out!! clearly. Lots of people love this game and I’m not trying to dissuade you from playing it if you haven’t already. Personally, I’d look towards the Wii reboot myself, as I feel like it captures the basic essence of this game while being fairer and more fun. But if you’d like to check this one out, go ahead. You’ll probably enjoy it even if I didn’t. I hope you enjoyed my look at Punch-Out!! Featuring Mr. Dream, and we’ll be back next time with a game that may or may not be a dating sim, KARAKARA.
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