 It was a confusing time to be a fledgling gamer back in the late 80s and early 90s. You could be talking to someone and then they'd ask you, Hey man, have you played Willow? Oh, you mean that sweet-ass arcade platformer where you hop around zapping stuff left and right and then you play as Mad Mart again and slice everything to shreds and it follows the movie and everything? Nah man, I mean the other Willow. Oh, you mean the one made for Commodore 64, Amiga and all those other computer systems that's nothing but a bunch of minigames? Nah man, the other other Willow. Oh, the NES game. Yeah, even though all three of these games were simply called Willow, they're all totally different. I've talked about the Capcom arcade game in a separate video, so let's tackle the Capcom NES game, which is in fact completely different as you can see. It's a top-down screen-to-screen action RPG complete with a leveling system and equipable swords, armor, magic and all that good stuff. I know at first glance the easy comparison right away is to the original Legend of Zelda and yeah, the combat's a bit similar and you follow set paths to move across a huge map one screen at a time. But Zelda is a bit more dungeon-heavy with a fair share of puzzles and riddles and all that and Willow does have a few dungeons, but it's a lot closer to Crystallis, with a lot of combat happening on the world map, complete with an experience and leveling system. You use the B button to attack with your sword, hold down a direction on the D-pad while pressing B and you'll do a jab. Otherwise, just pressing B by itself will do a big, slow swing, which would make sense since Willow is, you know, a little guy, and this sword, it looks pretty huge. But as you level up, his swing speeds up and it becomes a pretty effective attack, so that's a nice touch. You do this with each new sword that you find as well, so there's always an incentive to fight enemies instead of just skipping past them. I will say the slow sword makes the hit detection a little clumsy at first, but it's definitely not game-breaking or anything. The A button uses magic, which is allotted by MP that you can see in the upper left. You can obtain fire, lightning, acorns that turn enemies to stone, and other fun stuff. The way combat works is through random battles that appear as you move to a new screen, just take out whatever's in your way and move on. But what's convenient here is that if you don't like the hand that you're dealt, you can just nope out of the screen, back out, and come back, and roll the dice again, so to speak. I also appreciate the user interface. It's very clean-looking and easy to use, and you can easily see how much experience you need to get to the next level just by pressing Start. And you can see how easy it is to equip all your swords, shield, and magic and all that, and yeah, as far as that kind of stuff goes, Willow is just the bare essentials. But hey, if the game executes the basics well, then that's totally fine. Better that than over-complicating things with slow, cumbersome menus like you might find in other 8-bit RPGs. Willow for NES does have its share of drawbacks, however. Like, when you die, you continue at the last level you reached. I mean, ultimately, that's fine. You should pay a price because, you know, you died. But it's one of those things that people might not be used to from older games like this, so I gotta at least point it out. The biggest drawback for me personally is that there's not really any healing items, at least not really. There's nothing you can carry with you or use in between combat. There are some dungeons that have chests that'll give you some HP, but there's maybe one per dungeon. Otherwise, you can only heal and replenish magic in villages, at least until toward the end of the game when you do get a healing spell. I should also mention that this game has a password system instead of a battery save, and it's 18 characters long. Ugh. I should also mention that the story here does not follow the movie. It's just kind of like, hey, here's the characters from Willow doing Willow things in a Willow-ish environment with Willow-y music and all that. Ultimately, it has to do with turning the messenger from the spirit earth back into a human being, and I guess Willow has to try and change her back himself. And Willow's also kind of a badass in this game, a sword-slinging sorcerer that's actually competent and stuff. And that's totally fine, but it makes me wonder if Capcom was in the middle of developing this game anyway and just decided to attach Willow to it out of nowhere. Still, they really did a fantastic job working in the characters and making the presentation here look really sharp, not just with all the different familiar people showing up, but with the settings themselves showing wind blowing through the grass, a bridge swaying, the earth shaking. I mean, it's clear that a lot of effort went into this game. That's also made clear through the soundtrack, and I've said it for years. One major thing that makes heavy exploration games and long playthroughs more than the some other parts is a good soundtrack, and that's one big part of why it kept coming back to this game. I kept getting the music from this game stuck in my head. So yeah, Willow for NES is easily one of the very best licensed games on the system, and it's a pretty dang good action RPG too. Nah, it's not going to touch stuff like Crystallis or FaZanadu. Those games have a little more depth to them, plus Willow doesn't really offer that much of a challenge, but still, this game is a surprise to me. It's funny when you think of licensed stuff that has more than one good game attached to it, you'll usually think of cartoony stuff like Ninja Turtles or science fiction craziness like Terminator 2 or Aliens or X-Men or whatever. I wouldn't have guessed that Willow, of all things, spawned two completely different, yet very good games. You really can't go wrong with either game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.