 Hey thanks to Travis for requesting this one, here's kind of an oddball game titled Young Merlin. It's a top-down adventure style game that obviously as you can see stands out as something unique because of its unusual visual style. The western cartoony art style almost reminds me of the Zelda CD-i games in a way, and the darker richer colors using a more basic color palette almost makes this look like a Genesis game. It's a far cry from most other adventure style games of the time, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. The reason Young Merlin looks so different is because the game was developed in America as opposed to the usual Japanese developers like Squaresoft or Enix. Westwood Studios made this one, the same Westwood Studios responsible for PC games like Lands of Lore, IA the Beholder, and the Command and Concord games. And in fact, you know what? That's what Young Merlin looks like, an early 90s PC game. It's actually kind of impressive they were able to get the colors, artwork, and animation like this. It's definitely different for a console game. So how does Young Merlin play? It's initially laid out really well. Playing is intuitive and easy to figure out, and I'm willing to bet if you play this one within the first 30 minutes you'll be like, where did this game come from? It's fantastic! But, as you'll find out as you keep plugging further along into the game, Young Merlin has some serious flaws that keep it from being on the level of stuff like Illusion of Gaia or Soul Blazer or even Brain Lord. To sum up the gameplay, you collect items that you assign to either the Y or B buttons. The Y button is for items like potions, and B is for attack spells and such. You find these items, you dump them into the river, and they come out as something else. You start out with your attack as this star projectile thing, and you accumulate various other spells along the way. For the items, you can use the L and R button to cycle through, or you can press select and bring up a Zelda-like item table to select from. You can also collect these shamrocks, and once you get 12 of them, they enable a kind of magic bonus like temporary invincibility. You explore areas finding new items that enable you to access new areas, stuff that allows you to spring jump over a river, for example, or to inflate you like a balloon so you can float up to ledges. What, suddenly I'm playing Wario Land 4? The funniest item to get is the comb, which allows you to brush your hair and stagger enemies with your handsome good looks. Now that's funny. I like how straight forward this layout is, it's super easy to figure out right from the first minute of the game, but it's not perfect. For example, when you collect enough stuff, it's annoying to have to cycle through each item one at a time, and equally annoying to have to open up the menu every time to flip to a different item. It's the same way with attack, sometimes you have to use one attack on a boss, pause the game, and flip to another attack, then pause the game again, back and forth. It gets old. So yeah, you go around destroying the usual assortment of enemies until you get to the odd boss fight here and there, but Young Merlin is unusually forgiving. There's essentially unlimited lives here, and when you die, you start not too far from where you died. Okay, that's cool. Why is this game so forgiving though? I think the answer to that is because of how the game is structured, and that is Young Merlin's biggest flaw. This game might as well be called Young Merlin the Delivery Boy, because that's all you freaking do in this game. This fairy's buddy gets kidnapped, so you have to go fetch a certain weapon from a mine and navigate this repetitive maze. This wizard apparently locked himself out of his house, so you have to navigate another repetitive maze to find his house key. And you wander around and around and around and around the world map. The worst however are these minecart mazes. The minecart controls are absolutely terrible, and I'm willing to bet this is when most people are willing to give up on this game. Make one wrong turn, you crash, and you have to start all over. It sucks. But you know, I'm several minutes into a video about an adventure game, and I haven't once mentioned the story. That's kind of weird, right? Well, there's not much to talk about. Merlin acquires magic from another wizard to impress a girl's dad so he can date said girl. That's pretty much it. What's odd here is that everything is told in pictures in this game. There's no dialogue. Well, unless you count the password system. And no, the lady of the lake here isn't actually saying... malllllll 0 urrrrrr That brings me to the sound design, which like the rest of the game has its good points, its bad points, and its laugh out loud points. The good is the music, which fits young Merlin's world really well without sounding like any other 16-bit game. The bad are the sound effects, which are jarring and irritating and just sound really cheap. But what's hilarious here are, the voice effects. Uh, what? Did you learn how to speak English from the guys in Star Fox? Am I talking to Scooby Doo? What the hell is that? So yeah, Young Merlin is a little bit of everything. It has some really good aspects, it has lots of bad aspects, and it has certain stuff that leave you incredulous and make you laugh out loud. For as many flaws as Young Merlin has, I don't think it's irredeemable, I just think it's kind of annoying. If you want to get through this game, you have to take the bad with the good. Ultimately, this game boils down to what you'd be comparing it to. For example, yes, I would much rather play this instead of Lagoon or Lord of the Rings Volume 1, for example, but no, I would not put this ahead of stuff like Twisted Tales of Spike McFane or Brain Lord. Young Merlin is certainly promising, but ultimately disappointing.