 It sure seems like coming up with names for NES games must have been the easiest job ever, like, hey what do we call this one? Well, what's in it? I dunno, some swords and serpents and spiders and giant bats and zombies and nah, we'll just stick with some swords and serpents I guess. Now I know some of you out there are ready to jump down my throat with, well actually there's a perfectly good reason this title is swords and serpents here, it has to do with the obvious fact that the story pertains to blah blah blah, fine whatever. Just to drive the point home further, there's another game on Intellivision with the same name but it's got nothing to do with the NES title. And yeah, the story of Swords and Serpents actually has to do with a serpent that brought terror to this land for hundreds of years, and for a well-to-do folks band together to try and put an end to it, but you gotta navigate a series of gigantic mazes first. Your party consists of Ajax, who's apparently Peter Steele cosplaying as Tarzan, this gal Aron who has the same face as the woman from Law & Order SVU, you got Mask, a thief from the city who's just in it for the money, and a wizard named Iago. The serpent torments his dream, so he's gotta put an end to that nonsense. The thing is though, the game itself never mentions serpents, only dragons. Sure whatever. So all that sounds well and good, but unfortunately it's always a bit of an unenviable task to create a playable 8-bit dungeon crawler for NES, let alone a good one. But Swords and Serpents tries its damnedest. For one thing, this game already has one big advantage over its peers, at least on NES, cos unlike titles like Bard's Tale or Might and Magic, Swords and Serpents was made specifically for the NES. It's not a port, and it shows. The user interface is a little easier to use in the combat, alright, the combat's still kinda slow, but the battles are simple and don't take nearly as long as in other home console games like this. As you can see, you control a party of 4, and to start out with, you get to pick which classes they are between Warrior, Thief and Magician. Warriors have higher strength and can wear heavier armor, thieves lack in strength and defense but are adept at landing critical hits, and magicians have the lowest strength and defense but can cast a ton of spells, including a nifty healing spell that you start with. You can also allocate points to determine stats for each party member, just a simple number value that's automatically generated, and hey, if you don't want to bother with any of this and you just want to play the game, you can have a party automatically picked out and set up for you. You have a total of 16 mazes you have to navigate, and as you might expect from a dungeon crawler, they are long. You could easily spend a ton of time in each, and this playthrough could very likely climb up to 7 or 8 hours. You do have a map you can use in the upper right, but it's the old fog of war mechanic where you can't see anything until you've uncovered it yourself. And even then, this map is a wee bit limited, to say the least, and since these mazes are pretty dang big, what's kinda neat is that the manual, which is 60 pages long by the way, includes a section of several pages so you can draw your own mazes. So hey, the people that made this game figured that anyone that would want to play it would know what they're getting themselves into. The combat is really simple, you run into random battles with the maps switching out for enemy health bars, and you have the option to use a physical attack with the A button, cast a spell with one of your magicians with the B button, or to run away. What's interesting here is that when you press A for an attack you can hold down a button on the D pad to do damage to a certain part of the enemy's body, and the further along you play the more you'll learn where enemy vulnerabilities are. Like I said, this game was specifically made for the NES, and stuff like that is a reason why that's important, because it simplifies the combat while keeping it at least a tiny bit engaging. Another positive is that this game is multiplayer, two up to four players, albeit player one, would be the one navigating the maze, but the other players would be controlling their respective party members, so that's cool. The thing is though, well, this is a dungeon crawler on NES, and it still has a ton of limitations. I already touched on the map system, but the menus here as you might expect are slow and extremely cumbersome. Press select, wait a second, press A, wait a second, press A again. I mean, geez, all I want to do is equip a freaking sword. You also have to discard stuff before equipping, as well as trade stuff between party members. Ugh, it's just so annoying. Another major detriment here is the music, and it's not that bad at all, it's just that there's only a few songs. I mean, come on, really? This is a long ass playthrough, especially for an NES game, and you're only given me just a few songs to listen to the whole time. Also, if you want to play this one in the original cartridge, there is a password system, but you have to input five different passwords to continue your progress, one for each character and one for your overall progress. But it's all pretty pointless since it resets your experience. So yeah, if you're not into 8-bit dungeon crawlers, I don't think swords and serpents will win you over. There's just too much here that hasn't aged well, but if you do like older first-person RPGs like this, then you'll find plenty to enjoy in swords and serpents. I gotta admit, I don't normally like games like this, but I did enjoy some of it, like the simplified combat, I thought the enemies looked cool, and the random battles weren't too grindy. Games like this are obviously made for a specific audience, and well, if you're part of that audience, you'll find a bit to enjoy here, but if you're not part of it, then you should probably avoid this game. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.