 When it comes to top-down adventure games, most of us are used to sword and sorcery fantasy type stuff. But in Star Tropics, you play as Mike Jones. Who? Mike Jones, who's visiting his uncle Steve, a famous archaeologist. Only he's gone missing because he's been kidnapped by aliens, so we gotta find him by going through mazes, defeating monsters, and finding out information from talking animals. Oh, and you're a quote-unquote ace pitcher, so naturally you're given a yo-yo to fight enemies with. What? Well, Star Tropics is a bit more science fiction than fantasy. However, while the story is unique for the 8-bit adventure genre, everything else is pretty much what you'd expect. There's the familiar overworld view, and the dungeon or town view. There's puzzles. There's dungeons. There's the usual array of enemies. There's the heart meter. There's the heart containers to increase your heart meter. There's special items. You get the idea. It's all borrowing elements from Dragon Warrior, and of course from Legend of Zelda and Zelda II to a certain extent. I mean, the file select screen here is exactly the same as Legend of Zelda, which is odd. Star Tropics does have one notable unique puzzle, however, where the game instructs you to take a flyer that came packaged with the game and soak it in water to reveal a code. Now, that's cool. However, I can't imagine how mad I'd be if I rented this game and got that far and wasn't able to do that. But yeah, while this game looks very similar to games like Legend of Zelda, it's much more linear. Point A to point B. Anyway, the action here is top-down adventure-style stuff, where you can move in four directions. Unlike Legend of Zelda, you can jump, however, so that's nice. One odd aspect is that you have to turn to face the direction you want to move before you actually move. That's kind of annoying at first, but you get used to it. The structure here is similar to later games like Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia, where you either beat all the enemies to progress, or you have to solve a puzzle. That brings me to one flaw in Star Tropics. This game is pretty hard. Once you get to about level 5 or so, it picks up big time. And the last couple levels, woof. The game does auto-save, however, so if you die, you just go back to the beginning of the dungeon, so that's useful, and no Zelda 2-type crap here. Another aspect of Star Tropics that people may not like is that this is one of those games where you have to talk to everyone to progress. Every single NPC, even if they have absolutely nothing to say. But on the off chance you miss someone, you'll be stuck. This doesn't bother me that much, because I'm one of those detail freaks when I play games like this, I have to go everywhere and talk to everyone anyway, but I can see why this would be annoying. Despite those two flaws though, Star Tropics is a very good game, and one of my favorite things about it is the music. You spend a lot of time in dungeons fighting monsters in this game, and it would have been the game's death now, had the music been annoying. Thankfully though, it's refreshingly cheerful. It's one of those soundtracks where you hear just a little bit, and you immediately know it's Star Tropics, nothing else on the NES sounds quite like this game. Anyway, yes, Star Tropics is worth playing today, and no, it's not just tropical Zelda. Yes, it's a lot more linear, yes it's really hard, and yes it's easy to get stuck in the story if you forget to talk to someone. But the game looks and sounds great, and the story especially is something different. It's pretty funny at times, if it's not really effing weird. Star Tropics did get a sequel, Star Tropics 2's Zelda's Revenge, but I have not played that one. But yeah, if you haven't played the first Star Tropics, get the bananas out of your ears and go check it out, it's on the Wii Virtual Console.