There was a time when Japan was the center of game development. We take for granted how the digital age has, in a sense, shrunk the planet. I mean, we now live in a time where getting the next Yakuza or EDF game from Japan is not a matter of if, but when! And that's wonderful! Persona in Smash, what?! "Whaaaat?!" And despite the problems we had with Dragon Quest XI, it's awesome the world got Dragon Quest XI! But this wasn't always the case; It's bad enough to have to wait for games to come to the West from Japan, and it's a huge bummer when we never get them, but sometimes, what we got instead was even worse than nothing at all. There are a lot of examples of the American or PAL region versions of Japanese games being the worst version of the game. And I ain't talkin' about censorship, this is bigger than religious and cultural differences: This is about actual good games being changed into bad ones. And one of the worst offenders is also one of Japan's most notorious: Konami. This is Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and welcome to How the West was Worse: Konami Edition. But first, this video was sponsored by Squarespace! You can start your free Squarespace trial today by going to Squarespace.com/stopskeletons and using the offer code 'STOPSKELETONS' to get 10% off your first purchase. That's Squarespace.com/stopskeletons and the offer code 'STOPSKELETONS' Stick around at the end of the episode to hear more about how we used Squarespace to talk about the best video game dogs! [BARK!] Metal Gear is not only one of Konami's best franchises, it's one of the most celebrated franchises of all time. ... or at least it was, but before that whole mess, and even before Hideo Kojima conquered the world with Metal Gear Solid in 1998, there were the humble beginnings on the MSX in 1987. The original Metal Gear is a classic and, despite some rough edges, is still very playable today. Its stealth gameplay is simple and great, its story is full of memorable moments, and it's all done in a mostly-open world! A complete revelation at the time, it's easy to see why it was successful on the MSX, despite the system's limited reach outside of Japan. It even was localized for the European market, making it one of the few games on our list that DID see some play in the West. But if you're an American, and of... a certain age, then this is not your Metal Gear, THIS is your Metal Gear. The NES version of Metal Gear is a very, very loose adaptation of the MSX original, and I loved this game, I really did when I was a kid! And it was like nothing else on the system at the time! Open world, stealth gameplay, fantastic music, and a pretty adult story for the time! I mean I was, like, six, so... ... I dunno, it felt pretty adult. It was one of my favorite NES games, despite having HUGE problems, the most glaring of which being a general lack of care dedicated to enemy placement. It's far too easy to walk onto a screen and be spotted immediately. This is made mostly okay because alerts don't carry between screens, but this undermines the sneaking mechanic that is the central draw of the whole dang game! MSX Metal Gear, on the other hand, most screens are constructed in a way where that's not possible. Enemy placement will even be different depending on which direction you enter from. And if you get spotted, you can't just leave the screen and reset! There's also a general lack of direction in NES Metal Gear. It's to this game's credit that it has an almost original new layout, but the added sections are confusing and very poorly made. As a kid, it never occurred to me to walk to the back of this random truck to get captured, and there are no official mentions in the actual game of how to get through the jungle mazes. Also, there are no Metal Gears in Metal Gear, only a giant computer! However, we got a LEGENDARY English translation, and an instruction book with a story that has literally nothing to do with the game! We count these as positives. Still, we weren't the only ones subjected to Metal Gear sloppy seconds: This version was also released in Japan, which I can't imagine was an easy sell. The added intro was supposed to be a sort of extra bonus level to entice Japanese players who had already played the MSX game, but why play a poor copy when you got access to the real thing?! Despite all this, us yanks didn't know the difference, and NES Metal Gear was a hit, which led to Konami making a sequel two years later: 1990's Snake's Revenge. In many ways, this is a vast improvement over NES Metal Gear, if you look at these two games in a vacuum. It's also pretty faithful to the MSX original when you look at the gameplay. There's even Metal Gears in this version, even if "Metal Gear" isn't anywhere in the title. I was a big fan of Metal Gear, and an even bigger fan of Snake's Revenge, this was one of my favorite games as a kid, and it was basically because it was Metal Gear, but separated into large levels instead of a sprawling, poorly constructed open world. Plus, the guard placement had been improved, but not totally fixed, and it had another amazing soundtrack! But... despite that, it's... ... it's- it's- it's- it's not- not good. It's not a good game. Seriously, I wanted to come here and say "Snake's Revenge is not as bad as people say it is", but... ... I can't. It's got lame platforming sequences, horrible side-scrolling segments, some pretty weak and ball-bustingly hard bosses, and the same cheap deathtraps from the first game. On top of that, why am I playing as a super-roided Contra reject with the tallest butt I've ever seen? Or are those supposed to be some spare abs on his back? What is happening?! Y'know, there's a reason this game never came out in Japan. Needless to say, this game was made without Kojima's involvement whatsoever. Which brings us to the actual sequel to Metal Gear, the Japanese-only Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, also for the MSX. Apparently, Kojima wasn't even planning on making a sequel for Metal Gear until a developer from Snake's Revenge approached Kojima and said that he needed to make the real Metal Gear 2. So in a way, Snake's Revenge is responsible for the Metal Gear franchise? ... all I know is not only is Snake's Revenge a weak game on its own, there's just absolutely no comparison to Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, and it's an absolute tragedy the West never got to see it in its time. Because while Snake's Revenge was at least a faithful ode to Metal Gear's gameplay, Metal Gear 2 is a full-blown evolution, it's so different from Snake's Revenge that it's a struggle to compare the two! Just about everything from the MSX Metal Gear is expanded and iterated on, with smarter guards, a larger world, and a story experience that feels like a movie. Metal Gear 2 is the lineage of what Metal Gear Solid would become. I'm glad the world would eventually get to experience this game with the release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, even if it took 16 years. And speaking of Metal Gear Solid, let's fast-forward to 1998, when the Metal Gear franchise became a global phenomenon! This time the West actually got a slightly better version of Japanese Metal Gear Solid: Despite releasing less than two months apart, the North American version had a little more content and a few gameplay tweaks, like additional difficulty settings, and the absolutely essential Tuxedo Snake! To make up for this, Japanese players got the US version plus even more extras, like a crapton of VR missions and a full first-person mode, re-released to them as 1999's Metal Gear Solid: Integral. The North American and PAL regions got VR Missions instead. This is actually just a stand-alone release of the extra VR missions disc from Integral. A consolation prize, sure, but 300 new VR missions is a decent amount of game, though I really wish I could have got to play Metal Gear Solid in the first person on the PS1! Sounds like an absolutely garbage and amazing way to play that game! By the way, PAL region got the rawest deal: In PAL, the VR Missions was a data disc, meaning you had to have the original game to even play it, and because of this, there was no backwards compatibility on the PS2 and PS3. And while the world would get Integral as a PC port in 2000, the Psycho Mantis fight is shortened because the PC doesn't have a memory card for him to mind-read, though it would be funny if he searched your hard drive. "So, you pirated Castlevania?" Aaagh! Gah! Phew... Gah!! It's another example of why the West was worse! Our next franchise is Castlevania, another huge pillar of Konami's game empire, and actually, the West, specifically North America, had it pretty good! For example, you might have known that the Japanese name for Castlevania was "Akumajō Dracula", but did you know that there are five distinct games just called "Akumajō Dracula"? ... which must have been hell for Japanese consumers. And by the way, in the PAL region there are four distinct games just called "Castlevania". Yeah, for some reason, in Europe Circle of the Moon and Lament of Innocence were just called "Castlevania". But Europe was actually lucky enough to get an early Castlevania entry: 1987's Vampire Killer for the MSX. This is a fascinating and weird game that is also technically the first time an iteration of the Castlevania series left Japan. It's visually very similar to the NES Castlevania, but actually plays closer to Simon's Quest. Levels are more open world, with items to find and equipment to buy. It's stupid hard though, and there are no continues. It's not a great game, but it's a really interesting early take on the series, one that hardcore Castlevania fans should definitely check out! Though it did technically come to the West, so it's not in the spirit of this video. Vampire Killer is an outlier; most Castlevania games came to North America. There were a handful of differences between versions though: The Japanese version of Simon's Quest was released on the Famicom Disk System, and featured battery-backup saves, but horrendously long load times, and the NES passwords actually saved more of your inventory. Castlevania III for the Famicom had a more advanced sound chip, which gave the music a bigger but not necessarily better sound, at least in my opinion. However, the North American version has better aesthetics overall, so I'd call that particular case a wash, even if Sypha is, for some reason, a man. Everybody got Castlevania Adventure, so we can all share that misery together, and though we missed the Famicom version of Kid Dracula, we got the far superior Game Boy version in '93. However, 1993 is when things took a turn for the worse: First off, the original Castlevania got a massive remake on the Sharp 68000, which would see release in the West as Castlevania Chronicles the next decade. And, weirdly enough, the original Castlevania saw a Famicom cartridge re-release in '93, which featured an Easy Mode: No knockback, much weaker enemies, and you keep your subweapons and multiplier bonuses after death! It feels more like a ROM hack than an official Konami product, it's wild this thing is real! The real loss in the Castlevania franchise, however, was the Japanese-only Rondo of Blood. Released in '93 for the Super CD PC Engine, a.k.a. the Turbo Duo, it's probably the best Vintagevania ever, though my heart will always belong to Dracula's Curse and Castlevania IV. Rondo of Blood was a gorgeous and epic evolution of the Castlevania formula, but we never got that. Instead, two years later, as the Super Nintendo was being phased out, Konami graced us with a... port? ... reimagining? I dunno what to call it, but we got Castlevania: Dracula X instead. While it's a poor, though not terrible, Castlevania game, it's a very poor consolation for Rondo of Blood. It took a few things from Rondo, like the ability to jump on and off stairs, which was actually a big deal, alternate levels, and subweapons that drop behind you when you pick up new ones, which were welcome additions to the Castlevania formula. Again, it's not a terrible game, but it also doesn't execute these additions all that well. The alternate levels are literally halved, Maria is in the game but not as a playable character, overall there's just way less game here, and it doesn't play that much better either. Blinking time is way down, bats and Medusa heads can hit you twice, and you can't strike a pose at the end of stages, It's the Snake's Revenge of the Castlevania games: Weak in its own right, but trash when compared to what Japan got instead. We would eventually get Rondo on the PSP in 2007, and most recently on the Castlevania Requiem for the PlayStation 4, bundled with its canonical sequel, Symphony of the Night. Though they "fixed" the voice acting in Symphony of the Night in these versions. An improvement? I'll let you be the judge. "Ha! Mankind. A cesspit of hatred and lies!" But the answer is no, this is already perfect. [airhorns]
"WHAT-WHAT-WHAT-WHAT IS MAN?!" GRACE: And now, a scheduled Goemon interlude. Only five Goemon games were released outside of Japan. Out of, like... thirty? Man... ... that sucks. He's a champion of the people. Good luck, Goemon. DEREK: And next, it's Contra! ... oh, Contra. Contra is another giant mess for Konami, and of course, the West got the shaft almost throughout the entire series. While Castlevania and Metal Gear have their big examples, Contra's really just all over the place, so strap in! Of course, we gotta start with the first one: Contra originated in the arcades, but was soon ported to the Famicom and NES. Contra for the Famicom had a special chip inside of it that allowed the game to have a ton of features that never made it over to the worldwide release: The Japanese version had some cool graphical flourishes, a map, cutscenes and even a secret ending! Because Konami didn't want to produce that special chip for the overseas market, the North American version of Contra is way stripped down, though we did get the arguably superior additions of Mad Dog and Scorpion as codenames for Billy and Lance. PAL's Contra, on the other hand, went entirely off the deep end: Because of restrictions on violence in many parts of Europe and Australia, Konami decided to just scrap whatever cheese they had goin' on with Mad Dog, and just made everybody robots and called the game "Probotector". See? All better now! "Probotector" may sound like a weird name, but it's better than the ZX and C64 versions, which, no joke, were called "Gryzor"! However, Konami did make an MSX port of Contra that only came out in Japan, and of course, we need to talk about it because... c'mon, this is Stop Skeletons From Fighting, baby. Like Vampire Killer, this version of Contra is different enough that hardcore fans should definitely check it out! MSX Contra is basically the NES port we all know and love, except once you beat the alien heart, the game keeps going with eleven new levels! But it's a compromised version of Contra, that is single-player only, with no spread gun, screens instead of scrolling levels, and oh yeah, no continues. And the extra levels aren't anything to get too excited about, actually. It's maybe not a shame that it didn't ever leave Japan, but six-year-old me would have lost his damn mind if he had known about this version! Because of Konami's decision to rebrand Contra as Probotector in the PAL regions, and the general process of localization to North America, there are lots of minor differences between different versions of Contra games, but some of them are pretty hilarious! Instead of "Super C", PAL got "Probotector II: Return of the Evil Forces"! Now, I grew up with Contra so I'm a little bias, I think that's the cooler name, but man, "Probotector" is a pretty dumb and amazing name too! The bigger problem with Contra is that it's the inverse of Metal Gear and Castlevania: The West, and almost exclusively North America, got exclusive Contra games! Except they were the worst Contra games! Exhibit A: Contra Force. This stain on the Contra legacy was only released in the US. It originally wasn't even gonna be a Contra game, and then was gonna be Contra III before Contra III was Contra III, because for a hot minute, Contra III was gonna be Contra IV. Originally to be released in Japan as Arc Hound, it was cancelled and then dumped onto the US for some reason. Konami was literally dumping their garbage on us, because this game is terrible! It runs like crap, is a huge departure from the rest of the series gameplay-wise, and it came after arguably the greatest Contra game of all time. Contra III: The Alien Wars, by the way, has very minor differences between the various versions, so it's not really a part of How the West was Worse. But while I've always had a soft spot for III, I know some people are out there for Hard Corps on the Genesis, which I always thought was just a little too damn hard for its own good. But it turns out, it's because I was playing a much worse version! The Japanese version of Hard Corps features a life gauge instead of instant death, and unlimited continues! The North American version has no such life bar, and only five continues, which is slightly easier than the PAL region's four continues. But playing the Japanese version, I can finally see why people hold this game up so high! Hard Corps IS a good Contra game, it's just that it never got a chance to show its best self in the West. It's also the second and last game in the PAL region to be called just Probotector. In 1997, PAL would finally join the rest of the world with the Contra name, however, that game happens to be Contra: Legacy of War. Poor guys. Now we're truly getting into How the West was Worse, because the three worst Contra games only came to the West, and two of those only came to North America. Legacy of War was Contra's big third-dimension debut, and I do mean that literally. It even shipped with 3D glasses! And hey, if you have your 3D glasses, put them on now! Get a load of this!! Wow! Who thought this was a good idea?! Produced by Appaloosa Interactive, a Hungarian-owned studio best known for Ecco the Dolphin, Legacy of War was an early 3D title, so it's understandable that some mistakes were made. But there's no excuse for the second Appaloosa-developed title, C: The Contra Adventure, being even worse. It gets bonus points for having the blandest title in the franchise, but it attempts to rectify Legacy of War's mistakes by reverting to 2,5D run-and-gun stages, but it's just so listless and boring! Contra Force was made by Japanese and dumped on America. C: The Contra Adventure was made by Europeans, and dumped here as well. Y'know, maybe it's fair that PAL didn't get Contra 4. ... nah, I'm just kidding. But thankfully, everyone got Neo Contra and Contra: Shattered Soldier, and now... ... no-one gets Contra games! Konami doesn't even make 'em anymore! No-one gets 'em! ... so all's well that ends well, I guess. Konami's been makin' games... ... WAS making games... for several decades, and these sorts of practices have mostly vanished! When Castlevania Requiem was released, it received a worldwide release date! This is where we are today! No more staggered release dates between regions, well... far fewer anyway. We called this video Why the West was Worse because I liked the title, and because the 80's and 90's were kind of the Wild West for video games. And I got more ideas for this, so... ... Yippee ki-yay, m**********s! Let us know if you liked this format! I did a swear! GRACE: You did it!
DEREK: I did a s- I did a swear! Hey ma! GRACE: Wow, all grown up! This video was sponsored by Squarespace, they have an all-in one platform: No plugins, no updates, no patches EVER, which makes it super easy for the Hot Dog Gamer to add pictures of his favorite video game dogs to his website, Nochumpzone.com! They also have 24/7, 365-day support just in case you're havin' trouble making your dog reviews look doggin' good! You can start your free Squarespace trial today by going to Squarespace.com/stopskeletons, using the code 'STOPSKELETONS' to get 10% off your first purchase. That's Squarespace.com/stopskeletons.
I somehow never knew about the Japanese Contra being better than the US version. Holy shit, those animated backgrounds would have looked fantastic in a 90s NES title, much less one from 1987.