Developed/Published by: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems / Nintendo
Released: 05/10/1984
Completed: 18/01/2024
Completion: Saw all the levels (there’s only three.)
I’m not sure I can think of a company as venerated as Nintendo. A company that’s ultimately considered peerless–a promise of reliability, of quality, but with a mystique that somehow makes it all impossible to duplicate. While it’s made mistakes, they’ve always been mistakes that only Nintendo could have made. We might buy Apple products, or use Google, but even if we liked what they did at one point, we’re by now tired of the greed, the privacy violations, the churn of samey products, the enshittification. It’s hard to tell anyone apart. But not Nintendo. They stand alone.
Which I suppose is why it’s nice to go back and play these old games and see that just like everyone else Nintendo basically has no idea what they’re fucking doing. I mean, this. Devil World. Made with the gay abandon that only Asian developers can have about western religious iconography, it takes Pac-Man (sort of, more on that in a minute) and throws in random auto-scrolling and the need to collect crosses and bibles to survive while the devil dances at the top of the screen like he's in Haxan. It’s textbook weird and I’m sure it’s been in all sorts of Angry Video Game Nerd or Seanbaby-type videos but I’m not looking them up and neither should you.
There’s two things that are crazy about this. One, it’s that it’s apparently the first Famicom game that Shigeru Miyamoto directed. It’s a pretty early original title for the system (outside of sports titles) and it strikes me to what extent that even after Donkey Kong Miyamoto was still finding his feet as a designer. In fact, as I subscribe to the theory that Super Mario Bros. is more heavily based on Pac-Land than Miyamoto might admit (“sky colour” my arse) I wonder how much Donkey Kong was inspired by Space Panic, the proto-platformer, and Miyamoto simply “hit” on the tweaks that would make it eternal as he would do with Pac-Land. Here… he is not successful. In fact, the concept just feels sort of… unfinished. Half-arsed.
To put it in more detail: On the first stage of Devil World, you are navigating a fairly small wrap-around maze (a la Flicky) but one that moves in a random* cardinal direction for a random* amount of time, meaning you can get squished between walls and the edge of the screen. There are monsters that move around the maze (but who don’t seem especially bothered about chasing you, at least to begin with) who kill you on touch, but you can kill those by collecting a cross and firing a fireball at them. The cross, also, is the only way to collect the dots around the maze. It runs out after a set amount of time and then you have to collect another (though there’s a bunch around the level, and they don’t run out.)
*There may be some system to this, but I never worked it out.
On the second stage, you’re still avoiding the monsters and trying not to get squished, but you’re collecting four bibles and taking them back to the central “seal” (think the central ghost box from Pac-Man) to get to the next level.
The third stage is a bonus level with no enemies where you’re trying to collect six bonus boxes before time is up. The level is still scrolling randomly, but there’s some arrows in the level that… allow you to move the direction? Maybe?
Ultimately… none of this works. The random level movement and wall squishes feel, well, random. Having to collect the cross to pick up dots feels arbitrary, and the bible collection is sort of… pointlessly easy? And it’s all rather slow and unresponsive.
It’s possible that these were Miyamoto’s attempts to “level-up” the maze chase game the way adding jumping created the platformer and then when it didn’t work, well… the game had to come out. But maybe it’s also the fault of the second crazy thing about Devil World. Rather absurdly the game’s other designer, Takashi Tezuka, had never heard of Pac-Man. Doesn’t seem like the best foot to get off on when you’re, you know… cloning Pac-Man, to be honest.
Devil World is one of those examples of a game where some people tried something to make something already good better, and everything they did made it significantly worse. Wait… they enshittified Pac-Man… Nintendo aren’t different at all!!!!
Will I ever play it again? It simply isn’t worth the time.
Final Thought: I was honestly very surprised to discover that this was actually released in Europe in mid-1987 despite being not released in the US due to the ol’ religious iconography. Rough for the weans who got a copy of this that late in the game.
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