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The Monkey King: The Legend Begins (Wii) By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman I’ve never had a game just roll over and die on me that way that The Monkey King: The Legend Begins did. If The Monkey King was a girl I was pursuing, I’d almost be angry with it for “giving it to me” so easily. To say that the game is easy is a total understatement.
The game plays as a typical scrolling shooter. You guide Sun Wukong (the Monkey King) or his female counterpart Mei-Mei (who isn’t related to any character in the classic Chinese story, Journey to the West) along 6 levels in an effort to defeat the forces of Hell. The story very loosely follows the events of Journey to the West, but it’s more like a 4Kids translation of such, at best. The gameplay can be described as standard. There’s the standard mechanic of boosting Sun Wukong’s/Mei-Mei’s fire power with “POW” containers. You have special attacks with limited ammo in the form of the standard shmup bombs or crush (clear the screen of all minor enemies) weapons. All the baddies and bosses do the standard shmup “tricks” such as: shooting in formation then scattering, doing kamikaze dives into you, or just standing there while you lay their face to waste (this one happens a lot).
The only new innovation to this game is the “tilt” function. By tilting the Wiimote left or right you can drastically change the speed at which the game is scrolling. This helps if you’re looking to farm life or POW containers and need to shoot down a few stray, stubborn enemies. The function is also useful for potential speed runs or other challenge runs (low POW level completion) in that you can speed up and avoid all the unnecessary parts (basically the entire game, excluding the bosses).
It’s really hard for me to rate the graphics in this game or even make a fair commentary about them. The graphics are technically on par with a recent gen (PS2, Gamecube, Xbox, etc) shooter; however, they’re so poorly designed that they hurt my eyes. I believe this is more a problem with the choice of stylization than with actually programmed graphics, since Shenlong (the sky dragon, not the made up Street Fighter 2 character) looks pretty bad assed in spite of the games poor design. Perhaps, UFO was going for total Chinese immersion in their design, since this game stinks of stuff drawn out by a Chinese artist (while I don’t hate Chinese art, I think their sense of design is a joke). The music and sound effects are overtly generic. All I remember of it is this stupid riff done in a mock pentatonic scale that’s been haunting me at work all day now. If you are going to play this game, I suggest you start up CDs or mp3s that you like before booting up this game. Then again this game only takes about 30 minutes to beat the story mode, so you can feasibly live without the comfort of good music for half an hour. The absolute worst part of this game is the ending. If I lived in the world of The Ring, this game would have dick slapped me in the face through the screen upon beating the last boss. The end consists of a standard “You did it!” dialogue between Sun Wukong and this old monk; and then goes on to a very uneventful GAME OVER in red, no credits, no end song. After which the game immediately takes you back to the title screen, as if it’s one of your younger siblings asking if you want to play yet another round of Memory Cards. While I’m used to the mid 80’s to early 90’s arcade scene where the end of the game was often you breaking the game after beating an uncountable amount of levels, this is just down right insulting. Is it too much to ask that you put the names of everyone who made the game along to some catchy music and maybe even show all the enemies you fought in the game? Apparently, UFO thought it was. They couldn’t even give me a “Thanks for playing” or “Special thanks to you” at the end of the game, which I’ll admit is something I really liked seeing during the credits of the old NES games (I was quite stupid as a child and used to think “How did they know I’d pick this game, that they would have to thank me?”).
As I mentioned before this game is very easy… So easy, that I was able to beat it while piss drunk on two 40 ouncers and didn’t die at all. Veteran shooter fans will go through the game a little apprehensive, they’ll start to wonder if this game is too easy to be true (and it really is). Playing this game is like coming home and finding the sexiest girl (or guy, if you’re a girl or just roll that way) in your bed just asking you to be with them; you’ll sit there wondering why they’re doing this and what the catch is, eventually sleep with them anyway, and realize that they totally suck at sex. Throughout my entire playthrough I kept thinking I was missing something or that the game was just going to get crazy with the difficulty on me out of the blue, but this time what you see really is what you get. The game never got challenging at all, even the boss rush at the end and the final boss were jokes. I’m sure I had killed the last boss before he even got to fire a shot off in my direction.
Normally, this is where I give a score or some arbitrary comparison; however, I’m going to give you a: rent, buy, run suggestion here instead. Despite the fact the game is a little on the weak side, I’d actually suggest that you buy this game. Especially if you’re in the US, since it’s going to $4.99 new at Gamestop. I’d also suggest picking this up if you’re new to shooters and the sight of a Touhou, Treasure or other manic shooter looks too daunting for you to take on. And in the same light, this would make a really good game to play with your toddler or girlfriend that doesn’t game. Your child will feel like a “big kid” for beating a real video game and the game is easy enough for you and your girlfriend to talk about all the crap that’s going wrong in your relationship.
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