327 · Puss 'n Boots: Pero's Great Adventure
Join Pero as he travels through time to defeat the evil Count Gruemon in this platform-hoping, side-scrolling shooter adventure! Visit strange new locales such as the Wild West, Arabia, London, New York and outer space! Meet the denizens of these great places and shoot 'em! Pilot airplanes, submarines and even a hot air balloon!
Mike, Sean and Joe played this one. Pero is the Puss in Boots of Toei's Japanese anime, not the Shrek version we all know, and the game first came out on the Famicom in 1986. Americans got it in 1990, and it shows: a simple side-scroller that never explains itself, with a plot that lives almost entirely in the manual.
What's here
- A fluffy world map. The continents are clouds, Australia looks like a butt, and one stop is labeled Space Wars. That level is a propeller plane flying through our own sky. Liberty is New York, and the New York stage is the inside of a clock.
- A gun, in a cute game. Pero's main weapon is a gun. The boomerang (useful on bosses for its upward arc) and the bombs barely mattered. Nothing dies violently, so the gun feels tone deaf.
- A manual with a big story. Count Grumon hates mice and orders Pero to kill one. Pero befriends it, so Grumon and the wolf scientist Dr. Garigari send him on a time-travel trip, and the Cat Kingdom sends killer cats after him for breaking cat law. None of that shows up in the game, and we couldn't find the time travel either.
- Vehicles that are mostly paint. A submarine, a car, a plane and a hot air balloon appear, but half are sprite swaps. The submarine and balloon sink if you stop holding up, like Flappy Bird.
Why it didn't land
- Almost no resistance. Hits don't push you back, enemies walk their own routes, and Pero shrugs off damage until the bar empties. The boots you collect play no part in the story.
- Very short. Seven stages, each about the length of a Super Mario Bros. level, and you can finish in under 30 minutes. It felt like someone's first game.
- Open doors you can't enter. Some doors work and some don't, and they look the same.
- The final boss. Everything is easy until several figures arrive at once, one touch drains your whole health bar, and you can't hit the one on the left until you deal with the others. Videos we found showed the same fight. Then the Statue of Liberty's crown does something to a celebrating Pero that we won't describe.
Where it might fit
We tried to be generous. It could serve as a first platformer for a very young kid, and it may be the closest the NES gets to a preschool game. Nothing on the box says that, and we still wouldn't pay more than five dollars.
The bottom line
Skip it. Joe voted no, calling it the most functional game that has ever bored him: nothing is wrong except the final boss, but it is one note. Sean voted no too and called it objectively bad. Nobody put it on the Essential Games List.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Pero of storybook fame is caught up in a whirlwind adventure, traveling through time and around the world!
- NES Longplay
- Manual
- Puss N Boots
- Shrek
- Plot
- Count Gruemon, a notorious swine, hated mice with a passion. One day, he discovered a mouse in his castle. Frustrated and irate, Count Gruemon ordered Puss N Boots (Pero) to find and destroy the mouse.
- However, Pero was a kind-hearted cat and had become friends with the mouse, and so, helped the little creature to escape. In a fit of anger, Count Grue-mon, aided by Dr Gari-gari, a fiendish scientist wolf. sent Pero on a perilous time-travel journey around the world and into the past.
- Wait, so they sent him on a time travel vacation as revenge?
- Now, Pero must locate and defeat Count Gruemon and the mad Dr. Garl-gari, and use their Time Machine to get home-or be stuck in the past forever.
- To make matters worse, the Cat Kingdom has sent Killers after Pero because he helped a mouse and thereby violated Cat Kingdom Law. Pero must travel to exotic lands and overcome many hazards, but can he defeat the combined might of the diabolical Count Gruemon, Dr Garl-gari, and the Killers.
- Gameplay
- Weapons
- Gun, Bomb, Boomerang
- The boomerang I get, its cartoony. WTF with the gun?
- Also Missles, Machine Gun, Torpedos with the vehicles
- You switch between weapons by pressing start and then using the d-pad. Why wouldn’t it be select? NOTHING is for select
- Gun, Bomb, Boomerang
- No feedback when hit, theres a small sound, but its like Pero is acting like its no big deal before he just drops dead
- Of course Boots are something you collect
- The West, The Ocean (submarine), Arabia (car), Space Wars (propeller plane, title doesn’t match the setting), London, Liberty (hot air balloon), New York
- The enemies feel like they are avoiding you
- Sub level, boat 3 hits and sharks 1 hit
- Do all submarines drop to the bottom of the ocean if you don’t steer upwards?
- It’s an empty world and I hate when doors are open in buildings and you can’t walk through them
- The boss fights are kind of sudden and intense
- Weapons
- Sequels and spinoffs
- DreamWorks Puss in Boots (2011, DS)
- Christmas Stories: Puss in Boots (Collector's Edition) (2021, Windows, no info)
- American McGee's Grimm: Puss In Boots (2008, Windows)
- Brutal version
- 23-part episodic video game series based upon Grimm's Fairy Tales, designed by American McGee
- Alice video games
- Alice and Alice: Madness Returns. Supposed to be a trilogy, but no third game in sight
- Alice video games
- EGL
- Next week - Rad Racer II
- NEStalgia Byte- (Dragon Ball Z II: The Fury of Lord Freeza) [should drop today or tomorrow in show time]
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Puss in Boots, Perro's Great Adventure. Perro of storybook fame is caught up in a whirlwind adventure, traveling through time and around the world.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. Traveling through time and around the world. First off, is that a known power of Puss in Boots? Probably not. We'll get into it in the plot of why that's happening. Yeah. Well, Perro is Puss in Boots, right? I'm not really sure.
I don't really know what the canonical things about Puss in Boots really are. Well, this is also Puss in Boots instead of Puss in Boots. So it's like... Oh, just N. Puss in Boots. Right, like the letter N. So he's like the cooler version of Puss in Boots. See, I thought it was like going for like the Crash Bandicoot thing where it was like... The N is saying trilogy. N is like this middle initial, like, you know, Puss in Boots. But like you say it fast, like Puss in Boots. Puss Neville Boots. Well, Puss has to be short for something too.
I think it's short for how you refer to a cat. Yeah. Puss evil N. Boots. Okay, so I figured it out. But you still didn't do it at the end. I figured it out. Perro is Puss in Boots in the Japanese Toei cinematic universe. He is named Perro there. So there's Puss in Boots, the folklore. And then there's Perro, the character in the Japanese anime of adaptation of Puss in Boots. Okay. So obvious, right? Yeah. Not that we even needed the answer, but I'm sure you'll take my word for it. I am. Of course, the three of us know Puss in Boots from Shrek.
Right? That's true. I mean, when you think of your choice of Puss in Boots, you're going to think of the Universal or DreamWorks, right, version. Yeah. I mean, I don't think I saw that movie, but I remember it being like, don't forget to go see Puss in Boots at the movie theater. And I was just like, I don't think I'm going to do that. And that's pretty much my exposure to Puss in Boots. Yeah. I never saw the standalone Puss in Boots.
I did see the second Shrek at one point, but I did assume that like Shrek and Donkey, how they are original characters. I thought because he's such a main character, he would Puss in Boots was also an original character to that DreamWorks world. Well, I never knew he was one of the fairy tales. Donkeys are in a lot of like media and culture. Donkeys are real. Yeah. Come on. Get out of here. They don't make waffles for breakfast though.
Parfaits. Sean, if you did want to catch up on some Shrek, specifically Shrek 2, which Joe mentioned that he had seen and I think is the only one or the debut movie for Puss in Boots. I don't think he was in the first one. You'll be pleased to know that you can watch it on Game Boy Advance video. That format that existed for a while where they would shrink down entire TV shows and eventually movies like Shrek 2 onto a Game Boy Advance cartridge. I mean, theoretically, we'll get to that at some point on this podcast if we get to the Game Boy. Don't put that evil on us.
I don't even think those would be the first movies we'd review. I'm sure there were other like just we're going to put the whole movie on a video game. We're going to import it. But all that to say that it's interesting that we're not talking about like Puss in Boots, the public domain entity, if he even is public domain. I didn't check. I think he's like Winnie the Pooh in that regards. But this is the specific, you know, Japanese anime character of Puss in Boots, and it's all based around that. And then that was a Famicom game that came out in like 1986.
And for whatever reason, they finally decided in 1990, four years later, that like, you know what? Americans can handle this. They may not have the same grasp on Puss in Boots as we do, but they can handle the content of this game. It really does show. I will say, not knowing the lore of Puss in Boots, I was lost the whole time.
Yeah, I mean, I hope that the show really is like a globe trotting calendar trotting movie or show. Sorry, because this doesn't really make a lot of sense. And I would just to go off of what you just said, the fact that this is a 1986 game really does show. Yes, because we have this happen to us a lot, mostly with ports now of computer games or other consoles. And then you get the NES version. We've had this happen where it feels you feel the downgrade because we've been getting such great upgrades over the 300 games that we played on the NES.
That when it does graphically or even just gameplay-wise cut down on what's possible or the limitations of the game itself, you start to realize it a lot quicker. And I certainly realized it early on with Puss in Boots because when I was building out the gameplay section of like, well, what are we going to talk about? But, you know, a lot of these bullet points that I have, I'm grasping for things. I'm hoping we can fill them out here on the show.
So let's start with the world map because that's sort of like the whole vibe of what they're trying to go for here, like a globe trotting Puss in Boots adventure. And I'm sure that they started a map and thought like, oh, we should add some clouds, you know, make it a little believable. And then they were like, what if we made everything clouds, including the continents? So you've got this really fluffy looking world map. You've got some weird like places. There's the West, Ocean, Arabia, Space Wars, London, and Liberty. Space Wars? Mm-hmm. Like at least I get what they were going for with other stuff. Space Wars? And Australia looks like a butt. That's all I'm going to say. Oh, yeah. Oh, it always does. That part they got right.
Yeah. So, Sean, you bring it up. You know, New York is, if we're to take these as the actual continents, which they look good enough, like they are cloudy with a chance of meatballs. But New York is where it would be based on where they place the other continents and everything. And everything makes sense for the most part. And then, yes, there is the Space Wars thing, which I'm sure we all have thoughts about. But the real problem isn't that that is like the actual description of what goes on in the level to an extent because it's not happening in space. It's happening in the sky.
It's happening in our own atmosphere. So it's not space. But like that's the description of the level, not the location. Whereas like, you know, the New York level isn't like you wouldn't. What would you call that instead? Right. You'd be like that's, you know, drive town or something. Right. What even is Liberty? Liberty, like the only other time that I've described a place as Liberty would be New York. And they have that too.
Right. But New York is like the level itself is just like everything else is at least trying to be like look like that area. New York's like you're inside a clock. Just like a bunch of gears and shit. You're inside. Yeah. Times Square. Get it? Ooh.
Yeah. I said I said you were in a car, but that's the Arabia level, which is funny in itself because why you have a car in a desert? But that's the whole whimsical part of Puss in Boots, right? Surely this is just a silly game where from level to level, you know, you're driving different vehicles or doing different action platforming things. And it's all just going to be good old fun cartoony shenanigans.
There won't be any guns or bombs or missiles. Oh, that's that's all of his weapons. Actually, he just he he his main method of of taking down enemies is shooting them with a gun. The boomerang, the one weapon I get is is is funny, right? It's cartoony. You know, you throw it. It comes back to you. Seems great for Puss in Boots. A whip. Also great. He doesn't have one, but it'd be great if he had one.
What the hell with this gun? Like, yeah, come on. That's tone deaf, right? Yeah, it is. And it is like I don't know about you guys, but like I found almost no reason to ever not use the gun. So like you're pretty much encouraged. I mean, I think I I think I used the bombs once. I think I use the I use the boomerang a lot on bosses because it's got more of like an upwards arc. But yeah, the gun was the default. And I think, you know, if they had just like made it look less like a like a normal gun and maybe more like like a blunderbuss or something like I don't know. Isn't he supposed supposed to be from that like sort of medieval gunpowder time? I don't know. But it is silly. It's all very silly. The bombs to me didn't do much.
And if you you know, if you were expecting any anything else like violent, you wouldn't find it. Right. Like the gun is just a violent weapon. But like the way people die isn't violent or people the way the other enemies in the game die aren't violent. So it's like it's just a weird choice. But then it repeated over and over again. The manual to have like, you know, and then this vehicle has missiles. This vehicle has a machine gun like these are their words. It's like what? Like surely they could have been more playful with it, but they chose not to. So moving along. Forget about the weapons.
Surely this game also must not have a complicated plot, right? It must just be the whimsical adventures of a cat traveling through time and space or maybe space wars. Maybe maybe a little bit of that. No, actually, the manual at least tells a tells a pretty grand story that I would love to just kind of break down the beats with you guys and see if you noticed that any of this or even does any of it even matter? I noticed zero plot, environmental or otherwise. So please. Right. Would you need to know why he's going on this great adventure? Exactly. So Count Grumon.
Wait, OK, I'm going to stop you there. I was just going to say this is already crazier than I thought it was going to be. So from my understanding, like Puss in Boots is just sort of taking it upon himself to just sort of travel and stuff just seems to sort of get in his way. And, you know, when we're talking about bosses, it seems like there's kind of minding their own business. And then he sort of just shows up and makes them have a bad day. Like, are we saying that, like, someone's put him up to this or or there's like an actual an actual like bad guy is trying to stop?
Yes, there we are. His name is Count Grumon. Count Grumon hates mice. And who else might hate mice? Would it be Puss in Boots? It might be a cat, right? Like a cat would hate mice. However, when Count Grumon tasks Puss in Boots with finding and killing this mouse, Puss in Boots being the kind hearted cat that he is, becomes friends with the mouse and helps the mouse escape. So in a like in a blind rage, Count Grumon aided by Dr. Garigari, who's a scientist wolf, a wolf scientist. Where the hell is this guy in the game? Where's where is he? The only mouse I see him fight is made of metal and I don't see him save a mouse.
This is like if all of the Mario manual was this long backstory and then like at the end it was like, and now he's going to go do the thing he does in the game, which is different than the backstory. Like this has nothing to do with the game so far. Yes, agreed, agreed. So Dr. Garigari, who's the wolf scientist and Count Grumon, sent Pero on a time traveling journey around the world. And I just, the time travel part, right? Can we slow that down for a minute and talk about that? What, which part is the time travel?
It all, it all seems like it could, like the West is the wild West. I get that. But then it's like, if we just ignore that and that's just like some funny, maybe one town just never upgraded. The rest could all take place in the present day. Well, like a certain kind of present day. Like, you know, it's got like bi-propeller planes. So that could be like the team. Well, Puss in Boots is present day, not ours. Well, yes, his present day. Yeah, it just doesn't, nothing else feels like futuristic or there's no like dinosaurs or there's no, you know, the space wars certainly aren't in space. Yeah, I think like you could call pretty much all of this. It could have taken place between like 1895 and 1922.
So maybe they only have like... This is just funny that this is what we're talking about, about Puss in Boots. I'd say there's like, maybe they're, they have a few decades that they can time travel between before it gets really expensive with like the fees.
So that's why it's, it's not really that much time travel. Well, there's also one theory of time travel in which like you can only travel two times that the time machine was turned on. Like you can't go back to before it was invented. Yeah, yeah. You know, like once you turn it on, it's active. Some primer, primer level stuff. Yeah, yeah. To, to get along with the plot here. So now you get the mission, right? The mission is you've got to defeat Count Grumon and Dr. Garigari or Garigari and use their own time machine to get back home or else you'll be stuck in the past forever. That's the end, right? There wouldn't be any other like side plot or B story based on the game you guys played, correct?
Well, there is that side, that side story where he also fights a demon. Like would that, would that get in there? Like it's like a bat demon. Good, good question. No, that's not what they're going to cover in the manual for you. Instead, they want you to know that to make matters even worse, the cat kingdom, a collective kingdom of cats, has sent killer cats after Perro, Puss in Boots because he helped a mouse and thereby violated cat kingdom law.
Wow, that's pretty big, dude. So now that explains why all these people, all these enemies actually don't come, like Dr. Garigari didn't make them all. The cat kingdom sent them after you. So like, so those like British, like Kingsguard that you like just systematically kill, those are like not actually like the Kingsguard. They're like these cats in the sky. Oh, everybody but them. Those are just English people. Right, right. Yeah, that's just like suddenly the villains just become like other people in London.
No, I think they're just the other killer cats, which like, which funny enough are in the London stage. I didn't make note of every stage they're in, but they're over there. That giant demon you referenced, Sean, is also in the London stage. So we all have fond memories of the London stage, it seems. Obviously the best level in the game, right? You could say that, yeah. There isn't much. There isn't really much to compare it to.
So when you're thinking about the Puss in Boots game, a time traveling, world trekking adventure where you're being hunted down by a wolf scientist and you're considered a traitor by your own kingdom.
What are you expecting in terms of gameplay now for that? I mean, I don't know if I had like set expectations before this. Yeah, if I'm hearing this manual, to be honest, I think I'm probably still not expecting anything in particular because so many manuals that we've had are just like out there. And I think just knowing the title of this, booting this up and starting to play it, I'm not at any point like, oh my God, this is what it's like? No, this is kind of like what I expected.
And yeah, I'd say at a base level, it's what I expected. But I wasn't expecting it to be like just sort of this cookie cutter. Like this is somebody's first video game, I think. Well, yeah, that's another thing that I thought too. I mean, what I wasn't expecting because it's so rare is just how easy this game is. Like, yeah, like it's a perfect video game for your little brother, you know, like while you're playing Mario, you know, it's like it it. It would be good as like a as like a transition from Sesame Street ABC to Mario.
Just a couple of quick things I noticed in my playthrough. There's no feedback when you're hit. There is a small sound effect. It doesn't even sound that torturous or whatever. But it's almost like Pero's acting like the whole thing is no big deal before he just drops dead on the last hit. He's like, oh, it's just nothing but a scratch. And then finally just dies because there's no there's no pushback or anything. It's just you can walk through all your hits and just the HP bar gets lower.
Of course, boots are something you collect in this game. That was another sign of like phoning it in. Puss in Boots just needs to collect boots that don't. That's not part of the story. It's not like you have to go get the seven legendary boots or something. They're just something you collect.
The enemies at all times feel like they are avoiding you that they not that they're avoiding you. Maybe that's the wrong term, but that like they're not programmed to get in your way either. They are just on a course and you may or may not be on that same path with them. So you're walking left to right. They're walking right to left and just pray that you don't collide with them. And these are these are just some of the thoughts I have right now. I don't want to steal all of the thoughts in the show, but I want to leave you with my next thought.
Sure, the game is probably what we expected in terms of a Puss in Boots child like action game. But were you expecting the emphasis on vehicles so heavily? You know, you have a submarine, a car, a propeller plane, a hot air balloon. I mean, you know, that's neat. I guess if you're going to do like a globetrotting thing where there's a world map and you're supposed to you're trying to get as as much like, oh, yeah. And they go there. That's got like this kind of vibe. And then it's got it's got this kind of vibe. I guess like modes of transport, like planes, trains and plantains would be like the way you want to you want to like sort of glue those together.
Yeah, I appreciated that. I was definitely not expecting it to be like that. But, you know, once you kind of like look past the coat of paint that is like every different vehicle, half of them are is literally just a sprite swap. Oh, yeah. Of you like you're still just moving at the same speed. You still jump. You know, the only thing that's different is you don't have all your weapons. You just have like the missile. You just have the missiles. The plane, the plane just sort of works like any shmup plane. The submarine, I think it's more of like a flappy bird kind of thing.
And then there's the one where you're just sort of driving and you're just stuck on one plane. One plane of no, even the driving, the driving, you can jump. Oh, you can jump. But like you can't like just move. Yeah. So there's there's like two. I mean, there are subtle differences, but there's like there's like the side scroller levels like regular like Mario like and like no matter what vehicle you're in, it plays that way. I guess the boat you can't jump. Oh, the boat. Not the driving thing. Yeah. But then there's also, yeah, like car you jump. It's exactly the same as playing as as Pero. And then then there's the plane and the submarine, which play pretty much the same, I thought.
And then the only one that's slightly different is the hot air balloon where like, oh, that was a flappy bird. Yeah. That one's like flat, but like very easy. Yeah. Like just having your hand on up makes it like, OK, you've done that part. Like you don't have to worry about that anymore. Don't move your finger. I'll say the thing that stood out to me the most about this game was just so just how short it was. Like the like easiness is one thing, but I'm going back to like the idea that maybe this was the first game that somebody ever made.
Like it took them so long to like design it and to code it and to get the art in that they must have just thought like, oh, it took me a long time to make this. It's going to take them a long time to play it. And I remember back in the day when I used to play like RPG maker games on my RPG maker for PS1, save the game to a memory card sort of stuff. Like I spent hours on like one little scenario and then you could play it in literally two minutes. And I just feel like that's I'm relating to them after I project that onto them. Yeah. I mean, this is that's funny that you say that because I had this totally unfair thought towards the developer. But like definitely not true. But I was like, oh, they made this in they made this in a day.
Like that was my thought. I was like, hey, they got like two types of gameplay. They got a bunch of sprites and they just like, I just put them in there. Definitely. Obviously not what happened. But it's just like what my initial what felt what it felt like.
Because there's seven stages and each stage is the length of a Super Mario Brothers level. So it's like Super Mario Brothers at least had 32 stages. So you really feel the shortness here because of because of also the way that the enemies kind of again, they're not avoiding you. They kind of dodge you. Yeah, they're just there. Right. And so this game can probably easily be done in less than 30 minutes, if not even faster. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I hope it was a five dollar game on release. Or ten dollars.
But that said, OK, if you're you know, if you're the little brother who's having a tough time, like you're you know, your older brother's taking down Mike Tyson and Punch Out and you're the only other game he has is like Deadly Towers and you can't even wrap your head around it. It might be nice to have Puss in Boots in the house as like finally something for me that like I can I can dominate and I can be good at like it when you when you put it under the scope of a children's game.
It's a little funny because like we're we're not we don't have really much to compare it to on the NES other than the ones that are like educational. But when you put it as like an educational platformer in the sense of like teaching you how to platform. Right. Yeah. Teaching you how to play these kinds of games. Well, then it's like not so like I still wouldn't pay more than five dollars for it. Me. But like, oh, then you kind of see like a use case for it. And that's being very generous.
I mean, no, I would go as far as to say that, like, as far as a game that is like trying to be a video game for like almost a preschool audience. I think this is the best we've seen. I think this this fits that the best because it like it is playable. Here's where I think we're projecting that onto this game, though. Like, is it like what where does it like where is it explicitly saying this is a game for children? I mean, I have no idea if that was the intent. No, I have no clue. But I just it just feels like that's what would be good for. Yeah. No, that's a great point, though, Sean, because that is something I feel like I put on because of the whole Puss in Boots thing. And the, you know, the cartoonish, silly look of the cat.
Not like not like at face value, not being able to take any of that seriously. But you're right. There's nothing on here that's branding. Unless unless, you know, your first platformer. Yeah. Unless this manga or whatever, unless this anime Puss in Boots is is explicitly for children. It is. But that doesn't but that doesn't matter. Because, again, that's that's not something that like was getting localized releases. That's why this took so long to come over here in the first place is like this is all in Japan. And we're just we're just getting this now. Yeah. Maybe if the back of the box said for babies.
Right. One other thing I had about just a note on the vehicle. So the Space Wars level is the one with the propeller plane where the title doesn't match the setting. I don't really have anything else to say about that. But I do wonder why they chose Space Wars instead of just like. Is that the closest thing to Star Wars? And they just thought that's what's hot right now. I don't know. It's like a weird. They could have just called it like the sky. But specifically. I do wonder what it was. Yeah. Like the literal translation for from Japanese. However, what I want to talk about is the submarine level, the ocean.
Because in that one, the submarine drops to the bottom. If you don't if you don't steer upwards, they get to hold up on the D pad. I don't know if you guys noticed that or not. Yeah. I noticed that in the hot air balloon one. And I didn't remember that that was the case. I was just OK. So it happens in the hot air balloon one to them. But like I guess I was wondering, like, is that a thing for submarines? Like, will they just sink to the bottom of the ocean if you don't do anything?
No, I think they did. Like, it's all a level of like they can control their buoyancy. And I don't think they have to, like, tap a button like at the control panel to do that. I think real submarines are like Flappy Bird. I think it's that's where they got the idea of Flappy Bird. I'm pretty sure it's just like, oh, we're going to release some air. And then we're going to like, like, oh, we're going to open these balloons now. Like, you know, high tech military balloons that make them rise or high tech military balloons that they shrink to make them go down. That's what I think our military technology works like. Right, right.
It's a pretty empty world what's been designed here. And we've already hashed it out. So you don't have to comment if you don't want to. But I hate personally in all these NES games when doors are left open or, you know, have like that black gap between them to imply that you could go into them. And you just can't go through. Yeah, especially because at some points in this game, there are doors that you can go through like that. So like, why make them all look the same? Just close the door. Right. I'm totally fine with like, you don't even have to tell you don't have like a you don't need a text box that says the door is locked or whatever. Like, we get it. Okay. It's just don't leave it open then. Don't don't let my imagination wander.
Irresponsible. And lastly, the boss fights. They are kind of sudden and intense for this kind of game. They're not they're not ridiculously hard by any means, but they do require more thought than every other enemy in the game, which just requires you to shoot them in the face. These bosses require some precision targeting and are massive in scale.
That's correct. Yeah. I mean, I think that for the most part, I was like, yeah, this is feels a little more boss. Like they were still all very easy until the final boss. Was I the only one that was like just absolutely pulling my hair out frustrated from that final boss? Oh, yeah, that was. I mean, it's like unfair. I think like I think we did it wrong because that. So you're saying that you fought several cat like figures that all spawned at once and like kind of slaughtered you. Right. Yeah. It was like there were like two behind one in front of me and they like come in. If one of them touches you, you lose like your whole health bar.
They're all shooting projectiles at you and you have to like take out the one on the left before you can hit the ones on the right while dodging. Like what's weird is I watched the video of somebody else play and like that never happened. They took them on one by one. What? Yeah. And I don't know if it's something with like the copy that we used or if it's just like a bug sometimes. But I only I saw a video and they fought them one at a time because it's like this is actually like an evil game. It's if it's for children. It's like this is like all of a sudden the very thing ever. And then we're like we're literally just going to melt your HP to zero in a second.
Yeah. See, I'm watching a video right now and it is what we experienced too. So maybe there is like a way that you have to like go about it in order to get the one at a time thing.
But it's like, yeah, it's like one one of them is a cat and two of them are like these like purple Bernie looking clowns. It's it's kind of freaky. Yeah, I'm trying. I'm struggling to think of who the third person in the room is because we knew about Dr. Garigari and we knew about Count Grumam. But who's the third? Is that the. Yeah, well, two of them are identical. We got the creepypasta version. Yeah. Oh, so Dr. Garigari is two two separate. No, wait. Dr. Garigari is the wolf scientist.
So we got him covered. So then Count Grumam shouldn't be two separate people. Right. It's not like one of them is the count and one of them is Grumam. Well, so it also. OK, it also. Once you defeat the wolf doctor, the two.
It's like, OK, what's what's happening, actually, is like I think there's like a glitch or something with him moving because it's like you can see through him. He's like blinking in and out of existence. It's like he's teleporting at really, really fast speeds to like one foot next to himself over and over again. So I think it is one guy and you can't hit him. He's like invincible when he's those two guys until you've killed the wolf guy. And then he like merges into one entity. That makes sense. Just describing what I'm seeing, not what anything based on my prior Puss in Boots lore.
It is a mystery. And then you get to see the. Sorry. Go ahead. He impales himself. That's what I was going to say. I mean, I wouldn't call it impaling. I would I would say it was something a bit more raunchy. But he does do that on the Statue of Liberty. And it needs to be seen to be believed. Oh, yeah.
Well, you know, the problem is, is like there you wouldn't think any different if you freeze the frame of him just standing on the Statue of Liberty's head because you would just think like, oh, that's how it's designed. But during while he's jumping up and down for joy, we can see that the front of her crown is pretty long and then vanishes behind him as he stands there. So we can only assume that it has entered through him or or as Sean wants you to believe entered him. Well, that's entered. It's going through. Yeah. Entered and out. Right. Exactly. Really. Yeah. This is just as tragic as this two of Final Fantasy seven. Right. Like the the Statue of Liberty impaling Puss in Boots is right up there with Sephiroth and Aerith.
Spoilers. Whoops. For a how old game. Wait a minute. So, yeah. With what we just described was happening to Puss in Boots, people are going to have a lot of a total different idea of what Sephiroth and Aerith.
Yeah, that's true. It's the end of the disc one, not the beginning of this. Oh, right, right. You know, it's funny, though, because I actually played the game on an emulator, so I don't even know what the discs are. Like when people are always like, oh, yeah, this goes up to disc one. And I'm like, well, when would that be? Like, I don't know. I make these things up because I just click change disc when they happen on my emulator.
That's the problem with emulation, folks. That would be how you know. No, I know, but how am I supposed to remember that? Like, I never had to do the whole, like, oh, swap. Yeah, you didn't have to physically do it. Yeah, totally. I'll say, like, when games with multiple discs, which I only played a couple of them as a kid, when you change that disc, it's a big deal. It's a big moment. It is. And they would never have a second disc for Puss in Boots.
What would a second disc do? They wouldn't have needed a second cartridge, even. There's no way this took up all the space. Maybe we're missing the second cartridge. That's why we didn't get the full experience. The second cartridge is Puss in Boots controlling the Statue of Liberty like how you do it in Ghostbusters 2. Oh, what if the reason that this game is so short is... Because you have to plug it into the Sonic and Knuckles cartridge.
And then, like... Then it'll be, like, Puss in Boots and Knuckles. And then it's an actual full game. I've been advocating for this for a long time. That people just need to start putting everything into the Knuckles cartridge and just seeing what happens. Like, we need everything to go in there. Just like we need to find out if every game on the NES deserves to be on. The Essential Games List.
And no, they don't all deserve to be on the Essential Games List. And we've proven that a lot. We're pretty selective. Even if we're not as selective as I'd like us to be, we're still pretty selective on what gets into the Essential Games List. So you'd be crazy if you stuck around for this segment. But we're glad to have you. Thanks so much for listening. Joe? Oh, I'm going first. Well, I said no. I said no. Okay.
Yeah. This is probably the most functional game that I was this bored with that we've ever played. Like, it's not bad. There's nothing wrong with it, I guess, except for that final boss. But it's just really boring and kind of like really one note.
And, yeah, I do think that it would serve like a young kid a lot better who's like not, you know, doesn't have all their motor skills yet. And needs to learn to play a platformer. Like, that's the biggest problem with it is that it's just really boring. So I'm going to say no. Hi. Sean. Hi. This is an objectively bad game and it is not Essential. All right. There you have it. But we're still, like, hovering right around 10% of all of the NES catalog being Essential. Yeah, you're always fucking naysaying, Mike. You want us to be more exclusive?
I want to just have the 1%. I just want the 1%. Okay. You know what? But why? Why? Don't you just want the integrity of the Essential Games list to be intact and just, like, whatever we vote? Like, that's what it is. No, I just want everyone to know that only the 1%ers get anywhere in life. Oh, right, right. Right. No. 10% is fine with me, actually, now that I look at it. I'm fine with that. It seems like a lot when you say 33, but who cares, right? Like, at the end of the day, that means that there's... No, I want to take everything off now. Bad ones, yeah. All right, take everything off. Try it in the Best of 1990 episode in Winter 2048. Good Illinois. Illinois. Illinois Illinois.
