What are some great Famicom games that got butchered for the US release?

[Frozone212]

including homebrews

 

 

[Tanooki]

Oooh fun I'd love to see some roll out of things here.

 

I have some I could list, butcher may seem severe in cases, compromised would be best as they're not awful.   I own some of these even now on FC carts and have used a honeybee for years over it.

 

Konami was notorious for it because NCL didn't act like dicks and let them make their own boards and chips over in Japan, so I'm sure you know about the VRC2,4,6,7 chipsets right?  More memory, more color, more audio channels, and in the end (VRC7) FM music rivaling the SMS etc.  A good candidate to get puffed up over is Akamajou Densetsu aka Castlevania III.  It got the double slap, one for Nintendo censorship so almost all the crosses, religious icons, tiny bits of blood, tits on broken courtyard statues etc...wiped.  And the audio, that the real burner, because they were told they couldn't use their VRC6 chip that added sound channels.  The music is a piece of art on the FC, not that it isn't on the US version, but it makes the US one more fart than art once you play the soundtracks side by side.   MMC5 had much of what the VRC6 had going for it, but lacked that fine audio.   Along those lines another would be Life Force for us, Salamander for them, as that game got the VRC4 and allowed for more on screen so your ship got all 4 OPTIONS not 2 in the US, and other little odds and ends but it really made a difference for the worse.

 

I did want to throw another Castlevania or well II (both) in there, but it fits here... Famicom (DISK SYSTEM) as that thing is fantastic, not so much this many years on with the magnetic media being testy, but in the day...nice.  Sure it had limits of you needed more discs (max space) but there was a huge nice feature set to the games.  Better specific FDS hardware audio channels and save games!   Zelda 1 and 2, Kid Icarus, Metroid, Castlevania I & II, the list goes on with games we got saddled with long crappy annoying to carefully write down passwords.  There?  Kickass save screens we didn't see largely until the SNES really (Super Metroid 3 load/save screen very very copy cat of FDS Metroid 1.)  They'd save every thing you did, lives, ammo, items, cool pick ups, whatever.  Passwords only could go so long before a joke, they'd save the vital stuff, but not everything.  And looping back to the audio garbage from special chip Konami fun I tied in Castlevania I & II here with... have you ever tried a youtube or MP3 set of the music from either Zelda, Metroid or Kid Icarus?  We got screwed.  The added styles of instruments and recorded or otherwise generated sound effects are fantastic.

 

We got butchered sloppy seconds as far as audio goes often, too often in the US.  The censorship looking at the 'what of the children' witch hunt karens of the 80s made sense largely so they'd stay on top, but the other cuts, slights, it's rare a US game came out better than the source material due to less memory on board due to specific limited chips (MMC1-5) allowed and largely the cut audio.

[Steven Pendleton]

Akumajou Densetsu automatically is a candidate just for the NA/PAL version's horribly mutilated audio alone. Censor the hell out of the game or whatever and I won't really care that much unless the game is totally broken, but ruin the music and I want absolutely nothing to do with Castlevania III. I would LOVE to get a ROM hack that has Castlevania III's difficulty changes and Akumajou Densetsu's audio.

Edited November 24, 2022 by Steven Pendleton

[mbd39]

Famicom Contra has some cool cut scenes and enhanced background graphics in the levels themselves. Even the lesser version that we got is still an amazing top five NES game.

 

 

[Frozone212]

I can't really think of any except Zelda. The audio is a downgrade and Pol's voice is different but not much else.

 

All the ones i'm thinking of have slightly worse audio, I can't really see any true butchered ports outside of Hydlide and Ghosts n Goblins

[+wongojack]

Didn't they change the difficulty on some games for the US market?  I seem to remember hearing that about Bayou Billy

[Frozone212]

yup, the japanese version is easier. NOA (Wrongly) assumed that american kids wanted harder games. To think that they tried to stop renting in the US. Imagine, you want to rent Bayou Billy but there's a new law that says you have to buy it. I'd be pissed

[Steven Pendleton]

If it makes you feel better, renting games in Japan is illegal, I believe.

[Tanooki]

8 hours ago, wongojack said:

Didn't they change the difficulty on some games for the US market?  I seem to remember hearing that about Bayou Billy

Yeah a good deal of games that people consider the more noteworthy classics, have jacked up difficulty in the US because some third parties got pissed off at rental stores as they used them as the big demon of the era before it switched to blaming UFO copier devices onto floppies just after, then actual kits like the BUNG one and stuff with set storage and LPT(then USB) transfer cables.

 

Ninja Gaiden's trilogy has a really great bit of changes make the games notably more nasty in the US.  You get more damage per hit (Castlevania 3 does this too), and checkpoints get moved or utterly erased.  NG was known to have where if you die on the last boss you get to go back and do the full Act again or part as punishment.  The Famicom games honest difficulty levels, fair health damage and checkpoints were only correct on the NG Trilogy cart for SNES.  You can google is in general, but there are many because of the publisher being salty about rentals as they said it cost them thousands, tens of...hundreds of thousands of sold unit because people would just rent and dig hard into the games and finish them for like a $5 rental and they felt screwed. 

 

It's the same dumbass argument they make these days trying to sell second hand sales passes and wanting to kill physical media because anyone using a used game is criminal as they didn't get paid.  Odds are those second hand buyers were priced out or felt it was too much anyway...but they don't care.

[Frozone212]

To Quote the gaming Historian

 

"Video game rentals are nothing more than Commerical rape"

 

Putting aside the fact that comparing renting a game to rape is blatant idiocy in and of itself, not to mention very insensitive, I don't give two craps about rentals hurting the industry. Nintendo got scared over nothing and made us hate them long before Gamefly became a thing.

 

anyway, the one game that made me rage (and subsequently want to scream at the Japanese that had it easier) was none other than Contra. Nowadays I can play it without issue (and the konami code of course) but giving Japanese players the option of a life bar instead of a one hit kill? I hate you Nintendo!

[Wayler]

There's probably a few games that got butchered for the west but if they were completely changed (like a palette/sprite/name swap), it's hard to remember the original. 

 

But I do know an opposite example, where the NES version is awesomed. Chō Wakusei Senki Meta fight takes place on some distant planet, there's an invasion and an evil empire and a lone hero to save the day.

And this is only in the manual, the game just starts. Ho-hum, not very inspiring

 

Now, how about we change the plot completely? It takes place on Earth. You got a kid with a pet frog. And the frog gets mutated and jumps into the core of the earth that reveals a strange world to explore! All told through an excellent intro. Plus add the emotional turmoil that comes from fighting against your beloved pet. 

Blaster Master! 

[Tanooki]

12 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

To Quote the gaming Historian

 

"Video game rentals are nothing more than Commerical rape"

 

Putting aside the fact that comparing renting a game to rape is blatant idiocy in and of itself, not to mention very insensitive, I don't give two craps about rentals hurting the industry. Nintendo got scared over nothing and made us hate them long before Gamefly became a thing.

 

anyway, the one game that made me rage (and subsequently want to scream at the Japanese that had it easier) was none other than Contra. Nowadays I can play it without issue (and the konami code of course) but giving Japanese players the option of a life bar instead of a one hit kill? I hate you Nintendo!

You're so right and wrong at the same time on that by the block.  Yes the jerks of the era did use the rape card which was disgusting as it is wrong, second hand use or sales is not rape, it's not even stealing.  They still make the same argument just not throwing rape around as they'd get destroyed on social media and probably sued by some sensitivity groups.

 

Nintendo for the first few years, when this would have happened had every single right to be scared and it was nothing.  They couldn't even get into the market originally over a year because of what happened in 83 in the domestic market.  Oversaturation, no quality controls, increasing prices, decreasing quality, and third parties losing their minds because they lost tons of cash because lower cost period shovelware ruined their sales as 2 $10 pieces of crap looked more enticing than one great $30 game.  Nintendo put controls down over X games per publisher, and printing the games themselves for quality standards, but not all was perfect being dicks about special chips.  They could have had Konami, Namco, Tengen, Sunsoft send them their special chips for US boards, but refused to budge...dumb.

 

Contra is a good one too to get upset about.  The smoking, fine, remove the cig, but the other graphical etc details being gutted going with a cheap chip instead of something of a MMC1 level of need was just disgusting, no real excuse.  The game isn't broken or too worse off, but side by side, it's a slap to the face.  Nintendo has nothing to do with that life bar, that's Konami screwing with the rental market, blame them.

[Frozone212]

How was I wrong though?

[Tanooki]

The sputtering nonsense you closed on to start?  Nintendo has zero do to with the life bar, that wasn't even some over the top thing due to the cutback in chip selection for the US.  That was Konami middle fingering Blockbusters basically.  Blame them.

 

And as for the rest.  History can't be just erased and changed to fit your narrative there.  Like it not, they had to fight to even get into stores using the ROB as a boondoggle just to pitch it as a toy because video games were retail leprosy in 1983, 1984, and in 1985.  Atari, Intellivision, Coleco, and others shoveled such high degrees of largely utter mediocrity to pure crap.  Those who still tried to make nice stuff in those years sold for nothing because they cost more since more went into making things that weren't garbage, the shovelware and broken games broke the sales side of the industry and retail wasn't having it being suck buying stuff to sell at a loss.  Nintendo had to PAY places to take the stuff with a money back guarantee for the test market in 1985 into 1986.  It was only after it took off and kept going that Nintendo didn't have to start shelling out massive full refunds and paying to ship it back, it was a HUGE gamble that would have broken their US division.  So of course they slapped down restrictive policies and controls on publishing counts, them qualifying stuff to come out, pressing the games and shipping the games themselves, etc.  That brought back a virtually dead and scared industry that probably would not otherwise have recovered until the 16bit era when I imagine they or at least Sega and NEC would have taken a shot by 1988-90 if not later due to the big Japanese competitor going down in flames, they'd be doubly twitchy had the NES failed.

 

So yeah, that's why I said it's nonsense.  You're right though, the blame slapped on rental was utterly manufactured and childish.  It was just vindictive third parties throwing a hate party that Nintendo didn't have squat to do with.  They didn't tell them to cut this in order to make that so much nastier just so people would be forced to buy games, that was the developers choice.

[Frozone212]

Thank you for the corrections. My mistake

[Tanooki]

8 hours ago, Frozone212 said:

Thank you for the corrections. My mistake

You're fine.  Look we get hot and cold on stuff, I get you have your hang ups and stuff, and I get how I do when some lash out.  I didn't want to go jerk mode there and just wanted to try and nicely more so break it down.  Thanks.  You're not really mistaken, but there's just so much conflicting info/sides on stuff out there.