Kick Master (1992)

Anyone who's played JRPGs knows that hitting people with your fists and feet is stronger than any steel could ever be. And this is exactly what gets demonstrated in the opening cinematic of Kick Master, where the hero Thonolan's knight friend gets dead from skeletons, and tells him that only Thonolan's awesome kicking skills can allow him to defeat Belzed.

I kinda think it's more the bouncing-ball magic myself.

Kick Master is a side-scrolling platformer with light RPG elements. You can gain experience, and every 1000 EXP levels up Thonolan, increasing his MP total and unlocking a new kick attack. You also obtain magic along the way, starting from the humble bouncing-ball magic up to the utterly-useless harpy (grow wings and fly) magic. The game does have a nice number of different kicks, about ten, that you gain throughout the game. The main problem is that the NES controller really doesn't have enough buttons for that many abilities (even with using Select for magic), so several upgrades simply replace previously-unlocked kicks. One upgrade adds an automatic second kick to your already-obsolete-by-then basic kick, just leaving you immobile for longer. The ultimate kick is this bizarre flipping kick with an incomprehensible hitbox, which not only replaces the beginning and easy-to-use upright kick but also makes it impossible to use the best kick you obtain in the game. So you might as well just get to Level 4 and live with that.

How do you level up, incidentally? When an enemy is defeated, three random power-ups (or fewer if there's already airborne power-ups on the screen) fly up out of the enemy. The power-ups can give EXP, MP, HP, points (which do give extra lives), and poison (which hurts you). Thonolan's slow movement speed makes it difficult to even get the power-up you want from a defeated enemy. Luck determines entirely whether enemies will spew forth plenty of the 50 EXP power-ups or just the pithy 5 MP power-ups. The bigger MP restores give 10 MP, by the way, so it's your choice between getting the EXP and getting the MP.

I've mentioned the wonky hitboxes before, but the hit detection in this game is...not great. There are also plenty of annoying enemies, including lizardmen who can block your attacks without warning (causing you to pass through them and take collision damage), these transforming knights that seem to only die instead of transforming at completely random, and an abundance of teleporting wizards to harass you during a vertical ratchet-scrolling area. Many of the bosses are complete pains to even attack with your kicks, and two of them only become vulnerable once you've defeated the other parts of them (with no change to even denote the boss's main body is now vulnerable). Because of how difficult it can be just to hit enemies with your kicks, most bosses are best cheesed by using magic, particularly the very-cheap rapid-fire bouncing-ball magic. Of course, if you want a decent amount of MP, you have to forgo EXP, but as I've already mentioned, you might as well just stop at Level 4. You don't get the flying kick, but that tends to accidentally kill you if you're not careful.

One thing I can give Kick Master credit for is that the Options menu actually gives you the button prompts for all of the kicks, including the last two kicks they don't display in the menu (which suck). It's actually very nice graphically, which just makes it a shame that its potential doesn't really come through and it's both tedious and not very long.