Beat, ending at level 7 (walkthrough said max level was 8). I rented and beat this more than once back in the 90s and have fond memories of it, though had forgotten almost everything else about the game. I was even surprised when I did not see it on SNES searches, oh wait this was only on NES. Damn good for a NES game, though not quite up there with Crystalis and Zelda 1. The game had slightly cumbersome menu commands for searching, picking up loot, talking and using items but you could also bump into people to talk and press a button to loot. No way around searching though. The inventory screen had equipment slots and use slots, including eyes to get a description of the item, mouth to eat healing items, and use. Seemed like having both mouth and use was redundant, but I suppose it was a bit more immersive. Basic play moving around, fighting and exploring in top down view was fun. There was even an area map. I got my ass kicked by the 1st boss though because those play out in 2D side view like a fighting game. I didn't realize until later reading a walkthrough that crouching was infinite blocking, so I was trying to time quick thrusts in between the enemy attacks then jump back out of danger. The walkthrough talked about getting bosses up on higher ground to hit them in the shins without taking damage back. I did a little of that but mostly won by timing my attacks to when the boss jumped or rolled towards me as there was enough time to poke and safely get back to crouching. These battles were no where near as complex as actual fighting games and were pretty much identical other than terrain and 2 that did not use swords. They could have been a bit better designed with each boss having different moves.

The exploration areas did look very samey but were not a pain to navigate. I remember back in the day killing enemies over and over to farm as much xp and loot as possible. Too bad gold didn't have a purpose (other than needing some for the story) and that inventory was so limited. Juggling items between characters to make room and frequently having to shove food down their mouths was a little tedious. They could even dual wield 1 handed weapons or other items but only 1 weapon could be swung at a time so it really just saved space. I did not check to see if wielding a healing item allowed it to be used in the large battles, where going into the inventory was disabled. These battles involved all the party characters fighting large numbers of soldiers in a far zoomed out view. These battles were fun and even had a hint of tactics for positioning and switching which character to control. It also made it worthwhile to keep every character healed rather than hoarding it all for Robin. I controlled him for the battles and had great success, especially after finding a bow and sniping from across the screen.

I overused the bow and was completely out of arrows before completing the final area. Too bad you could not dual wield a bow and sword, that would have been awesome. The crossbow was 1 handed and did allow this, but I gave that to Tuck instead of using it myself so no sure if it was as powerful as the longbow. I did not like the Locksley bow because it rapid fired too many arrows, wasting them when it only took 1 arrow to kill guards with the longbow. In retrospect it was probably a waste to kill melee guards with arrows since they were slow and easy to kill. I used sword for small animals because it seemed a waste to use arrows on them. The little bats, mice and rats were annoying but at least they died after inflicting only 1 hp of damage. The cats or dogs or whatever were faster and tricky to fight in melee so shooting them was a good idea. I also used the bow on boars, for the ridiculously easy boar boss, and the water monster boss. The archer enemies were the toughest and I took a lot of damage from getting shot. I really had to shoot them from diagonal or zoom around them with melee. The seemingly infinite enemies annoyed me but I still ended with plenty of healing items. I did not enjoy the runner style horse jumping but at least it was very easy; nothing like god damn Battletoads.

Definitely one of the best movie tie in games even though the plot and dialogue presented in the game was quite simple. Still better than a lot of NES games. The lack of saving, only 3 continues and fairly short length hold this game back a bit from otherwise being a paragon example of early action rpg design.

8.2/10