Chaos World for NES

Chaos World, an old school RPG originally only released in Japan, but translated quite a few years ago for those willing to hunt it down, is a surprisingly fun game.

You start off by making your character, one of 7 classes and of either gender, and then off you go to the king’s castle. It seems his daughter is sick, and since you’re the offspring of a great warrior, obviously you must go and find the cure, but that’s only the beginning. Something foul is afoot….

Something or someone has begun to spread an evil religion, and people who follow that religion are starting wars all over the world, and so you gain friends, and help each town or city, and eventually fight the great evil, which has been lurking silently since time immemorial.

The Good

Chaos World is visually appealing, has great music, and simple game play. What’s odd is that it appears to be more complex than it really is.

For instance, when you have an enemy encounter in most RPGs, you sit there staring at the screen while nothing is happening, just waiting for your bar to fill, so you can mash a button, select an action, select a monster to act upon, and then repeat. In Chaos World, you just select fight, and it’s automated, but, before fighting, if you so choose, you can pick a specific attack formation from plan.

I don’t even know how many there are because I only ever used the one, assault, which is not the default one, but it put 3 guys in the front, and my magic caster in the back, so I stuck with it. You can go through the whole game with assault. In fact, you can probably go through the whole game with the stock setting, which I think is called attack.

Another cool feature is the ability to switch party members. Including the protagonist, there 14 playable characters. You can have only 4 with you, so the rest you keep on standby to do guild jobs, but it only takes one person to do a guild job, and there’s no reason to switch party members because the newer people will be at too low of levels to be any help. Furthermore, the differences between classes are barely noticeable.

Once I got my first shaman, that was it; I had myself, a knight, another knight, a fighter, and my shaman. I had a thief in there at one point, which was fine, but I needed her for a guild job, and by the time that was done, the knight I had stuck in to replace her was much stronger than the thief, so I just stuck with that party.

It may sound like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I think these features are really cool, but they’re under utilized. Another cool thing about the game is the rate at which you level up. You don’t need to grind for 2 hours to gain one level for each party member like Final Fantasy. With about 30 minutes of grinding, you can easily raise your whole party’s level by 3.

The Bad

Sometimes, the game is just confusing as shit. There is one dungeon for which you will probably use a walk through because it totally appears as though it’s random. Like, if you go up one set of stairs, you pop out from another set, and if you turn around and go back, you won’t be where you started, but this isn’t nearly as bad as the next scenario.

At one point, I had to get the rainbow flower. No big deal. I had already been to the town, which grew the flower, so when I got my orders to get the flower, I went to that town, but I wasn’t able to enter the keep to physically nab the flower.

Normally, in these kinds of games, if you run around, and talk to people, you’ll be told what to do; you’ll get a clue. Nope. Not in Chaos World.

To get the rainbow flower, I had to take a guild job, in another town no less, to learn about the rainbow flower…again. Then, I had to go to the desert, on a different continent, mind you, and jump into a tornado in order to be transported to somewhere in the sky, to go through another dungeon, only to be told again to get the damned flower. Finally, I was able to walk into the keep, and get the flower.

Any kind of a clue from an NPC would have been helpful, or if the guild job results had mentioned the tornado that, too, would have been helpful.

All-in-all, I think Chaos World is a great game for the 8-bit era. Today, finding walk throughs to help in confusing situations is the norm anyway, so you can enjoy the game play, the graphics, the music, and the cast of characters.

I give it a B+ score.

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