Parodius (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Palcom's 1992 PAL NES shoot 'em up game, Parodius.

Played through on the normal difficulty level.

The ever awesome parody ("Parod") of Gradius ("-ius") actually made it to the NES! Konami released this amazing port of the 1992 arcade hit in Europe under their Palcom label, which was created to get around Nintendo's limit of how many games a publisher could release each year - just like Ultra in America.

The original game was called Parodius Da! in Japan, and the SNES version was named Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy for its English PAL release.

You can find the SNES version here:    • Parodius: Non-Sense Fantasy (SNES) Pl...  

Despite the huge amounts of slowdown and flickering, the sheer amount of detail in the sprites makes Parodius far better than it has any right to be on an 8-bit console. The game play is faithful to the arcade version, even with the few changes made to the boss line-up, and it even has an exclusive levels included just for this port. The PAL version doesn't have all of the secrets that were in the Famicom game (at least, I've never gotten them to work in this version), but most of them were included, and I show these in the video.

The graphics are a miracle by NES standards - they resemble the original arcade game's graphics far more than most NES ports ever came (including classics like TMNT 2: The Arcade Game!), and the adaptation of the music to the NES's sound capabilities is spot on. A few new tunes were included as well!

The constant slowdown does make this version much easier than the other versions, though, as a screen full of bullets and huge enemy sprites tends to bring the action to a crawl at its most intense moments. It's not as game-breaking as it was in Contra Force, but it does make the game far easier, even when accounting for times that you'll accidentally eat a wall because you weren't expecting the game to suddenly speed back up at an inopportune moment. This is one of those cases where the NES was being pushed to do a fair bit more than it was capable of, but somehow the magic wasn't lost in the compromise.

It's a really fun game that holds onto it's Gradius-with-a-sense-of-humor personality quite well, and it was an impressive technical feat for the already then decrepit NES hardware. The 16 and 32-bit ports are undoubtedly better games, but there's something really appealing this one too!

(This is a brand new recording to replace my original playthrough. Now, not only is it in 720p50, but I also show the secrets.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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