Blue's Journey (Neo Geo AES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of SNK's 1991 platformer for the SNK Neo Geo AES, Blue's Journey.

Blue's Journey is quite an early release on the Neo Geo, and it's one of the few traditionally-styled platformers to appear on the platform. And while it might not set the world on fire with it's originality, it is a solid and fun platformer that, though not "difficult" per se, will challenge you a fair amount before you reach the conclusion. It was developed by Alpha Denshi (ADK), who also handled Magician Lord and World Heroes (among many, many others), and it definitely feels like their work.

Blue's Journey is one of those early 90s games that champions the saving the environment. There were a whole slew of games that attempted to capitalize the save-the-planet craze that had taken America by storm: most of them (Captain Planet, Awesome Possum, et al) were literal garbage, but occasionally one managed to rise above the dreck and provide a legitimately good game as a vehicle for its political grandstanding. Blue's Journey is one of those rarities.

The whole plot boils down to saving the polluted world of Raguy, and that's fine. Platformers don't need good plots to be good games, but Blue's Journey makes a decent effort. The graphics look great for such an early title (it was a 1990 arcade release, 1991 for the home version). Even though the sprites are all on the small side, they're bursting with color and have some well-detailed, cutesy type animations. The backgrounds all nail it, with loads of detail, layers of parallax scrolling, and a coherent connection to the game's theme - things get pretty grimy looking by the end, but they do it quite artfully. There are some fun cutscenes throughout, including random and unexpected challenges from a rival for the princess's love, fake "endings" when you pick an obviously wrong dialogue choice at a boss, and my personal favorite, the shopkeeper kicking you out of her store if you try to "buy" her. It's got a good sense of humor, and the Engrish script provides a number of unintentionally amusing moments. I'm a huge fan of the music, too. The samples are a bit lower quality than you're probably used to if you tend to stick with the system's later releases (cut it a bit of slack, 50 megabits made for a ridiculously massive cartridge - and price tag - in 1991!), but the FM music sounds great, and the soundtrack's energetic bounciness serves it well.

I didn't cover all of the levels in the game in this playthrough - the game branches at a few points, but you can only see everything available by playing through the game several times. The same goes for the endings - the game has a fair few, but I only show the best one here.

I remember that this one was critically smacked down when it was released because it didn't do much to change up the standard platformer formula, but I think that a lot of that criticism was unwarranted. "Traditional" doesn't automatically equal "lazy," "bad," or "unplayable." It merely provides an opportunity to further polish a style of game play. Blue's Journey does that quite well.

It's about on par with Marvel Land on the Genesis and Dino City on the SNES, in terms of presentation, challenge, and overall quality. And really, if you can say that about a game, how can it be bad? I still play it fairly often - the Switch's ACA classics line makes it easier than ever to revisit some of these old classics.

Maybe now that it isn't being released in 1991 against the likes of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog it'll get a bit more recognition. It's well worth a play, especially for the pittance that the digital versions can be had for.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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