Sweet Home (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthough of Capcom's 1989 license-based horror RPG for the NES, Sweet Home.

Sweet Home was a Japanese-only release. I am playing the game in English thanks to a fan-made translation patch. If you're interested in playing it for yourself, you can find the patch here: https://www.romhacking.net/translatio...

Capcom's first stab at "survival horror," released years before such a genre was recognized, is a traditional Japanese role playing game that is anything but traditional. Based on the Japanese film of the same name (スウィートホーム/Suiito Hoomu), Sweet Home was a first in many ways, and it served as the foundation for Resident Evil (originally conceived as a remake of this very game). It's rather different from what you might've expected from Ghost 'n Goblins creator Fujiwaru Tokurou, who also played a key role in the creation of several of Capcom's 8-bit era classic franchises. It plays like Dragon Quest, but it features zombies and incinerated children.

It's grotesque, disturbing, and all-together awesome.

Roughly following the plot of the movie, you control a group of reporters that have all arrived at the abandoned Mamiya estate, hoping to document a series of famous frescoes that were hidden inside decades earlier. However, as soon as they enter the house, the vengeful spirit of its previous owner makes it presence known, promising the trespassers that they will not escape. The group splits off into teams to search for an exit, and as you might imagine, things get ugly, fast. With all manner of monsters and supernatural beings roaming the house and its grounds, survival is anything but assured.

Resident Evil was originally conceived as a remake of Sweet Home, and as you might expect from the game that was its direct inspiration, many of the elements seen in Capcom's 1996 breakout survival horror hit appear here for the very first time. Creaky door screen transitions? Check. Finding random keys and solving puzzles? Yep. A heavy focus on inventory management? Of course that's here!

Though on the surface it resembles a typical JRPG, Sweet Home's game play far closer resembles Resident Evil than it does Dragon Quest. As you explore, you document the frescoes, examine skeletal remains, messages left in blood, and diaries, all in an effort to find a clue as to how to escape. And as you delve deeper into the mansion's interior, the truly horrifying fate of its previous inhabitants is slowly revealed, piece by piece.

I won't go into any more of the story than I already gave here, though. Much of the tension that the game relies on comes from the way it handles its story, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone that wants to experience it for themselves first hand.

For an NES production, Sweet Home is truly amazing. Despite the system's limitations, it manages to effectively use the setting to tell much of its story. The level of detail of the interior areas is truly impressive, and the music effectively nails being creepy and foreboding. The battle scenes are particularly notable. The cast of enemies is huge for such an old game, and they look fantastic. They don't animate, but the level of detail (and how gruesome they can be!) is unparalleled in NES-era RPGs. The only real complaint I can muster is that the menu system is a bit cumbersome, but in light of the number of ways Sweet Home brilliantly succeeds, that's small potatoes. In all fairness, the interface was fairly well streamlined by 1989 standards.

Sweet Home was an insanely ambitious project, the likes of which had never really been seen before on a console, and its willingness to tackle such mature subject matter was unprecedented. It's easy to imagine how, in the hands of a less capable developer, the game could've easily become a convoluted mess, but fortune smiled on gamers here. Capcom's audacious experimentation and forward thinking gave rise to the birth of a genre. It's a brilliantly made game that was years ahead of its time, and it is must-play for any NES fan.

Happy Halloween!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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