Developer: Joy Van Publisher: Color Dreams Release: 1989 Genre: Action
I’ve made fun of it long enough, it is about time I explain why Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is one of the worst games on the NES. When you are young you are willing to play almost anything put in front of you. You have not developed taste yet and think all video games are good. But there are some good titles that give you a bad feeling; you just know that something is off. I wish I had listened to my intuition when I bought Uncanny X-Men for my 10th birthday but I digress. Master Chu was one of many unlicensed titles released by Color Dreams and would set the bar as to what to expect from this publisher.
Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the stupid name or the confusing box art but I knew no good could come of it. I avoided renting it despite nearly caving in to desperation. Years later after watching youtube videos and playing it through emulation (because fuck me if I’m going to spend money on this one) my suspicions were correct. This is a thoroughly awful game that deserves every bit of the ridicule it has received.
Let’s get the one good thing I can say out of the way: the art direction is pretty good. The Chinese decorum is vastly different from what you usually saw on the NES. The art looks good even if it is repetitive. In many ways the game resembles Demon Sword but on a budget. I also have to give credit to the artists for creating unique sprites and animations for Master Chu and Hu; the vast majority of games are still content to palette swap. But as I just mentioned the game repeats itself in short order and recycles its architecture and bosses heavily. Maybe if this were shorter it would not have been as noticeable. Any enjoyment soon turns to disillusionment. That also applies to the gameplay.
I made the comparison to Demon Sword for a reason. The two games are similar on a surface level. Your primary attack are small….I’ll assume they are magic bullets. These are extremely weak and never grow in power. At most you can collect an item turns it into a three-way shot. But any hits reduce it back to its default state. You also have a fan that is useless. The range is too short for melee attacks and supposedly you can deflect projectiles with it. But I’ll be damned if I ever managed to it once. You press up to jump which does not feel right in this game but that describes the controls in general.
The gameplay in Master Chu suffers heavily due to the sluggish controls. Both characters are stiff and slow to react. Because you are so weak every enemy takes multiple hits to kill and they move faster than you. Cheap hits abound meaning you are better off avoiding combat as much as possible. The goal in every level is to collect eight yin yang symbols at which point you are automatically taken to the end level boss. These are anywhere in the environment which in combination with the lethargic controls makes the hunt laborious. The only saving grace is that the levels are small and only three screens wide. But the tedium involved in combing every square inch with these busted controls make the process a chore.
Ultimately what damns Master Chu is the repetition. Once you complete the first level you have seen almost everything it has to offer. Sure I like the art. But when it repeats with minor changes over the course of almost ten levels it grows old fast. There are at most four enemies in the game and they all seem disinterested in your presence. Even the bosses share the exact same pattern and palette swap after a few stages. The last three levels are a boss rush of sorts. Except here you fight the same boss three times in each with only a slight variance. The entire game feels like someone made a few assets and they were copied and pasted past the point of reason and the game suffers for it.
In Closing
Master Chu and the Drunkard Hu is every bit as bad as you have probably read. There are no redeeming qualities to be found. This is a boring, repetitive mess of a game that I question why anyone would bother to release, legally or otherwise.
