I would like to preface this by apologizing, which is the best way to start a review. Like i posted i while back i was planning on posting this on friday but unfortunately i became quite sick over the weekend and ended up posting it today.

developer: Sunsoft

publisher: Sunset

composer: manami matsumae

release date: november 27 1992

genre: platformer….I geus

Have you ever heard the term “it’s the little things” be applied to a game. Usually its in the context to that fun little element in a game that although not improving the game altogether, make the experience of the game slightly more fun. Well that in a nutshell is trip world.

Trip world was released in 1992 by sunsoft, the same team behind my favorite nes game Gimmick! (cant wait to do that review). Trip world is simply put a platformer and on its surface its actually that simple of a game. You run from left to right, you have a short range attack and there is a boss at the end of each stage. In all these regards trip world is a descent platformer and this is why writing this review was difficult from the onset I knew that if I started reviewing this game the same way I did every other game I would not be able to properly represent what it does well. So let me show you what it does well.

First the visuals, from the very first screen trip world show you this.

So yes trip world is one of these truly hand crafted pltformer that reuses very few assets; actually, that is a common theme with trip world as you will see later.

From this screen you enter the first level. You see your first enemy and you attack.

Clearly you have never played trip world. This enemy is completely friendly, he will jump at you but if he manages to get to you he jumps on your heads and sits

and this is by far my favorite part of trip world. About 70 or so percent of the enemies are either completely passive or will only attack if you attack them. and this is what makes trip world so fun, in a way much like yoshie’s island every time the game introduces you to a new enemy type it will use it once and you will never see it again. On top of that almost all of these enemies will react to you in a completely different way. Lets looks at these enemy types.

this bird is just sitting there minding his own business. try hitting him 3 times.

This cat chases you but doesn’t hurt you if he catches you.

these things are just adorable

This flower

so as you can see most of these enemies don’t really want to hurt you. At this point your probably thinking “this game must be pretty easy” and you know what your right. Honestly I beat this game in about an hour and once you really know how to play you can beat it in about 15 minutes. The only real difficulty spike is the last boss which is insanely fast and ridiculously hard.

The last thing I want to mention about this game is the soundtrack. Now I hope to make something clear quickly, I am a huge video game music dork. I really hope to do a video game music article sometime soon. As anyone who knows sunsoft knows their music. Everything from gimmick! To euphoria, its all great and this game is no exeption. I don’t believe this OST is as strong as those previously mentioned games but it still has some great tracks.

Putting a verdict to this one is hard, really hard. So I’m not going to score it. I enjoyed this game in a way that I know not everybody would. This game is the definition of an experimental game. I’ve heard so many times that “this game couldn’t have come out today” after looking at this game its quite the opposite. This game should not have come then. A game like this could have found an audience today but this game came out in 1992…1992! Who in 1992 would have accepted and purchased a game where the enemies where friendly. Even today this game is incredibly subjective. I found it incredibly charming, had I not I might have found it slightly boring. If you want to know at the end of this review what my opinion on this game is, its that you should play it, you should really play it. And this where the price comes in, unfortunately for the reasons I mentioned this game found very little success in either of its releases. As a result this game is incredibly rare. someday I would love to own this game but for now there is an alternative or there should be I guess. So basically trip world hit the JP and PAL 3DS eshops but was never released here, why I don’t know. So I guess ill suggest you emulate it and this breaks my heart and here why. I’ve always wanted Nintendo to put up the complete but unreleased NTSC version of Gimmick! On the virtual console, this has never happened. My hope was that if people buy other sunsoft games the powers that be would give us Gimmick!. But then again ive never understood virtual console.