A playthrough of Taito's 1992 NES game, KickMaster.
This video shows the entire first loop of the game. You get slightly different congratulations messages after the second and third loops through the game, so in lieu of posting three consecutive playthroughs, I put the endings of the second and third loops directly following the original ending. The ending of the third loop features a pretty cool credit sequence that you don't see on the first or second.
43:35 First loop ending
45:07 Second loop ending
46:37 Third loop ending
The fourth loop merely repeats the same exact ending as the third, as do those that follow. I beat it five times in a row just to make (relatively) certain that it just repeated after the third.
Make sure to watch the video at 60fps, or there will be a fair number of elements missing from where the game purposely uses flicker to show more things on screen at once than is usually possible - the biggest example of this is the group of items that fly out of enemies when you kill them. They appear transparent on an NES through an old CRT TV, but usually they completely disappear if you cut the framerate to 30fps.
KickMaster is an utterly fantastic NES platformer, with a huge variety of moves, some really amazing NES graphic effects, and an absolutely killer soundtrack. Kicking everything to death also makes it easy to imagine that you're playing a medieval Chuck Norris, which in truth everything that I have ever dreamt for in a game.
The challenge is fairly stiff on the first loop, but don't worry - it gets much more difficult in the loops that follow it. The story cinematics are neat, and it has pseudo-RPG experience and magic systems that add a surprising amount of depth and strategy to the play. It's a prime example of a game well-deserving of high praise, but utterly buried beneath the tonnage of the NES library. It was only released in the USA (despite being made by a Japanese developer) and just a few months after the stateside launch of the SNES. That probably didn't do much to help its case.
It also might not surprise you that it was developed by Kid, who developed some excellent games on the machine - many of which are among my personal favorites (the GI Joe games, Low G Man, Recca, Crazyland, and the hilariously bad but great PepsiMan for the PS1). In my opinion, Kid occupies the same role among NES developers as Now Production. They both sit behind some pretty heavy-hitting games published by various companies, and get virtually no recognition whatsoever.
No matter, all you need to know is that this game is completely worth any and all time you're willing to direct toward it. It'll reward you well.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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