Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (Jankenteam)
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
I imagine that many remakes begin with a question: how much fidelity to the original is necessary? If you’re not aiming for a 1:1 recreation, questions start radiating out: What can one tweak from a game that so many have played over time? Should one take into account differences in hardware? Are some things, like slow frame pacing, too important to the gameplay to be “fixed”? Can, or should, some of the movement controls or hitboxes be adjusted? What about the art and music - do you preserve the original look and sound, mimicking the style as much as possible? How about checkpoints? Or health? Items? Older games can be pretty unforgiving.
Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986) is unforgiving. Controls on land have a skid to them that’s just shy of what I might expect from an ice level in other platformers. The jump is very floaty, yet the game demands a high degree of precision. Lives operate on a three-strikes rule - in the original, when you’re out, that doesn’t mean that you start the level over, it means “game over” in a more traditional sense. If you fire up the ‘86 version of Miracle World, don’t get too comfortable. Get ready to see the start menu again. And again. And again.
What about Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX (2021)? The most immediate difference is in the visual art. Like some other recent retro remakes, there’s even a button that lets players switch from the new style to the old, making comparisons easy to experience on the fly. With that said, there’s an element of oddity to it - even the classic art appears to have been re-made, or at least that’s what a short note at the introduction to the unlockable “classic mode” suggests. That’s right: there’s an unlockable, remade mode of the original 1986 game included with DX, though you have to complete the new version to play it. Its existence implies that there’s more than a few small differences between the original and remake in the redrawn art and music.
And indeed, there are. The promised alterations to boss fights are easy to spot, although it seems to me that, if anything, they now take a few more hits than in the original. The game is longer, too, with additional levels interspersed between those of the original. Honestly, without referencing the original, it’s hard to spot which levels are transitional ones from the 1986 game and which have been added. That’s a credit to the developers, given their clear intent to hew closely to the source material. However, it also means that they replicate much of the flawed or limited level design from the original. Most levels are flat affairs with interspersed piles of blocks crawling with enemies, from left to right. Adding more of those doesn’t exactly liven up the experience.
DX is full of alterations such as these, and for the most part, they’re executed with a light touch. For example, there are checkpoints in the remake. This strikes me as a very good choice, especially given the decision to stick with Alex Kidd’s fragility. If anything touches the little guy in any way, his soul floats up and out of the screen. I didn’t count the number of times that I heard the five-note death jingle while finishing a run through the game. In DX, checkpoints largely correspond to where the side-scrolling screen stops at a new challenge. Although Miracle World is a console platformer, it was still made with an arcade-style screen-by-screen sensibility that’s clear in the placement of enemies, obstacles, and sparse topography. DX’s designers clearly have an eye for the bones of the original, as checkpoints seem to largely correspond to these cues.
Perhaps hoping to capture the same success as they did with Sonic Mania (a game with similar origins), Sega gave the five people behind Janken Team the license to build on what was originally a fan remake of the original 1986 game. And they’re clearly fans, perhaps too much so considering some of the flaws that they preserved or exacerbated.
Movement in Miracle World is, in a word, bad. Alex Kidd skids slightly on landing, like he’s always in an ice level from another game. Ironically, there are no ice levels in Miracle World, but he skids nonetheless. As I mentioned above, he’s also unusually floaty by the more tuned standards of current platformers. This is unfortunate, especially when coupled with his fragility. Even worse, Alex Kidd’s primary attack is a punch, requiring the player to maneuver him close to enemies to deal damage. But the hitboxes seem overly finicky, and so it often felt as though I had just as much of a chance of accidentally bumping into an enemy (and instantly dying) as hitting them.
Part of the trouble appears to lie in the redrawn art. The mechanics of Miracle World, together with the original graphics, exist on a grid. The original’s large, chunky pixels conform to this grid, which makes it relatively easy to read how much distance a player would need from an enemy in order for Alex Kidd’s overly-large fist to connect. In the redrawn art, this relationship is thrown off. This may seem like a fine detail, but his fist is too small. In my experience, this meant that I often got closer to enemies than necessary, especially bosses. And that meant I was regularly putting myself at greater risk of yet another death.
This isn’t the only way the remake gets in the way of cleanly reading the game. For example, in a forest level, there are monkeys that can hurl projectiles at Alex. In the original, these show up in high contrast, with no foreground or background to speak of - they are easy to read. In the remake’s new art style, there may be branches in the way, obscuring their flight. But remember - one touch of anything at all, and Alex is out. Good thing for those checkpoints!
All of this will likely be enough for many players to reach for the only available toggle to save themselves from repeating levels over and over - the button that Janken have included to enable infinite lives. It’s a funny thing, seeing this lone concession to the game’s difficulty instead of, say, more frequent shields, or providing Alex with the means to take more than one hit. I have a feeling that the developers would take the approach from 1986 on this toggle, and that they see enabling it as a sort of cheat.
But here’s the thing: in the intervening years, most platformers, even of hardcore or masochore stripes, have dispensed with lives and continues. It’s enough to offer challenging screens or levels with tight controls that players can repeat as many times as necessary. I’ve died many more times playing Celeste than Miracle World DX. I may even have died more times while playing and replaying Shovel Knight and the rest of the Treasure Trove games. I died plenty of times while completing the similarly-inspired Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom. Any shame that I might have felt about restarting over and over at a checkpoint until I make it through a screen is long gone. Perhaps it’s buried back in the 90s.
There’s charm in Alex Kidd in Miracle World that makes the game worth playing, even for those who aren’t the most ardent fans of Sega’s back catalog. There’s an intriguing amount of variety for a game originally from 1986, with the occasional vehicular level featuring motorcycles, helicopters, and boats (each, of course, is fragile and can be lost simply by connecting with the wrong piece of level geometry, let alone an enemy). Then there’s the Jankenpon, or Rock-Paper-Scissors, motif and mechanics. For whatever reason, the big bads of the game all force Alex to play the game, sometimes in lieu of a fight, sometimes as a prelude to one. There’s an interesting mix of platforming styles in different levels, with destructible blocks that allow the player to carve their own paths, side paths, and castles that enable and may require some backtracking to complete. There’s currency to grab and items to purchase, and the remake even does the player the favor of showing them how much cash they have on hand. The plot is told in the kind of stilted, limited dialogue that speaks to its origins in single, on-screen text boxes. I can understand why some have such fond memories of Miracle World that they would be inspired to remake it, even if I don’t possess the feeling myself. Unfortunately, I can’t say that I find myself inspired by the DX remake, either.
Available on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC. Played for review on Switch. Code provided by publisher.
