Hide far far away from this abomination.
What the hell does the word "Hydlide" mean? I have no idea whatsoever. All I know is that this is without a doubt the worse RPG ever to come into existence. The game's presentation is just pitiful. Just looking at the horrible box art tells you that something is definelty wrong with this game, plugging the cart in gives you an unpleasant feeling that you're in for a horror show.
First of all what's wrong with this picture? As soon as you start the game, you see a dragon shoot fire and kidnap a princess and then that's it. No text. No dialogue. Hell, you don't even get any badly translated or misspelled proof read text! Okay, what's the storyline? Where's the plot? How do they except me to want to play and beat the game if I don't know what the hell it's about?
First of all the first thing that you'll notice is that the music in the game loops over and over and over again. It's the same damn song played over. A terrible rendition of John Williams' "Indiana Jones" theme. So annoying that even after 1 minute you'll want to hit the "mute" button. Trust me, it's that ear gouging. The ingenuity of Hydlide is painfully generic and unoriginal. Wow! Trees, grass, hidden caves, walls. What's next? A dragon ripping off Zelda's ganon? Yes, we are aware that this game doesn't hide the fact that it straight up rips off Zelda. The graphics are just boring ,cliched and forgettable. Green, blue and grey sprites? Couldn't come up with anything else? Why not a sailboat?
The controls are just convoluted. You press "A" to use your sword or lance or whatever. While there are other weapons, it's nearly impossible to acquire or find any new items. Considering the fact that the weapons and Item selection system is so confusing and user- unfriendly. Why can't I select the proper item or weapon when I need to? And what is up with the password system? The game claims it to be a save feature, but you've got both a "password" and "save game" selection on the pause screen, but there's nothing in the "password" selection, it turns out you have to select the save feature for the password. Pretty much defeating the whole purpose of having a password selection.
The gameplay is just absolutely horrendous. You can't jump, you've got to contend with confusing level design, the enemies are very hard to kill, you take damage too easily, and once you die, the GAME IS OVER! I guess the designers Pony Canyon figured that since you can use a password to start off where you died that there's was no need to include an extra lives system. Okay, that still doesn't make the game any better. And the enemies are really stupid. The A.I. is just programmed to run into you, plus the hit detection in the game is bad, that you can kill some enemies just by ramming into them. But unfortunely the game is very glitchy that you can randomly die for no reason at all for some point.
Hydlide truly is that AWFUL. You have to play it to believe it. I did and threw the controller down after five minutes and gave up. And while I've never beaten the game, I've seen others do it and have discovered just how asinine the ending is. Remember the terrible proof read spelling in the Ghostbusters game? It's pretty similar, except you just get a "Congratulations!" text after saving the princess. Which begs yet another question: Why does this game feel like it was so lazily designed? No story. Nothing. Good let's keep it that way, because I'm about ready to smash this cartridge. Hydlide. It's hard to believe that Pony Canyon a well know Japanese media company made this yet most of this Japanese export games suck real bad. What for? What exactly went horribly wrong in porting an otherwise simple Famicom port over to the American NES? Why exactly does this conversion fail so miserably as a game? What was this game supposed to be about and why couldn't they have just designed a decent Zelda clone? There are so many questions and yet there are zero answers. Maybe it should stay that way.
Publisher: FCI.
Developer: Toshiba.
Best Feature: I couldn't find any.
Worst Feature: That it exists.
Release Date: May 30, 1989. U.S.