Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for NES demonstrates the duality of bad and worse
When navigating the squalid wastelands of video games, I often must turn to reputation to figure out where to stick my fingers. In the West, few games have a reputation for being awful quite like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
This is entirely because of the Angry Video Game Nerd, who I respect but isn’t always the best source since he’s primarily aimed at providing entertainment through a schtick. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been singled out by him as one of the darkest spots in the NES library. I have to disagree.
Oh, it’s definitely awful. Don’t assume that I’m here to defend it. It’s as boring as a lecture on the history of terrycloth (did you know it dates back to before 4000 BCE?) and as tedious as chewing through a concrete brick. However, what you might not expect is that, when examined through autopsy, a lot of it feels very deliberate, even if many of the decisions seem misguided. A game that tries to blaze its own trail and fails is a lot more interesting than one that just ineptly follows in another’s footsteps.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was created by the creatively named Advance Communication Company and released on the Famicom in 1988 as Jīkiru Hakase no Hōma ga Toki, or just Hōma ga Toki on the title screen. The full title roughly translates to Dr. Jekyll’s Hour of… something. I often see the translation of “wandering demon” or “wandering evil,” which I think is correct, but the combination of kanji seems a bit obscure.
As the name implies, the game is (very loosely) based on the 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. The NES/Famicom didn’t really have a good track record when it came to adapting classic literature. Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the first that comes to
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