Spelunker II on Famicom is a very confused sequel

destructoid.com:

Spelunker may be considered by the Japanese to be a “densetsu no kusoge” or “crappy game of legend,” but I consider myself a fan. It wasn’t bad, it was just sort of a jerk. It made bank in Japan, but it then started filling up the bargain bins. So, you have to wonder what led to the development of Spelunker’s sequels: Spelunker II on arcade and, confusingly, Spelunker II on Famicom. Were they trying to make more money off the name, or were they trying to continue the legacy by making a worse game?

I don’t have an answer to that question, and by the end of this article, I still won’t have an answer. Spelunker II: Yuusha he no Chousen on Famicom isn’t terrible. It’s not great, but I’ve played much worse. More strikingly, it has very little to do with the original Spelunker.

The Famicom version of Spelunker was a simple game at its core. Your goal was simply to descend or “spelunk” a cave to the very bottom. The twist was your protagonist had bones made of breadsticks and could die if a bat pooped on them. It was a simple port of a Broderbund game that got blown out of proportion due to its reputation.

For the console sequel, Irem licensed the title from Broderbund. After that, I can’t follow their logic. You start off by picking one of three characters: the explorer, the priest, and the esper. An esper, if you didn’t know, is someone who can use extra-sensory perception, which seems to just mean psychic powers to the Japanese. I’m not sure what a clergyman and a person who can tell what’s on the concealed side of a card are doing plumbing caves, but here we are.

The important thing is that they all have different abilities. While the explorer just has a gun and a knife to start with, they can carry more items. The priest