Chew-Man-Fu (Virtual Console) Review

Like most of the TurboGrafx games showing up on the Virtual Console, Chew-Man-Fu is fairly obscure and probably not known to a lot of you. It’s an action/puzzle game with embarrassingly heavy doses of Chinese stereotyping. It hasn’t aged so well, either, having been originally released in 1990 and showcasing some rather plain graphics and obnoxious music.

The objective in these single-screen puzzles is to push or pull four differently-colored balls through a maze and onto their corresponding floor plates. Once you’ve grabbed onto a ball, you can take it wherever it will fit, forward or backward, which leads to some satisfying maneuvering around corners. Balls can be kicked, as well, a tactic useful for killing monsters or breaking down walls to reach once fenced-off areas. Each ball color acts a different way, too. The blue ball is super bouncy, the red ball does more damage against monsters, and the black ball is best for plowing through walls. Given that, it’s sometimes better to hang onto one of the balls so you can utilize its power.

Between levels, you’ll receive words of encouragement from your mentor as he tallies up your points. His dialogue is painfully cheesy and needlessly long, though, one of Chew-Man-Fu’s bigger annoyances. At certain intervals, this wise man will also give you the chance to exchange collected diamonds for 1-ups or to participate in mini-games (for 1-ups). Extra lives are not hard to come by, but you do lose them easily. Unless you’ve picked up health in-game, it takes just one hit to knock you out. The level doesn’t always restart when you die, and you have infinite continues, so overall frustration is pretty low. The difficulty quickly escalates in later levels, however. It’s a race against the clock, after all, and you deal with numerous monsters that not only respawn but occasionally tamper with the balls.

Chew-Man-Fu features a whopping 550 puzzles. These come in sets of 10 that take place in different areas with different themes. Once you’ve beaten five areas (50 levels), the game starts over, but the puzzles have changed to be more difficult. That’s a lot to keep you busy, considering one group of 50 levels can take over an hour to get through. Since puzzles are limited to one screen, though, they start to feel very similar to each other. Items and monsters help shake things up, but there are only so many ways you can arrange horizontal and vertical walls. Once you’ve gone through about 100 levels, you’ll start to wonder if any of it is really new.

Fortunately, this is made more tolerable when two players tackle the puzzles together. All the same rules apply, it’s just that now there’s an extra player to help out. And in some of the puzzles, having a partner makes all the difference. He/she can move a ball that’s blocking your way, kill a monster sneaking up behind you, or take care of one side of the maze while you do the other. The two of you can get in each other’s way, of course, and it’s easy to get trapped by the careless antics of the other player (that was an accident…. right?!). Still, Chew-Man-Fu makes for a great co-op experience, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.

On top of this, the game also includes a level editor and allows you to store up to 12 custom maps. The editor features everything you could want as a Chew-Man-Fu designer, it’s just not very easy to use. The menu only pops up by dragging the cursor to the bottom of the screen, you have to cycle through every category of items to find what you’re looking for, and you can’t place multiples of the same item at the same time. It’s clunky and, ultimately, not very thrilling to see in action.

Final Comments

Puzzle fans who like a little action with their “thought-provokery” will absolutely love this game. The ball system is a lot of fun and lends to some genuinely hectic and hilarious moments. 550 levels is a lot of content, too, despite the fact that they start feeling too similar too soon. When you’ve got another player alongside you, though, it doesn’t really matter. If you want a good 2-player co-op experience in your VC repertoire, this is $6 well-spent.