| Kick Master | |
|---|---|
Cover art of Kick Master |
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| Developer(s) | KID |
| Publisher(s) | Taito |
| Designer(s) | Shinobu Yagawa Kazuhiro Iizuka |
| Composer(s) | Nobuyuki Shioda |
| Platform(s) | Nintendo Entertainment System |
| Release date(s) |
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| Genre(s) | Action (side-scrolling martial arts) |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Media/distribution | NES cartridge |
Kick Master is a side-scrolling action video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System that was released in 1992 by Taito. The game has some role-playing game elements, such as leveling up.
Contents |
The kingdom of Lowrel is attacked and burned by monsters sent by the evil sorceress Belzed (curiously, some sources such as Nintendo Power described Belzed as a male wizard,[1]). In the attack, the King and the Queen are slain and their only child, Princess Silphee, is kidnapped. The king's guards were all killed, except for the knight Macren. He and his younger brother, Thonolan, an aspiring martial artist, take off on a long journey to free the princess. As the fight against the wicked Belzed's minions commences, Macren is mortally wounded by a skeleton. With his dying breath, he pleads his brother to use his "great kicking skills" to avenge him and Thonolan swears to make Belzed pay for this.
Thonolan's quest will take him into the following levels:[1]
If the player manages to complete the game, Thonolan kicks the evil Belzed to death and rescues the princess Silphee. He then torches down Belzed's tower and disappears, never to be heard from again. (The player is then given an opportunity to try to beat the game again on the higher difficulty level.)
Enemies are defeated by using various martial arts kicks and magic spells. In this fashion, the player is a spellcaster/monk. Defeated enemies drop three items that will either help or hurt Thoalan. When Thoalan gains a level, his maximum MP is increased and new moves are learned.
Kick Master did not became very well known when it was first released.[2] The game was mocked by a Something Awful reviewer in 2005 as "a game so full of martial arts knowledge that I have already achieved olive belt status, something I made up just right now".[3]