Pyroclastica

Shares some similarities with Legend of Zelda, in the sense that it’s really interesting to see which parts of the Metal Gear series have been here since the beginning. It’s probably more than you think: Cardboard boxes, cigarettes, a tank as a boss, etc. Even the plot line is roughly the same as Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation
That said, if you don’t have a guide, this game is a SLOG. I’m not sure it would be worth playing except as an artifact of history. Equipping different card keys constantly is very annoying, the game constantly makes references to “Building X,” where X is a number, despite the fact that none of these buildings are ever labeled. There’s no map, you can’t know where you are, and the hints you would get have been really destroyed by the bad translation.
Unlike a lot of NES games, the manual doesn’t really help any of this at all. Using a strategy guide is definitely the way to go.
Accountability Corner: For the first time ever on one of these reviews, I have used a save state. After killing Coward Duck, I accidentally killed one of the 3 hostages, which took my star ranking from 4 to 3. I don’t know how to recover from this, so I assumed my game was in an unwinnable state. I rewound and went back to before the Coward Duck fight. I always hate to do that, but for this reason, this run was not entirely legitimate. I think I paid enough punishment for this, as after the Duck fight, I immediately died and had a TON of backtracking to do, but I didn’t save state my way out of that one. I suffered the failure just like you’d have to do on original hardware.
A lot of the backtracking, especially when you die, is really punishing, but I did all of it, every time. I even walked all the way back to the only place in the game that has Missiles (building 1) when I was very near the end of the game because I had run out. There are many elements like this, which I think were purposely designed to make the game feel longer than it is.

Metal Gear