Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (Sega CD) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Sony Imagesoft's 1994 license-based horror adventure game for the Sega CD, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a game that, for a very long time, I had no interest in whatsoever. I wasn't impressed by the SNES game when I played it, and the fact that the Sega CD game was released only as part of a "buy one get one" bundle with Bram Stoker's Dracula (   • Bram Stoker's Dracula (Sega CD) Playthroug...  ) didn't instill in me any high expectations of quality. Especially not when Bram Stoker's Dracula had already been released as a stand-alone title a year prior.

But while this movie adaptation was in no way a runaway success, it turned out to be far better than the drek I had assumed it to be. It's an odd game that bears little resemblance to the cartridge-based versions. Instead of going the route of a horror-themed platformer, Psygnosis got creative, and the result was appropriately enough, something of a Frankenstein's monster.

Are you familiar with a Sega CD game called Revengers of Vengeance (   • Revengers of Vengeance (Sega CD) Playthrou...   It combined elements of RPGs, shooters, and 1-on-1 fighters for something that was thoroughly weird but enjoyable.

I ask because Frankenstein is a similar sort of unexpected genre mash-up: it's a graphic adventure (think King's Quest or Maniac Mansion) that is also a fighting game, all vaguely based on the 1994 film.

It's a phenomenal looking game considering the style on the Sega CD. Much of it consists of traditional 2D sprites overlaid atop prerendered CG backgrounds. The animation is super smooth and there is a lot of detail packed into most scenes, but the low color depth hurts the image quality pretty badly. Objects and screen exits alike are obscured by the dithering and blurriness, which can be pretty frustrating when your stuck.

The soundtrack fares about the same as the graphics. The music is great and it sets the mood nicely for every scene, but instead of being streamed from the disc as Redbook audio, it's encoded in fuzzy, low bit rate PCM streams.

It tries to do a lot of things with its presentation, and none of them quite work, but together they somehow balance out to be something that's generally enjoyable.

And yet again, this can be said for the gameplay itself. Both of its core modes feel half-baked. The fighting portion is slow, there are too few moves and no combos, and any opponent can be utterly toppled by spamming the charging headbutt move. The adventure mode provides little guidance to move you along, and it rarely requires you to do more than find arbitrary objects for people. There's no sense of continuity linking things together, nor is there any real challenge in figuring any of it out.

But somehow, as damning as all that sounds, I had a good bit of brainless fun with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I really dug the game's foreboding tone and the way it haphazardly throws together random moments from the film. I appreciated the high budget production values and the art direction regardless of how ill-suited it all felt for the platform. I loved the sheer novelty of having, of all things, a shoddy Street Fighter II clone shoe-horned in to the design.

It doesn't feature any of the stars from the film, the game loads for nearly a full minute before you see even the first flash screen, and the intro is an absurdly long and dull FMV clip. It makes a terrible first impression, and the whole game feels like it would've greatly benefitted from longer development cycle. I am okay with all of that, though. For me, this is one of those games that, however flawed, has enough charm and quirky weirdness that I find myself totally absorbed whenever I play it.

If the notable lack of Robert DeNiro's zombie wiener or Helena Bonham Carter's mange face aren't dealbreakers for you, and if you enjoy mediocre games loaded with uncouth design choices, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein on the Sega CD might just appeal to you. It would've never stood as a full-priced retail game on its own, but as part of a B1G1 package, it's respectable enough.

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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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