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I’m in the midst of another detour from my nominal timeline for this series. Having reached the first truly 16-bit console role-playing game, Phantasy Star II, in March 1989, I then went all the way back to June 1987 for Glory of Heracles: The Labors of the Divine Hero. I’d originally skipped that because I thought it was a simple Dragon Quest clone, but in fact it has a bunch of interesting ideas of its own. Now, I’m jumping forward to July 20, 1988, when Capcom released Bionic Commando in Japan for Nintendo’s Famicom system (although I played the US port for the rebranded NES, which released in December of the same year). That puts it between Blaster Master and Exile in our timeline. Like Glory of Heracles, I’d originally skipped over Bionic Commando, in this case because I thought it was a pure action game and thus outside the scope of this series. Later, I learned that it had a lot of design ideas that would influence the nascent Metroidvania genre, which puts it in scope after all. Bionic Commando also has another, far more notable claim to fame: it is the first game with a grappling hook as a central mechanic.

Sure, Rygar technically had a grappling hook back in April 1987. But he could only launch it directly upwards, to pull himself up to higher ground (or lower himself down instead). Ladd, the protagonist of Bionic Commando, can use the grappling hook in his bionic arm to pull himself up to higher ledges too, but he can also do a lot more with it. He can fire it directly forwards, to knock enemies back or to grab items from a distance. Most importantly, he can fire it at a 45 degree angle, to grab hold of a ceiling or lamppost, and then start swinging, launching himself across gaps or even into a series of aerial grappling swings to cross long distances. This is critical, in fact, because it’s the only way Ladd can cross over pits and other obstacles. He is, you see, unable to jump. He can only grapple.

I never played Bionic Commando as a kid, but I’d heard about it. It was preposterous: a platformer, in which you can’t jump? How would that even work? My friends and I all scoffed. I also heard that it was really hard, which came as no surprise. I mean, you can’t even jump. Of course it’s hard. We shook our heads and played other games instead. In our defense, we didn’t know that grappling hooks were cool yet. Today, swinging around on grappling hooks is considered one of gaming’s most hallowed activities, but games didn’t have them back then. Bionic Commando was the first. And, given its age, I’m surprised by how well it works. Swinging around in Bionic Commando feels great.

The grappling hook is surprisingly nuanced. To use it like Rygar’s hook, players must hold up while firing it, something I did often to ascend to higher platforms. Less often, I held forward to have Ladd fire it straight ahead, to nab an item that was across a gap. But the deafult behavior of the hook is to fire at a 45 degree angle, encouraging swinging right from the start. Once the hook is attached, players must press forward to start Ladd swinging, which is accompanied by a lovely animation as he gracefully arcs back and forth. Keep pressing forward and he’ll leap off at the end of his swing, ideally landing on a platform, or — in the game’s trickier sections — firing the hook again to go directly into another swing. I didn’t realize until near the end of the game that Ladd doesn’t need to leap from his swing immediately; he can swing back and forth indefinitely, never losing momentum, and wait for the opportune moment to leap. Or even leap back in the opposite direction he started from, if need be.

Of course, if Ladd is close to the ceiling when he fires his grapple, then he’s hanging from a shorter length of cable, and can’t swing as far. There are separate sets of animations for different cable lengths, which is a lovely touch. Even cooler, he can retract his grapple with a second press of the button, pulling himself up (into shorter and shorter swings) until he’s hanging from the ceiling, and can climb up onto the platform above. It’s clear that a lot of love was poured into the design of the grappling hook movement, and once I got the hang of it I was having a blast swinging around the various stages.

None of that nuance is captured in the manual, sadly. It’s poorly translated and lamentably short on detail, barely covering the most basic controls. Given how different the grapple hook movement of Bionic Commando is to other games, it’s a real shame that the manual doesn’t describe it better. I suspect that’s one reason players found Bionic Commando so hard. Another is that it tends to front-load its difficulty, such that many players would have struggled with its very first stage. You see, when Ladd starts the game, he has no health bar, and will die in a single hit from an enemy soldier. But, as he collects bullets from defeated enemies, he will eventually “level up” and get more health. This is another thing the manual never mentions (the bullets are mentioned, but not what they do). There are also places in the game where Ladd can find items that give him “continues”, so he can resume the game even after he loses all of his lives. Once players know where those are, they’re quite easy to nab, so there’s really nothing stopping players from continuing over and over. Just as long as they don’t turn off the game, that is: like Blaster Master (which released just one month earlier), there’s no password or save system at all. Players have to win in one try, even if they effectively find infinite continues. Fortunately for me, I was able to use save states to pick up where I left off, so I didn’t need to set aside an hours-long gaming session just to see things through to the end.

It’s not just the fact that Ladd hasn’t leveled up yet that makes the first stage tough, though. It’s the fact that Bionic Commando requires a different way of thinking about space. Without a jump, all my instincts about how to navigate a level proved wrong. Small gaps that would have been trivial to cross in a traditional platformer became huge obstacles. Vertical navigation was totally different, as I could climb easily with the grappling hook but had a much harder time getting back down again. I had to learn how far Ladd could go with a swing, to look for spots where vertical climbs were possible, to identify good grapple points to move around. The first stage starts simple, but soon sent me into a massive underground base with multiple floors and different routes to take through it. Like Blaster Master, levels in Bionic Commando scroll both vertically and horizontally, allowing for big spaces like this that are a joy to explore. But it can be a lot right at the start, and I found myself facing a “game over” screen and having to start over often.

Once I got the hang of things, however, I started to really enjoy myself. And, indeed, to challenge the idea that Bionic Commando is hard. The first stage is tricky, sure, but only because I was still learning how to grapple. And also because Ladd hadn’t leveled up yet, but it’s actually pretty easy to level him up in the first stage since enemies are constantly parachuting in, ready to drop bullets for Ladd to nab. After that, I was doing really well and besting many stages on my first try, feeling awesome as I pulled off cool aerial manuevers with the grappling hook. No, Bionic Commando is not hard, I thought. It’s ahead of its time. A platformer where players can’t jump, but must instead use a grappling hook for traversal, which transforms the way levels are designed and navigated and yields surprising permutations during play? That’s the kind of thing that would earn heaps of critical acclaim for an indie game from the 2010s. To see it in a game from 1988 is astonishing. Platformers, as a genre, had been around for less than a decade at that point, yet here’s a game that totally reimagines how they can work. My friends and I were foolish to mock it. If we’d taken the time to learn its foibles, we would have found a unique and rewarding game. Not being able to continue after turning it off is a big drawback, but it didn’t stop us in Blaster Master, why should it here?

Then I reached Area 6, and… yeah, OK. Bionic Commando is really hard.

Let me back up a little. Much like Rygar, Bionic Commando was originally an arcade game (released in March 1987), before getting a port for home systems that was pretty different. The arcade version was a pure action platformer, but the Famicom/NES version added a map in which all the stages (Areas) are shown, not always in numerical order, connected by different paths. Players direct their helicopter to move between areas, and then can descend, or transfer to another area. Enemy trucks move around this map too, and if the helicopter encounters one, players must descend and enter a short top-down run-and-gun stage, similar to those in the earlier arcade title Commando (in fact, the US release of Bionic Commando is pitched as a sequel to Commando, where Ladd’s mission is to rescue Super Joe, the hero from Commando, from the evil Imperial forces). It’s in these top-down sections that Ladd can find continues, so if players are ever having trouble with the platforming stages they can just fly the helicopter around until they encounter a truck and earn some continues in just a few minutes.

There are even side locations on the map which are neutral areas, where Ladd is forbidden from firing his gun lest the guards attack. These reminded me of town areas from Zelda II, since Ladd can walk around and chat with the locals, and sometimes find important items. These items do all sorts of things: a flare gun is needed to light up a darkened cave area later on, armor can help deflect a few bullets, new weapons have different firing patterns that are useful for certain enemies in certain stages. There are multiple different communicators to find, and Ladd must bring the correct one for each stage, as he will always be looking for the communication room where he can contact friendly agents and wiretap enemy conversations. These provide story, hints, and gate progress in the stage by opening the doorway to the boss. All of this — the items, and the map that connects all the Areas — reminded me of Clash At Demonhead, which would release about six months later. I’m now convinced that Bionic Commando was a big influence on that game. There’s more backtracking to earlier locations in Clash At Demonhead, though. For all its nonlinear layout and open-ended level design, Bionic Commando is mostly tackled in order, and sometimes even directly prevents players from flying to later stages on the map until they’ve completed the earlier ones. Still, Bionic Commando feels much more open than a standard action game, and I can see how it influenced the interconnected worlds of later Metroidvanias.

The map even indicates what kind of terrain players will encounter in each stage. When I reached Area 6, the helicopter was flying over water, and I found some sort of naval shipyard, with bunkers built on platforms in the water. Here I came to respect and despise the lowly lamppost. These are great for grappling onto, but while Ladd can pull himself up onto them, he’ll slip off quickly. Yet I found myself doing exactly that as I tried to navigate the devious Area 6, where I needed to cross a large stretch of water using only lampposts as grappling points. I had to climb onto a lamppost, grapple onto another immediately before slipping off, then perform a sequence of swings from other lampposts in order to cross the water. And then do it again for the next part of the stage, before facing a gauntlet of rolling barrels like some mockery of Donkey Kong. I fell into the water so many times. I used countless continues. Area 6 challenged me to truly master mid-air grappling, and it was a trial by fire (er, water). It made me realize that Bionic Commando is not messing around.

Yet, I persevered, and I’m glad I did. By the time I finally completed Area 6 I felt like a true grappling expert, and was able to meet similar challenges in later stages without much fuss. Nothing else challenged me quite as much as Area 6 did, but the later stages are pretty tough regardless. There are tricky grappling sequences that drop Ladd back to an earlier part of the stage if he falls, so he’ll need to climb back up again before he can attempt them once more. There are boss enemies with nigh impenetrable defenses, who are better ignored in favor of blasting the computer core they’re guarding. There are threats that only appear once, like the creatures that lurk underground and swallow Ladd whole if he tarries too long, or the soldiers in mini-helicopters who attack from above and below.

But this also means that Bionic Commando has tons of variety. Stages are rarely repeats of similar challenges, and each has its own identity. Perhaps Ladd is climbing a fog-ridden mountain, in order to infiltrate the secret base at its peak. Or maybe he’s dropping into the garbage dump, based on some intel that he’d find an ally imprisoned there. One memorable stage was a vertical climb up a tower, while paratroopers harried Ladd from all sides. The game is bursting with ideas.

And despite the difficulty spike in Area 6, and all the challenges that followed it, I ended up returning to my original conclusion about Bionic Commando: it’s way ahead of its time. Grappling through its memorable stages simply feels great, and so different from other platformers before or since. Playing it without a save state to continue from would have been tough, but I still wish I’d tried this as a kid. I don’t think my parents would have approved though; they were cautious about games with modern military themes. Today, of course, we’re inundated with them, and there are known connections between the video game industry and the militaries of various nations, including the United States. In the late ’80s, though, it was still somewhat controversial for games to feature “real” violence like this. Even Bionic Commando was censored for its US port. The original Japanese version (titled Top Secret) featured neo-Nazis as the villains, who used the Nazi swastika symbol and were trying to resurrect Hitler. In the US version, all direct references to Nazis were removed, and the secret plan is to resurrect “Master D”. But it’s still clearly a story about a military commando going up against a fascist regime.

Honestly, that theming may have made Bionic Commando less interesting to me as a kid, too. I was more into fantasy and sci-fi in my games back then (and I still enjoy those now!). And if I had played it, I might have given up before I figured out how to use the grappling hook effectively. I’m glad I went back to play it now, though, because it’s impressively imaginative and fun. And more influential than I thought: there’s a direct line from Ladd’s grappling hook to the Grapple Beam in Super Metroid, which is probably my favorite Metroidvania of all time. One thing I learned while researching games for this blog series is that there weren’t actually very many early Metroidvania games. Most of the titles listed under the genre are from 2010 or later, with earlier titles mostly restricted to the Metroid and Castlevania series that gave the genre its name. So it’s cool to find these early examples of proto-Metroidvanias like Blaster Master, Bionic Commando, and Clash at Demonhead.

If you’re interested to check out Bionic Commando yourself, there was a remake called Bionic Commando Rearmed in 2008, but as far as I can tell the only way to play the original Famicom/NES version is by using emulation as I did. As usual for NES games, I used the Retroarch frontend with the Mesen emulation core to play. I recommend trying it, the save states offered by Retroarch eliminate the main issue with the game, letting players continue where they left off as they swing through Ladd’s dangerous mission. If you’re worried that the first example of gaming’s beloved grappling hook will be clunky and primitive, don’t be. It turns out grappling hooks were great from the very start.

Next, we’ll be jumping all the way back to March 1989 — the same month that Phantasy Star II appeared — for the final game in our detour. After that, we’ll be back to our nominal timeline! Stay tuned.

Next on Console History: watch this space!