Console History: Ai Senshi Nicol (Love Warrior Nicol)

This is Console History, a special sub-series of my more general History Lessons series, covering console role-playing games, action role-playing games, Metroidvanias, and action-adventure games in nominally chronological order starting in the late 1980s. The chronology is garbled in the beginning as the scope of the series expanded, but it gets more organized later on. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

The Great Console History Reorganization continues! Last time, I added Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll to the ranks of games I’ve already covered. If I’d had my timeline in order, next would have been Esper Dream, then The Goonies II, Golvellius: Valley of Doom, and Rygar. Since I’ve already written about those, we move now to Ai Senshi Nicol, a sci-fi action-adventure game released by Konami on April 24, 1987 for the Famicom Disk System. Ai Senshi Nicol was only released in Japan, but all of the in-game text is in English, so I was able to play it without needing to track down a fan translation.

The manual, however, is still in Japanese, meaning I was stuck with an awkward machine translation. But I suspect that even with a proper translation, the premise wouldn’t make much sense. The protagonist, Nicol, is a 14-year-old genius who has invented a dimensional space transporter device with his girlfriend, Stella. My machine translation rendered the protagonist’s name as Nicole, making me imagine a teenage lesbian scientist couple, which would have been an impressively early example of queer representation. The in-game text, however, confirms he’s a boy named Nicol. A cow demon warlord from another star system contacts Nicol to buy the device, but Nicol refuses, because he believes the cow demon will use it for military expansion. In response, the demon attacks the couple and kidnaps Stella (typical damsel in distress plot, sigh) and steals the unfinished device. He offers Stella in exchange for the final piece of the device, but Nicol instead blasts off on a rescue mission. So the demon breaks the device up into fragments and hides them on different planets. Nicol must collect the fragments, reassemble the device, and use it to confront the cow demon and rescue Stella.

An odd setup, but it’s really just an excuse to send players to a bunch of different planets to collect fragments. These planets are nonlinear areas that are explored screen by screen (and the occasional scrolling area), from a top-down viewpoint that is clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda. The cave entrances or stairways leading to subterranean areas will feel immediately familiar to anyone who’s played Zelda, but the way each planet is its own self-contained area, tackled in sequence — with players able to save their game to the Disk Card whenever they reach a new one — feels much more like the first game I went back to as part of the Great Console History Reorganization: The Mysterious Murasame Castle.

Nicol’s fights against the cow demon’s biomonsters, however, don’t really feel like either of those games. Nicol uses a fast-firing, short range pistol to fend off his enemies, in a classic run-and-gun style. Esper Dream featured similar combat two months before Ai Senshi Nicol, but I suspect Konami was actually pulling from arcade action titles like Commando. But I was reminded most of the bunker exploration segments in Blaster Master, which wouldn’t release for another 14 months. The resemblance is uncanny: Nicol’s large size relative to the smaller blocks that act as obstacles; the way some of those blocks can be shot to reveal power-ups; even the appearance of the power-ups themselves is nearly identical to Blaster Master. Sunsoft must have taken a lot of inspiration from Ai Senshi Nicol when they designed the on-foot sections in Blaster Master.

But Ai Senshi Nicol has one thing that none of the games mentioned above have: Nicol can jump. Rygar featured jmumping in its overhead exploration sections, but it released only a week before, so I’m guessing the developers independently had the same ideas. As Nicol explores the different planets, he will encounter pits, sometimes with moving platforms over them, that he must leap across. Thankfully, falling in does not mean instant death. It just drops Nicol into a small area underneath, where he must find an exit that will return him to where he was when he fell. In fact, falling into these places is often a good idea, because they can contain important powerups. They add another layer to Nicol’s explorations.

The planet layouts are more complex than either Zelda or The Mysterious Murasame Castle, because most screens have walled-off areas that can only be accessed by taking a different route. Instead of a single exit on each side of the screen, there can be several, each leading to a different walled section on the next screen. These sections can then become paths leading all over the planet. It’s not as complex as the dungeon in Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, which used a similar design concept a few months later, but it does make the planets feel denser and more interesting than any of the locations in Ai Senshi Nicol’s predecessors.

The planets are varied, some resembling high-tech facilities, others verdant grasslands, or oceans dotted with islands. Water or lava is common, however, slowing Nicol’s movement and damaging him unless he stocks up on some Astro Pants. Yes, there’s a powerup called Astro Pants, and I usually had plenty of it, so I actually never got damaged from wading through harmful liquids. But I assume that’s what would happen without the pants. Other powerups include Astro Wear, which acts as armor against enemy attacks, energy tanks for more health that are copied straight out of Metroid, and upgrades for Nicol’s pistol range and power.

Those upgrades are permanent. The speed upgrades, sadly, are not. Nicol can collect a few of these, each making him move a bit faster, but upon reaching a new planet they’re lost, and he must find them anew. This conjured unpleasant flashbacks of Ganbare Goemon! Karakuri Douchuu, where every death became a failure spiral because Goemon would lose his essential speed boosts, but it’s not as annoying here since death always means starting the entire planet over. Nicol restarts in a safe place, not in the middle of the mobs who just killed him, so he can safely seek out the speed upgrades again.

But restarting entire planets has its own drawbacks. Ostensibly it’s similar to the levels in The Mysterious Murasame Castle, encouraging players to carefully learn each level and master routes through it, but it doesn’t work nearly as well here. Partly that’s because the levels are truly nonlinear: there are three fragments of the device hidden on each planet (typically in the underground areas), and Nicol can retrieve them in any order he pleases. As soon as he’s nabbed the last one, his spaceship appears and he can hop in and blast off to the next world. This means there’s no defined endpoint to any of the planets. It also means there’s no traditional final boss fight. There are bosses, but they feel more like minibosses, popping up in certain places while Nicol explores. Sometimes they’re guarding one of the fragments. Sometimes they’re just somewhere along the path to one of the fragments. Sometimes Nicol can run into one early on, before he’s ready to face it, and find his otherwise generous lifebar emptied in a few seconds.

The real problem is that these bosses are the only time Ai Senshi Nicol is truly difficult. In The Mysterious Murasame Castle, learning routes through repeated failed attempts is fun because the challenge level is consistently high throughout. In Ai Senshi Nicol, most exploration is gentle, with enemies offering only the slightest friction, until suddenly a boss appears and brings a swift death. Faced with going through all those easy screens again, I found myself quickly frustrated, and falling back on save states to remove the repetition.

One example came on the very first planet. I easily found the first two fragments in my wanderings, then headed down what I assumed was the path to the third. Suddenly I found myself in a locked room with two giant serpents. I’d faced some of these on the way to the other fragments and they weren’t too much trouble, but with two of them in a more open area I suddenly found Nicol had perished, before I even realized what was happening. I started over, taking the same route, thinking I was ready this time. I was not. On my third attempt I tried using Nicol’s special Cosmo Ball attack, a limited-use powerup that damages everything on the screen, and got through with no problems. But having to do the rest of the planet three times just to figure that out was annoying.

Sometimes, the frustrations don’t come from bosses. On another planet, I had to navigate a winding corridor full of pits, and enemy robots placed in such a way that they could easily knock Nicol into the pits. Usually, pits drop Nicol into small areas that are easily navigated, but this time it dropped him into another winding corridor, full of lava, with a few enemies taking potshots that were hard to avoid. After slowly wading through all that, Nicol would return to the place from which he fell, only to get knocked into a pit again immediately. It was maddening, and soon I was using a save state after every jump just to avoid another slog through that underground tunnel.

By far the worst difficulty spike, however, is the final boss. After exploring the entire final world, collecting three fragments, and dueling with a few tough regular bosses, I finally unlocked the room to the cow demon himself, only to die instantly. I’m not even joking. I barely had time to register what was happening in the fight before I saw the game over screen. The worst part is that the cow demon isn’t even the worst final boss I’ve encountered in the Console History series (for the curious, that honor belongs to Hydlide 3: The Space Memories). He has specific attack patterns that players can learn, moving Nicol to safe spots from which he can return fire, then disengaging and dodging once the cow demon starts stomping around. Once I learned this, the cow demon was fairly straightforward to defeat. But the punishment for dying during the fight is to do the entire final planet again. Every time. It took me maybe a dozen attempts to defeat the cow demon, but that was using a save state from just outside his room. If I’d had to play the final planet a dozen times over I’m not sure I would have persevered.

Playing with save states, however, clearly alters the experience. It only took me two play sessions to finish Ai Senshi Nicol, a remarkably short duration for a game of the time. For many of the planets, I wandered through and finished them without visiting every area, making me worry that I’d missed out on important upgrades. If I’d played properly, I would have repeated these planets so often that I would have time to explore every nook and cranny, and find every last powerup and boost. I would have learned the best way through each one, tricks to defeat bosses more easily, and ensure Nicol was best equipped for later planets. If I was frustrated at having to repeat a planet after dying to a boss, I might have just taken a break, returning later from the saved game to tackle it afresh. The playtime would have been much longer, and each new planet reached would have been a milestone. In 1987 I probably would have enjoyed the process, because it would have made Ai Senshi Nicol feel like an epic adventure.

But the fact remains that when I played The Mysterious Murasame Castle in 2026, I still wanted to approach it this way. With Ai Senshi Nicol, I did not. Too much of it is simple enough that repetition brings no satisfaction. I would have found some enjoyment in learning the full layouts of every planet and the locations of all the powerups, but repeating them all just to get to the boss that was giving me trouble would have been annoying.

That’s a lot of complaining, but overall I had fun with Ai Senshi Nicol. Controlling Nicol feels responsive and smooth, the varied planets feel distinct from each other, and exploring the twisting paths on each planet is fun. It has some excellent music too, using the extra sound channel of the Famicom Disk System (compared to the standard Famicom) to great effect. A few annoying difficulty spikes are easily mitigated by judicious use of save states, turning the game into a breezy sci-fi adventure that can occupy an afternoon or two. And you’ll definitely have access to save states if you want to play it; aside from the original Famicom Disk System release, Ai Senshi Nicol saw one mobile phone port in 2006 (also in Japan only), and that’s it. Realistically, the only way to play today is to use emulation, as I did. As usual for Famicom games, I used the Retroarch frontend with the Mesen emulation core to play. You’ll also need the Famicom Disk System BIOS file, as I discuss in my post about Esper Dream.

Up next, we’ll jump past Zillion to another Famicom Disk System game that released a month after Ai Senshi Nicol. Stay tuned!

Next on Console History: watch this space!