Ashura Who?

Rambo: First Blood Part II proved to be an absolute monster at the Box Office. Produced on a budget of $25.5 Mil, the film went on to gross a staggering $300.4 Mil. And that was just from theater ticket sales, saying nothing about licensing rights for broadcast, home video sales and rentals, and more. That’s the kind of math Hollywood cannot simply ignore. John Rambo has been cemented as a bona fide 1980s icon. His face began appearing on everything, from t-shirts to lunch boxes, posters to toys.

And, yes, video games. From 1985 through 1987, a whole fleet of licensed Rambo games were released on various consoles and computers. The first was 1985’s MSX title, Rambo, which tried to mirror the basic plot of Rambo: First Blood Part II as well as a tiny game on a limited cartridge for a very limited home console computer could allow. That game was ported to other home computers as well (at least according to Wikipedia, although not all sources agree), and it was only the first of many to follow. Very soon, many other graphical adventures for the damaged Vietnam veteran would follow.

Sega was one of the first to capitalize on the sudden, massive success, working to put out a bigger adventure for the hero to handle. Their solution to get the game out fast and quick? Take an already existing game and repurpose it with the Rambo license. Released in the U.S. in December of 1986, Rambo: First Blood Part II for the Sega Master System was actually the Sega Mark III game Ashura, which was published in Japan a month earlier. Amusingly, it then became Secret Command / Secret Commando in European PAL territories in October of 1987 (because the Rambo license Sega bought didn’t extend to Europe).

The game is honestly a pretty basic run-in-gun, top-down shooter. You play as Rambo (on the first player, and a reskinned ally on second player), moving your way upwards through multiple jungle stages as you battle to find POWs that the Vietnamese have captured and kept from America after the war. Rambo (and friend) have to kill everyone that’s trying to kill them as they march through the jungles, working to stop the evil army and save all the allies they can without running out of lives.

And then, weirdly, the game cuts over to the U.S. for a stage. Instead of fighting the Vietnamese, Rambo (and friend) battle dastardly cops and evil sheriffs, all while continuing to shoot anything that moves before they shoot him instead. This then leads to a cave entrance where, for the last stage, Rambo (and friend) once more march upwards, through forests that become a technologically advanced military base, taking out the evil soldiers that want to kill them. It culminated in a battle against an evil A.I. (maybe, or an evil stone face, or something), and defeating that ends the war and saves all the POWs. Hurray!

Rambo: First Blood Part II for the Sega Master System is a strange game, although it doesn’t start out that way. Its first four stages are very basic. Like Ikari Warriors and other games of its ilk, you take your soldiers vertically through the game, shooting in five directions while you move around. You also have grenade arrows you can shoot, which explode in a wide blast zone. But then, the enemies have guns and grenades, too, so a lot of the challenge of the game is avoiding everything flying at you while you kill anything and everything that moves.

The game started as Ashura, but it was a pretty easy transition for Sega to make it into a Rambo title. The buddhist monks that were the warriors in the original version become Rambo and his ally. You’re saving kidnapped friends instead of POWs. Various cut scenes showing Asian landscapes become cut-scenes emulating stills from the First Blood sequel. All around, whether intended originally or not, the game very easily slides into the Rambo licenses with little fuss or muss, making for a game that’s at least, visually, pretty easy to get into.

Play wise, though, this game is pretty hard. Classic Sega games are known for their difficulty, with the developers having no mercy on players, and Rambo: First Blood Part II is no exception. The first stage isn’t too bad, although you will still notice plenty of the elements that will come into play early on: bullets flying everywhere, a variety of enemy types from running gunners to flamethrower users, and even snipers and mini-tanks. But once you start moving into the later stages the enemies start coming on more and more, pretty relentlessly, all while bullets and explosives start flying. Getting through to the end game is likely an impossible task for most people, and when you add on the fact that enemies just keep coming, spawning in randomly if you stand still for too long, even trying to memorize their locations would be impossible.

It’s an arcade-style gunner, though, so that’s really to be expected. The game goes for the quarter-munching mentality, with you getting a few minutes of game time before it becomes so punishing it sends you back to start. But that was really the way these kinds of games went in the mid-1980s. They emulated (or were directly ported) arcade titles and the way they operated, expecting players to want that kind of gameplay at home as in the arcades. That would shift by the tail end of the decade, but Sega simply made a game that mirrored other titles at the time, and that’s fine. If you played any other top-down, run-and-gun shooter, you knew what to expect.

With that said, the game is fairly limited in its scope. It’s six stages long, and each stage has the same basic function. Run from the bottom to the top, shooting with your basic gun while collecting grenade-arrows to use (sparingly) as well. Get to the top, then fight a bunch more enemies until the way opens and you can blow your way past the final door. Then do it all again in the next stage. Most of the stages look the same, too, since they’re largely all jungle locations. Only the last two stages change that up at all, and with the high difficulty you’ll be lucky to get that far to see the difference in stage style.

It would have been nice to get some more variety in the title. A few different enemies would have been good, and a few more weapons would have been even better. Or a flying stage or two, since Rambo uses a helicopter in the sequel so why not have him use one here. Naturally this game isn’t really a Rambo title, but is a reskin of Ashura, and maybe having Buddhist monks flying helicopters would be weird. Still, even from that perspective, whatever version of the game you’re playing, the gameplay itself is very limited. It isn’t very ambitious and feels far more repetitive than it needed to be.

Still, for an early 1985 game isn’t not bad. It’s short, it’s basic, and it’s pretty standard, but it’s also an arcade shooter so you do get what you expect. If a sequel has come out we’d want more, but all things considered this is probably about as good of a Master System shooter as we could hope for. That doesn’t make it great, it just makes it good enough for the library it was part of. Better shooters were around at the time, and would continue to come out over the next couple of years, leaving this Rambo title in the heat of the jungle, lost among the hail of bullets.