Developed/Published by: Namco, Tose / Namco
Released: 19/09/1986
Completed: 28/04/2025
Completion: Completed it–but with a complete collapse in dignity, having to abuse save states starting around area 14.

Well, it’s been a while since the Xevious klaxon has gone off here in exp. towers–I think the last time we mentioned it was actually Tower of Babel–but here it goes off because we’re only bloody playing the first “real” sequel to Xevious! And it’s yet another Famicom game with Nazo, aka “Mystery” in the title. They were mystery mad in Japan in the mid-80s!!!

If three years feels like quite a gap for a game as successful and influential as Xevious to get a sequel, it’s worth mentioning that this is actually the fourth game in the franchise. Xevious in the arcades got an update in the form of Super Xevious (to which this has no relation) and then–and this is true–Xevious creator Masanobu Endo made a game starring an enemy tank from Xevious, Grobda, because he thought it’d be funny.

Grobda seems pretty forgotten now–and I don’t think “the top-grossing arcade game in Japan for December 1984” is quite enough to believe it was that much of a success. But of course, we know that Xevious itself was a huge success on Famicom–so it only makes sense for Namco to bang out a sequel. In this case, Endo probably didn’t think it was funny–he was on record as believing that a direct sequel to Xevious was unnecessary, and he’d left the company a year earlier. 

With Endo’s guiding hand missing, Namco–with the aid of Tose–did something that I think on paper makes sense. They looked at the huge success of Xevious, an Endo joint. They looked at the huge success of The Tower of Druaga (oh dear, set that klaxon off as well) also an Endo joint. They looked at how Tower of Druaga’s mystery design had been implemented into basically every other game coming out at this point, and thought: well, it’s chocolate and peanut butter, innit? Smash ‘em!!!

So with Xevious: GAMP No Nazo, you play Xevious levels where you have to do a particular action to progress–this is actually a bit less punitive than the original Tower of Druaga, where you can keep playing through the game with no way to win because you missed something. This can be as simple as defeating a boss (hardly a secret) or as annoying as finding hidden things in the level or interacting counter-intuitively with enemies. 

To put none too fine a point on it, this doesn’t work. At all. It’s obvious that at least Japanese players had become comfortable working through obscure fucking nonsense without the cameraderie of the arcade, but a vertically scrolling shooter puts pressure on you in a way that Tower of Druaga’s mazes didn’t–you can’t navigate back to something you’ve missed, and having to do an extra loop in GAMP No Nazo to get back there is brutally punitive.

Because GAMP No Nazo is miserably hard. There’s no sense here of the push-and-pull “intelligence” of the enemies of the original, just walls of bullets and, frankly, unfair bullshit from the very start. The first level sets the tone by featuring clouds that obscure enemies and bullets meaning you can be killed by something you can’t even see.

Trying to find what’s required to get to the next level just isn’t fun because of the high tension and sense of a “wasted run” when you get to a point and progress. The things you’re asked to do aren’t very interesting, either–while I’m hardly going to ask for the misery of The Tower of Druaga and having to, like, kill enemies in order, or something, the game only thinks to do something obvious like offer you different routes in levels like… twice.

You can choose to play this like Xevious: to see how far you get, how high your score goes by just memorising all the requirements, which isn’t actually so bad. And the game… sort of works. But it’s not as fun as the original, feeling more predictable and rote before getting ever more absurdly difficult, and I certainly wasn’t sure why I was bothering at a point–each time I’d think “maybe this is ok, actually” I’d start a new run to try and get further and get killed by enemies hidden by clouds immediately, sapping any urge to continue.

Namco might have been able to get away with this bar for the fact that it’s mid-late 1986 and the Famicom has already seen the likes of Gradius and Metroid, and Castlevania is out in a week. They went big with this one–no more numbered boxes, a special golden cartridge–which raises the question if they knew they had a pig on hand that they hoped more lustrous lips might help. Because it feels like Namco is getting left behind in both tech and design on the Famicom: GAMP No Nazo doesn’t look or play any better than the original, and that came out in 1984! At this point, the Famicom is Konami’s to lose…

Will I ever play it again? It isn’t worth it.

Final Thought: Namco, obviously, will be ok. But the sad thing, really, is that Xevious won’t be. The series that really started it all will limp on with a few sequels, but won’t ever be an important factor in the shooter genre ever again.