Rampart was one of the games my whole family could enjoy. Even my dad had this brief period where he was engrossed in the single-player campaign of Super Rampart. Memories of the NES version sit in some of the furthest regions of my memory (I was probably four). The formula can only be stretched so far, but I have a fondness for it all the same, despite my familiarity.

That’s why it interested me to find out that the Famicom version of Rampart is a unique take on the formula. You’ll notice I mentioned the NES version – totally different. Jaleco did the North American NES version, whereas the Famicom version was done by none other than Konami. The team was made up of people who worked on Lagrange Point and Bucky O’Hare. It’s a whole fat Konami game, and I’m maybe the only person who’s a bit upset that it’s on a generic Famicom cartridge rather than Konami’s distinct brand.

Anyway, this is exactly why I tell NES fans that they need to get into Famicom games.

BALLS TO THE WALLS

If you’re unfamiliar with Rampart, the concept is pretty simple. You have a castle keep, and you need to keep that castle keep completely encased within an outer wall. Within the walls, you place cannons to blast away enemies or your opponent’s walls. A round is separated between shooting your cannons and rebuilding your walls. Walls are built with Tetris-like blocks, and if you’re unable to keep a castle keep enclosed by the end of a build turn, you lose.

In the original arcade version, the single-player mode has your castle on an island, and you have to shoot at boats in the surrounding waters. The boats not only hurl cannonballs at your walls, but if they reach land, they’ll unload little ant dudes who try to swarm your walls. Same as in multiplayer, you need a completely enclosed keep to stay in the game.

Rampart on Famicom gets kind of creative with the concept, at least when it comes to single-player. Instead of fighting ships from your island castle, you’re presented with a choice of four different scenarios. They roughly equate to practice, easy, normal, and hard. Practice is modern military, and has you fighting tanks, but, as its name implies, it’s mainly to get you to grips with the game. It gets more outlandish from there.

FOR THE SHOGUN

The strangest is Easy Scenario. It’s themed around Red Riding Hood of all things. She’s on her way to Grandma’s house, and needs to fortify herself along the way. You build fenced in areas, and your cannons are little elves that throw apples. You’re up against wolves and trees and mice.

Normal is medieval fantasy. Interestingly, your cannons are dudes in armor instead of, like, catapults or something. The enemies are dragons and zombies.

Lastly, Hard mode is Sengoku-era Japan. Your cannons are actual cannons, and you fight Samurai and their Ashigaru.

So, rather than boats, you usually have a group of big enemies who show up on cannon phases, and little dudes who appear during build mode. The little dudes are essentially the same as the ant dudes from the original rampart. The big dudes, however, just rampage around. They’ll throw cannonballs at your walls, but they do the most damage by just marching over your blocks. They’ll flatten entire walls just by randomly jogging over them. They can be tough to hit, too, because, like the arcade version, cannonballs have a lot of hangtime and take a while to reach their target. The big enemies move semi-randomly, so they’re hard to predict.

You sort of lose the strategy of prioritizing ships that are headed for shore, but it’s replaced with prioritizing who’s closest to your walls and who isn’t moving. Plus, there’s a greater variety of enemies who behave in different ways. It allows for boss battles, which aren’t as impactful as the ones in Super Rampart, but are still a nice twist.

APPLES TO APPLES

There are two ways that you can win a map. Well, three ways. The first is by gaining enough points. Points are most easily earned by walling in a lot of territory during the build mode. The second way is by eliminating all enemies. This means you not only have to kill the big dudes rampaging around, but you have to take time to squish all the little ones. The third way only happens on a few maps, and that’s by walling in an object in the environment. Usually, you have to eliminate all the big dudes before the landscape opens up to allow you to wall the thing in, but you don’t succeed unless the thing is in your territory.

You not only lose if you can’t protect your castle keep, you can also lose if too many rounds pass. I rarely lost for taking too long anywhere but in the hard campaign.

It can get pretty annoying. The one great thing about the ships dropping dudes on your shore is that it was predictable. You could cut off the source to stem the flow. In Famicom Rampart, they just drop in from the edge of the screen, and there’s nothing you can do about it but try and box them in with walls, or shoot them with cannonballs. You can’t build on top of them, so they’ll sometimes leave you completely helpless when trying to repair your walls. That’s a normal Rampart annoyance, though. It’s by design.

It’s annoying that, after you destroy all the big dudes, the clock instantly jumps to three seconds remaining. So, if you want to kill the little guys, you have to do it while the big ones are still alive. It’s dumb, especially since one of the goals is to kill everyone.

It feels like a lot of luck is involved. Sometimes trees will stretch from a castle keep to the edge of a map, making it impossible to build a wall around it. With the random movement of the big enemies, you can have huge sections of walls crushed in mere moments.

It will also be a complete dick to you in the hard campaign (heh.) After some rounds, you’ll be interrupted by dialogue, and then certain things on the scoreboard will either increase or decrease. For example, there’s one level where toward the end, at about the time you’d be getting close to killing all the dudes, it will chime in and drop 40 more on the scoreboard, so you suddenly have to scramble to up the pace of your killing.

It’s scripted to happen at the same point every time, so it’s not entirely unfair, but what a way to be a cola douche.

KOCHOKOCHO

In spite of the frustrating aspects of it, I really dig Rampart on Famicom. I cussed at it a whole bunch, but I was always willing to give it another try. And it maybe doesn’t feel as great as Super Rampart, but it’s also different enough to feel like comparison isn’t necessary. Overall, it’s just a great take on a classic formula. It’s the only game I know where you get to take part in the military campaign of Red Riding Hood and her fruit-flinging gnome army.

I did test out multiplayer. You can select what scenario you play in (modern, Riding Hood, medieval fantasy, Sengoku), which is pretty neat. However, rather than provide you with preconfigured castle locations, you place your initial castle and secondary castle however you want. You can even put all your eggs in one basket and build them right next to each other. You can also uncover bonus items hidden in the map, which increase your points.

You might be wondering, as I had, if it still contains the loser humiliation mini-game. In the original Rampart, it’s a guillotine. In Super Rampart, it’s walking the plank. Here, it’s tickling the other player’s foot. So, that’s a bit weird. Don’t make this weird.

7/10

This review was conducted on an RGB-modded NES using a Famicom adapter and a cartridge copy of the game. It was upscaled via Retrotink 4K. All the above was paid for by the author.