It started out like any other day. You were strolling down the streets, trusted baseball bat in hand, ready to smash down goth kids with flaming auras and beat down humanoid legs trapped in the ground. Suddenly, the surrounding air grows thick with terror and fear, your breath grows sharper and everything around you changes. Hands start protruding from the ground, a dog with a human head starts heading towards you while bloody faces float all around, wwhile a huge smiling cactus in the distance, turns ugly, haunting and menacing.
These were just the first five minutes of Monster Party, a game developed by Japanese company Human Entertainment, that somehow found its way on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the West, despite the Draconian rules set by the Japanese company and copious amounts of horror it still presents after cuts were made. How did this happen?

Monster Party was released on US territory in August 1989, right around that same time Nintendo had dropped their infamous rules dictating what kind of content would be allowed on their console and what wasn’t. It is unclear, at this stage, how this game managed to escape those rules basically unscathed. The main alteration regarded the title screen, made with more green goo and less blood, but that horrifying first level which turns bloody after the mid-point? Left basically intact, which might raise more than an eyebrow considering Nintendo’s family friendly image.
While its cover presents a generally average selection of famous copyright-free Universal monsters, basically none of them make their appearance. Talk about false advertising. The story goes that Mark, a clean boy who loves baseball, was on his way home, when he spotted a comet. Suddenly, the comet slammed into the ground in front of him, and a flying demon came out. The demon referred to itself as Bert and asked for Mark’s help to defend his dimension from the monster’s attack. Thus, Mark and Bert will go together in this weird journey of demons and ghouls.
Interestingly, the original Japanese version of the game (Parody World: Monster Party) seemed to feature many more classic horror monsters, discovered in full after the prototype found on Yahoo auction was dumped. We’re going to look at them later. Monster Party plays like a basic straightforward 2D action adventure: go from left to right, with some slight variations in the last levels, defeat enemies and bosses, collect the key to open the door and head to the next round. Sometimes, Mark can turn into Bert, thus able to fly and shoot lasers, by swallowing pills found by defeating random enemies.
That’s all there is. Enemies will also randomly drop health restoring hearts and question marks that will prolong your monster form. But that’s basically all the gameplay has to offer. So why am I showcasing this game if there’s really not much going on, mechanicwise? Because it is a miracle how, despite the numerous cuts made from the original Japanese prototype to the released US version, this game still retains so many zany and strange ideas to remain notable. It is not a coincidence that Undertale uses “please don’t pick on me”, as a quote from one of the game’s bosses.

The best part of Monster Party are definitely the boss fights. These take place in separate rooms from the rest of the gameplay, it is mandatory to go through them all to get the key to be able to progress to the next level. The first one is already quite something in itself, as it is a take on Audrey, the man eating plant from the remake of Little Shop of Horrors. In fact, as soon as you walk in she goes “Hello baby!”, originally the plant was much meaner looking and would attack you by singing musical notes. These were all removed, for some reason, and the notes changed to bubbles.
Along the things that were cut, there was a boss lifted directly from Planet of the Apes, an ape riding a horse complete with a crumbling Statue of Liberty in the background. Medusa would also make her sweet appearance, along with the mummy, which was kept but turned transparent. I would imagine they were afraid of copyright issues, even though there is really no copyright on the image of a moving corpse wrapped in bandages (Castlevania already used them years before, so they should have known!).

There was also a Mogwai, which would obviously turn into a Gremlin right at the start of the battle, transformed in the final version into a plain cat (still funny). Plus a lot of references to The Thing and Alien, all removed for probable fear of copyright problems. We definitely missed out on a lot of references which should have made, surely, a much better Monster Party. Still, all those changes leave the player with a probably even stranger collection of bosses: a cat, dancing zombies, a well that launches plates, Royce the giant caterpillar (because it rolls…), a guitarist with a mohawk and a bull man who throws small cows.
Despite so many references to Japanese monsters, such as the Taiko drum zombies and the Jiangshi (also removed from the US version), it is worthy to note that Monsters Party never had a Japanese release. The reasons behind this are, again, not known, we can speculate that the budget ran out or the Japanese publisher was not interested. Still, the Japanese version looked basically finished, from what we can see from the prototype.

While I rambled on the boss fights, that is not to stay there are no other interesting mechanics in Monster Party. Definitely of note is how Mark is armed with a bat all the way through, never getting another weapon. But, as opposed to the much more plain and boring bat of Ghoul School, Mark can also use it to ricochet bullets towards the enemies. This is a great way to quickly dispose of bosses, but also of several irritating enemies, such as the goth kids.
Monster Party maintains a classic NES difficulty from start to finish, never backing down from giving the player a challenge. It does come with unlimited continues, making you start from the last round, which keeps things, at least, fairly manageable. Unfortunately, the whole health system is completely random and doesn’t seem to respond to the player’s needs or any kind of pacing. Sometimes the game might dole out three health items one after the other, other times it just won’t give you anything.
This becomes especially a problem in the last two levels, where enemies transform from the usual ground/jumping attack, to the more complex attack from the sky which makes things hard to predict or to bounce back with the bat. The second-to-last round even presents a complicated maze, which might make you want to keep paper notes to avoid being quickly lost. The final level presents all kinds of enemies and obstacles, with even constellations coming out to shoot at Mark and a boss hidden right to the left of the starting point.
The ending is also not particularly satisfying, going for the usual “Super Mario Bros 2” cop-out, but adding one last-minute twist to, at least, make the player walk away feeling some kind of accomplishment. But it does have also another disqueting image, with Mark rotting in front of the player in a nightmare. Nintendo was really sleeping on the job with this one.

The main team behind Monster Party did not really seem to work on much after it, with the exception of designer Hiroshi Haruna who did indeed repeat a similar experiment with Venus Senki that same year and, to a much less successful extent, with the weird Gilligan’s Island NES game. Several members of the team will also work on Vasteel, a 1990 Turbografx CD turn-based mecha game.
Monster Party, to this day, remains a quirky proposition for late 80s NES. Not only because of its level of blood and violence, which makes it stand alone for games that actually came out in the US, but also because of its strange missed Japanese release. This is the rare NES Japanese title to only have a Western release. With peculiar and bizarre writing, a strange amalgam of Western monsters with a Japanese twist, plus a couple of interesting mechanics, it makes for a unique Halloween pastime.
Thanks to Alexander Chatziioannou for the inspiration and Gaming Historian for additional information.
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