El Viento – Wolf Team - 1991 - First time playing?: Yes!

America, the roaring twenties. Organised crime runs rampant through the streets. Not content with merely having a monopoly over bootleg liquor, the mafia’s empire has been expanded to the worship and summoning of a lovecraftian god, none other than The King in Yellow, Hastur. Thus, the ultimate enemy of the American mafia, a green haired anime magical girl, must destroy their religious cult and their god with boomerangs and magic fireballs. Oh also, the magical girl’s adoptive father is anime Indiana Jones.

Like any reasonable entity would, my immediate thoughts on hearing this premise is that this is clearly the greatest game of all time. Yet somehow, “magical girl fights 1920s gangsters” is barely scratching the surface of how completely and utterly off the rails and unhinged this beautiful mess of a game is. Every time I think it’s hit a peak that it can’t possibly top, the next level comes and somehow makes this already quirky game even more utterly absurd. El Viento is at least worth a look for the craziness alone, but how’s the gameplay? Er, not that good, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Annet is our heroine for this game, a descendant of Hastur who has his eldritch blood running through her veins, and the sister of Restiana, a sorceress allied with the cult and determined to resurrect her lord. Starting out with only two boomerangs and a weak fireball spell, she nonetheless has all she needs to tear through an endless supply of gangsters and cosmic horrors all by herself. Yeah, she’s kinda badass. The boomerangs are weak, but their speed and ability to be fired in rapid succession, especially later on when you get a third boomerang, work great for keeping up the damage-per-second in between heavier magic attacks. Your fireballs meanwhile deal quite a bit more damage than the boomerangs, but are also a bit slower and cost MP to cast. MP regenerates over time ensuring that you’ll never be out of magic for more than a second or two, but rapid usage of your spells can leave you defenceless in hectic combat encounters.

There’s quite a bit of almost RPG-esque character progression as you progress through the game, with Annet’s max HP increasing with each 100,000 points earned, as well as your max MP increasing each time you learn another magic spell. Each newly learnt magic spell is more powerful than the last, but as a tradeoff they have higher MP costs and longer charge times before you can fire them. Your magic spells also have enough different properties for all of them to still be useful even after you’ve learnt more powerful spells, such as the water magic where Annet pours a slightly sus looking stream of water which will then run across the floor, allowing you to safely hit lower enemies from a higher platform. The explosion magic meanwhile has a large enough blast radius to even hit enemies through solid walls, which the lightning magic you get after the explosion magic is less effective at. Using specific magic spells is still a bit clumsy however. There’s only a single button for using magic and it’s used for both selecting and firing spells. If you hold down the C button instead of just tapping it you’ll charge your magic shot as your spells will be cycled through up in the HUD. Once the spell you want to fire is highlighted in the HUD, let go of the C button and send that magic flying. If you hold the charge button down too long and accidentally select the wrong spell, you’re going to have to start charging again in order to get the spell you actually wanted to fire, plus you’ll also have to wait for your MP to regenerate as you wasted a large chunk of it by firing the wrong spell, not really something that’s fun to fiddle with in the middle of a skirmish.

“Clumsy” is really the best word to describe El Viento’s gameplay. It’s by no means awful, but fairly amateur and unpolished in a lot of aspects. The controls are fine for the most part, but enough subtle things are off for it to feel a bit sloppy. For instance, Annet is always positioned near the bottom of the screen, even when jumping. This means that while platforming, the very platforms that you’re trying to land on will vanish while you’re in mid-air due to the camera panning up too high in order to keep Annet at the bottom of the screen. Annet’s sprite is also quite large, giving the camera a zoomed-in feeling that often feels cramped, limiting your field of view and making it much easier for out-of-frame enemies to suddenly jump you. The difficulty curve is also a mess, the first boss is miles harder than any of the following ones, having you endure a three phase long fight while you're still only equipped with the weakest magic and pitiful max HP. This is the only boss in the entire game with multiple phases, so its placement in the first level is bizarre.

Combat in general is pretty chaotic and messy. It's common for large swarms of enemies to rush you at high speeds, and since Annet has very few i-frames and takes no knockback on getting hit, common enemies can deal a lot of damage very fast just by having their sprite sit on top of you. There's also a lack of feedback that your attacks are doing much. You can see your enemies HP bar go down if in the midst of the chaos you have the time to look up at the HUD, but the lack of impactful sound effects or any visual indication of the enemy sprites reacting to getting hit can leave you wondering how many of your attacks are even landing, especially due to the utterly bizarre pathfinding on Annet’s boomerangs.

Messy as it is, the real draw of the combat is how utterly nuts it is. The first level is relatively grounded, which is saying something because you're still fighting shirtless hockey-masked hair metal bikers, gangsters with tommy guns and even random civilians that also want you dead, watching you from their window where they attempt to bash your head in by tossing potted plants, chairs and Winnie the Pooh dolls at you. There's a memorable section in the first level where the mafia come after you with clown cars that look like they came out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, constantly drifting back and forward across the screen while an infinite supply of goons pour out of it to attack you with swords. This level culminates with a boss fight against a massive screen-filling tank, which Annet of course tears to shreds with her boomerangs and small fireballs alone. Again, she's a badass.

You'd think you'd get desensitised to this game after all that, but this game’s just getting started. Future levels have you fighting flying cacti, bean-shaped mohawked drunks with the most caked up asses I've ever seen in a Mega Drive game, random cavemen in a subterranean cave under a bar, sentient pop-up pirate toys, eyeballs with veins for legs and a lovecraftian flying fungus that plays a shell game with you. The absolute peak of this game however is a level where you ride on a dolphin while fighting hang gliders and giant pixelated octopi that are so massive they don't even fit on the screen. If this isn't already epic enough for you, know that explosions are everywhere in this game as well, massive explosions covering the entire screen in a fiery blast so intense that the Mega Drive's sprite limit can't keep up with it. Even just blowing up a tiny bat can cause an explosion this massive. This game rules, this is rad as hell.

While the game is a bit hard, especially since dying once is an instant game over and you only have three continues, it wasn't hard enough to get in the way of my enjoyment of this chaos, especially since the game is pretty short. Even if I ran out of continues and had to start over, it wouldn't take too long to catch back up. Well, this was the case until I reached the final level, one of the worst final levels I've played in a long time and a massive buzzkill at the end of an otherwise enjoyable game

Gone are the unpredictable and imaginative designs of the past levels, the final level is instead just a long stretch of absolutely nothing but climbing up a brick tower while being swarmed by bats non-stop. This would already be an underwhelming finale as is, but this level is also cheap as hell. There’s almost always bats on screen, they’re absolutely everywhere in this level, nowhere is safe and they are extremely fast. If one gets on top of you then not only are they out of range of most of your ranged attacks, but you will also not be able to shake it off by the usual running and jumping. In just a few seconds you can have three or four bats all piled on top of your sprite rapidly draining through your HP thanks to your lack of i-frames. The only way to outrun the bats is to use the otherwise underutilised slide manoeuvre, done by pressing the jump button while holding down on the d-pad. All of this is already bad enough, but they also all respawn infinitely. Kill them all you want, but any time you do, another bat will just fly in from off-screen to ruin your day yet again. This is a long level too, also involving some maze-esque design, switch puzzles and dead ends, but I was only able to find a single healing item in the entire stage. Worst of all, you still have to fight the final boss at the end of this gauntlet, and you are not given a chance to heal before that fight. Die on the boss, then you go all the way back to the start of the level, having to get through all of those infinitely spawning bats all over again. The final boss does pitiful damage, so if you have roughly a third of your health left you’ll likely have no trouble brute forcing your way through it, but good luck managing to get all the way there at all, let alone with enough health to actually win the game.

I ran out of continues on this final level twice, having to restart the game from stage 1 each time, and this was unfortunately where I started getting irritated. The problem with a game that’s more appealing for being weird as opposed to having fun gameplay is that the novelty wears off with each replay. Before the final level I was still excited replaying the earlier stages after running out of continues. It meant with practice I’d be able to get even further, reach new levels with more continues in reserve and see even weirder enemies and setpieces, but once I reached the final level I knew that all that was waiting for me beyond where I previously died is yet even more bats. I did however manage to pull through in the end. My strategy was to not even bother fighting the bats and just attempt to speedrun through the level as best as I could by sliding non-stop. It still took some tries, those dead ends and awkward switch puzzles are a pace killer if you don’t know exactly what you need to do in what order in advance, but as long as I kept sliding as much as possible, I would end up taking much less damage than if I played cautiously and tried to fight the bats, since that’s just giving the infinitely spawning bastards more of a chance to kill my run.

At least seeing the ending cutscene was a nice reward. El Viento has some beautiful artwork used as intermissions between each level, showing the lavishly detailed shoujo manga character designs as Annet communicates with allies and antagonists to learn more of the cult’s intentions. The music’s also solid as well, with the credits roll theme being my favourite track in the game. In spite of my frustrations with the final level, I still very much enjoyed El Viento. With the exception of the bat maze, it had me laughing a ton the whole way through, but I felt like I was laughing with the game, not at it, as I was having a reaction of joy over the non-stop ridiculous action I was taking part in. I highly suspect there’s going to be a chunk of my brain dedicated to the memories of El Viento till the end of time, and I’m more than happy for this trip of a game to make itself comfy there, rent free.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 1st June 2024