XP Arcade: Rod Land

"Rod Land" is a thing you can name a video game, yes.

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

We’re not in the midst of a renaissance of single-screen arcade platformers, not even close. We are, however, living in a time period where the age of that kind of game has been rediscovered: imagine that Florence, Venice, et al had rediscovered the classics of antiquity and then just made them available again instead of building off of them with original works. It’s very easy to once again grab the Bubble Bobbles of the 80s and early 90s because of this, but things have gone deeper than that, to the point where more obscure titles that weren’t franchised and didn’t leave a larger impact on the industry, like Jaleco’s Rod Land, are also out there to be purchased and played once again.

Rod Land might have been everywhere (well, in Japan and Europe) back when it released in 1990 — it originated in arcades, and was ported or converted to the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Game Boy, NES, and ZX Spectrum — but then vanished from existence for decades. It’s since reappeared on the Nintendo Switch and Sony’s Playstation 4 through the Arcade Archives series, this time courtesy of Japanese publisher City Connection, which acquired many of Jaleco’s licenses in 2014. (Fun fact: looking for info on “City Connection” and “Jaleco” will lead you to pages about the 1985 platformer City Connection, which Jaleco published in Japanese arcades.)

City Connection has basically made their whole business plan the acquisition of older properties that were somewhat adrift, and then re-releasing them. It’s not a unique strategy, but as someone with a column titled “Re-Release This,” it’s appreciated regardless. Sometimes it’s with a modern remake, like with Soldam — a falling block puzzle game starring the characters, sights, and sounds of Rod Land — or Psyvariar. Sometimes it’s a collection, like with the pair of Psikyo Shooting Stars compilations. And sometimes it’s enhanced versions of classic titles that had fallen by the wayside, such as with their Saturn Tribute series. And then there’s the direction Rod Land took, which was a re-release via Arcade Archives.

The title screen for the English-language arcade release of Rod Land.

This release of the game includes both the Japanese and English-language arcade versions, as well as a single-sitting, play-til-you-lose High Score mode that doesn’t let you save your progress, and, as is typical of Arcade Archives, a Caravan mode as well. Whether it’s the definitive release of Rod Land depends on how you feel about some of its ports and the changes made to them: the NES edition speeds up the gameplay and changes up the soundtrack for the better, though, it’s not as interesting to look at as an 8-bit port of a 16-bit arcade game, while the Game Boy release makes things easier by letting you use your attack while climbing ladders, which the others do not. Regardless, since Rod Land only released in Japan and Europe prior to its Arcade Archives appearance in 2021, so as far as North Americans who don’t go around emulating old Jaleco arcade titles go, this is Rod Land.

Here’s how the game works: you play as one of two fairies, Rit or Tam, and your mother has been kidnapped by monsters. Armed with a magic wand that lets you grab and slam enemies back-and-forth against the ground and into each other, your goal is to score as many points as possible while clearing dozens of stages in search of your mom. It’s simple enough on the surface, and wouldn’t be that enjoyable if the entire game was just grabbing these enemies and slamming them a few times until they die, but there are layers to the scoring that are tied up into how you go about actually completing stages, and it keeps Rod Land feeling engaging throughout.

Mom has been kidnapped by a giant bird, so now you have to slay a whole bunch of monsters to get to her.

There are flowers scattered across each stage you need to collect, and you reach them through the ladders scattered around the screen, the occasion ridable balloon floating up from offscreen, or ladders you yourself build. While ladders in a stage can be a variety of lengths, sometimes spanning the very bottom of the screen to the topmost platform of it, the ones you can deploy at will whenever you want to are a standard height that go up just one platform level. You can also have just one of your own ladders at a time, but this can be used to your advantage, too, since enemies will sometimes climb or descend your ladders — you can’t exactly control where these enemies are going, but you can disrupt their more natural movements to try to clear a path for your own.

These flowers are worth a ton of points, but only if you collect them a specific way. The first is worth 50, but picking up a bunch in a row will net you up to 800 points per flower. You don’t need to grab them at a specific speed to keep the multiplier up, but instead, it will remain so long as you don’t attack an enemy in between flower pickups. So, it’s worth it sometimes to figure out how to avoid enemies entirely until you’ve picked up every flower on the stage, maximizing the points you get from them.

Sharks can run fast, but they also stop and fire deadly drops of water that will rain on you from above. They still find time to derive joy from riding a balloon, though, despite this violence against you.

“Sometimes” instead of “always” for two reasons. The first is that there’s an invisible timer in each stage that will run out and kick off “Meanie Mode,” which brings tougher and more enemies into the level — the game becomes extremely difficult here, since your character only moves and attacks so fast and is always, always susceptible to death even mid-attack, while enemies can rush you whenever and tend to speed up or slow down depending on how intent they are on killing you.

The second is that collecting all of the flowers opens up “Extra Mode,” which turns each enemy on screen into the same little round guy without any tricks up its sleeve. Defeating one of these will spawn an orb to collect: each orb has one letter of the word “EXTRA” on it, and spelling out the entire word will grant you an extra life and 10,000 point bonus. The extra life is a plus, obviously, but 10,000 points is how many you get for defeating a boss, so that’s no small thing, either. Spelling out “EXTRA” will also end the stage, which can cost you some points if enemies are left, but the benefits far outweigh the costs in this scenario, especially since you would have already picked up all of the flowers.

A fairy grants you an additional life for spelling out the word “EXTRA”

There is yet another scoring wrinkle to consider, however. Every enemy you defeat outside of extra mode spawns a weapon of some kind. A warhead that, when bumped, will fly in a straight line in the direction you’re facing. Bouncing orb bombs marked with an S. Some real Looney Tunes-looking bombs that will explode where they sit when you touch them, devastating any enemy they touch. Every foe you defeat with your wand will net you a couple hundred points, but defeating them with these items will cause them to drop a little card with a fruit on it that’s worth 1,000 points when you collect them. So, there might be instances where you want to take out a few enemies before you grab any flowers and kick off that scoring chain, in the hopes of making navigation easier for you while also scoring some significant points from items in the process.

Bosses are still single-screen affairs, but other than popping up a ladder sometimes, play much differently than the standard stages. Your wand isn’t used to grab these foes, but instead, hits them with the burst of energy that traps normal enemies and allows you to smash them. So you just kind of spam those attacks while trying to avoid taking damage from the various minions bosses send at you — six crocodiles on the side of your screen release tiny crocs at you that you must defeat and avoid while delivering damage to the big guys, or a whale that takes up most of the screen will unleash enemies from its blowhole while you try to hit its eye with your wand, and so on.

You’ll eventually save your mother (hooray), which will open up even more Rod Land for you. This is only in the arcade versions of Rod Land, however, so, points to that one if you’re still keeping score of which release is definitive. There are 31 more stages here, and this time Rit and Tam are heading downward through a pyramid instead of up through a tower, and attempting to save their father. Rather than the many animals and cutesy blobs of the “original” game, the pyramid is full of robots and the like. Sure, why not? You can also access the quest to save Rit and Tam’s father from the start by adding a credit, then pressing down on the joystick/analog stick three times before starting the game. It won’t tell you that you’ve successfully managed the feat, but once you start the game, you’ll get the opening for the second game, instead, and see that your goal is to collect gleaming jewels rather than flowers on the stages here.

Rod Land isn’t an incredibly deep experience by any means, but it’s fun to play and keeps you focused due to its scoring system and invisible timer, and is especially enjoyable if you’re into this particular genre of single-screen arcade titles like Donkey Kong, Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros., The Fairyland Story, and so on. And there’s certainly plenty of Rod Land to play, between the standard stages and the second quest to save dad. It hasn’t and won’t be enough to convince the world that we need that single-screen arcade-style renaissance, no, but you could do a lot worse than $8 for this title that previously hadn’t existed outside of Japan, Europe, and emulation.

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