Little Bond on a Big Adventure

We haven’t discussed James Bond Jr. much on this website (and by “much” I mean “at all”). That’s largely because it didn’t easily fit into the discussions we’ve had about the James BondThe world's most famous secret agent, James Bond has starred not only in dozens of books but also one of the most famous, and certainly the longest running, film franchises of all time. franchise up until now. While technically a licensed James Bond product, in that United Artists had the rights to the James Bond franchise and they authorized the creation of this cartoon, it wasn’t officially part of the EON series, nor did it leave that big an impact on the franchise as a whole.

Now, I’m sure there’s going to be some fan of the series out there that wants to defend the cartoon. It did have 65 episodes (although only one official season), along with books, comics (although back in the 1980s Marvel comics basically made a comic for any cartoon out there just to keep their lights on), as well as video games. For a brief span of time there, in 1991, kids got a whole lot of James Bond Jr. And then, just as quickly as it arrived on the scene it then faded away because, well, kids just really didn’t care that much about James Bond.

Still, it is technically a part of the franchise, and while I’m going through, covering all of the James Bond licensed games that I can, it’s hard to argue that the video games based on James Bond Jr. are any less worthy of discussion than any other title in the series. You could easily slap some different likenesses on the characters in these games and have yourself a James Bond game instead of a James Bond Jr. game, and that makes them worthy of coverage in my books.

For those unfamiliar, James Bond Jr. follows the exploits of Bond’s nephew, the eponymous Junior. While attending the Warfield Academy, Junior and his friends – Tracy, IQ, Gordo, and Phoebe – are tapped to aid in the fight against S.C.U.M. (Saboteurs and Criminals United in Mayhem), a group dedicated to unbalancing the balance of power so they can take it all for themselves. Across those 65 episodes Junior and the team fought all manner of henchmen and villains all before they stopped Captain Walker D. Plank and Skullcap from finding Norway Mjölnir, the hammer of infinite power, in Norway in the season one finale. And then the series was cancelled without further adventures to come.

How much of that makes its way into the NES game? Very little. The game is a pretty generic NES platformer that barely applies the James Bond Jr. skin to it. The main character sprite does look vaguely like the main character of the cartoon, and a couple of characters make brief appearances as portraits in the game, but for the most part if you were a huge fan of the cartoon you’d probably be as confused by the visuals and style of this game as anyone that didn’t know anything about James Bond Jr. in general.

The game has a fairly basic structure. Junior is sent out on a series of missions to stop S.C.U.M. Each one involves him infiltrating a complex base and platforming his way around the stages, running, jumping, swimming, and gliding around (as he collects power-ups). The whole base is there for you to explore, and you’ll have to because each base has a certain objective you need to complete, be it deactivating missiles, opening safes, stopping computers, freeing scientists, and the like. Junior will have to complete all of these objectives within a set amount of time (usually 30 minutes or so, although that can be extended with hidden timers) and then get out before the mission is over. And then it’s on to the next base to do it all again.

Structurally I’d call James Bond Jr. on the NES a “Metroidvania lite”. The stages are freely explorable, with no death pits or other traps that would completely stop your progress. You can go anywhere and do anything, so long as you have a power-up, like a jetpack, that lets you get there. Refills for your power-ups are plentiful, and they also carry over from one stage to the next, so once you have a good repertoire collected, you’re free to navigate and explore as you like in each stage along the path.

The trick is, of course, that your first time or two through the game (if you even get through the game) will be rough. The stages are pretty big, and there’s no real clear direction where you’re supposed to go or what you’re supposed to do. Frequently much of your time will be spent going back and forth in areas to figure out the proper path, where to get items, what everything does, what your mission objectives will be… it’s a lot to keep track of, and with each base being pretty expansive it’s easy to get caught up somewhere, run out of time, and have to do everything all over again. It can be a frustrating experience.

Making matters worse is the fact that the game absolutely loves to play dirty. There are enemies everywhere, and they frequently spam attacks, hitting you with projectiles from every angle. You get a stash of lives, and plenty of health (with drops coming regularly here as well), and there’s no real penalty if you lose all your lives since you can continue right where you died, keeping everything going until you finish the mission or run out of time… but that timer is always ticking, and that’s more likely to catch you up more than anything else.

And the game is really repetitive. While each base has a different layout, and the missions objectives are all different, they all amount to, more or less, the same thing: explore every nook and cranny (which sometimes can be very will hidden to an unfair degree) to find every objective you have to fulfill, and then move onto the next stage and do it all again. After about the third stage, and way more exploration I wanted to do, I was already bored with the game… and there was still way more of it to go than I really cared for. Even speedruns of the game are well over an hour, and that’s with people playing that know what they’re doing. The average player could be trapped in this game for hours… if they even manage to clear it at all.

I don’t want to hate on the NES version of James Bond Jr. too much because I do respect what it was trying to do. It’s clear that developer Eurocom had an idea of a game that would provide a decently lengthy game experience that fit well within what the NES could handle. Plenty of Metroidvania titles came out on the NES in its heyday, and they frequently were well liked by the player base. With the right license, and a little more polish, James Bond Jr. could have been an interesting game.

It’s just that whether due to time constraints, license demands, or Eurocom not having as good a handle on the NES hardware as they’d like, James Bond Jr. doesn’t quite work. There’s a thread of a good game in here, but it’s mired in repetitive gameplay and a boring play loop. I could see someone having some fun with this game, but for most of us, James Bond Jr. is more of a slog than a solid spy adventure. But hey, there’s also an SNES game. Maybe that one will be better? (Although that’s doubtful.)