One theoretical game restart averted by the use of savestates later and we’re back at the Five and Dime. We want to get the lantern here and then head back to the General Store.
Here, we sell the pearl for an extra hundred dollars. The only item we actually need here is the ladder (we can buy the fish too if we want) but let’s see what happens if we buy the costume..
The costume turns Alf into some kind of horrible Alf-Yoshi hybrid. Also, there are.. apparently zombie dogs straight out of Resident Evil that run down the sidewalk if you sit on this screen for too long. The costume disappears if you get hit, and if you lose it there’s no way to finish the game.
I got the ladder and the fish just for swag value. Now, you’d think we’d be going to some new destination, but no. We’re going back to the bat caves. But first, let’s pretend we went all the way back into the bat caves to the shed where we found the gold nugget.
The game won’t give you any indication of what you’re supposed to do unless you jump facefirst into the pit.
If you have the ladder though, it’s.. somehow already laid out across the hole when Alf gets there.
Beyond the first shed is - actually, it’s a carbon copy of the bat caves up to this point.
At the end is another shed, not surprising given that this area is basically copied and pasted. The fuel pellet is the second to last item in the game. Now clearly, all we have to do is keep going left and we’ll be out of the caves in no time.
Or not. There’s an invisible wall right here, so we need to go all the way back through both layers of the cave. The only reason I can think of that the developers would make you do this is that they did not want people finishing this game.
Either that, or they wanted to sell strategy guides for a game no one was likely to buy, because there’s actually a cheat that allows you to skip straight to the final section of the game. Since no one wants to see the entire bat caves a third time, let’s restart the game here (since we already have the fuel pellet) and do some cheating. Looking back, I wish Ni no Kuni 2 had a cheat like this.
Here we are back at the start of the game.
We want to go into the kitchen like we did the first time, only this time we want to grab the salami before grabbing the cat.
Now, we go back to the kid’s room where the swimsuit could possibly be..
Here, we need to pause the game. This can be a little tricky if you’re trying it on real hardware because the pause button was on the Master System itself, not on the controller.
However, I don’t own a physical Master System. What I have is a Model 1 Genesis/Mega Drive, which can play Master System games through a piece of hardware called the Power Base Converter. The PBC has the pause button on it - though some of the third-party clones released in the 90s apparently did not.
…But I don’t own a PBC either. What I have is an Everdrive - if you’re using one of those, it’s the little black button on the top of the cartridge assuming you didn’t get the X3 model.
Once the game is paused, hold Up and Left on the pad and hit Button 1, then Button 2. If you’re using a Genesis controller it’s A and B instead. I’m starting to feel like that guy who makes videos on how to crash Paper Mario.
This will give you the swimsuit, fuel pellet, and the pearl, which is all you actually need to finish the game. I also tested to see if you could go back and get the pirate treasure and pearl again, but..
The game straight-up disables them both.
Now that we have the fuel pellet, we can start up Alf’s space scooter and get off the planet.
The game will send Alf flying upward (in a cutscene that you can’t control) and then hands over control to you without any warning. Going off the bottom of the screen here is a death, even though it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Holding the jump button makes Alf fly upward at a pretty slow pace. Interestingly, Metal Slug 3 pretty much had this as its ending sequence. Did Nazca/SNK steal from Alf? Post your theories in the thread.
The first sky sequence is relatively easy - there are jets that will fly by, but they’re slow and you can stop holding the jump button to fall and avoid them.
Oh no, we’ve entered a gradient field!
The fact that there are jets flying as low as maybe 50 feet over the houses here and as high as the edge of space is just.. man, what the shit?
Anyway, we’re now in space. Alf can breathe in space. I mean, technically he’s an inanimate object but whatever.
A bit higher, and we reach this thing. This is the space station, and is also a checkpoint.
If we had continued from the original run, we’d also have the lantern and the key we could sell to buy the spacesuit. Instead, we’ll just trade the pearl for it.
Alf has now successfully painted himself purple.
This part of space is where shit gets real bad. You see, Alf has all the maneuverability of a rock, and as soon as we go past the space station, vertically falling comets start to drop. These are WAY harder to avoid than the jets were.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also UFOs that go from side to side. Which side they come from is random, as is WHEN they come. If you get one in a bad position, there’s no way to avoid it.. and dying sends you all the way back to the space station.
This section takes a good two or three minutes to complete. The trick is to stay right about here. The meteors won’t fall on this section of the screen and you have enough time to dodge the UFOs provided that they don’t come from the right side while you’re in a bad position.
At the top of space is the moon, and with the meteors and UFOs still coming, you have to think quickly to figure out what to do. I got here on stream without using any savestates whatsoever and died because I couldn’t figure it out right away.
What you have to do is.. go into the moon’s mouth. Which contains a spaceship repair kit. I don’t know how that’s supposed to be an intuitive thing. By the way, it’s EXTREMELY easy to not see this text box unless you fall into the mouth rather than fly upward into it, because holding the jump button will skip the text in a single frame.
The game then immediately goes into this screen.
Our score would be higher if we hadn’t cheated, but who cares? It’s over.
