Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of those NES games that my friends and I wanted to like, but never managed to finish. My friend Eric owned it, and he claimed to know what to do and how to beat the game. He might’ve, but we never managed to play the game long enough to find out.
It is an ambitious game, but nothing is done well enough for it to be a fun game. Just writing out the object of the game makes it sound more fun than it really is. The game actually follows the events of the movie, which was a rarity for movie-based games.
This is one of the games that I think of when I think about LJN. There is something about the game that made us want to try to beat it, but we always gave up and went outside or played something else. I’ve tried to write about this game a few times, and even then, I managed to get sick of it.
TLDR: An overly ambitious game that felt like it needed more time to develop.
Narrative
This game does a decent job of following the movie’s plot. The game takes place in Los Angeles in 1947, and people live alongside cartoon characters. Roger Rabbit gets accused of murder, and it is up to Eddie to clear his name. The game starts in Eddie’s office, and has you wandering around the city in search of clues and items.
Once you’ve found all four clues that clear Roger’s name, then you head off to Toon Town to confront Judge Doom. As it turns out, Doom is also a Toon, and Eddie has to kill him to save Roger and Jessica Rabbit. There is an end screen that congratulates you on beating the game, and you start to question some of your life choices.
Just like the movie, the story is fun and gets the job done. Rare did a good job of sticking close to the movie’s story, and I think they got most of the narrative beats into the game. All of my issues with the game have to do with the gameplay and not the story.
Gameplay
Like many of the games that Rare and Atlus made for LJN, this one is overly ambitious and feels like it needed more quality assurance testing. It shouldn’t be a surprise that LJN and Acclaim didn’t care much about the quality of what they were making. Who Framed Roger Rabbit feels like it could’ve been a good game if it had more time in development.
There are two parts of this game. The side scrolling stages, where you have to explore rooms and talk to people. This is the bulk of the game where most of the action takes place. It is also how you fight the final boss.
The second phase is the overhead view, where you go from one building to the next, and how you get to the different locations in the game. This feels like it should’ve been a bigger deal, but it wasn’t done very well. These stages are in an overhead view, and they feel too big for a game like this.
The driving controls are horrible. Not only that, but you call for a cab and hope that it shows up before something randomly kills you. It is horrible, but it is one of those things that you need to do if you want to beat the game. It is also one of the more ambitious ideas that Rare had, but didn’t finish before they sent the game to LJN for release.
A lot of what you’re doing is talking to people, collecting items, and either avoiding bad guys or fighting them. The weapons in the game are mostly used to distract enemies. One strange thing about this game is how you have to randomly look through buildings to find things. Thankfully, people will tell you if a building has anything of value in it.
The manual is available online (Link). It does explain a few things, which is always nice. If you don’t use a guide, then the manual can answer a few questions, like what the items do.
Overall, the gameplay feels like it needs to be refined. There are a lot of times when you won’t know what to do or where to go, and the NPCs don’t help you out enough. It has everything that I would enjoy in a video game, but it is too ambitious for its own good.
Visuals
This is a decent looking NES game. The sprites feel a little underdeveloped in a few spots, and it makes me wonder if Rare was forced to push the game out the door. Both parts of the game look good enough, but nothing is special.
The side scrolling stages are all okay. There are a few instances where there are falling objects that you might not notice right away. I really hated this because you don’t have a life bar. It is all one-hit deaths, and if you get whacked on the head by a flower pot, then you’ll lose a life.
The graphics aren’t the game’s biggest problem. This looks like a decent NES game, and the graphics don’t hurt the gameplay. They also don’t do much to enhance the gameplay in any meaningful way. There are some good looking things in this game, but the game’s visuals are average overall.
Reviews at the Time
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the games that received the AVGN treatment in the 2000s, and like other retro games, was negatively reviewed a lot during that time. I’m not going to completely disagree with them; I just want to see what people thought about it when the game was released.
Nintendo Power gave the game a positive review. MobyGames lists the score at 4/5, but reality is a little different. The Nintendo Power article has four categories, two of which received a 4/5, and the other two are a 3 and a 3.5/5. At this time, Nintendo Power didn’t give an overall score. The score would’ve been closer to a 3.6/5. It is a typical fluff article that does more explaining instead of critiquing.
I didn’t find another review for this game from an English-language source. There is one in Portuguese, but I didn’t look at that one because I don’t know the language.
With such a limited sample size, it is hard to see what the media thought about a game. Since I couldn’t find reviews in the independent magazines, I guess they didn’t view the game as being worth their time to review. They had limited space in their magazines, so they had to pick and choose what to put in.
6/10. This isn’t the worst LJN published game, but it isn’t that great. I think this one is a below average game on the NES, but there is something there that makes it memorable. It is a game that I’ve always wanted to like, but couldn’t manage to stay interested in.
Pros
- Decent Graphics
- Fun Story
Cons
- There is a lot of “Where do I go?”
- It is a confusing game
- Overly ambitious game design
- Too many items for its own good
Conclusion
I have a lot of memories of trying to play this game. It felt like my friend Eric would convince us to try and beat the game once or twice during the summer, and then we would give up on the game after about thirty minutes. I don’t think we ever got very far into it.
It is great that the game follows the movie as closely as it does. This is one of those overly ambitious games that was made for LJN. There were quite a few of them, and while they are better than people think, they don’t always translate to a good game. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the games that I want to like, but simply don’t.
This is one of the games that I went out of my way to get when I started collecting games in the late 1990s. I remembered playing it when I was a kid, and I wanted to play it again when I was in high school. I don’t remember what my thoughts on it were back then, but when I played it recently, I can say that I don’t enjoy it as much as I want to.
If you liked this post, please check out my other posts about LJN games, such as Friday the 13th and Jaws.