Contra ©1988 Konami
魂斗羅 ©1988 Konami
"Kontora"

Contra is one of those perennial favorites, a game that most that everyone has played and enjoyed.  It's great fun either by yourself or with a friend, and it's universally agreed to be of the best NES games ever produced.  Amazingly, you might be surprised to find out that the Japanese release of Contra is even better than the American one.

You see, in Japan third-party developers were allowed to produce their own custom chips for Famicom games.  In the USA, only Nintendo-made chips were allowed.  Konami used their own special chip in the Japanese version of Contra, which results in the game being a bit more animated and detailed than the USA release..  In addition to the overall graphic enhancements, the Japanese release also has a map and a running story illustrated by ingame cutscenes.

Below, I've translated the introduction story and a few of the cutscenes that appear inbetween levels.  Please note that I don't know much Japanese so what you read might not be completely accurate, but I hope it helps you get the gist of things anyways!


"In the year 2631 A.D., a mysterious meteorite fell into the sea by the islands of New Zealand."

Eagle
"Two years after the mysterious object fell, mankind's destruction began.  A group called "Red Falcon" invaded.
Now, the main characters head towards Red Falcon's front line base."



The Earth Marine Corps Headquarters has ordered their "Kontora" unit made up of Bill and Lance to destroy the enemy base.


Here's the ingame map!



"'Point A' has been reached.  We will now commence infiltrating it."


"'Garumakiruma" (the boss of the first base) has been destroyed.
I am now heading towards my next destination, 'Point B.'"

(...  I skipped a bunch of cutscenes after this one, because they all look the same until you beat the hangar level, which is where I continue below...)


"The base's defense systems have been destroyed.  We're rushing in..."


"It seems like the enemy headquarters is alive.  What on earth could this be..."


Escaping in the helicopter!

Apart from the cutscenes, the new animated backgrounds are pretty neat too!  The final base is particularly creepy, and probably would have scared me when I was younger.


Running through the jungle...


Adventuring through the driving snow...


... and exploring the inside of the alien base.

Actually, even one of the cutscenes is animated, like so:

Apart from the animation and cutscenes, Kontora and Contra seem to play and look pretty much exactly the same.  So why didn't we get the fancy ingame animations?  Again, it'd have to be because Konami of America was forced to use a chip inferior to its own VRC2 chip due to Nintendo's policies for games distributed outside of Japan.  I can't help but wonder why the cutscenes were cut, though, since games like Ninja Gaiden were released in the States with similar graphic interludes.  Maybe Konami just decided to pinch a few pennies and save on the cost of cartridge production by removing the cutscenes.  At least they didn't change all of the human characters into robots, like they did in the European release of Contra, called Probotector...