March 1994. The Super Nintendo had already been out for nearly three years. Sega was pushing the Genesis hard, Sony hadn’t even announced the PlayStation yet, and somewhere inside Nintendo, a small team was still quietly finishing a game for a console most of the industry had written off. That game was Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II, and it turned out to be one of the last things Nintendo itself ever built for the NES.
The original StarTropics had already proven Nintendo could do something strange and personal with the console late in its life. The sequel doubled down on strange. Mike Jones, the same kid hero from the first game, gets pulled into a time machine by his uncle and scattered across history. Stone Age. Ancient Egypt. The Wild West. Victorian England. Each chapter drops him into a different era, chasing down Tetrads, odd little relic pieces that look suspiciously like Tetris blocks, while the villain Zoda schemes from somewhere off-screen.
Along the way Mike runs into Cleopatra, King Arthur, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sherlock Holmes, all of whom hand him gear instead of just advice. Cleopatra gives him a bronze dagger. Leonardo gives him a katana, which is a historically bizarre pairing nobody at Nintendo seems to have worried about. Merlin teaches him a psychic shock wave that scales up as he collects more heart containers. It’s a strange engine running underneath a straightforward action-adventure game, and it mostly works because nobody involved treated the premise as a joke.
Critics at the time were split on whether that commitment paid off. Electronic Gaming Monthly gave it a 6.4 out of 10 and said it just didn’t stand out on hardware everyone had already moved past. GamePro disagreed hard, handing it 16 out of 20 and praising how much educational material got smuggled into an action game without slowing it down. Decades later, when the Wii Virtual Console brought it back, IGN scored it an 8.5. Opinions on this one depend entirely on how much patience you have for a game the industry had already stopped paying attention to when it shipped.
Here’s the detail that makes it worth remembering: Zoda’s Revenge was the second-to-last first-party game Nintendo ever released on the NES. Only Wario’s Woods came after it, and that one also shipped on the Super Nintendo. Everything else Nintendo put its own name on for the NES came before this. A company already three console generations into its future circled back one more time to finish a story about a kid fighting a space squid clone through five different centuries.
That late-era timing is exactly why a sealed or high-grade copy of Zoda’s Revenge carries real weight with collectors today. Print runs for first-party NES titles shrank fast once Nintendo’s attention moved to the SNES, so fewer copies exist in the kind of shape graders want to see. If you’re curious what that grading process actually looks for on a cartridge this age, our gallery of graded games is a good place to start poking around.
Nintendo didn’t owe the NES a proper send-off by 1994. Most companies would’ve let the platform die quietly and put every resource into the next thing. Instead, somebody green-lit a nine-chapter time-travel epic co-starring Leonardo da Vinci, and shipped it anyway. That’s a strange note to end on, and it’s also a pretty good one.