Altered Beast (PC Engine CD) Playthrough [English]

A playthrough of NEC Avenue's 1989 beat 'em up for the NEC PC Engine CD, Juuouki (獣王記).

The game was a Japan-only release, so for this playthrough I translated and subtitled the intro cutscene. There wasn't any other Japanese in the game aside from the title logo.

Juuouki ("The Record of the Beast King"), better known in the west as Altered Beast, arrived on the PC Engine about ten months behind its Mega Drive cousin, and there were two versions of it. The CD-ROM² version was released a week ahead of the HuCard one.

can't quite match the quality of Sega's own 16-bit adaptation.

The PC Engine CD game is pretty solid in its own right, though. On top of the brand new voice-acted intro, all of the levels, digitized voices, beast transformations, and enemies from the arcade game are here, as are the animated scenes that play during the attract demo. It also plays pretty well. The controls are stiff, but they're easy to handle once you get used to jumping with the up button, and the difficulty level is way up there. It's much harder than the Genesis game, and I liked that about it.

There's no 2P mode in the CD version of the game, though. It also lacks the parallax scrolling of the Genesis version, the characters look squished thanks to the change in resolution, and it's annoying how sometimes the game stops mid-level to load.

Altered Beast Turbo doesn't quite take the gold, but it puts up a respectable effort that's worth checking out if you enjoy a challenge and tacky intro cutscenes.

(If you do play it, make sure you're using System Card 1.0. The game breaks on anything higher unless you have an updated copy.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

[skyrimwolf]

This seems a good amount of lore in this version

[Buck]

Fun fact: The Wolf howl is from the 1981 movie An American Werewolf in London. The sound was made by rewinding an elephants trumpet call.

[robbrindisi]

I never knew the back story had so much lore to it

[titusrome]

Wow this version is way more fluid and crisp than the Geneis. Music is clear too

[troypeterson]

I remember as kid my mother would go shopping at Shopko with me abd ny other brother and while She was shopping me and my brother would go to electronics, music and game department where they had a Sega console to play and this was game they had on it to test play. Great memories!

[michaelwan]

13:23 His "Bear Form" is so cute that makes me want to sing the "Thunder Buddy" song 🤣

#ted

[glennjosechristman]

The thumbnail was like: "Surprise, Madabakka!".

[winsyrstrife]

That thumbnail! Bringin' it back baby!
HERE I GO AGAIN ON MY OWN!
GOING DOWN THE ONLY ROAD I'VE EVER KNOWN!

[michaelwhitacre]

One of my FAVORITE games on Genesis. This version is very interesting 👍 LOVE the audio!

[cobrakainevereverdies]

The sound on some parts is absolute Sega Master System quality. On other sounds, it's Arcade PERFECT.
Reminds me of that TRASH MK 2 32x

[JohnHenryDavisIII]

1:25 - I'd be scared if I had've seen that as a kid but now as an adult, I laugh at it.

[NoleenRankin]

Knocked it out of the park once again with the thumbnail, my dude lmao

[Aeonkraken]

Every story is fantastic with a japanese dub

[smbhax]

WHoa I did NOT know about that intro! = oo

[kbutseriouslywhatsthisonmyuser]

I noticed a few things in this port that I also noticed in Ghouls N Ghosts on the Genesis and SuperGrafx. Notice how this port has animations from the arcade that are missing from the Genesis version. That also occurs in the SuperGrafx port of Ghouls N Ghosts, where most of the boss intros/ animations and visuals were cut out, and I get that since the Genesis ports were released early in the Genesis’s lifespan, while the PC Engine CD/SuperGrafx ports were released much later, where memory constraints weren’t as big of an issue. This doesn’t apply to just these games however, it also applies to other games released on the systems.

[pixeljoyful]

Narrator: speaks in japanese 😃
Zeus: speaks in english 🤨

[velvetpilot]

If only SEGA had taken the best of this version and combined it with the Genesis version. Primarily that story intro. I never knew the story to this cause the Genesis version doesn't allude to it.

[spahr]

The arcade version has one of the best original soundtracks of any game.

[Akira]

This is much closer to the arcade than the Sega Genesis port.

[JinzoCrash]

The arcade ending was funnier, in almost the exact same vein of humor as Sega's other arcade game from around that time, Golden Axe.