The Belmonts are the only family able to make a whip-wielding bloke seem badass.

I’ve got a confession to make: While I’m an ardent fan of the Castlevania series, I never actually owned any of the NES games when I was younger, and didn’t really get into the series at all until being coerced into trying Symphony of the Night many years later. My dabblings in the realm of the original classic series — which is to say, the trio of offerings available on the NES — had been limited at best, and I’d taken special care to avoid Simon’s Quest, the much-hated second game in the series. This game was the worst by far, according to many, an atrocity that scarce deserved to bear the Castlevania name. If everyone hated it so much, it must be pretty terrible, so who was I to doubt the wisdom of the masses?

Cut forward to yesterday. With a few minutes to kill while waiting for a projector to be set up in the other room, I decided to fire up some old NES games on an emulator, knowing I’d have little patience to last long on them. Among others, I tried Simon’s Quest more for humour value than anything, though I’ve long been a fan of the game’s tinny soundtrack. Through part morbid curiosity and part determination to prove to myself that I still had the skills to play 8-bit classics, I forged ahead and in spite of myself ended up getting quite hooked on this odd little game. It helped immensely that I had knowledge of its more esoteric parts, largely from videos and other mentions of the game citing its obscure puzzles and confusing layout, but it mattered not — I was hooked, and while it took me until the last few hours of today (and a walkthrough to help with the more confusing parts) to muster the patience, I’ve managed to beat the game and lay Dracula to rest once again.

The crazy part is, I kinda liked it.

Okay, so some of the puzzles are frankly absurd — the Blue Crystal’s use to reveal hidden passages in the lakes is a stretch and the Red Crystal’s cyclone-summoning is nigh-incomprehensible — and the world layout can be confusing at the best of times with many areas looking extremely similar save for minor adjustments or palette swaps. Beyond that (and let’s face it, there are many NES games guilty of confusing layouts and esoteric puzzles) I’m really not sure why gamers seem to have such a deep-seated loathing of the game, as if it somehow exists on the same level as the Atari 2600′s infamous E.T.

The graphics are charming and as varied as one could expect from an 8-bit title, the soundtrack is one of the best of the series with some truly memorable tunes, the back-and-forth gameplay involving the acquisition of various optional and essential equipment closely mirrors more modern and far more highly-acclaimed games such as the above-mentioned Symphony of the Night and its descendants on the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS, and overall the game feels far more like a prototype — albeit one that showcases a number of poor design decisions — of the later brethren in the franchise. Okay, so the currency-farming was a little tedious at times, the boatman’s dual destinations confused the hell out of me, and I managed to skip Death’s mansion entirely by mistake until finally realizing that I was missing something — but was any of the above truly game-breaking? No, not really.

So tell me, gamers: why the hate? Is Simon’s Quest truly such a bad game, or is it simply vilified for trying something a little different?