Posted by Gravecat at 5:05 am under Gaming, Retrogaming. Comments (6)
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?
Churchwood — November 14th, 2011 @ 4:16 pm
Those puzzles were pretty game-breaking for folks who had no idea how to solve them. The game has been out a long time, so, by this point, everyone knows (or knows how to find) the answers to them. When it was brand new, not so much, and that’s what most players remember. There was also a lack of save states, and if I remember correctly, there was a very cumbersome password system for saving your progress, and it was not very reliable.
Gravecat — November 14th, 2011 @ 4:21 pm
Well~ yes and no — I agree that the puzzles are absurd (though the townsfolk and hint-books hidden in-game offer some tips), but I seem to recall many games around the 8-bit era were similarly incomprehensible, and yet didn’t receive nearly as much scorn.
As for the password system, I didn’t think that was so bad at all — four sets of four characters, the only caveat being that it brings you back to the first town when you “reload” the game. Again, about on par with other NES offerings. (The ones and zeroes were also clearly-distinguishable from the I’s and O’s, too, thank god.)
Churchwood — November 14th, 2011 @ 7:50 pm
I didn’t hate the game like other people did, but I did find it to be too difficult to warrant a full play-through. I never bothered to go back once there were FAQs and such to explain it all.
Honestly, I don’t know why I played games back then at all. They were all kind of a mess, all very unforgiving and aggravating things, even at the best of times. I suppose I just didn’t know any better, and there weren’t any other options.
Gravecat — November 14th, 2011 @ 7:56 pm
Mmm, I think that’s why it confuses me so much that people can praise some 8-bit games and rabidly loathe others, given that — let’s be honest here — most of them were primitive and clunky as hell at the best of times. It was an era when gaming was just getting its footing, and with some extremely rare exceptions, most all of them sinned in various ways.
Still, yeah, I’d probably not have managed to complete it myself without the internet for assistance — most of it was pretty straightforward (though I missed half of the whip upgrades and pretty much all the optional items) but there were a few parts that simply seemed to make no goddamn sense. I’m glad to have beaten it, but I doubt I’ll be going back for a second helping. ;3
Insomnia509 — January 17th, 2012 @ 4:04 am
Those “game breaking puzzles” were part of the NES era, which most Castlevania fans are too young to remember, being born by people who actually played Castlevania I-III (honestly, no offense to you youngins’). As you noted in your mini-review of the game, hair-pulling frustrating puzzles was a part of many games of that era; something totally alien to gaming since the advent of common internet usage.
Yet what confused fans back then, and starts internet flame wars now, is that CastleVania II varied from the franchise formula. It “dared” to cross genres between what was (at the time) a very poorly defined RPG genre and the action/adventure genre.
With regards to the “insane” puzzle elements and confusing item use: has ANYONE that has ever complained about “insane puzzles” EVER played the original Legend of Zelda through an entire game? Do they remember that there was no linear path to dungeons, or that to find most of the heart caves and extras required experimental flaming of ALL bushes, and bombing of ALL walls? Do they remember the path through the ORIGINAL “Lost Woods?” Again, probably not because they weren’t born yet… Back then, what most kids in the 80′s did was they experimented and exchanged tips at school… until magazines like EGM, GamePro, and Nintendo Power (precursors to GameFAQs and the like) gave one of the kids the answers, which he passed around to his buddies at school. That’s how it was done, and that was pretty much standard for gaming at the time. Game developers didn’t have to “apologize” for insane puzzles at the time. Players could either could beat the “insane” challenges (even with some help from friends or game magazines), or they couldn’t. There weren’t forums to flame, there weren’t email addresses to bomb… in short, there wasn’t a place for youth gamer rage.
The CastleVania II level-up RPG element is a bit hardcore, and definitely over the top for a two-button action game, but at least the puzzle element can be explained as being part-and-parcel with games of the time. Konami certainly could have been more inventive, but it wasn’t as bad as “new gamers” want to say they remember it being back then – it was par for the course.
I have some fond memories of renting CastleVania II when it was new, namely because I was one of the (apparently few) gamers that enjoyed Action-RPGs, before it was a well established genre. I think that CastleVania II received its poor reputation from more contemporary reviews and rants, based mostly on the rather modern notion of Franchise Gaming, where all sequel games must be the equal of the predecessor without daring to change the format at all, see also: Halo series and Madden. It’s ironic how in the copy-paste era of the modern gaming age we applaud an original, innovative game, or a cross-genre game, ONLY as long as it doesn’t use an existing franchise name that we “love”. CastleVania II only had the poor fortune of being reviewed a decade after it’s release, and often only by Franchise Fans that don’t want to see a change in the formula.
Gravecat — January 17th, 2012 @ 10:34 am
Wow, what a comment! Well, let me say that I’m certainly not one of those youngins’, but I suspect my opinion of NES-era gaming is coloured by the fact that my first console was a Sega Megadrive (Genesis in the US); before that, it was microcomputers all the way, and they tended to have a very different style of gameplay — the 8-bit games of the microcomputer era weren’t difficult because of abstruse, esoteric puzzles, they were difficult because most of them required levels of skill far beyond that of a normal human being to beat, or even get past the first few rooms.
With few exceptions, it was a similar gaming mentality to that of the NES, but a different direction entirely — less of the wander around and figure out what to do, more of the dying repeatedly on the first area because who has reflexes that fast anyway?
I suppose it doesn’t help that — over here in the UK — microcomputers dominated the 80s gaming scene to such an extent that the NES generally took a back seat, at least in the town I grew up in. Yeah, a lot of kids had a NES; but a whole lot more of them had a ZX Spectrum, or Commodore 64, or there was always that one rich kid who had an Amiga 500 or Atari ST.
We certainly did have some games with the painfully esoteric style of puzzles, though, such as the Dizzy series, but they were overshadowed by platformers and action games which were often cruel enough to require weeks of dedication to muster the skill to beat the first level. Did anyone ever manage to beat Roland in Space without cheating?
In conclusion: Great comment, and it’s certainly interesting to see things from the perspective of someone who’s played the games in their heyday. It’s just a shame that it’s often hard to enjoy such games for anyone who isn’t a veteran of the old NES ways. :)