Collection essentials #43: Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES)

 

Rather than simply build on the foundation set by the first title, Castlevania II goes in a very experimental direction. Gameplay initially feels the same, as it’s still a side-scrolling platformer featuring the same dude with a whip as before. But the structure of the game is completely different from the original. In this game, you aren’t given a gauntlet of levels to take on one-by-one. Instead, you’re placed in a rather open-ended area and you have a bit of freedom on how you want to progress. There are some elements here borrowed from role-playing games, as after defeating enough enemies you are able to permanently increase your power and amount of health. There’s also a day/night cycle, and enemies are tougher by night.

Castlevania II wasn’t the first game like this, but this was still certainly before this type of design became common. And in fact, years down the road Castlevania itself would completely change its basic formula that was closer to this style than the original. So you could certainly say Simon’s Quest was ahead of its time, and it probably sounds like a really great game based on these two paragraphs.

Well, I wouldn’t call it a bad game, but unfortunately Simon’s Quest is a little rough around the edges and is usually not considered on the same level as its predecessor or successor, and you probably won’t ever see anyone name it as one of their absolute top NES games. The game at times can feel tedious, such as the way the day/night cycle is implemented and backtracking that has to be done. The game also suffers from a poor localization. Back in those days, games were sometimes not well translated from the original Japanese, and this is a prime example. Part of the game involves talking to people in a town who give you clues, but the bad translation partially ruins this. And even in the original Japanese, some of the townsfolk lie! That wasn’t a very good design choice and it thankfully didn’t catch on.

This game also provides examples of really cryptic progression too, something that’s unfortunately a bit common with older games. In other words, there are parts of the game where a player isn’t realistically going to be able to figure out what to do next with the clues given by the game, and has to learn what to do from an outside source such as a friend or a strategy guide or magazine sold separately. Tvtropes.org names this phenomenon “Guide dang it!” Of course nowadays with the internet you can just look up the solution, but many of us gamers really prefer to avoid that if it can be helped.

But it’s not all bad. As I said before, this game had a lot of great ideas, it just took a while before developers really started perfecting them. And the music is also a highlight of this game. Have I mentioned that music is low-key one of the best parts of video games? Back at this time consoles didn’t have the greatest sound capabilities, but composers certainly did the best with what they had and produced many tunes that got stuck in all of our heads. Some of the music from Castlevania II would go on to be rearranged and featured in newer Castlevania games on systems that could do the great compositions more justice. So, Castlevania II may not be the best game in the world, but I still view it as very significant and consider it essential.