Collection essentials #72: Kid Icarus (NES)

This is another early platformer from Nintendo, though this one did actually come after the one with the famous plumber. Kid Icarus isn’t quite a standard platformer though, as it mixes in a variety of styles into its levels. You start in a level where you’re constantly ascending upward (like one does in yesterday’s Ice Climber). There are also more-conventional side-scrolling stages too, as well as labyrinthian fortresses that you traverse from room to room looking for the boss. And at the end of the game is a genre switch, as you get to play a shoot ‘em up level. This is also one of the earliest platformers to have currency and shops to buy stuff.

Kid Icarus is a rather iconic old NES game that a lot of people remember. Opinions on it are mixed though, it’s not usually considered one of the best of the system, and unfortunately I’m one that falls in the more negative portion of the “mixed.” I like a lot of the ideas in Kid Icarus, but the execution just leaves too much to be desired for me to really enjoy playing it. There’s a lot of really annoying, punishing things in this game. For example, in the levels where you ascend upwards, you can’t ever go back downward. If the previous platform you were standing on goes below the bottom of the screen, you can’t try and go back there, or else you’ll fall to your death, which doesn’t really make sense. There are also really tricky, really annoying enemies, most infamously the “eggplant wizards” in the dungeons that place a curse on you that is a fate arguably worse than death, rendering you unable to attack. I like the idea of shops but the items are really expensive and can often require you to “grind” more money by killing tons of little enemies if you really want something good.

I thought of leaving Kid Icarus off this list, but it’s just too iconic of a game not to. The game spawned one sequel, and then the series was dormant for a long time, but then the main character Pit was brought back for 2008’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and a few years later we got a full-on modern sequel that was actually good. What clinched it for me, though, was that in this year’s Super Mario Bros. movie, there’s a scene where Mario is straight-up playing this game. I gotta have a game like that which everyone saw in the big screen!