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Castlevania II: Simon's Quest review

Game: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
Platform: NES
Genre: Adventure
Developer: Konami

Featured reader review by JoeTheDestroyer

October 04, 2011

WHAT A
HORRIBLE
NIGHT TO
HAVE A
CURSE.

Such an iconic quote from a less than impressive title. Yeah, I said it. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is the black sheep of the franchise for a very good reason: it's no fun. Perhaps in the late '80s and early '90s it was entertaining. There was something magical about calling your friends up for a weekend session of "beat Castlevania II", remembering especially to invite the rich friend in your circle who actually had a subscription to Nintendo Power, and staying awake until the wee hours trying to rid Simon of his curse.

...and all that magic emanated from a very particular source: Nintendo Power. For without it you bumped around in the dark until you accidentally found your way or gave up.

Sure, there's some magic in setting off on your own without the almighty NP as your guide. Castlevania II attempted to take the franchise in a different direction, away from its platformer roots and towards a non-linear adventure, rife with exploration and secrets. Ready as you might be to lay the whip to legions of undead creatures, you actually begin your quest in a town with various citizens who love to chat. Much of what they say is uninteresting, but later townsfolk spout off either helpful clues or accidentally hilarious lines.

"Rumor has it the ferryman loves garlic," an old woman says.

"Careful not to look into the Death Star, or you will die," another says, apparently afraid Lord Vader has his sights set on Transylvania.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest screenshot

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest screenshot

Leave town and that's when things pick up. You stumble into a tenebrous forest, greeted by the snarls of powder blue lycanthropes, menacing skeletons, and spiders as large as your torso. The now legendary track "Blood Tears" kicks in and your ire rises. Whip in hand you commence smiting evil through dense cemeteries, barren wastelands, poisonous swamps, and across decrepit bridges. Your pathway branches here and there, providing you with an ample amount of areas to investigate. There are even several towns along the way with more clues and items for sale, all purchased with the disembodied hearts of your foes. Your main objective is to locate several body parts of Dracula to break the curse put upon our hero. Each one can be found inside one of the various mansions scattered about the land.

It's almost beautiful how the old mechanics and concepts can be adapted into a different style of game, one that looks brilliant at first glance and feels adventurous and exciting. It all seems so picture perfect that when it finally goes wrong you can't help but shed a few bloody tears of your own.

There is a persistent annoyance in Castlevania II and it comes from that quote at the top. Every so often, a text box with appear and very slowly spell out said quote, then the screen will very slowly fade to black, and very slowly fade back in. Night has fallen, and you've become much weaker. Enemies dish out extra damage, and you deal less. After a short while, the very same thing happens with a slow transition to day time. This wouldn't be an issue if it were a rare occurrence, but this phenomenon happens about every five minutes and it gets old very quickly.

But no matter. It's a minor aggravation. You trudge onward, unabated by the annoyance, until you reach the entrance of a mansion. Enter and you'll notice that it's structured much like the levels of the first Castlevania, complete with interspersed platforms, traps, and all sorts of "challenging" situations. More disappointment ensues. Most of the platforming situations are about as amateur as they get, like playing the first adventure with training wheels. The only complication comes from fake pieces of floor. Take one step and you fall through, usually plummeting to a watery grave. A tiny bit of a challenge, yes, but still only a minor setback. By tossing holy water before taking each step, you can not only avoid falling but effectively kill the pace and reduce your indoor adventure to a slow crawl.

You endure all of this banality in the hopes it will climax with an epic boss battle as it had in the previous title. Yet, all there is at the end of the mansion is a crystal ball. (Only two mansions have bosses, and both are incredibly easy). You wonder what the bloody hell you're supposed to do with the crystal. You try whipping it, touching it, throwing holy water on it and nothing happens. Turns out you're supposed to buy a stake and throw it at the crystal to reveal one of Dracula's body parts. Unless you happened to talk to the right person or accidentally unearth the right hidden tome, you might never have found that out.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest screenshot

Simon's Quest suffers from one crippling, consistent flaw, and it has to do with uncovering the game's many secrets. How would you have known to kneel at a random rock wall with a red crystal equipped to travel to a different part of the world? You can talk to every person in the game and nab some clues, but that one is never really addressed. Some clues are even completely unreliable. Remember the old lady that told us about the ferryman and his garlic fetish? Try giving the ferryman garlic and the clove will fall through his boat and into the water. That's money wasted on a clove of garlic, and if you want another you'll have to pad back to the nearest town that carries garlic.

Careful inspection of a nearby issue of Nintendo Power will reveal that Dracula's heart is what the ferryman is after, and not garlic. It's at that moment you speculate that Konami developed Simon's Quest as a means to sell more issues of Nintendo Power and other game magazines, possibly for a kickback. The only sure way to make it through this quest is with a walkthrough. Now days we have the Internet and a dense population of talented FAQ writers, so getting through Simon's Quest is no biggie if you're willing to spoil the secrets. Unfortunately, secrets are the heart and soul of the game. Take that away and you've reduced your experience to little more than following someone else's orders and going through the motions.

It's understandable that Konami wanted Castlevania II: Simon's Quest to be a challenging experience. When a title lives and dies by secrets, it's only fitting that said secrets should be difficult to uncover. However, burying them beneath layers of counterintuitive ideas and bizarre conditions is downright cheap. Any minute now someone's going to say: "Well, what do you expect from an NES game?" I expect quite a bit, actually. Titles in vein of Simon's Quest like Faxanadu, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link, and Battle of Olympus were able to deliver the same style of gameplay with far less ambiguity and/or illogical solutions to their secrets and puzzles.

Thankfully, this wasn't the end of the franchise. Konami would eventually return Castlevania to its roots with Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, a marvelous and challenging installment to the series. For now let's be thankful that they haven't revisited Simon's Quest's style of gameplay. Let's put it behind us and remember only the good!

Rating: 4/10

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