Game 446: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987)

 

         

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

Japan

Konami Industry Co. (developer and publisher)

Released 1987 for NES in Japan; English release in U.S. in 1988

Date Started: 5 February 2022

Date Ended: 6 February 2022

Total Hours: 7

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 25

Ranking at Time of Posting: 221/460 (48%)

     

I have long been vaguely aware of the Castlevania franchise, but this is my first exposure to it. My understanding is that it features a family of vampire hunters with the last name Belmont who have taken it upon themselves to kill Dracula every time he resurrects himself. That usually means exploring his castle and dealing with his various minions. The first game in the series debuted in 1986 and fielded about a dozen sequels for different platforms through 1999, all of them featuring side-scrolling action and platform gameplay. A 1999 reboot for the Nintendo 64 (Castlevania) introduced a rotating three-dimensional "behind" view (before I get to the first RPG with that view, I'll have a better name for it), and since then, the series has featured games using both types of interfaces.

    

Most databases agree that Castlevania II introduced enough role-playing elements to be called an RPG. MobyGames also puts that designation on Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (2003, Game Boy Advance), Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (2005, Nintendo DS), Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (2005, PlayStation 2 and Xbox), Castlevania: Order of Shadows (2007, Windows Mobile), Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (2008, Nintendo DS), and Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (2010, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360). Two others are tagged with "RPG elements": Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997, PlayStation) and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon (2001, Game Boy Advance). Having watched video of almost all of these, I'd have to say that the RPG elements seem extraordinarily light. The ones that are tagged as "RPGs" or "RPG elements" are far more like the ones not so tagged than they are like conventional RPGs. The driving game mechanic is rapid-fire action and jumping, the sort of thing I suck at.

    

The kind of problem I have with these games.

      

Nonetheless, I thought I'd check this one out because there aren't many side-scrolling RPGs or RPGs with platform elements. I played both Sorcerian (1987) and Zeliard (1987) what seems like a lifetime ago, didn't hate either, but didn't finish them largely because of the platforming bits. I have an odd reaction to side-scrolling games. On the one hand, there's something about the aesthetic that I enjoy, the unexpected implausibility of making a two-dimensional world on a vertical plane rather than a horizontal one. RPGs rarely have any sense of vertical space, even into the modern day. I also enjoy the graphical cleverness by which the designers depict people, objects, and events in such a perspective. On the other hand, the perspective makes the most sense for action gameplay, including jumping. I can't think of a side-scrolling turn-based game, nor can I even imagine what that would look like. I'm sure my readers will tell me they exist, but they must be rare.

      

Experience, levels, and an economy of "hearts" is this game's claim to RPG status.

    

(Let me pause here for a rant about how much I hate game titles that offer no easy shorthand. Castlevania sounds like I'm talking about the first one. Quest is too generic, and I obviously can't call it Simon's. Am I supposed to just refer to it as II?)

     

The manual provides a brief backstory: you play Simon Belmont, a "gothic warrior respected by kings," who defeated Count Dracula in the first Castlevania. But in his victory, Simon apparently acquired the vampire's curse. He is plagued by nightmares, and instead of healing, the wounds he received from Dracula are growing worse. A beautiful maiden appears in a vision to tell him that his only hope is to find the "five body parts" of Dracula and burn them in his castle. So it's kind of a self-serving quest.

      

A little in-game backstory.

      

You start with a leather whip, 50 hearts (the game's currency), and three lives in personal injury lawyer's dream. To get through the tiered town, like most places in the game, you have to jump over gaps between platforms. Water instantly kills you. I lost a couple of early-game characters just figuring out the jumping system's tolerance for error.

   

The starting town, Jova, is one of five in the world. Each town has NPCs wandering outside, plus doors leading into "shops" that sell exactly one item each. Most towns have a temple, which are the only places in the game that you can restore lost health. There are otherwise no healing potions or spells, although health also restores on the rare occasions that you level up.

        

I'm surprised Nintendo allowed the religious iconography.

      

You can carry a maximum of 256 hearts at once, and I generally found that the best strategy upon arriving in a new town, if I couldn't already afford everything it sold, was to just grind until I could. It doesn't take long.

       

I'm not sure what garlic ever did for me, but I bought some.

     

NPCs supposedly give you hints as to how to complete the game, but most of them are either nonsense or outright lies. You have to talk to all of them because even the outdoor ones occasionally sell something you need. The game has a day/night cycle and keeps track of the passage of days. At night, enemies get twice as hard (i.e., they require twice the number of attacks to kill) but drop more hearts. Indoor locations in town are closed during the night and the NPCs on the streets are replaced with zombies. Curiously, no time passes when you're inside one of the game's mansions. 

         

If this is true, I never found any clues. Dracula doesn't really have a "riddle" anyway.

      

Combat is a mostly-simple affair of facing an enemy and hitting the "B" button to attack. You can jump just before you to do so to make a high attack or squat to make a low one. It's one of the quirks in the series that the Belmont men favor whips. The leather whip gets upgraded to a thorn whip, then a chain whip, and then a morningstar, all sold in towns, each about twice as powerful as the one before. Late in the game, you can find an NPC who adds a flame ability to the morning star and makes it even more deadly. Enemies mostly keep up with the increased damage done by the whips, and for almost the entire game, you face enemies who die in one or two hits.

     

An NPC upgrades my morningstar.

      

At first, I thought the purpose of the whip was to allow the player to attack at a distance while avoiding the lunacy presented in most side-scrolling action games in which a single weapon somehow becomes an inexhaustible missile reservoir. But this game has that, too. You find secondary weapons like daggers and holy water vials that work like missiles that never run out, although some of them consume your hearts. Daggers attack in a straight line from the character, but holy water potions and some others attack in an arc so you can hit enemies on lower platforms.

        

I jumped to throw that dagger at this skeleton.

         

The RPG elements in Castlevania II are mostly illusory, it turns out. Yes, you have experience and levels, but in way that satisfies the letter of "character development" without satisfying the spirit. I'm pretty sure that gaining levels only increases your maximum health. Specifically, you get two health bars per level from a starting point of 12 bars. That's barely noticeable. And even that development is somewhat illusory. In a real RPG, health is a resource to be managed. You have to sacrifice some of it to win battles and level up. In action games like this one, success depends on hardly ever losing any health. If you do, you've screwed something up. Those bars have to last you from the last temple through several hostile wilderness maps, through at least one castle map, and back through a couple more hostile wilderness maps on the way back to town. As such, whether you have 12 or 16 bars really doesn't make that much of a difference.

       

Skeletons come at me while spiders shoot webs. Moments like this are rare, however.

       

(I often get so hung up on the issue of character development that I forget I have two other criteria in my definition of an RPG. If I'm right that leveling doesn't make you any stronger, then this game fails the third one and thus needn't have been played. That didn't occur to me until I was almost finished.)

    

Thus, despite the halfhearted inclusion of some RPG elements, the game plays somewhat indistinguishably from its predecessor. As neither an action game nor a platformer is it particularly hard. Enemies always appear in fixed locations and do exactly the same things. Only a couple of them have ranged attacks. The platform puzzles are so simple that they're barely "puzzles." Only in a few places do the platforms move. 

   

Even when the individual enemies and platform puzzles are easy, a platformer can be hard if you're fat-fingered like me. All it takes is one ill-timed jump in every dozen, and you lose a life. Lose three lives and the game is over. But in Castlevania II, all you have to do is hit "continue" to keep playing from your death position. The only consequences are that you lose your accumulated hearts and however many experience points you've earned since your last level. Both are relatively easy to replenish with a little grinding. You stop gaining experience from enemies once you've outclassed them anyway, so I found that my best strategy was, upon reaching each new town, to note whether the enemies in adjacent screens were giving me experience or not. If so, I grinded until they stopped. I only made 4 levels in the entire game, and I'm not sure that any of them were really necessary.

 

This was the hardest part of the game for me to pass. I couldn't time my jumps right to avoid bonking my head on the ceiling while going for the next platform.

           

The game is divided into screens and areas. Each area scrolls for about three or four screens horizontally and up to two or three screens vertically before making a hard transition to a new area. There are a little over 40 areas in the game. Apparently, the English version of the game didn't have a map, but the Japanese version did, so I allowed myself to use it. It wasn't a lot of help, particularly since it suggests a two-dimensional surface whereas the reality of the game is one-dimensional "on the ground." Nonetheless, it helped keep me a little oriented. I printed it and made annotations on it and found myself wondering why I don't do that more often for computer RPGs. Much of the world is theoretically "open" as you begin the game, but the value of that is dubious when there is such an obvious order imposed by enemy difficulty and plot. The ultimate goal is to explore five mansions, recover Dracula's rib, eye, ring, heart, and nail, and toss those items into a pyre in Dracula's castle. A few of the mansions can't be explored until you find certain items, and there are parts of the game where you need to have a particular item to progress.

   

There are a couple of things that make the game difficult, if not particularly challenging. The first is a number of places in which the way forward requires you to find illusory passages (they look like stone walls or floors, but you can pass right through them) or smash blocks of stone. There's no way to identify these locations, and they don't even occur in obvious places such as the ends of otherwise-empty corridors. Thus, to find all of the objects and clues in the game, not to mention some plot-critical items and NPCs, you have to essentially test every block. These blocks can only be smashed by weapons that fire in an arc, including holy water, Dracula's nail, and something called a "sacred flame" that I never found. 

  

Here, it's obvious those blocks need to be smashed if I'm going to have any hope of jumping to the next platform.

But how would you know this room had a destructible floor unless you tried every floor?

        

The second problem is that a couple of places require you to solve a puzzle when it's not clear that there is a puzzle. For instance, there's one screen in which you find yourself up against a body of water with no platforms. To progress, you have to cause the water to "drain" by equipping a blue crystal and squatting for a few seconds. If this is clued in the game, it's clued vaguely. There's another place where a ferryman takes you across a lake, but you really need him to take you to a different location. To get him to do that, you have to have Dracula's heart equipped when you talk to him; I don't believe this is clued anywhere. In a third place, you have to equip a red crystal and squat in front of a cliff.

     

Kneeling here summons a whirlwind to carry me away.

    

It would be cool if the game had let the NPCs clue you as to these puzzles, as well as to the locations of secret areas, but the lines you get from NPCs are either misleading or useless. For instance, an NPC in Aldra tells you, "Hit Deborah Cliff with your head to make a hole." I guess "Deborah Cliff" is not a person but the cliff I referred to in the paragraph above, but I don't see how kneeling next to it with a crystal has anything to do with hitting it with your head. Another woman in Aldra says, "I'll see you at midnight on the river bank," but she's never at any riverbank at midnight. I guess poor translations from Japanese are responsible for some of these useless clues; numerous reviews of the game note them.

       

I don't see why Deborah Cliff deserves such cruelty.

      

For a modern player with access to walkthroughs, these frustrations are easily overcome, but I can only imagine the frustration I would have felt as a child. I do like my games to last longer than 8 hours, but only because they have content, not because I have to methodically toss a vial of holy water at every brick. Maybe some players liked it, though. I have vague memories of Super Mario Brothers and how most fans played its screens hundreds of times, discovering every single block that could be smashed, every hidden passage, every secret object. Kids have that kind of time.

       

At the doorway to a mansion. You have to find five of them.

      

The mansions are disappointingly easy. (Online, they all have names. In game, I never saw any names.) Each one requires you to explore only a small area with only a few puzzles. In each one, you have to find an NPC selling an oak stake, then find a crystal ball, then use the stake on the crystal ball to smash it and get Dracula's body part. Only two of the mansions have bosses, and of the two bosses, only one is required and the other is moronically easy to beat. It really says something when someone like me, who sucks at action games, is disappointed by the bosses. 

    

Approaching the crystal ball in one of the mansions.

      

The first boss is "Death," who swirls around what I guess is Braham Mansion. I encountered him so late in the game that I had already concluded there were no bosses. He throws scythes at you. I didn't know he was optional when I encountered him, so I just dodged the scythes, waited for him to float towards the ground, and whipped him to death. He left a gold dagger which is a decent throwing weapon but consumes your accumulated hearts with each toss.

        

It feels like "Death" should outrank Dracula, but I guess not.

     

The second boss is a giant floating head found in Laruba Mansion, which was the second-to-last one I explored but I guess the last one listed in most walkthroughs. It occasionally explodes into missile weapons, but they're easy to avoid if you stand out of the way. The rest of the time, it moves in predictable circles, allowing you to kill it by jumping and throwing a dagger. It leaves a cross behind, which is necessary to enter the titular Castlevania.

       

The unexciting combat with the floating head boss.

        

Once you have the five body parts, you journey to Castlevania, which I was surprised to discover is both quite small and doesn't have a single enemy except for Dracula, who like the flying mask is almost insultingly easy. Once you enter his room, the game takes over and shows you tossing each of the five body parts into some kind of receptacle. It erupts into flames, and Dracula appears. He flies around the room, sometimes makes copies of himself, and tosses whirling knives at you. But I just stood in place and whipped away and killed him without even losing half of my health--and I was two levels below the game's maximum.

   

The endgame text shows Dracula's grave and gives you a message letter-by-letter:

   

The battle has consummated. Now peace and serenity have been restored to Transylvania and the people are free of Dracula's curse forever. And you, Simon Belmont, will always be remembered for your bravery and courage.

       

What I now know is the "bad" ending.

    

After I won and was researching the game online, I was surprised to find that this is the "bad" ending. There are actually three potential endings that depend on how long you take to complete the game. I paid no heed to that. I went off and made dinner at one point while the game transitioned relentlessly between day and night in my absence. But the odd thing is that the "medium" and "good" endings don't necessarily sound any better. In fact the medium ending is notably worse:

    

Although the confrontation between Simon and Dracula has concluded, Simon couldn't survive his fatal wounds. Transylvania's only hope is a young man who will triumph over evil and rid the city of Dracula's deadly curse.

   

Not only is Simon dead in this version and not "remembered for his bravery and courage," but he apparently didn't actually win the game. I can't imagine this text wasn't intended for the "bad" ending, particularly since the "medium" ending seems to depict Simon kneeling at Dracula's grave whereas the "bad" one shows the grave by itself. Anyway, the "good" ending reads:

    

The encounter with Dracula is terminated. Simon Belmont has put an end to the eternal darkness in Transylvania. His blood and sweat have penetrated the earth and will induce magic and happiness for those who walk on the land.

   

While this text is arguably better, it also depicts Dracula's hand thrusting from the ground at the end, which neither of the others do.

      

The screen is shaking at this point, so the still image is blurry.

       

While the ordinal nature of the text may be questionable, the graphical quality of the ending scene does follow a clear order from worst to best. The "bad" ending is in black and white, and without Simon. The "medium" one shows a colorful daytime scene, and the "good" one shows a nice evening red sky plus treats the player to a bonus scene teasing the sequel.

      

The normal colors of the "medium" ending.

The somewhat haunting colors of the "good" ending.

         

I won in about seven hours using walkthroughs to get me past a few difficult parts. I missed some items, including a useful weapon called a "sacred flame." There are a couple of places in the game where you can buy laurels, which temporarily render you invincible and are necessary to cross long stretches of deadly swamp. You can only hold four of them at a time, and I guess there's an NPC who gives you a bag that allows you to double that, but I didn't find him. I missed a few cluebooks hidden in walls, none of which would have helped me that much, and I ended the game two levels below the maximum. Overall, aside from having to get help from walkthroughs when the puzzles were too obscure, I didn't find anything to be terribly upset about. The game lasted a defensible number of hours, had some good visuals, and was easy to master in terms of controls. Like most console games of the era, the music is repetitive, relentless, and impossible to turn off independently of the sound, so I can't say anything about the sound effects.

    

I gave it a 25 on the GIMLET. It does best (4s) in "gameplay" (short, not too hard) and "graphics, sound, and interface," worst (1) in character development, and 2s and 3s in everything else. One thing I'll say about console games of the period is that they knew how to make the best use of their gamepads. I'll always prefer a keyboard to a gamepad, but so many RPG programmers of the 1980s and 1990s had no idea how to effectively use the keyboard, or worse, ignored the keyboard and required a joystick or mouse. (As much as I prefer a keyboard to a gamepad, I prefer a gamepad to a joystick or mouse-only interface.) There is thus something refreshing about playing a game like Castlevania II and knowing that you're not going to have any insanity like WarWizard's hidden inventory windows, Towers's mouse-only combat, or Phalsberg's use of a joystick to move among 45 keywords.

      

Of Castlevania II, Wikipedia says:

     

Gameplay of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest departs from the standard platforming genre of the first Castlevania for a game inspired by The Maze of Galious. It features nonlinear gameplay and role-playing elements such as a world map which the player is free to explore and revisit.

    

To me, this paragraph is written by someone who fundamentally doesn't understand RPGs. I don't think any serious RPG player would play Castlevania II and think that it's an "open-world" game or that it's "role-playing elements" represent a significant departure from its predecessor. I've watched videos of both the original Castlevania and The Maze of Galious, and to me the sequel seems almost identical to the first (but for the dubious inclusion of "experience") and almost nothing like the latter, which has much more complex enemy and platform movements and much more abstract environments, not to mention a classical Goofy Cartoonish Little Man (GCLM), which the Castlevania series mercifully avoids. I don't think if I were a fan of the series, I would lament or even notice the loss of II's so-called "RPG elements" in Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse.

     

For those readers wondering why I played it at all, it was a product of my occasional (roughly every five entries) tendency to randomize my list of abandoned and rejected games and give a try to whatever comes up. In this case, it was a bit irresponsible given how many balls I have in the air already. I have to finish the seemingly endless Angband, which is now actively boring me, finish the seemingly impenetrable Phalsberg, finish the long WarWizard (which seems to be getting better), and wrap up my ongoing replay of Pool of Radiance, which for some reason I've lost interest in. Also, this week brought me nearly simultaneous messages from LanHawk, who figured out a way past the copy protection obstacle in Towers, and the co-creator of Towers, who sent me the game manual. And all of this while I'm still completely reeling from the start of this semester and getting over my bout with COVID. This is all to say that I apologize if things are a bit rough for a few more weeks.