Castlevania II: Simon's Quest retrospective: Quest-ionable design choices | NES Works
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 ก.ย. 2024
- It's the most wonderful time of the year: Time for a Castlevania retrospective. As NES Works 1988 winds down, Halloween 2022 seems like the perfect time for a proper look back at Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, one of the most ambitious and frustrating games of the NES era. The second of the NES's "weird sequels," Simon's Quest combines a lot of different influences and ultimately does a lot to define the series' future... even if it would take a while for the series to realize it. In the meantime, NES kids had a whole lot of Nintendo Power coverage to help them solve Dracula's so-called "riddle."
P.S.: I am aware that this video rendered with a caption error that I missed. Adobe Premiere happens.
Production note: NES footage captured from @analogueinc Mini. Arcade footage captured from MiSTer FPGA cores; special thanks to @MiSTerAddons. Video upscaled to 720 with XRGB Mini Framemeister.
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Thanks to games like Castlevania II and Zelda II, I didn't even question whether SMB2 was even a "real" Mario game until way down the line. I was basically like "well, the second game is always weird"
More second games need to be weird IMO
The empty castle at the end makes me think the developers wanted to communicate the tension of Simon going through the abandoned castle and approaching in silence the chamber where the unholy ritual to bring back Dracula will be performed... and they just couldn't make it work.
I think it's a great choice. I always read the fact that there's a sudden dropoff on ALL activity once you reach the castle grounds as the fact that Dracula's curse had such terrible power that nothing could live under its influence.
I'm one of the rare folks who beat this back in the 80's without Nintendo Power. Even solved the red crystal thing on my own. I'd love to say it was because of my incredible puzzle solving skills, but that would be a lie. Instead I screwed up a game mechanic and fell ass backwards into the solution. I could see the platform under the lake where you need the blue crystal, and thought if I held down on the controller long enough the screen would pan down and show me if there was another way down there.
Later I tried the same thing for the red crystal puzzle once I was out of ideas. It took me something like 2 months of real time to finish the game
You’re not alone. My brother and I figured it out as well. Without Nintendo Power. Funny how Legend of Zelda was often just as cryptic and impossible without a guide, but that game gets NO hate whatsoever.
And that’s a life of achievement right there on its own
In Super Metroid you're supposed to use the Power Bomb in the glass tunnel to get into lower Maridia. I missed out on this fact and wound up scouring every part of upper Maridia for at fifteen hours of in game clock time. You use the xray scope on the tube and "This is clearly not a bombable block why would I do that?" this violates everything else I've seen in the game, and yet here we are.
Castlevania 2 feels like it's full of "Fuck around and find out" things like this. I know, it's the 80's, there's no focus group testing, really. Devs only test with over devs who are busy plowing through their own deadlines.
WELL DONE to you! Simon's Quest was my major Christmas present for 1990. I progressed well enough past the first mansion (Ribcage), but then became haplessly stuck, like so many others, trying to find Dracula's remaining four mansions. Eventually I got some help from a friend in finding the LAST two mansions (Nail and Ring), using the jump+whip technique to leap over the "impossible" jump at the end of the cemetery where you can find the Silver Knife. But that STILL left me/us unable to prossess Dracula's heart + eyeball.
FYI I had already found the clue about kneeling by the lake with the blue crystal. I remember subsequently kneeling down multiple times, but I mustn't have kneeled down for long enough (i.e. five seconds or so) because the technique never worked. And of course why should it have? After all, nowhere in the manual does it say that using the crystals requires more than just selecting them in your inventory? Nowhere. It would have been reeeeeeeally handy to know to kneel down for several seconds. Thanks Nintendo.
Eventually, about 3 months later (March) I have the Nintento Hotline in Australia (where I live) a call. They were able to tell me what to do, and I finished the rest of the game with ease, within a day or so, basically - as I already had all the other items and the flame whip, etc.
I remember when I fought Dracula for the first time I didn't even realise it was him until afterwards. He was so damn easy to kill, and he didn't really look like Dracula. I just thought he was another boos to defeat. I remember thinking that once he was defeated I should try jumping/sliding down the "pipe" the the centre of the room ala Super Mario Bros, and maybe that would lead me to Dracula. But once the ending sequence kicked in (I got the "bad" black and white ending), I soon realised, WOW I JUST KILLED DRACULA AND COMPLETED THE GAME AT LAST! I remember how excited I was to be able tot ell my friends that I had become the first of them to complete the game (with a little help).
The one surprise the game had left, though, came a few moths later when I played it from start to finish, and to my absolute shock, this time the ending was different (I got the daytime ending where Simon beats Dracula but dies of his wounds). Once again, the manual made NO MENTION of different endings based on how fast you complete the game, as you well know. I initially thought that I had gotten this different ending because in this playthrough I used the morning star (rather than the flame whip) to defeat Dracula, and maybe this whip simply wasn't "strong enough" to truly defeat Dracula.
I subsequently achieved the third (best?) ending sometime later too (where Dracula is defeated but rises from his grave).
Still love the game, overall. though. Played it through again (using RetroArch on my PC) and had a great time.
I definitely appreciate the idea that, like in the real world, a video game world can be filled with people who run the spectrum from "has actual useful knowledge" to "is repeating something that their grandparents told them in a centuries-old game of telephone" to "is just trying to mess with you due to either malice or ignorance."
I read somewhere that any character who couches the information instead of just saying it (like if instead of saying "there's a secret item here" they might say "I heard there's a secret item here") is a guaranteed liar.
This game did the "Dig Reagan Up Just to Shoot Him Again" thing before it was hip.
How did you post on a merely day-old video 2 weeks ago?
@@CarbonRollerCaco You have to hold a blue crystal iPhone and kneel in front of TH-cam for 12 seconds.
@@CarbonRollerCaco Patreon early bird
@@philmason9653 haven't finished reading all the comments, but I'm going to say this is the best one
Back in the day Simon's Quest was my best friend/next door neighbor's favorite relatively early NES game. It even got him to subscribe to Nintendo Power for a couple of years after he read my issue that covered the game and decided he didn't want to have to borrow mine all the time. While Simon's Quest wasn't the "best" Castlevania game on the NES it held a special place on our hearts and we poured many hours into getting all the different endings and exploring every nook and cranny of the game. Plus the graphics and especially the music are quite good as well! It's easy difficulty was a nice change of pace since a lot of other games were quite hard at the time. It was a good game to play when it was too hot or cold to go outside to play as a kid.
Jeremy Parish talking about Castlevania never ages for me.
Graveyard Duck is my favourite Castlevania character.
_Count_ Duckula.
Fits right in with Revolver Ocelot and Psycho Mantis
Simons Quest is a masterpiece. The music alone is legendary
Playing now for the first time and really liking it
I loved Simon's Quest growing up, warts and all. My parents bought it for my 9th birthday. The RPG elements and exploration really appealed to me. Probably my second favorite Castlevania behind SotN.
Whenever I go 8 bit retro theme in my phone, Bloody Tears is my ringtone.
I'm one of those insane psychopaths who loves this game in the series the most out of Castlevania 1-4 (out of all the ones prior to SOTN probably Bloodlines on Genesis is my favorite). I got it when it came out and played the Hell out of this game. I did, after months, finally break down and got the Nintendo Power issue on this game (though to be fair I did get about half-way through the game on my own), but this is hands down the NES game I put the most hours into. When I did finally beat it, I played it a few more times to see if I could do it better.
Didn't actually know about the 3 ending back then. I would shoot myself in the foot by farming on the first enemy screen until I had enough hearts for everything in that town, a Whip upgrade in the next town, and the Oak Steak in the first Mansion. I played this game so much in the 80s that around 1990 I stopped playing it, didn't pick it up again until 2 years ago, and beat it flawlessly, without getting lost once, on my first try. This game is just burned into my brain.
My only complaint with this discussion is the disrespect placed on "Dwelling of Doom" as a background track. Sure, it's not "Bloody Tears", but it's still a fantastic chunk of OST.
All these years I thought the bad villager dialogue was a result of poor localization.
Jeremy did too, until an interview with Igarashi
I still think it is. I think he was lying when he said it was intentional. That was his lie, just like the vilagers. Seriously. Did you not understand him being that way?
Simon's Quest seems like a case study in how a few influential critics can completely change a work's critical reputation. In the early 2000s, Simon's Quest was seen as a flawed classic whose forward-thinking design choices set the stage for Symphony of the Night. IGN's History of Castlevania and other retrospectives reflected this view. James Rolfe and Arin Hanson completely overturned this consensus with their video reviews, creating a new consensus in which Simon's Quest was seen as a disastrous misstep for the series. Part of what made Rolfe's review so funny in the context of 2006 was that it defied what was then the critical consensus about the game.
Rolfe's video (besides being hilarious) basically perfectly encapsulates all the frustrations of CV II. It's not surprising that resonated with people, despite CVII still being a well-above average NES game for the time that was fun to play despite all the cryptic BS and cut corners in the game.
Ever since beating the first Castlevania I've been beyond stoked to play this one. I haven't started it yet, but I now own it for FDS. I wanted to get one that had a Konami Card as well, but I think that doubled the price... Oh well... At least my copy of Ai Senshi Nicol has one.
I actually love the idea of the villagers lying to you or mistrusting you. I think that concept has a ton of potential. However it should have come with someone who warns you not to trust everyone. Or a way to figure out who's lying. Nothing too obvious though. I tend to like worlds where magic is mistrusted or similar ideas, so having the hero not immediately treated as the savior is kinda rad. Then again, my favorite games are stuff like Kings Quest 3 and Majoras Mask; not the most friendly to the player
Well, the instruction manual states that some of the clues townsfolk give are false, but not many kids read their NES game manuals.
CV2 is definitely a strange beast, but I love it. Appreciate you drawing the connection between this and SotN and the later IGAvanias. It seems obvious but I rarely hear anyone acknowledge it.
I always liked the way the daggers shined in this game. It's almost hypnotic.
That localization tidbit is absolutely new to me (that text was intended from the start)
Imagine NPCs in current AAA games that lie to you
Dragon Quest XI has an optional mode where NPCs lie to you
I played this on the NES classic and shamelessly used a guide the whole way. I have no idea how it’s possible without one.
"A succession of NES sequels arrived in late 1988 and cemented for the platform a reputation for being the system on which second entries in long-running series turned out to be really weird."
A similar thing happened with Sega Master System sequels released in the summer of 1988. Zillion II: The Tri Formation was very different from Zillion, Fantasy Zone: The Maze was very different from Fantasy Zone I and II, Alex Kidd: The Lost Stars was very different from Alex Kidd in Miracle World, and Wonder Boy in Monster Land was very different from Wonder Boy.
What a great retrospective. I beat this game back in the 80s when it was still new but it was using the collective effort of myself, my brothers and other friends who probably read the strategy guide in Nintendo Power. I also had all the Worlds of Power books. Great memories.
Jeremy- wonderful job at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo a couple of weeks ago! Your presentation on Sega’s 8-bit journey was a blast. It was great meeting you and chatting a bit afterwards! Thank you for signing (and drawing in!) my copy of NES Works Volume II: 1986. Cheers! -SpaceMonkeyJay
I'm sad you forgot to mention how utterly and amazingly ATMOSPHERIC this game is for an NES game. Heck, I'd say it's the most atmospheric game on the plataform, with Metroid being a close second!
I still love playing through this game. I agree that without Nintendo Power, a lot of kids probably never would have figured out this game. I remember relying on it heavily when I was a youngster.
Xanadu, Druaga, Romancia and Milon's Secret Castle are all fantastic games and it's nice to see them represented alongside Simon's Quest. I was wondering what sort of tone you were going to take with this entry and I'm glad it's a very fair and balanced overview without getting into hyperbole and that considers both its predecessors and successors in the market and of the series itself.
After seeing your name in the credits of The Mummy Demastered last night... this is a truly fitting video for this Whacky Wednesday
Oh, I forgot I designed and produced that game. Wait, what?
@@JeremyParish thats what im saying! Wait what??? You did a great job; fun short game i had no idea existed until it was on sale on Steam.
@@MiguelPaulettePerez-bj8ml Yeah, that game was way more awesome than a The Mummy game had any right to be
Castlevania II has so many good music in it... and enough things to make memes out of it that after all these years it's still a classic.
Awesome, as always. Love this game. I've made an LP of it in 6 different languages. It's always the first game I try when I'm learning a language.
Great video as always. I love this game. It’s nowhere near as frustrating as some people make out. I feel the same about Zelda 2.
I'm never tired of watching vids about Castlevania franchise. Thank you.
To think I would live to see a respected video game journalist call Simon's Quest a good game. What a world... what a world...
Yeah. "lol it sux" no longer the consenus on this classic?
@@BasementBrothers Seems not. Now it's more "flawed classic that laid the groundwork for future awesomeness" :D
It is very fitting for you to cover this game for Halloween!
I was 7 years old when I played this game at my cousin’s house and I could not get out of the first “stage” of the game. Up until that point my video game accomplishments included making it to Super Macho Man in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, beating Kung-Fu and Rad Racer, among others.
I did not know thar Nintendo Power gave it that much coverage, but it's interesting to see in retrospect. I wasn't a big Castlevania fan until the GBA era so I missed a lot of the original games, and to this day I haven't played CV2. I'm mostly familiar with it due to AVGN's review, of all places. So this was a welcome look at the game in the context of its time!... Not sure I'd like to dive down into it since I've only really played CV4 and Bloodlines since from the old-school ones, I fear the 8-bit generation may be much for me, but an interesting glimpse still.
Ugh that OoE crab boss, excellent game though
Simon's Quest is my favorite when it comes to atmosphere. The later games on the GBA and DS don't have a world that feels as believable as this one.
This game is fun if you know what to do. It becomes more about mapping out your path and strategizing the best use of your time and hearts.
Honestly I was too young to understand this game was “flawed.” I rented it and loved it.
According to Castlevania anniversary collection this game came out on my 13th birthday. Not to mention I’m in that Nintendo Power for a high score in Top Gun. Win win.
I played this game for the first time ever just recently (earlier this year in fact) as part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection on Steam. It's certainly the easiest Castlevania game from an action perspective as you mentioned, with generally easier enemies and platforming and the disappointing bosses, but if you weren't playing with a walkthrough, the game is _nightmarishly_ difficult from a navigation and puzzle-solving perspective- it's really hard to keep track of how the world is all tied together, and some of the puzzles (not only the infamous Red Crystal puzzle, but things like working out the Ferryman will take you to a different location if you talk to him with Dracula's Heart equipped) are almost pure trial and error. I think it's still a worthy playthrough, though. Also, I think 'Dwelling of Doom' (the manor theme) is actually really cool, even if it does only go 25 seconds before it starts looping.
Have to correct you, getting a game over in Simon's Quest doesn't JUST cost you your hearts and accumulated EXP, it also sets the in-game clock forward by several hours, moving you closer to a bad ending. Or at least that's what I read.
Also, it's been theorised that "ahiru" is an obscure Japanese slang for a night watchman, meaning it is referring to the guy in the graveyard who gives you the Silk Bag. But that's just a guess.
I think it's because ducks tend pace back and forth like guardspeople.
I had never heard of the clock advancing with each game over.
Does it happen in the mansions too or just the overworld?
That's not quite right. The clock resumes at its current time when you die and immediately continue. It only resets to a specific time of the current day (I think noon) when you continue from a password. Someone mentioned above that you can game the system by getting a game over right before midnight and restarting from a password-it'll set the clock back to noon, and if you know your route from the starting point, you can gain some extra time that way.
It's crazy how different some NES sequels were from the original. They were really trying to push originality and innovation - obviously it backfired at times. Mega Man had a much different approach to it's sequels and seemed to do pretty well, with small sequential changes to a tried and true formula. Castlevania 2, Zelda 2, the US Mario 2, Dig Doug 2, etc
This was a great game and a challenge finding everything as a kid
ah castlevania 2... sank some serious time into that one in my younger years, but never managed to reach the end. fast-forward to modern day, and konami's first castlevania collection on modern platforms. thankfully with the QOL upgrades finishing this one was at least slightly easier than doing it on OG hardware. SO thanks to that compilation I finally got vengeance against dracula since playing it as a kid!!
Just watching this video makes me want to replay Simon's Quest and use that mansions strategy. I love the music of the game, it's night music makes it always a great time to have a curse, and for years,. Simon's Quest was the only Castlevania game I could see the ending of. I definitely think Simon's Quest being the first game that James Rolfe did in his Nerd persona also helped make this game so beloved (the AVGN episode on it is a classic). And I love the use of Zero Wing for the stinger.
Hey now. Every night is made better by a retrospective.
The Simon's Quest Nintendo Power cover was pretty traumatizing when it came out. The sight of Simon Belmont holding Dracula's freshly decapitated head terrified kids. Several parents called Nintendo complaining that the cover gave their children nightmares.
At least many Open World games learned from this game to not include insta-death zone too much in mandatory path.
Also, I've only learned that vertically moving platforms gives additional intertia against Simon's jump trajectory 10 years after I've initially got this game. (When the platform is moving upward, Simon covers more ground, and vice versa.)
At least it isn't a horrible game. There are plenty of games I've borrowed from Blockbuster that left sour taste in me for years to come, and SQ felt much sweeter compared to them.
11:14 Even in the original Japanese manual of the game, it blatantly says that "There are some villagers who lies" (Page 22, Paragraph 1, source: gamingalexandria), so it is pretty much a game mechanic. Maybe it was placed to deter pirating. If I were to remake this game, I'd add to either Dracula's eyeball or ring an ability to mark any liars with malicious grin.
This was my introduction to Konami titles, as well as the first Castlevania game I actually got to play. Granted, I had seen plenty of the original CV in the Nintendo Player's Guide, but I never had a chance to try it out. A school friend had a copy of SImon's Quest and it is the only remaining memory I have of spending time at his house. It was always a fun rental too, even if I never figured it out back then. It's a game I've always wanted to go back and play through, as it's the only retro console-based game in the series I haven't completed.
Another great video, my fellow Triangle North Carolinian.
Only Castelvania we ever owned but by far my favorite.... Precisely because of the figuring out and the general aesthetic.
The original and Simons Quest pair as my 2 favorite games of all time even with it's flaws. so I wasn't even sure if I wanted to watch this. thanks for not downing on the game the whole time.
Loved this game at that time. Never got really far, but loved it
11:30 "I once asked castlevania's DS era producer Koji Igarashi if he would ever want to remake or create a *spiritual successor* to Simon's Quest and he said _'absolutely not'"_
We'll see about that soon enough 👁
Maybe he's a lying villager
It's me, the person who didn't think to use the White Crystal in the first mansion and just stumbled around like an idiot instead.
A lot of people who weren't around when certain classic games were first released probably want to know which ones are actually worth playing through now just for the references and memes. That's a tough question to answer for Castlevania II - especially for people who insist on playing blind their first time through a game. We definitely put up with a lot of quirky NES games because we had to save our allowance for months to buy them and insisted on getting our money's worth.
I always wondered how that NP cover was approved in a world that was still feeling the effects of 80's satanic panic and also parents' growing concern about the amount of graphic violence kids were being exposed to (some of it through video games).
I'm not American (french canadian, we didn't have satanic panic here) and i was into gamebooks in the 80s and eventually became a gamebook collector in the early 10's and honestly one of the main appeal and selling point of a lot of these books were their cool, often times downright beautiful dark fantasy covers and gamebooks were mostly a craze in the UK and France (it's how they got popular here in Quebec because French publisher Gallimard who had built a whole amazing collection translating and publishing the best UK gamebooks published them here too) and i found out a lot of the ones released in the US had different (and often very lame) covers because selling books to children that had dark imagery and horrific looking demons and vampires was not gonna fly in America. And yet here you have Nintendo marketing a magazine mostly to kids doing this.
I mean, don't get me wrong, it's among my favorite NP covers. It just seems wild they allowed it.
They supposedly got a LOT of complaints about it, so you're not wrong.
I was a kid at the time and a former Fun Clubs News subscriber who got the entire run of Nintendo Power, but it wasn't until the '00s when I started hearing about it being infamous online that I even thought about it. It just seemed like a normal cover to me.
Wow. I had always thought the issue with the game was poor translation. That it was on purpose is pretty hilarious in hindsight. Great episode! 😃
I would love a Zero Mission or AM2R style remake of Castlevania 2
There is. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest Revamped
@@Suprentus sweet, this is why I commented. I'll definitely be checking this out. Is it as good as AM2R as far as being a polished fan game?
@@Packers4Evar12 I played it like 12 years ago, and it was pretty polished for the most part. I remember one oversight that softlocked my game where the red crystal didn't have the function of the blue crystal, meaning if you didn't complete the mansion that requires the blue crystal before getting the red crystal, you're softlocked. I'm sure that's probably fixed by now though.
I had fun with it. The boss fights were actually boss fights. I should probably pick it up again.
By some coincidence I had just finished your old Anatomy of Games look at Simon's Quest a week or so ago. I wondered when the NES Works revist was due--lo and behold!
I really like that the main challenge is figuring out how to progress by talking to people and slowly figuring out what is actually helpful from those clues. The problem with Simon's Quest is that it has a bit too much information to wade through and the correct hints are themselves not necessarily easy to parse, so you could dismiss some right information as useless.
I've noticed a lot of people are pretty down on having "figuring out how to progress" as the main challenge. I've seen complaints that Metroid has no map and that the hints in Zelda are just hints and not outright answers. I suspect that people view the intended challenge as being an obstacle in the way of playing the game, rather than the game. Also, there aren't a whole lot of games made since the NES era that have that as the core challenge, so it's not something that many people are used to. Especially for Zelda and Metroid, which look like their SNES counterparts, but are very different games under the hood.
Another cool note on this game is that the ending system builds a second life into the game. Once you have learned how to get through the game, you can practice getting better and optimizing your path to try for the best ending.
Love this game. Its flawed and a nightmare to find your way through the first time but its enjoyable to revisit.
You know, while I have revisited Castlevanias I and III plenty of times, i don't think I have attempted a full playthrough of this since it first came out (thanks, Nintendo Power).
Contemporary games like Tunic, Hollow Knight, Astalon, and the Souls games are great because they embrace the esoteric like this game did! : D
My favourite in the series. I grew up playing this game and mega man 2 before playing castlevania 1 and mega man 2. I find castlevania 2 unique in its own right. Only flaw I see is that I wish the mansions had its own boss. Other than that the game is on 🔥
The thing with the NPC dialogue is that there are examples of poor localization as well as lines that were confusing, nonsensical or straight-up lies in the original Japanese text. The truth as to whether it was all the translation's fault, or the developers' original intent, is somewhere in the middle. A fellow named bisqwit created a site that compares every single line of dialogue between the English text and the original Japanese, where you can see there are around 10 or so lines that WERE in fact helpful originally, but got woefully mistranslated. On the other hand, it also confirms that a large portion of the text was impenetrable nonsense from the start.
This game was also very clearly rushed out the door unfinished. If the absurdly easy bosses and empty final castle wasn't clue enough, there's a
section in the Disk System version where the act of walking across two screens requires ejecting and flipping the disk over about 4 times, a result of terribly sloppy data partitioning. (The polar opposite to Zelda II's relative kindness in changing your spawn point to the entrance of the final dungeon if you happen to die inside it, bypassing the need to flip the disk over.)
While the comparison to Romancia and Milon's Secret Castle is completely valid, I don't think Xanadu really warrants the comparison, as that game doesn't have too many of what I'd call "Druaga-ism"s. The most obvious Druaga reference in Xanadu is the hidden item shop in the very first area, reachable only by turning back around on ONE specific tile on the way to the underground, but that is really a bonus and not something required to complete the game, as in Druaga or Hydlide. (in fact, high-level Xanadu players often refuse to use this shop anyway, due to the advantages it offers.) Xanadu's difficulty comes from its mechanics being highly complex for its era, and those mechanics being mostly obscured from the player initially, almost certainly resulting in hitting a brick wall in your first few attempts. This is a different beast from the Druaga/Hydlide style of performing arbitrary actions in specific locations without even so much as a vague hint in-game, all but requiring one to look up the answer in an external source. Xanadu is more akin to something like Vagrant Story; both games are very impenetrable and hostile to newcomers at first, but rewarding and fun for players who can stick with them, learn how they work, and adapt to their peculiarities.
I had this game as an 8 year old. Needless to say, I never knew what to do. I am still upset I got this one instead of Castlevania I or III.
Rented it when I was 8 and was confused. Very soon after, friends showed me the way through and I loved it.
It's interesting to see Koji Igarashi learning more humility and appreciation of games he didn't like at first as he went on, producing the series.
Order of Ecclesia in particulat features
- a standalone storyline having nothing to do with the Belmonts
- a female protagonist
- and being a spiritual successor to Simon's Quest in so many ways
All of which he previously shrugged off.
To a point, as Igarashi was also the one responsible for removing several games (conveniently one he didn’t oversee or make) like Circle of the Moon and the N64 ones circa 2005/2006.
While some are better than others (Circle) it did come across as petty, especially as the chief conceit of streamlining the story to connect to the fabled 1999 game with Julius Belmont hasn’t materialized.
@@osurpless Yes, but that exactly proves my point. He did remove these games from the timeline, but put them back for the promotion material for Portrait of Ruin, semmingly having made peace with others' contribution that may not match his vision. He probably originally wanted something else to happen (or not happen) in the 1800's featuring the Belmonts, but maybe gave up on it and just let the existing games be canon.
Except Legends.
Castlevania II is my fave in the series I love everything about this game including the cryptic clues one of the first NES games I beat bad or good end
it was unfortunately so cryptic that I found glitches and game hacks before I found the pathway the game devs actually intended for me to take. As flawed as it was I still kinda love it and played the hell out of it in the late 80s and early 90s
The official Super Mario 2 (the one in Japan) was more of the same, but more difficult. The NA/EU releases were a reskin of another game. I'm far more familiar with the latter though, and I remember enjoying what it was.
I love this game, it's my fav Castlevania on NES. I know that's an unpopular opinion but I don't care. If you're a wierdo like me and you love Simon's Quest, you need to play Infernax BTW, it's a great modern interpretation.
It's weird but this is the Castlevania game i played the most. At least 8 times from beggining to end years ago. The last few attempts were me trying to optimize a route and end the game in as few days as i could.
Best i could do was like 3 in game days if i recall correctly.
Not the awful game i was led to believe, it was ok at best, but i would recomend using a guide and map.
Edit: 9:53 i found this to be my favourite way to kill Dracula too. Most people say you should use the laurels and whip inside him, or use the fire. But the Golden knife is good enought and not hard to obtain.
I like the music to castlevania 2 and it's still excellent today. 😀👍🧛♂️🎮
This was my favorite Castlevania....not a popular opinion but I loved it!
Those damned villagers. Literally; they get less useful as you get closer to Dracula's digs, like they're so scared of the tougher horrors near the place that they end up going a bit loony. I actually like that touch. And, thankfully, none of their wrong tips actually get you into any special trouble.
As for translation, there's more to
consider than Legends of Localization. Bisqwit's work on the version differences is VERY thorough.
Great channel. The Zelda 2 video was my first impression on this channel. Definitely subscribed. You the man! 👍
I loved Simon's Quest as a kid, was my favorite Castelvania.
Yep keep up the mixed love/hate of this game, always makes me laugh. Still my favorite Castlevania entry. Simon's Quest is responsible for many of the RPG elements moving the series forward. Spoiler alert, wasn't Symphony of Night(which is a great game on its own).
IMO, this game aged like milk in the sun, but I think the fan-made Spectral Interlude for the ZX Spectrum made the Castlevania 2 formula way more palatable and I'd recommend it over Simon's Quest, even though the story is completely different
I guess I misinterpreted the ending text I got, I had about two weeks on the ingame clock but the ending sounded like Simon survived.
They messed up the order of the endings. The ending you get for the best time isn't actually all that great!
@@JeremyParish Remarkable- so not only were the requirements for best ending obtuse, the endings being out of order makes the plot even harder to parse!
Parish wasn't kidding about the few bosses being pushovers. In fact as you saw in the video you can just walk past them and not fight them at all. And if you have the right items, you can kill Dracula in about 30 seconds, perhaps the most anti-climatic finale of any Castlevania title.
I'll say it: Simon's Quest is the most fun NES Castlevania game. 3 was better, sure, but it was so brutally hard as it went on that if you're a kid it just isn't fun, it's frustrating. Simon's Quest, if you have a Nintendo Power to help with a few of the bad translations, the game itself is fun to roam around in and fight stuff without just slamming the power button off in fury.
I'm not really sure about Castlevania II influencing SOTN directly. I guess it could be, but at the time RPGs were really the prime genre in consoles not the least of which the PS1.
I mean, especially because the only similarities between the two games is that they had added RPG elements. SOTN didn't have any town to town travel, gameplay happened only inside of Dracula's castle. Simon's Quest may have influenced later games in the franchise more than SOTN.
EDIT: Well, sure, there are the NPCs you interact with... But they existed in other games as well, such as in Faxanadu.
If you play Catlevania II carefully, it's possible to take advantage of the timer's quirks and finish with a very low playtime. The password only records the major day of the game time. When you enter a password to resume, you always start at noon in the starting town. You can use this both to warp from the far right side of the map back to the starting town after you finish everything you need to do there, and to reclaim any time after noon to midnight. (I forget the exact details of this trick, I might have gotten some minor elements of it wrong. It's been over 30 years since I figured it out.)
While Castlevania II does have lying villagers (which is actually a feature I _like_), its still hampered a bit by its translation, and the absence of the map from the Japanese version's manual. Romhacker Bisqwik (who also has a TH-cam channel!) created a much improved translation patch for the game, that also adds some interesting features, like tracking which cluebooks you've found and letting you review them, making sure all the town signs in the game work so you'll know where the hell you are, and also including the manual map in the game itself. It's really a standout hack, one of the best for the NES!
This was my favorite Castlevania game as a kid, and I was able to beat it without Nintendo Power or a strategy guide. This game gets a lot of hate that it doesn’t deserve. I’ll take an adventure any day over a side scroller.
Holy water works well on those eeeeeeevil floors..!
Part of Nintendo Power's purpose for existing was to improve people's perception of NES games, by pointing them to the better games and explaining how some of the weirder games work, so their console's library wouldn't be full of "underrated gems."
It has been [28] days since the last Heiankyo Alien reference
It's coming. Give it a few weeks.
I'll be looking forward to your next video on the never-before-seen NES port of Zero Wing
This game gets a lot of negative reviews. But I must say I love this game
It has it's flaws, but it's still a very good game. It's one of the best examples of a "flawed masterpiece". No matter what you think about the gameplay, level/world design, and the manner in which you are supposed to progress through the game, the graphics and sound are outstanding! There's a reason that so many people remember this game, many, many years later.
You know I was expecting this video to be one of those "Let's all respect this ambitious mess" like Golgo 13
Huh
I've heard people say that this was a terrible game, but it's always been one of my faves. Not just of games on the NES, but all time.
That’s because it rules
Good ole B2 for Basic D&D, Keep on the Borderlands, had a random rumor chart. Roughly 1/3 were patently false, and the true ones varied from useless to helpful. The false ones were flavored in such a way it could either be commoner ignorance and superstition or active disinformation from your enemies. My favorite was a mistranslation of a line that would be uttered by goblins if met in a certain circumstance, which could lead a party to misread the situation unless a PC was fluent in goblin.
I love this game. Always have.
Simon's quest redacted a fan mod fixes most of the problems with this game. The core of it actually is a pretty cool pre metroidvania game
12:36 they using the FDS music on the commercial of the NES version
The npc information is either 'gibberish' or they give hints on where to find the 13 clue books; the villagers are deceptive/ignorant, but the books have the correct information on using relics or finding items, but are more prone to translation issues. Feels like all the retrospective/review videos leave out the role of those clues in figuring out the game. That said, there are two geographical errors with the clues in the game; the clue that describes how to use the blue crystal is found closer to the town for that crystal, but the in-game dialogue names the forest closer to the starter town; secondly, there are two cliffs that share the same name for summoning the wind with the red crystal, so if the player is following in-game information, they may end up at a dead end that doesn't do anything by kneeling.
What a horrible night to have a curse (1000 nights later...)
Since the whole story revolves around Dracula's curse on Simon, I'm not sure why they didn't just call it... well, Dracula's Curse. That title would've been way better for this game than the third one!
The JP subtitle translates to “The Cursed Seal,” so that was just Konami USA goofin’ around
@@JeremyParish Yep, I think learning that years ago was what made me go "hey, wait a minute..." about the Dracula's Curse title in the first place. It has kept me up at night ever since.