Considering the original La Mulana had a secret level that essentially remade part of the castle of maze of galious, complete with a reimagining of the overworld theme, I think it's safe to say Naramura knew what he was doing.
From playing this back in the day as a kid in the UK (as far as I know thanks to the Konami club back then I was the first person in the UK to find the cross) No guides no internet no nothing we had to work it out ourselves and that "Cross" was bloody well hidden. I cried when I beat the game. I had spent so much time on it and it was a triumph.
Thanks for the great review. Konami made many exploration-based games for the MSX long time before Metroid, like "Usas" for the MSX, thanks for pointing that out. I'm also looking forward to the official remake. Let's see If it ever comes to live. Blessings from Germany. 💛🙏
You're one of ym favorite content creators from the ones I've seen in the past few months, great video here. This is where I would give merit to the Japanese way of categorizing things. In the west, we assimilate genres to games as there was no clear categorization or reference before them "Rogue-like" "Metroid-Vania" and so on... in Japan, they simply describe it by the verb being executed. This whole genre is simply called "Exploratory Action" and it describes so much more (as well as assimilates similar concepts like Zelda and Metroid-isms), it is technically a much better solution to the convention we use. Great vid, glad to see you mentioned La Mulana director doing a Maze of Galious remake/remaster/sequel, not many people are aware of what happened there (Konami opened a contest for indie game devs to participate and the prize would be money to develop a game in one of their older franchises in which Gradius, Parodius and Maze of Galious were part of.... Suffice to say that La Mulana director won the contest and that's how he got his gig doing this... time comes full circle, even if I wanted the Paro Paro/Ranger Dog developer to do a Parodius/Gradius game)
To be fair, a lot of the larger genres has purely descriptive names in english as well ("first person shooter", "real-time strategy", "deck builder", "simulation", etc). (Though first person shooters were known as "Doom clones" for a while before the modern term caught on). I'm very curious why "metroidvania" and "roguelike" were the name-based terms that stuck around forever, especially "roguelike" has been very contentious since the game Rogue has fallen into obscurity and many modern games of the genre has nothing in common with it - back in the 90s a bunch of game developers even had a workshop to decide on and write a manifesto about what counted as a roguelike, and the terms they decided on included things nobody associate the genre with today, like being grid-based and using text instead of graphics.
As others have said, La-Mulana isn't arguably inspired by Galious -- it's VERY SPECIFICALLY inspired by Galious. Naramura created it as a love letter to classic MSX games, specifically classic Konami MSX games, and SPECIFICALLY Maze of Galious. Other indie games were similarly inspired very, very directly by Maze of Galious, too, with UnEpic being the other big one. UnEpic certainly doesn't wear its inspiration on its sleeve quite as readily as La-Mulana does, but its creator has gone on record stating that the game was directly inspired by Galious, and it also has an infinite-use halo item that immediately warps you back to the central save hub, so... yeah... it's pretty Galious-y in its own right. ;) As for the "Metroid" or "Vania" debate, for me, it's 100% Metroid, I'm afraid. If comparing which is the better game, Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, it's Super Metroid all the way IMHO for one simple reason: Super Metroid has a place for everything, and everything in its place. There are no extraneous items or rooms in Super Metroid -- there's a reason for every screen to exist, and a solid use for every single item you can find. That, to me, is masterful game design at its finest. Symphony of the Night is an incredibly fun game, of course, but it's hard to deny that it suffers from bloat. By the end of the game, your inventory is filled with probably a hundred different items, weapons, armors, etc. that you've likely never used even once. And you may have 100%ed the map (or, what, 212%ed it, is it?), but if so, you would've had to actively pursue that goal, since the map in SotN is filled to the brim with dead-end passages, overly open courtyards, and pointless corridors. SotN just feels a lot more haphazardly designed than Super Metroid. Which has its charms, for sure -- real life is full of dead-ends and useless items, so you could even say it's more realistic to explore a world that features these things -- but it's just so satisfying to play Super Metroid and know that no matter where you're going, you'll find SOMETHING worthwhile there, and you'll never have to scroll through a seemingly endless menu of utterly pointless macguffins in order to select the specific weapon you're looking for along the way.
I played this game A LOT back in the day. Yes, there are some really obscure parts, but things were different back then. You wrote a letter to magazines, asked your friends... In the end someone gave you the answer and sometimes you were the one to find it. Life was slower so waiting times did not feel as unbearable as today. In fact, it felt really good.
Thank you for that video! I played this game when i was 8 years old. It was so hard and i never beat it. I did not understand english at the time (Germany). Now that i saw your video, i want to play and beat it finally
That's great that you're covering this series. Very few people talking about it. I hope you do Knightmare III as there's basically no youtube videos actually talking about it!
Beside Zelda and Galious one should definitely mention Falcom's Dragon Slayer II Xanadu (since it predates and may have influenced them). Other titles in that series, especially Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu, seem like fusions of all of these games (the same way From Software's King's Field and Souls feel like 3D-evolutions of these principles of game design).
Falcom really used to be ahead of the curve in so many ways with their experimentations back then, yeah. Incredible powerhouse of a company in the 80s. Still need to properly sit down for Legacy of the Wizard/Drasle Family at some point. Faxadu was one of my childhood favorites.
Holy heck, I'm 2½ minutes into the video and it's incredible how similar La-Mulana is to this (especially the original version). I've seen the name Maze of Galious before but I never realized the lineage was this clear.
I wasn't too sure about the visuals at first, with how basic they are. The character sprites being see-through where there'd normally be an outline and such. But it's so visually clear and distinct. Very pleasing to look at. Gameplay has some quirks too, like Up is jump in the way a lot of old microcomputer games function, but it controls well enough once you get used to that.
I've seen people attempt to describe Sweet Home and Tomba as metroidvanias while doing research for videos and... God, does that hurt. Anything slightly exploratory is one to some people now.
More people complain about it being overused than actually overuse it. It's applied narrowly enough that basically no one genuinely includes Zelda games and, despite what steam tags say, in every discussion I've ever seen of whether or not the Ori games are metroidvanias most people agree that Blind Forest at least isn't much of one.
@@Kidneyjoe42 i doubt that, but even if it's true i still wish we had a better catch-all term for side-scrolling action/adventure platforming games emphasizing exploration with rpg elements and/or ability gating. (i don't particularly think "search action" is great, either.)
There are MSX controllers, and the vast majority of games support them, Galious included. However, like so many other games, Galious does not 100% support controller play -- you still need to use the keyboard for some functions, including opening the menu. See, most MSX controllers are two-button, but early MSX controllers were one-button, and Galious was designed with the one-button controller in mind, so that one button is dedicated to attacking, with up as your jump and F1 on the keyboard opening the game menu. ...And, of course, you need to use the keyboard to type out the boss summons, as well as to use the knife. Kind of surprised AboveUp didn't mention the knife, as it's probably the single most ridiculous special item in any game ever. Extremely useful, but absolutely ludicrous to use. What it does, see, is allow you to instantly destroy every bat on the screen, any time you'd like... only, to do so, you have to type the word UMBRELLA on the keyboard. I'm not kidding. I swear half my time playing this game was spent running around with the controller, entering a screen with a ton of bats, and literally DROPPING my controller onto the carpet in order to hurriedly type the word UMBRELLA as fast as possible so the bats would all go boom. (The reason it's the word "umbrella" is because of those famous Japanese yokai that look like umbrellas, but as you draw near them, they wake up and start flying, because they're actually bats. But why that causes all the bats on the screen to self-destruct, and why a KNIFE gives you that ability, I'll never be able to adequately explain!) Curious to see how that'll be handled in the official remake. ;)
Considering the original La Mulana had a secret level that essentially remade part of the castle of maze of galious, complete with a reimagining of the overworld theme, I think it's safe to say Naramura knew what he was doing.
I havent played the original msx version of la mulana. Mostly because i cant figure out how to put it in english lmao
From playing this back in the day as a kid in the UK (as far as I know thanks to the Konami club back then I was the first person in the UK to find the cross) No guides no internet no nothing we had to work it out ourselves and that "Cross" was bloody well hidden. I cried when I beat the game. I had spent so much time on it and it was a triumph.
Thanks for the great review. Konami made many exploration-based games for the MSX long time before Metroid, like "Usas" for the MSX, thanks for pointing that out. I'm also looking forward to the official remake. Let's see If it ever comes to live. Blessings from Germany. 💛🙏
You're one of ym favorite content creators from the ones I've seen in the past few months, great video here. This is where I would give merit to the Japanese way of categorizing things. In the west, we assimilate genres to games as there was no clear categorization or reference before them "Rogue-like" "Metroid-Vania" and so on... in Japan, they simply describe it by the verb being executed. This whole genre is simply called "Exploratory Action" and it describes so much more (as well as assimilates similar concepts like Zelda and Metroid-isms), it is technically a much better solution to the convention we use. Great vid, glad to see you mentioned La Mulana director doing a Maze of Galious remake/remaster/sequel, not many people are aware of what happened there (Konami opened a contest for indie game devs to participate and the prize would be money to develop a game in one of their older franchises in which Gradius, Parodius and Maze of Galious were part of.... Suffice to say that La Mulana director won the contest and that's how he got his gig doing this... time comes full circle, even if I wanted the Paro Paro/Ranger Dog developer to do a Parodius/Gradius game)
To be fair, a lot of the larger genres has purely descriptive names in english as well ("first person shooter", "real-time strategy", "deck builder", "simulation", etc). (Though first person shooters were known as "Doom clones" for a while before the modern term caught on).
I'm very curious why "metroidvania" and "roguelike" were the name-based terms that stuck around forever, especially "roguelike" has been very contentious since the game Rogue has fallen into obscurity and many modern games of the genre has nothing in common with it - back in the 90s a bunch of game developers even had a workshop to decide on and write a manifesto about what counted as a roguelike, and the terms they decided on included things nobody associate the genre with today, like being grid-based and using text instead of graphics.
As others have said, La-Mulana isn't arguably inspired by Galious -- it's VERY SPECIFICALLY inspired by Galious. Naramura created it as a love letter to classic MSX games, specifically classic Konami MSX games, and SPECIFICALLY Maze of Galious.
Other indie games were similarly inspired very, very directly by Maze of Galious, too, with UnEpic being the other big one. UnEpic certainly doesn't wear its inspiration on its sleeve quite as readily as La-Mulana does, but its creator has gone on record stating that the game was directly inspired by Galious, and it also has an infinite-use halo item that immediately warps you back to the central save hub, so... yeah... it's pretty Galious-y in its own right. ;)
As for the "Metroid" or "Vania" debate, for me, it's 100% Metroid, I'm afraid. If comparing which is the better game, Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, it's Super Metroid all the way IMHO for one simple reason: Super Metroid has a place for everything, and everything in its place. There are no extraneous items or rooms in Super Metroid -- there's a reason for every screen to exist, and a solid use for every single item you can find. That, to me, is masterful game design at its finest.
Symphony of the Night is an incredibly fun game, of course, but it's hard to deny that it suffers from bloat. By the end of the game, your inventory is filled with probably a hundred different items, weapons, armors, etc. that you've likely never used even once. And you may have 100%ed the map (or, what, 212%ed it, is it?), but if so, you would've had to actively pursue that goal, since the map in SotN is filled to the brim with dead-end passages, overly open courtyards, and pointless corridors.
SotN just feels a lot more haphazardly designed than Super Metroid. Which has its charms, for sure -- real life is full of dead-ends and useless items, so you could even say it's more realistic to explore a world that features these things -- but it's just so satisfying to play Super Metroid and know that no matter where you're going, you'll find SOMETHING worthwhile there, and you'll never have to scroll through a seemingly endless menu of utterly pointless macguffins in order to select the specific weapon you're looking for along the way.
I played this game A LOT back in the day. Yes, there are some really obscure parts, but things were different back then. You wrote a letter to magazines, asked your friends... In the end someone gave you the answer and sometimes you were the one to find it. Life was slower so waiting times did not feel as unbearable as today. In fact, it felt really good.
Thank you for that video! I played this game when i was 8 years old. It was so hard and i never beat it. I did not understand english at the time (Germany). Now that i saw your video, i want to play and beat it finally
Great video bro, love classic older titles like this.
That's great that you're covering this series. Very few people talking about it. I hope you do Knightmare III as there's basically no youtube videos actually talking about it!
Beside Zelda and Galious one should definitely mention Falcom's Dragon Slayer II Xanadu (since it predates and may have influenced them). Other titles in that series, especially Legacy of the Wizard and Faxanadu, seem like fusions of all of these games (the same way From Software's King's Field and Souls feel like 3D-evolutions of these principles of game design).
Falcom really used to be ahead of the curve in so many ways with their experimentations back then, yeah. Incredible powerhouse of a company in the 80s. Still need to properly sit down for Legacy of the Wizard/Drasle Family at some point. Faxadu was one of my childhood favorites.
Holy heck, I'm 2½ minutes into the video and it's incredible how similar La-Mulana is to this (especially the original version). I've seen the name Maze of Galious before but I never realized the lineage was this clear.
Cheers to the genre naming segment. I wish we called those games a more general name, like exploration platformers or somerhing. Good video, also.
The game that started it all. The best game ever made. My childhood revolved around this game!
I can't believe how good it looks
I wasn't too sure about the visuals at first, with how basic they are. The character sprites being see-through where there'd normally be an outline and such. But it's so visually clear and distinct. Very pleasing to look at. Gameplay has some quirks too, like Up is jump in the way a lot of old microcomputer games function, but it controls well enough once you get used to that.
love the channel bro
Now I'm hyped for the remake.
This is the game that inspired the La-Mulana series. 😁
This sounds great might have a look at that remake when it comes out.
Played the hell out of this game. F5 Continue cheat was absolutely required though!
OMG the bubbles turn into a fairy!!?? Never knew that!
Would be awesome to see a review for La-Mulana since despite being inspired by Maze of Galious, it's a amazing game in it's own right.
Given that it took me more than a decade to find the Sabre item.... Also, A Catholic priest that stole a baby is the final boss.
A remake???!?!?!? What? Will you please tell me your source?! This is beyond amazing, omg!
www.ign.com/articles/la-mulana-director-wins-konami-contest-to-revive-old-ip
i appreciate this thumbnail. "metroidvania" is so overused and often really not apt.
I've seen people attempt to describe Sweet Home and Tomba as metroidvanias while doing research for videos and... God, does that hurt. Anything slightly exploratory is one to some people now.
More people complain about it being overused than actually overuse it. It's applied narrowly enough that basically no one genuinely includes Zelda games and, despite what steam tags say, in every discussion I've ever seen of whether or not the Ori games are metroidvanias most people agree that Blind Forest at least isn't much of one.
@@Kidneyjoe42 i doubt that, but even if it's true i still wish we had a better catch-all term for side-scrolling action/adventure platforming games emphasizing exploration with rpg elements and/or ability gating. (i don't particularly think "search action" is great, either.)
I’m curious if this games we’re supposed to be played with msx keyboard or did they have some kind of controller
There are MSX controllers, and the vast majority of games support them, Galious included. However, like so many other games, Galious does not 100% support controller play -- you still need to use the keyboard for some functions, including opening the menu. See, most MSX controllers are two-button, but early MSX controllers were one-button, and Galious was designed with the one-button controller in mind, so that one button is dedicated to attacking, with up as your jump and F1 on the keyboard opening the game menu.
...And, of course, you need to use the keyboard to type out the boss summons, as well as to use the knife. Kind of surprised AboveUp didn't mention the knife, as it's probably the single most ridiculous special item in any game ever. Extremely useful, but absolutely ludicrous to use. What it does, see, is allow you to instantly destroy every bat on the screen, any time you'd like... only, to do so, you have to type the word UMBRELLA on the keyboard.
I'm not kidding.
I swear half my time playing this game was spent running around with the controller, entering a screen with a ton of bats, and literally DROPPING my controller onto the carpet in order to hurriedly type the word UMBRELLA as fast as possible so the bats would all go boom.
(The reason it's the word "umbrella" is because of those famous Japanese yokai that look like umbrellas, but as you draw near them, they wake up and start flying, because they're actually bats. But why that causes all the bats on the screen to self-destruct, and why a KNIFE gives you that ability, I'll never be able to adequately explain!)
Curious to see how that'll be handled in the official remake. ;)
@@Wyrdwad thanks for the explanation
@@Wyrdwad That's pretty amusing lol