Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
Nintendo Entertainment System
Nostalgia Factor:
As a young kid, I absolutely loved the original Castlevania. Its sequel, however, I had very mixed feelings about. Whereas the original game in the series was a straight up platformer that was as linear as they come – Castlevania II changed the formula a bit. You had an open game map. You visited towns. You talked to people. You bought things with in-game currency. There was no “obvious” destination you had to go. You’d start up a new game and get dropped into the action, with no directions or instructions whatsoever.
I’d play that game for hours on end, wandering aimlessly, constantly getting stuck. Where was I supposed to go next? How was I supposed to get there? What was I even doing??? As a result, I ended up actually really hating the game. I was never able to beat it and eventually I just gave up on it.
Let’s fast forward thirty years into the future. I’ve been running this blog and writing game reviews for several years now. I always knew that eventually I was going to have to come back and give Castlevania II another chance. I kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off. Truth be told: the game scared and intimidated me a little bit. I was never able to conquer it as a kid. All my memories of it were negative. I had it in my mind that this game sucked and that playing it would be an absolute chore and a half.
You know what? I sucked it up, buttercup. I knew that with the help of the internet, which I didn’t have back in the late 1980s, I should be able to make it through this game.
Did I do it? Would my opinion on Castlevania II change? Read on and find out.
Story:
I don’t have the original instruction manual for this title, so everything I know about the story of Castlevania II comes from in-game text. This text doesn’t do a great job at explaining things, but if I understood properly – Simon Belmont was cursed by Dracula at the end of the original Castlevania. The whole purpose of the game is to find Dracula’s body parts, which have been scattered around the countryside, and reassemble them so that you can kill Dracula (again) and break the curse forever.
That covers the basic gist of things, right?
Gameplay:
Controlling Simon, you must traverse the forests, villages, and marshes of the area surrounding Dracula’s castle. The D-pad moves your character. You use your whip to attack enemies. Enemies drop hearts, which are used as this game’s version of currency. Gather enough hearts and you can buy things from the game’s villagers. These items include holy water vials, throwing knives, whip upgrades, and plot-specific items that help you advance in the game.
As I mentioned earlier, this is no linear platforming title. When the action begins you are dropped in the middle of the game’s opening village. You can walk around, talk to villagers, and get a feel for the action of the game. You can exit the village from two different sides. The left side takes you to a difficult area of the game that clearly you aren’t ready to handle yet. Take the right side exit and it takes you to a forest filled with very manageable skeleton, wolf man, and spider enemies. It won’t be long before day turns to night, in one of the more infamous transitions in video game history. All of a sudden the enemies are tougher, the villages are not safe havens, and you can die a lot – LOT easier than you would during the day. The catch? Enemies drop double the currency when it is night time. Schwing! So if you are saving up money for that big whip upgrade, farming for currency is best accomplished at night.
It is your goal to find five different mansions in the game’s overworld. Four of these mansions contain the Dracula pieces you need to complete the game, and the last one contains Dracula’s ring, which helps bind the pieces together. The catch is that these mansions are very, VERY well-hidden – to the point where their locations are terribly obscure and almost impossible to discover on your own if you don’t have a playthrough guide sitting right next to you. For example, to unlock one of the mansions you have to equip the blue crystal and duck at the edge of a lake for ten seconds. Doing so reveals a hidden passageway under the water that takes you to the game’s next mansion.
Huh? How would you have known to do that? The game’s villagers are supposed to give you tips and hints to help you on your journey, but no one says anything about that! Luckily for me, as a kid, one of my friends told me how to do this. Using this tip, I was able to complete two of the mansions in my childhood. The rest of them? Never was able to find them.
I tried to play the game without enlisting the help of an online guide, but even as an adult I couldn’t figure out what to do next. I had gotten stuck at the exact same place I had as a kid. To the internet, I turned.
What did I have to do? Equip Dracula’s Heart and talk to the ferry man on the left side of the map. That took me to an area of the game I had never previously discovered. I cleaned up house over there and returned to the ferry man. This time, I took the normal path I had taken as a kid. This path took me to what was seemingly a dead end. What do you have to do here? Equip the red crystal and duck in front of the wall for ten seconds. A tornado comes and picks you up and takes you to the next location of the game. Again – how would I ever have known I was supposed to do that???
Luckily, the rest of the game was pretty straightforward. I was able to figure things out, advance to the end of the game, and defeat Dracula once and for all. Well, maybe not. There are how many Castlevania games after this?
Regardless, I could feel a giant weight lifted from my shoulders as I beat this seemingly impossible game from my childhood for the very first time. And you know what? I had a good time playing the game. Aside from the handful of instances where I got stuck, I found this whole thing to be a pretty enjoyable experience.
Graphics:
I’m sure by today’s standards this game isn’t much to look at, but you have to remember: I am an old fart who grew up with games that look like this. I thought back in the 80s that this game looked really great, and I STILL think it looks really great. Okay, maybe not really great, but pretty darn good. The enemies have some nice detail to them. The game’s environments are all very distinct and different looking. No two areas look the same. It’s easy to get lost in this game, but not for that reason. Throw the music on top of that and Castlevania II on the whole is one pretty darn engrossing experience.
Sound:
The music is probably one of the highlights of this game. It sounds AWESOME. And my opinion on that hasn’t changed over time either. So many memorable tunes. The sound effects are great too. That talking/typing/whatever sound it makes when the game transitions from day to night is unmistakable. Blindfold me and put me in a room with someone playing this game, and I can identify it IMMEDIATELY. I could have done that even before my recent playthrough, after having not played the game for over 30 years. That is a true mark of greatness in my opinion.
Overall:
This is a really fun game. I don’t understand why I hated it so much as a kid. Well, I guess I do understand (the obscure tasks you have to complete, the well-hidden game locations, the lack of direction, etc) but none of that matters now. This game has redeemed itself in my eyes. I had a lot of fun playing it, and as soon as I finished playing I wanted to turn around and fire it up again, seeing if I could find everything without the help of the internet this time.
It’s well mapped out, it’s clever. The RPG-like elements were really ahead of their time too. If I had to fix anything about this game, it would be that the villagers and NPCs did a better job telling you what to do or where to go next. You should never, ever HAVE to rely on a guide or a walkthrough to finish a game. If they could have fixed this issue before pushing this game out, it would have gone down as an all-time great.
I still think this game is pretty great, but for me it doesn’t quite hit the high notes of the original Castlevania. That said, almost no NES game can! Castlevania II is a solid, fun title that gets a bad reputation because of some of its flaws in game design. If you can look past these flaws, you’ll find a perfectly fun and enjoyable game at its heart.
Final Score:
A-
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