Listen, I'll try to make this review shorter than this game's levels. The summary of the review is... cut the levels by half, and this could've been an infinitely better game.

As much as the upgrade systems were a little difficult to grasp (that's on me for not reading the manual...), I did enjoy the feeling of scaling my way up the vertical stages, and strategically taking down the enemies in my way. The dungeon-like levels and horizontal ones weren't too bad either.

My willingness to replay this game again however, is ruined by the exhausting length of each stage, its layout copy-pasted several times to pad things out. If they wanted Kid Icarus to feel like a grand adventure through how big it is, that's fine, but you're gonna have to do a lot more than this. As it stands, there's too much here for too little gain.

Before Kratos there was Pit and I can tell you that he didn't leave much of an impression compared to Kratos.

This is a very mediocre game, who would've known! This is a common early NES game issue, they tend to be really frustrating and just not fun enough to complete.

This is a platformer game, unsurprising for an NES game, and the obvious goal is to get to the end of each stage. The main idea of Kid Icarus is kinda fun and doesn't seem all that hard but with the number of enemies spawning right next to you, above you or anywhere else you don't expect them to be trust me they will be there and at the worst moment. Otherwise, for an NES game, it's pretty in-depth since this game doesn't rely on a high score system since there's an actual ending but good luck getting there without cheats or saves states because you will die over and over and with how repetitive this game is it's not like Super Mario Bros 1 or 3 where when you lose it's like "Aw man, guess I'll try it again" No with Kid Icarus it's just "I'm not grinding hearts ever again fuck this game".

Should you play this game? Dear god no, it's not worth going back-... to this version, maybe you should check out the 3D classic version of the game on the 3DS.

Over the many years that they have been a company, Nintendo has created many franchises, with them still making entries for a good number of them to this very day. However, there have been plenty of franchises they have made that they let slowly die over the years with a major lack of releases, such as F-Zero, Earthbound, and Advance Wa- wait a minute, that last one is getting a remake soon, never mind on that one. Anyway, you get the point, there are many dead Nintendo franchises, and one of the ones that has been treated more poorly than most of the others would be Kid Icarus.

Whenever people bring this series up, they mainly talk about Kid Icarus: Uprising (as they should, because that game is fucking amazing), but in terms of the original Kid Icarus, the one that started it all, it still holds up pretty well, and I had a pretty good time with it overall. I wouldn't consider it perfect by any means, but it does still hold up quite a bit after all this time.

The story is simple, yet it is enough to get you engaged (at least for me), the graphics are good, even if they don't look as good as other NES games at the time, the music is very catchy and iconic, the control is pretty good, although I wish Pit's movement was a little less floaty, and the gameplay is simple, yet diverse enough to where you won't get bored with the game easily.

The gameplay in Kid Icarus is pretty varied, with three separate gameplay styles seen throughout. The first is a 2D platformer mixed with adventure elements, where you traverse up and to the right of stages, shooting enemies, gathering hearts and hammers, while also exploring the various doors that you find along the way, where you can defeat enemies for even more hearts, buy plenty of items to aid you on your quest, gather upgrades to your bow, and face off against endurance tests to gain upgrades to your arsenal. Even after the my second time playing through it, I had a lot of fun with these levels, as it does feel pretty satisfying to conquer these stages and their challenges, with the upgrades and items also being extremely helpful for what you have to deal with throughout.

The second gameplay style would be with the fortresses at the end of each world, where you go through a dungeon-like labyrinth, freeing Centurions, buying more items that help you out, and fighting bosses to get the three Sacred Treasures. To be completely honest, I don't like these parts of the game. A lot of the rooms in these labyrinths look incredibly samey, meaning that it is incredibly easy to get lost, and it can take a long while to find the boss to get a move on. Not to mention, there's also those times when you get turned into an eggplant, and you gotta go to a hospital to take care of that, which can be a hassle.

The third and final gameplay section (also, spoilers for a 35+ year old game or whatever) is when you collect all three of the Sacred Treasures and you then enter a side scrolling shooter segment, where you also fight Medusa to beat the game. This section is also pretty good, and can be fun at times, although I wish you had a much higher firing rate for your projectiles.

In terms of overall complaints I would have with this game, I would say the difficulty could be a little too much at points, with enemy spawn points and rates can be pretty unpredictable at times, along with enemy movement being very erratic at points. In addition, in order to use several of the upgrades you get, you need to have a bigger, full health bar, which is kind of a hassle, but it isn't too hard to get there. And finally, the boss fights SUCK. Seriously, they just walk, float, or jump around, and you shoot them, that's it. There is no variety in their strategies, except for maybe a fireball or two. Hell, even with the final boss, you can literally just sit there and spam the attack button, and you won't get hit.

Overall, while it does certainly have plenty of problems, I still find the original Kid Icarus to be pretty fun and different compared to other Nintendo games at the time, and I would definitely consider it a classic of the NES library.

Game #85

What would a lot of people consider this game as a classic, this game is average when it comes to gameplay.

Graphically , this game looks decent. The Enemies sprites looks good, the main characters as well. However, the background is kind of basic. A black background with obstacles in the middle is average to the other games that I played so far.

This game is a platformer that you go from bottom to the top of the screen. The screen will follow the character. However, you can't go back. Once the screens goes up, you cannot go down again. This is present in most of the game. You also have some doors that have some shops in them or simply some bonus rooms. The bonus rooms are really unclear on what to do.

Your main character can shoot tiny arrows and jumps all around. This game have also a health bar system. The character can level up when completing a stage or in bonus rooms. Like I said previously, it is really unclear on what you need before entering the room. Once you exit that room, you lose the ability to go back in. That means you can lose some upgrade along the run.

There are some dungeons setting that you can pass through doors and the screen is still until you cross a door. Those dungeon are really easy to get lost in them. The enemy spawns in certain rooms can also be really annoying at some time.

One part that is really nice to do is at the end when it is a side scrolling part where your character flies and becomes a side shooter style game. That part was a nice change to the pacing. However, it only occurs at the end of the game.

Even though I have my complains about the game, the controls are good and the shooting part is kind of fun. However, I still don't understand why so many people adore this game when I only found it decent. Maybe it's simply because I don't have the nostalgia for it.

Game #45 of my challenge.

Nintendo front loads their most popular franchises with a new slab of entries so frequently that one can forget about the other selections they offer. Japan’s richest company could probably still subsist from Mario and Zelda (and maybe Kirby) alone, which is why we mainly see fresh releases from these franchises as opposed to offering a smorgasbord of their properties per release schedule. As impressive as this is, I think the true testament to Nintendo’s monolithic presence in the gaming world is its vast catalog of IPs. Just use the success of Super Smash Bros. as a point of reference: every single character from Nintendo’s roster, no matter how old or how popular, elicits at least a respectable amount of excitement from most of their fans. Nintendo’s fans still remember their failures and burnt-out relics even if the company tries its best to sweep them up in a dustpan and dispose of them in the refuse of time. Nintendo kicked this process into overdrive in recent generations with several of their properties, but they’ve been doing this since their heyday on the NES. Kid Icarus used to be the poster boy of forsaken Nintendo franchises, debuting on the company’s first console with one title before being abandoned completely. Given that the game was released alongside generation-defining titans like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, it seemed like Kid Icarus was destined for success. However, upon playing Kid Icarus, it’s not hard to imagine why Kid Icarus didn’t catch on like its contemporaries.

But why was Kid Icarus reduced to a one-hit wonder when it was propped up amongst the architects of Nintendo’s legacy? Certainly, Kid Icarus is more inspired and offers more content to extrapolate on compared to its fellow NES stalemates like Ice Climber and Clu Clu Land. If one’s high school education needs dusting off, the game’s title alludes to the Greek myth of Icarus, the young man who infamously flew too close to the sun and fatally dipped into the ocean from the sky and drowned. Whether or not one sees this story from ancient times as a sympathetic tragedy or a fable poking at the hubris of man, Icarus has ostensibly resonated in popular culture from centuries onward. However, Kid Icarus is not an 8-bit rendering of the morality tale. Hell, the winged, cherublike protagonist of the game isn’t even named Icarus–but the blunt-sounding nickname of Pit. No matter, for the game can still borrow plenty from the gilded Greek mythos to sculpt something of substance. Kid Icarus presents itself as the same respectable tribute to the entirety of Greek mythology that Castlevania does with the golden age of horror films.

Then again, refusing to commit to a single source of inspiration might be the root cause of Kid Icarus’s downfall (no pun intended). Kid Icarus’s gameplay is cemented in the 2D platformer genre, but the game insists on warping the perspective for every level. The game begins as a vertical platformer, hopping upward on a series of clouds and Corinthian architecture to eventually reach the goal at the zenith point of the climb. The NES was no stranger to these sections spliced into the action of other 2D platformers, and their inclusion was a tense, thrilling mixup of the standard side-scrolling action. In Kid Icarus, however, prolonging these sections to the length of an entire level makes the ascent a hefty endurance test. Slipping down the cavernous pratfalls created by the scrolling screen devouring the level will obviously kill Pit instantly, which makes him channel his inner Daniel Plainview and scream “I’m finished!” as he is transported back to the beginning of the level. A one-life penalty seems harsh, but at least a password system is implemented instead of sending the player back to the start of the game upon dying. Still, these vertical levels feature far too many hazards, especially at the beginning of the game. The levels in the second act of the game adopt a more traditional trek to the right side of the screen, and the difference in difficulty between the opposing level axes is clear as day. Technically, Kid Icarus only offers 3 levels, but they are divided into four sections that extend those levels significantly. The sublevels are already lengthy enough as is, so the player has to endure an onslaught of hazards before they are victorious. The fourth sublevel will always remain constant: a labyrinth stage where the player must navigate through a series of rooms and find the correct path to the boss. These sublevels are intended to ape the dungeons in Zelda, but not even the hidden bomb passage in the first Zelda is as cryptic and circuitous as these befuddling excursions. Also, finding the dungeon map in Zelda would uncover the entire layout as opposed to putting a blank board on the screen shaped like a waffle with one glowing dot to indicate Pit’s location. Why do these levels punish the player so swiftly without them warranting it?

If the inflexible level design doesn’t crush the player’s spirit, the droves of mythical enemies definitely will. They complement each level’s challenge effectively, but more like an axis of evil and torment than anything. Snakes with wings will fall from the ceiling without little notice, and the piles of sludge that form from the ground are short enough to only scrape their heads with Pit’s arrows and piss me off. A particularly irksome enemy type is the reapers. These scythe-wielding phantoms go apeshit when they are aware of Pit’s presence, signaling four minions to swoop down on Pit and distract him from his trajectory. They also tend to be situated on the slimmest of platforms along the path, making them especially difficult to avoid. Really, the one enemy from Kid Icarus that is so notoriously vexing is the Eggplant Wizards. Where in the Greco-Roman texts do these robed cyclopses stem from? Probably none of them, but they’ve earned their spot in the Kid Icarus canon. They’ll lob their namesake fruit at Pit and if he comes in contact with one, their black magic will reduce him to nothing but an eggplant with legs. Being that eggplants are soft and squishy, Pit cannot fight in this handicapped state. The only solution is to visit a sectioned-off block of any fourth level dedicated to a doctor who’ll cure Pit’s ailment. Considering all the player has to reference is a rectangular pastry to find this specific area, pray to the Gods of Olympus if you stumble upon these purple bastards. Surprisingly, each boss at the end of every fourth level is relatively undemanding, even if Pit doesn’t free the petrified soldiers with the hammer items.

Only having the poor excuse for a map the game offers isn’t entirely accurate, I must admit. The player can purchase a pencil from one of the merchants, but the player would be better off saving their heart currency for other items. The saving grace of Kid Icarus is that the game becomes far less stressful once the player acquires all of the upgrades, permanently boosting their maximum health and damage output for the duration of the game. Other nifty tools to purchase are fire arrows, magic rods, and a glass of wine that restores a fair bit of health. How bohemian. While all of these upgrades seem like a practical solution to beating this game, none of them come cheap. I mean this quite literally as buying any of these items will break the bank, so the player will have to make an entrepreneurial decision on which item will be the best for them. If the game still proves to be excruciating with this frugal system, the other option is to farm hearts with a maximum quantity of ten. The player is forced to engage in several forced grinding sessions to make the game tolerable, and that aspect is absolutely unforgivable.

Also, the amount of items the player has on hand coincides with the ending the player receives. Kid Icarus already flirts around with different interpretations of the 2D platformer, so why not add a space shooter section as the final one for good measure? At the end of this overlong flight, Pit will take down Medusa, the prime mythical Greek figure who serves as the game’s main antagonist, by shooting the eye of the monstrous vegetation she’s hiding beneath. Paulutena, the damsel in distress, rewards Pit the same way a boss would. Depending on the player's diligence, Pit’s future will range from a lowly farmer to a prestigious role as a knight in her army. As far as I’m concerned, she can demote Pit to a shoe shiner because the qualifications needed to put Pit in a more lucrative position isn’t worth meeting. Sorry, Pit.

The main issue with Kid Icarus is that its gameplay identity wasn’t worth giving further attention to. The game isn’t any more cruel and cryptic than its peers at Nintendo, frustrating the player to no end and leaving them as lost as a gerbil in a test chamber. However, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid pioneered a fresh outlook on game design that the world would’ve been bereft of if Nintendo decided not to expand upon, despite their myriad of gameplay flaws. Pit throws every conceivable method of platforming in a 2D space at the wall and executes them all very poorly. I’m forgiving its rudimentary foundation to some extent like every NES game, but Kid Icarus simply doesn’t offer any visionary concepts. No wonder why Nintendo left Kid Icarus at the front steps of the gaming orphanage. Nintendo was only producing game changers at the time, and Kid Icarus didn’t quite cut it.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

Far from the best NES game but definitely overhated.

I finally took the time to push past the first level and it really gets going by that point when you get strength powerups and the bow upgrade.

Level design is pretty cool, especially the boss labyrinth levels, feels very inspired by the original Zelda which I imagine was being worked on at the same time.

Overall a good NES game and I think it deserves the frustrating first 30 minutes to get past the first stage or two!

One of the very few genuinely awful Nintendo games. It is just frustrating to play. The enemies are vastly overpowered and you die in way too few hits. The dungeons are slogs to get through, and the fact that you are expected to grind an absurd amount of hearts just to get a freaking map is bull crap. Did I mention the bosses that take LITERALLY ONE HUNDRED hits to kill?! The Bosses also don't play fair, like the snake dragon boss that bounces around the room, making him not only hard to hit, hard to doge also, especially when you only have like three platforms above death lava below. Oh and how about those eggplant wizards who permanently leave you with no way to attack until you make an outrageously long hike to a doctor's room (which you may not even no where one is if your in a dungeon because of the ripoff map prices). I cannot recommend that you AVOID this game more. The soundtrack and unique style are the only things stopping this from being a half star rating.

Pros: Tons of gameplay variety, from sidescrolling platforming to dungeon crawling, and even a fun shooter segment. There's a decent amount of challenge here too, but was never too much for me to quit. The world of the game is pretty charming as well, with a fun sense of humor and hummable melodies.

Cons: The controls aren't great, would be nice if you could slide around while aiming upwards for instance. And some elements feel rather cheap, like falling into pits as the camera scrolls up, on stage one of all places. Of course, there's being turned into an eggplant, that's a chore, heh... And without save scrubbing, the game is a lot more... painful.

What it means to me: I don't know why I was compelled to play this game, perhaps it was because of Smash Melee, which discussions of characters like Pit joining, had me curious to try the titles. So I did! And I played through the game multiple times to get the best ending, and y'know, I think I enjoyed myself with this more than the original Metroid for NES, not bad at all!

Played this game on wii virtual console back in the days, but didn't get very far cause it was too hard for me.
Well, this game really isn't that difficult, I was just bad back then.

The music is good and there are some catchy tunes in the game.

Gameplay is overall really solid with some fun platforming. I thought the jumparc was slightly weird at first, but it didn't take that long before I got used to it.
Levels are for the most part fun, but the last level in each world is a labyrinths which could be really confusing and frustrating. There are also these eggplant enemies that turns you into an eggplant which makes you unable to attack. The only way to get back to normal is to find healing rooms around the labyrinths.
Sometimes they will hit you just as you enter their room and you almost can't dodge them.
Luckily the healing room are close to most eggplant enemies, so it could be worse. The labyrinths are still the worst part about this game and drags it down a little.
The other stages are pretty fun tho.
The first world is the hardest and then it gets easier from there cause you grt more life and damagr upgrades.

Overall the game is really soild with some stages dragging it a little down
Without those the game would be really high up in terms of NES games for me.
It is still pretty high up there.

I give Kid Icarus 3.5/5.