Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is an unfairly maligned game that prossesses an ambitious approach to world design, fun combat encounters, and tricky dungeons. It still generates a true sense of adventure decades after release.

Castlevania II follows the NES-era trend of ambitious and weird sequels. It eschews the straightforward stage layout of the original for a proto-open world. You once again take control of Simon Belmont and find yourself in a town where the first NPC you chat with will tell you to buy a White Crystal. The manual says it gives you light magical powers, and your inventory already has the 50 hearts necessary to buy it from one of the first merchants in town. You then have the option to go left, where a poisonous swamp awaits if you manage to fight your way past the strong enemies that introduce this area, or to go right, where you’ll find much more manageable enemies and eventually encounter your first manor.

The gameplay loop remains pretty much the same throughout. Show up to town, buy up sub-weapons (now permanently held and, with some rare exceptions, repeatedly usable without heart consumption), whip upgrades, and consumables while chatting up all the locals. Leave town, go through an area with lots of enemies and usually some branching pathways. Arrive at a manor and go through it, being sure to find a merchant to sell you an oak stake and then using it on a glowing crystal to capture one of the five pieces of Dracula necessary to advance on his castle and destroy him.

There are two notable mechanics added beyond accruing hearts to purchase permanent upgrades: a leveling system, where a fixed amount of Experience gets you a boost in overall damage resistance; and a day/night system, where enemies will become stronger but more likely to drop large amounts of hearts at night, but towns will only be open and available for exploration during the day.

The general shift to permanent upgrades in the form of purchases and levels is a welcome one, and it works on the same risk-reward as Dark Souls later would, though with a bit more wiggle room. If you lose all your lives and get a game over screen, your experience points and hearts will reset to 0. So you’re incentivized to grind close to a town on easier enemies at night to be sure that you can get what you need. On the other hand, the more day/night cycles you go through, the worse ending you get. In this way, you’re encouraged to go into manors, where time doesn’t advance, to do the grinding necessary to get upgrades and level ups, though this brings greater risks with harder enemies and the necessity of back-tracking through enemy territory to merchants. Perhaps most notably, you get infinite continues with these resets as your only punishment. Most of the time, your respawn is exactly where you just died. It’s a fun system to approach, though mileage will vary widely based on how well the combat clicks. I find the whipping to remain fun, and turning my enemies into small balls of flame didn’t get old, so I was more than happy to do extended grinding sessions that are basically necessary for game progress for a standard player.

Though these choices are a bit more explicable for a post-Dark Souls audience, one consistent source of criticism⁠—and one that has inspired fan mods to basically completely overhaul it⁠—is the in-game hint system. The clues are intentionally cryptic, both in English and Japanese, but a prevailing rumor about a poor localization job (mostly based on innocuous typos such as coming to “prossess” parts of Dracula) has led many English-language players to completely ignore what hint books and NPCs tell them.

It’s my firm opinion that spending two seconds looking at the manual clears up the central mechanics of things like using oak stakes to finish manors. NPC hints are for the most part useful, with lies and useless dialogue coming more at the end of the game when you’re not really in a position to need many more hints or hand-holding.

The game would be entirely playable blind, in my opinion, if there had been one small change. The blue and red crystals, which gatekeep parts of the map until the player demonstrates readiness by acquiring them, either have impossibly hidden clues that indicate how to use them or none at all. The manual really could have just had some flavor text about kneeling to access the magic power or whatever, and I think they’d be pretty straightforward with hints that are already present and visual information in the places where you use them. The ferryman is actually doable entirely with in-game information (as long as you retain the information that “the curse” is related to Dracula’s pieces) but would have probably been more elegant as one unified hint about what the ferryman likes rather than a lie about garlic that’s supposed to make you think about what he actually does like and a hint about the Dread River and the curse.

Manors are laid out in pretty neat ways. They consistently feature tougher enemies (though the enemy placements usually end up making the actual encounters easier than the overworld) and they’re fun and weird to explore. The player must keep constant vigilance for pitfalls and fake wall blocks to navigate deeper into them, and some of these get a bit tricky in the later manors. Again, there seems to be some grief about the way pitfalls work, but without this bit of puzzle-solving, the manors would be extremely straightforward areas with less challenging combat than some overworld areas and a bit of grinding for those who couldn’t get through them with 50 hearts still on hand.

One unfortunate change that came with manors was the gutting of boss encounters. I can only imagine that this was in part an attempt to give players a bit more choice in which manors to tackle in which order, but the game is very linear overall, so that doesn’t resonate entirely for me. Perhaps there just weren’t enough upgrades that the team wanted to have tied to bosses. Only two manors and Dracula’s Castle even feature bosses, and one of those bosses is a bit easier repeat of the Grim Reaper fight from the original game that is technically skippable, though the weapon he drops is very useful for the rest of the game. It’s just a shame, because the original game really has some great boss encounters, and these bosses are all pushovers, even without Sacred Flame, which I did not find on my playthrough. At least the visual designs of Carmilla and Dracula are pretty cool.

Though it misses out on some of the pure action game DNA that made the original so wonderful, Simon’s Quest has some great adventure elements and light RPG mechanics that, though less universally praised than the original’s tighter combat and level design, offer a lot to the right player.

After playing the classic first Castlevania game for the NES, the next logical step was to play the infamous sequel, Simon’s Quest, a game that despite the widespread disdain many hold for it, still has its defenders, simply calling it deeply flawed, yet with a decent game lying underneath. After playing through the entirety of it, I definitely fall more on the side of saying that this is just not a very good game, for reasons that go far beyond the insanely cryptic nature of trying to progress in the game, as when looking at a lot of other design choices, you can see that this game has a lot that’s wrong with it in terms of other core elements of the game.

With that said, if there’s one thing that Simon’s Quest ought to be praised for, it’s the impressive ambition that went behind the game, with non linear progression and RPG elements incorporated making for a very unique, innovative experience for the NES, even though the archaic design philosophy of games from this era really reared its ugly head throughout. Ignoring the glaring issue that I’ll get to a bit later; this game just isn’t very enjoyable to play through in a few other ways as well. While the soundtrack definitely softens the blow of having to grind, parts of this game end up slowing to a painful halt if you want to make your way through optimally due to the fact that this game requires you to grind to get enough hearts to be able to afford not only weapon upgrades, but items that are absolutely essential to be able to make your way through. This issue is further worsened by the fact that you lose all the hearts you’ve accumulated if you die 3 times, which is something that is quite easy to do, especially due to how many cheap deaths can occur, quickly draining an unsuspecting player’s lives and by extension, hearts, leading to a vicious cycle of repetition and wasted time.

The game’s grasp on fair difficulty is absolutely all over the place, with frequent moments that seem designed specifically to make the player angry through the sheer garbage put on display. One of the most egregious examples of this is the extremely janky physics that are a part of any of the sections involving vertically moving platforms, requiring absolute pinpoint precision to be able to make it across, lest you’ll end up dead at the bottom of the death pits below. The shame is that this is combined with some downright uninspired world design, with most enemies being placed around that all act more or less identical, with areas mostly looking extremely similar and haphazardly designed, making the exploration of this relatively vast world feel extremely unrewarding to explore. That said, I would take uninspired designed over the abysmal mansion areas, which employ the most stupid forms of artificial difficulty and asinine choices within this game. The layouts of these places are sprawling and labyrinthine, with dead ends everywhere making it frustrating to find your way to your goal, especially combined with some absurdly precise, yet unnecessary platforming that only serves to lengthen the time taken to get past certain sections. This alone would cause these areas to be unenjoyable, but then the game takes this to another level of awful by putting false floors and walls everywhere that are impossible to tell the difference between, sometimes leading directly into spikes. What this does is force the player to expect that the only way to safely more forward is to inch forward at a snail’s pace while throwing holy water at the ground after every step on the off chance that you’ll discover that a tiny bit further would’ve sent you down a floor, wasting more time, making these sections not only annoying, but painfully tedious as well.

Of course, the worst part of the game is the progression, with a ton of cryptic requirements to really make any progress in this game rendering a walkthrough almost essential if you want any hope of making it through this. The villagers that are meant to be giving you helpful hints and directions on where to go end up being vague at the absolute best at times, and flat out incorrect at the worst, meaning that the player isn’t able to trust any of them due to the potential of what they’re saying being completely false, not to mention that the lack of area names make many of their directions completely useless even ignoring the chances of them being false. What truly makes this problematic is the fact that so many parts of the game make the player do incredibly unintuitive things in order to progress, such as having to equip a certain item before the ferryman will take you to a specific place, except nowhere in the game is this hinted at. The most infamous example that comes to mind is of course needing to equip a red crystal, and then kneeling for 5 seconds up against a cliff in order to make a tornado take you to the next area, which really speaks for itself in terms of cryptic nonsense, really cementing this game as an extremely frustrating, unsatisfying playthrough.

Overall, while this game is definitely impressive in certain respects, and one that I do personally think is at least a noble failure, given how there clearly had some ambition behind it, even if it almost entirely didn’t pan out, there’s no doubt in my mind that this game is far from something I’d consider even decent. Everything just feels really unsatisfying, disjointed and slow paced, with the player regularly finding themselves grinding, lost or fumbling about rather than doing anything that could be considered outright fun. The game itself is definitely functional and playable at a base level, with the character controlling about as well as in Castlevania 1, but I do implore that if one wants to check this game out, to either do it with a walkthrough by their side, or to go an find the “Redacted” romhack of the game that improves at least a couple of elements of it, such as fixing what the villagers say in order for their directions to actually mean something.

Scattershot Statements:

While the music in this game isn’t as consistently amazing as the first game, it has THE most iconic Castlevania track on it, Bloody Tears, with the rest of the soundtrack also being of very high quality

The atmosphere in the game is admittedly impressive in parts of the overworld, and really manages to set a mood despite the fact that this game is incredibly ugly looking, even for its time.

The bosses are such a joke that they singlehandedly make the game feel about 10 times more unfinished than it actually is, they even respawn when you transition screens.

The day-night cycle is honestly something that I think is cool, even if its implementation in the game felt rather limited

Subweapons in this game are all basically entirely useless other than holy water, never needed to use them once since most enemies act the same, so just standing back and whipping them always did the trick

Time doesn’t pass inside mansions, so do any grinding there if you’re going for the best ending, which requires you to finish the game in a certain amount of in game days

Some of my favourite games are in one way or another unpolished, unrefined, imperfect in so many ways that when i think about them isolated from the experience of my playthrough, i often wonder why i consider them so high.

Then the chills come.

And this happens to me a lot, actually. Anytime I think about Yakuza 6 I can spend half an hour criticising all of the short comings, and bullshit about the combat or some of the systems, it doesn't matter, really. The core is pure, and in that core there's a story that resonated with me in ways I was only hoping it would; there is an open world that contains the kind of shit that I fall in love with in such a way I can only think about it for days and days.

Castlevania II is bullshit; obscure, obtuse to an extent that most would consider a total failure, I might consider it a failure tomorrow, i don't care, this game has connected with me as Dark Souls did in 2014. This is an ambitious aproximation to the formula that with all of its problems and the utmost certainty that it can't be completed without a guide, I cannot take anything away from the moments i have gone through and how its ambition, as often as problematic, is also inspiring and in some ways revolutionary. Coming from a linear, action game with a difficult curve that turns the later half of the game into an insufferable hell, Castlevania II implements levels and the possibility of healing in churches, it creates an actual curve that even with bosses broken by items and a difficulty that goes inverted, let's you familiarize with its enviroments.

If Castlevania was a test of skill and especially patience, Simon's Quest is more akin to the type of tiny puzzly world that wants you to wrestle with it's own rules, it's a pure adventure game, one with fenomenal ideas that turn the world into a somehow believeable and consistent environment. The interconnection between the cities, that serves as main hubs, let's the player little nuggets of brilliance in both rythm management and world design; it's about the consistency, how the few rules that the game bases upon itself are repeated, and even with assistance to decode some of these, there are beautiful moments to be found in understanding and relating clues to events, events to objects, and then finding out the next step in the journey. This is a game that both rewards exploration inside levels as much as requires attention and puzzle solving in the open world; and even if some of this puzzles are too obtuse, the verbs of the game are few, and it manages this communication to the player through clever design in a lot of places.

What does a barrier mean, the use of objects not just for attacking but for exploring, how the game tutorializes you in safe places to let you interpret what this initial clue based design mean. But again, it's all about the chills, it's a frustrating and failed game in many ways, one that made me gasp when i kneeled next to a river, that excited me throwing holy water, videogames are fucking great if I can say this without deleting it one second later.

And this is a fine videogame.

folks who play simon's quest nowadays and dismiss it as some overly cryptic, obtuse relic of a game are really missing out on what made it cool. even back in the day without romhacks and internet walkthroughs, people beat simon's quest. people shared information on how to progress, whether they read it in the pages of nintendo power or discovered it on their own through experimentation (given the unreliable hints provided by town npcs). it's not unlike, as an example, learning of how to confront the deceptive yurt in demon's souls before he kills everyone—whether on your own or in conversation with friends. i think that's great stuff.

anyhow. it isn't my favorite of the nes castlevanias, but it is a good one and it still feels good to just pick up and play. come to it with some patience.

"This game sucks"

AVGN's review: https://youtu.be/V4we8iFk-fY

Website link: https://cinemassacreold.website-us-east-1.linodeobjects.com/2004/05/07/castlevania-2-simons-quest/