And I thought the original Castlevania was exhausting...

Simon's Quest has some interesting ideas mushed into a very passionate sequel that was too big for its own good. After a linear platformer, making a story-focused open-world adventure that absolutely refuses to tell you what you need to do unless you look up a guide is an interesting choice, to say the least.

Let's say you wanted to give the players a world to explore, with a city full of secrets, interactable NPCs, stores, monsters, hidden pathways, and a day & night cycle that serves a purpose. I mean, it wouldn't be the first game that requires you to grind to explore it, and it wouldn't be the last. But why on earth would you hide the good ending behind a very short amount of completion time :D

I already lost the good ending before I realized it was an open world that required a lot of backtracking, and a comprehensive guide to actually find the items you're looking for. After the second Dracula piece, I'm calling it quits. I, unfortunately, don't have the patience to follow a walkthrough for this game, especially after it told me to go back to the starter town after all this. A linear, everchanging experience was good for Castlevania but this may not be my thing, sorry.

On a good note: The music is once again a banger, having a currency & upgrade system is a good idea, cities and NPCs also work well (and would work even better if it was linear), combat is less challenging but still fun, especially because it doesn't make you wanna kill yourself. There's a good game underneath all my pet peeves, and I would love to pick it back up when I have the patience for it.

Curious that the game that directly influenced Symphony of the Night, the one that seemingly everyone loves, is overwhelmingly hated because some angry nerd decided to do an awful, flawed review video and successfully manipulated a whole generation of gamers.

It's sad because there's actually a lot to love about this game. It kind of resembles modern gaming's problem in the way that gamers shun any type of experimentation whatsoever and are okay with a regurgitated Assassin's Creed camouflaged into a new IP every year. Here, instead of repeating the successful structure of the first Castlevania, they decided to try something different and ended up setting most of the fundamentals of contemporary action RPGs already in 1987. Seriously, play this with Bloodborne or the Souls games in mind, and you'll see that it's not that different. The gloomy setting; paths that split into two, with one of them leading you in the right direction and the other inaccessible until later; open world but with difficulty walls that lead you; characters that give you tips where to go with really cryptic dialogues; multiple trinkets to use; illusory/hidden walls; deadly traps; required item interactions to progress the story; NPCs that try to misdirect you; even poison swamps. It all sounds too familiar.

Now, I should mention that I've played Castlevania II with bisqwit's ROM hack that fixes the mistranslation issues (I didn't tick the optional gameplay changes), but still, without it, it'd probably be like a 4/10 minimum (and that's because of my rating system, it's probably a 6/10 minimum for most). It's nowhere near a half star like the hive mind make it out to be. I actually considered rating this a 6, but I can't ignore the instakill shenanigans and the lame bosses, specially in contrast to the original that features some great fights. On top of that, there are a few items here that completely trivializes them.

A flawed game, but overall, I loved the intent. Use bisqwit's hack and go into it with an open mind, and you probably won't hate it.

Also, if you're like 20-something+ years old, and grew up listening to retro videogame music in your adolescence you might find that some great tracks came from this. And Binding of Isaac's "What a horrible night to have a curse" reference too.

I'd heard for years that this was "the bad one". It's just different from the Castlevanias that preceded or followed it. You can actually see the blueprints of the genre that the series would eventually take on starting with SotN; Simon's Quest has a nonlinear critical path across a map that you're gradually able to access more of as you obtain progression items (although exactly what has opened up to you is rarely very clear, unfortunately). While I didn't really gel with the maze that is trying to "solve" this game, I could absolutely picture someone who owned its original release really resonating with it, mapping out each area and puzzling out where to go.
The cryptic hints are apparently only somewhat less cryptic in the Japanese release, and a proper translation would only help so much; I will grant the game's detractors that much.

So ahead of it's time its kind of unreal. Every bad thing anyone has ever said about this was wrong. Less challenging and less "perfect", so to speak, than the original Castlevania but the gameplay, setting, tone, and story (even with the butchered translation) are much more interesting. So many great little moments, the way each subsequent town is a little more sparse and a little less welcoming, the way the day-night cycle reinforces both Simon's impending death and the impact his curse has on the world around him, the halls of Dracula's castle lying abandoned and in ruins as you push forward to the center... it's easy to see why people say this game is blatantly unfinished or whatever but the occasional emptiness of the world makes complete sense within the story and never really detracted from the gameplay for me. It leads to a dismal atmosphere and a bleaker, more introspective pace to the entire game compared to Castlevania 1, which I really appreciated. Probably one of my new favorite Famicom games. Man, there were so many groundbreaking unique games on this system that just get completely disregarded these days in favor of their flashier, more accessible sequels.





I was going to make a joke about how this is probably as close as you could get to making Pathologic on the Famicom but then I remembered Takeshi no Chōsenjō exists

part of growing up is learning to disregard the opinions of gaming youtubers and to actually form your own

crazily enough, a bad translation should not define how a game is percieved, and in an age of romhacking and text insertions, you'd think that people would've caught on by now that maybe, just maybe, an nes game with countless articles going over the numerous translation errors and unintelligable text would have more people wondering what it would be like to play in its native language. but alas, despite being a game cut from the same cloth as the many pioneers of games as we know them today, simon's quest is usually only met with vitriol.

as good as symphony of the night is, and as much influence it had on the metroidvania genre, to disregard this game and claim that sotn is entirely what constitutes for the "vania" part of "metroidvania" instead is both dismissive and disingenuous. i'm not saying sotn isn't part of the vania in metroidvania, because sotn played a huge part in popularising and refining the formula - what i am saying is that sotn and countless other games in turn inspired directly by it likely wouldn't exist without castlevania 2. It, the first metroid, and the first legend of zelda (which i admittedly have more qualms with) all tackled non-linearity while console gaming was still in its hayday, all to mixed degrees of success, and quite frankly castlevania 2 stands on top as my preferred game. at least, it stands on top when the text actually makes sense. yes the translation sucks, yes "laurels in your soup" and "don't look into the death star" and all that, but if you're going to acknowledge that this game's translation is bad then you're doing it a disservice by playing it with that bad translation and judging it based on that when better, easily accessible alternatives exist.

the control scheme is still classic castlevania with your stiff jumps and knockback and it still feels good to just walk around and whip things. subweapons are definitely lacking though and you're required to throw holy water down a LOT in order to reveal illusorary blocks in the floor and secrets in the walls (the latter being well telegraphed and opting to throw water at each wall you can really doesn't consume too much time anyway) and while i'd be hard pressed to say it plays better than the other nes castlevanias, I can still pretty comfortably say that simon's quest is simply just a good game. it's certainly not as polished as the other two but it tried something new and didn't play it safe, and for that it helped form an entire genre. I respect it. it also had me bringing up a word document to note down all of the text because almost 90% of the text in this game is some kind of clue on what to do next, and I think the clues that you find in walls don't reappear either, which is kind of an issue. so that's something i definitely recommend doing.

here's the patch I used, it's pretty customisable and includes some nice qol additions that you can toggle on and off to get a more vanilla experience if you'd prefer. chief among these additions are the ingame map (which is copied 1-1 from the japanese manual) and a clue browser that saves having to manually note things down. I personally just enabled the retranslation (and kept the day-night transition text the same, mistranslation or no "what a horrible night to have a curse" will always be iconic, glad that's an option). The website is in finnish by default but there's language options as soon as you open it. Oh yeah, this thing is a whole project - it covers translations of the game in finnish, english, french, spanish and filipino. The author also has a page dedicated to dissecting the differences between the original official localization, the japanese script, and their own translations with their own reasoning provided. definitely worth checking out. one major word of warning though: there seems to be a bug where if you press right while hovering over any of the items in the upper half of your inventory, it just. wipes the lower half. scrolling loops around if you keep pressing left though, so it's not a huge issue. might be a good idea to have rewind or a savestate to go back to.

also if we're gonna make avgn's opinions the be-all end-all of retro gaming takes can we also admit that zelda 2 is actually good HE SAID ZELDA 2 WAS GOOD GUYS