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.
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.