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Demon’s Crest
You know, occasionally I forget how much Capcom used to hate us.
I don’t know why this game kept popping up in my head, but on a whim, I decided to give it a go last night. It’s the second sequel to Gargoyle’s Quest for the Game Boy, one of the first video games I ever owned. The series is an offshoot from the Ghosts and Goblins series, renowned for its insane difficulty; Firebrand the gargoyle is a Red Arreemer, one of the most annoying enemies from that game.
Everything seemed to be going okay for the first stage or two; the flying mechanic took a little getting used to (You can fly infinitely, but only horizontally; you can’t ascend) and I initially had some issue with aim, but other than that it was just fine. Then the hellish enemy-spam started up and I switched to using game genie to save my sanity. And it was probably good that I did.
If you just play the game normally, you go through 4 stages, then there’s a final boss fight and an ending. But there’s still half a world map unexplored and a ton of items missing. Turns out, you need to find the secret exit (and boss fight) in the fourth stage to unlock the other stages. A bunch of the Castlevania games do this too, and I’ve never been a fan: Figure out this obtuse puzzle—that the game doesn’t even make clear exists—or you only get half a game. Plenty of games have “false endings” halfway through, and when they’re clearly from a Yes/No prompt or other obvious choice, I’m fine with that. Reload your save, try the other choice. But “replay this stage only jump into the slightly different-looking bottomless pit near the end” (the rest still kill you, of course) isn’t cool.
The does it again, mind you: If you fight the final boss after getting all the crests but without getting every other item, you get the “incomplete” ending. If you find every item, you get the complete ending then a secret passcode that lets you play one more stage as the Ultimate Gargoyle—a boss battle that could destroy the soul of anyone, even someone who beat Battletoads. Two forms that take an obscene amount of punishment, are invulnerable half of the time, and give no indication of progress; the area slowly turns entirely into spikes; and hard-to-avoid projectiles everywhere. Only after that do you get the “real” ending.
So, the game only has seven real stages, but you need to do each one two or three times (more, if you’re trying to unlock the super-secret final stage and boss fight), and you fight a lot of the bosses two or three times. The later ones are often a different color and usually faster, but that’s about it. It’s a marvel of efficient programming, I’ll give you that. But similar to the way early rpgs filled time with grinding to make the game artificially longer, early platformers made stages insanely hard and forced repetition to pad themselves out. (This game takes barely two hours to complete if you know where things are and don't die a dozen times per stage.) Given that Super Mario World managed a huge game with relatively little of that as an SNES launch title, I expected better from a mid-lifespan SNES game.
It does make me want to do something with a winged dragonborn character, though...
I don’t know why this game kept popping up in my head, but on a whim, I decided to give it a go last night. It’s the second sequel to Gargoyle’s Quest for the Game Boy, one of the first video games I ever owned. The series is an offshoot from the Ghosts and Goblins series, renowned for its insane difficulty; Firebrand the gargoyle is a Red Arreemer, one of the most annoying enemies from that game.
Everything seemed to be going okay for the first stage or two; the flying mechanic took a little getting used to (You can fly infinitely, but only horizontally; you can’t ascend) and I initially had some issue with aim, but other than that it was just fine. Then the hellish enemy-spam started up and I switched to using game genie to save my sanity. And it was probably good that I did.
If you just play the game normally, you go through 4 stages, then there’s a final boss fight and an ending. But there’s still half a world map unexplored and a ton of items missing. Turns out, you need to find the secret exit (and boss fight) in the fourth stage to unlock the other stages. A bunch of the Castlevania games do this too, and I’ve never been a fan: Figure out this obtuse puzzle—that the game doesn’t even make clear exists—or you only get half a game. Plenty of games have “false endings” halfway through, and when they’re clearly from a Yes/No prompt or other obvious choice, I’m fine with that. Reload your save, try the other choice. But “replay this stage only jump into the slightly different-looking bottomless pit near the end” (the rest still kill you, of course) isn’t cool.
The does it again, mind you: If you fight the final boss after getting all the crests but without getting every other item, you get the “incomplete” ending. If you find every item, you get the complete ending then a secret passcode that lets you play one more stage as the Ultimate Gargoyle—a boss battle that could destroy the soul of anyone, even someone who beat Battletoads. Two forms that take an obscene amount of punishment, are invulnerable half of the time, and give no indication of progress; the area slowly turns entirely into spikes; and hard-to-avoid projectiles everywhere. Only after that do you get the “real” ending.
So, the game only has seven real stages, but you need to do each one two or three times (more, if you’re trying to unlock the super-secret final stage and boss fight), and you fight a lot of the bosses two or three times. The later ones are often a different color and usually faster, but that’s about it. It’s a marvel of efficient programming, I’ll give you that. But similar to the way early rpgs filled time with grinding to make the game artificially longer, early platformers made stages insanely hard and forced repetition to pad themselves out. (This game takes barely two hours to complete if you know where things are and don't die a dozen times per stage.) Given that Super Mario World managed a huge game with relatively little of that as an SNES launch title, I expected better from a mid-lifespan SNES game.
It does make me want to do something with a winged dragonborn character, though...
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