Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987)

So, I've seen AVGN and Egoraptor's videos on this game, but I thought they were being hyperbolic with the game's flaws for entertainment value. After playing it for myself, I feel like the game is just as bad, if not worse than they said. Hearing about a game's flaws is whatever, but experiencing it for yourself really makes the complaints resonate a lot more. The game feels like it's made to waste your time with the grinding for hearts, slow text scrolling, and backtracking. The game is incredibly cryptic and sometimes the NPCs straight up lie to you. I should probably mention that I don't think I've ever beaten any NES adventure game without a walkthrough, so this game isn't isolated in how difficult it is. It did make me grateful that the problems that were present in the 80s with the poor localization, character (as in the alphabet) limitations, and games being cryptic is less of a problem today. Even if those issues exist, they're alleviated by being able to look up info on games for free. I got the worst ending and I'm okay with that, don't really plan on replaying this game ever.

Edit: Something else I wanted to talk about is that modern games are generally self-contained. What I mean is that you don’t need outside resources to play, the game will generally teach you mechanics and let you know where to go whereas older games needed the instruction manual or outside note taking.

Beat with the normal ending. I started off buying the white crystal and wandering to the second town. I did find the first dungeon but the hidden platform did not appear despite having the crystal. At this point I started using a walkthrough to keep on track; pretty much exploring around and doing the dungeons on my own until I got stuck, and checking afterwards to see if I missed anything. Oh and having a map, which the game was completely lacking. So I ended up grinding enough money to buy the chain whip and dagger, then doing the first dungeon. I hated the day night cycle because of the limit it put on exploring the towns and shopping. Time should not have passed while in towns during the day. I also hated using holy water to destroy blocks because the game did not teach or otherwise indicate that this was possible. Coming from the original game, one would expect to use the whip to destroy certain suspicious blocks to find items. I did not like how there was no health hidden anywhere and that enemies did not randomly drop it. What was a huge improvement for the series was the inventory system, allowing use of all sub weapons. It boggles my mind that Castlevania 3 did not use this! I did like how the dagger and holy water were free to use, so I used them liberally. I only used the better knives occasionally for tough situations, and the sacred flame once or twice when time was more important than cost. I used the diamond for boss fights due to the way it bounced around the screen and could last a very long time; the final boss especially was owned by it. I did not like how there was no axe and there was no upward weapon to hit those annoying enemies. I usually had the rib equipped for the shield, occasionally switching to the nail to whip blocks. They should have been passive effects rather than an equipment slot.

This was not a well designed game. While it was a good choice to make an open world Castlevania, and thus helping create the Metroidvania genre, the game had too many design problems that put it behind similar games (like Metroid 1 and Zelda 2). The cryptic nature of what to do, the lack of items/abilities that allowed access to new areas with secrets, the lack of creative challenges beyond just enemies, platforming, destroyable blocks, and illusion blocks, and the lack of bosses. Seriously, 6 dungeons and only 3 bosses; what were they thinking? And the final dungeon has no enemies or platforming challenge whatsoever. What the hell? They don't even use the more powerful regular enemies as early bosses. The dungeons were generic with the same few enemy types, completely failing to make use of some of the outdoors enemies. The game needed more rewards for exploration, more challenges, and more variety of challenge. As it was, the game failed to be good at being either a Metroidvania or a Castlevania game.

6.0/10

Completed on emulator using a guide, savestates and fastforward. It took me like 5 hours to get to the end of this awful game. I still can't believe how bad Castlevania 2 is, to the point that the game seems carefully crafted to be as anti-fun as possible.

I can say that the music is good, and the graphics are maybe even a bit better than CV1. But everything else... man, the slowdowns, the locations of the items, the bosses, the GRINDING (it was tedious even at 300% speed on the emulator), finding the hints/secrets... everything is terrible!

To put it simply This game sucks