A modern review of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest for the NES

Literally every YouTuber has already talked extensively about this game. And by “literally every YouTuber”, I mean the Angry Video Game Nerd and Egoraptor have done videos on it. What could I possibly add to the nuanced criticism they have no doubt put forth to the ever-dying circulation of retro video game analysis? Well, I actually think Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is kind of alright. By absolutely no means am I suggesting that Simon’s Quest is a good video game, or even a passable one. It is, by all accounts, pretty bad. But a game being pretty bad doesn’t mean it can’t be a worthwhile experience, and boy is Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest worthwhile, I fucking guess.

Before we jump into anything else, it’s important I share a small secret with you, my friends. No, it is not that I am a faux smart-person man, because trust me, that is not a secret. My secret is that I find it hard to trust a lot of what modern critics say when attempting to visit an old video game for the first time. I suppose the swell of that mistrust comes from the realization of the many technological advancements made through the medium in fairly rapid succession. The new technology makes the old technology laughable, and the artistic merits of a game created in 1987 is not able to carry itself into serious or relevant contemporary discussion. This is a problem and will always be a problem, because media consumers have only become more gluttonous with their content, and producers of said content have only become more greedy. How does one critique a video game like Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, or literally any other game I’ve reviewed, after having experienced a post-DLC, post-regular patching, and post-microtransactions-and-sustained-monetization gaming landscape? The answer is that you don’t, because attempting to do so, even if you plead with your audience that you are objectively analyzing it from the lens of a player in 1987, is futile. Brains do not work that way, no matter how much therapy you receive. Perhaps we were never meant to critique video games on the merit of artistic quality as they were, almost from the very beginning, designed as a commodity. A product meant to make money as opposed to an artform meant for expression. This is probably why so many video game reviews from any major outlet are actually just a list of features and the quality of said features. You are making a transaction not for a unique piece of art, but for an item curated specifically to be monetized. This likely needs to be a discussion for a full essay, but I am much too lazy, and my fear of confrontation is far too great to go through the process of making such a thing happen. The only thing you need to know is that all video game criticism is worthless and that includes this literal review.

So what does any of this have to do with Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest? Quite a lot, actually, or enough to where I can at least pretend it’s a significant amount. Castlevania II has received an unfortunate amount of negative feedback as a result of the criticisms layered onto it from the advent of freelance criticism. Many sources you can look into nowadays will tell you Castlevania II is simply a bad game, and this is, unfortunately, how it’s known within the wider gaming spectrum in the current year of writing. But Castlevania II was actually, like, kind of well-received when it first came out. Almost like it was a good video game. God, the worst part about looking through modern criticisms from random people on shit like Metacritic is I can’t even distinguish which of them feel legitimate. Like, even the positive ones almost feel like they’re overly positive to make up for the negative attention the game has gotten. But like, the game was well-received in it’s time so I don’t think these are people who are going in unexposed to the vast array of negative critique and are being contrarian more than anything? Like, holy shit, what the fuck are we doing with our lives? Specifically, what am I doing?

Regardless, Castlevania II is pretty cool. I will be going over the good stuff before the bad because I want people to forget that I actually think this game does kind of suck before I completely thrash it with my epic critical powers. Castlevania II is not a traditional platformer like Castlevania and the other numbers that come between 1 and 2 apparently. Hell, this is even a wild departure from Vampire Killer, which was itself a wild departure from the original game. Castlevania II has traded it’s challenging platforming action for a far more contemplative and atmospheric adventure game. Castlevania II is less about testing your reflexes and short-term strategic legibility and more about asking you to traverse a wide area and make discoveries as you progress. Keep in mind this was 1987, and few games had really tried such an open-ended design philosophy. Execution is iffy at best and atrocious at worst, but I would say the same about Metroid, which everyone is fine with, probably because AVGN never did a video about it.

One of the bigger problems with Castlevania II’s world is that it’s basically impossible to understand many of the nuances. A number of secrets held within it’s walls are, objectively, impossible to figure out by a normal human adult. One could not be reasonably expected to figure out you need to crouch against a random wall for a few seconds while having a red crystal equipped in order to be taken, by a tornado, to a different part of the map. Again, brains don’t work this way. It would all be forgiven, however, if the game had hints. Fortunately, the game does have hints. Unfortunately, it actually doesn’t. The NPCs you come across within the various towns throughout the world are evidently meant to give you hints, but they are almost always completely useless or outright incorrect. The hint given for the prior example, I think, is “Hit Deborah Cliff with your head to make a hole.” What? That is not correct, nor is it a safe thing for Simon Belmont to be doing. He would likely get a concussion, or become a skeptic.

But that leads us to another area where criticism becomes interesting. Castlevania II’s English script is an absolute mess. There’s no getting around the legitimate grievances many players have with this aspect of the game. But here’s my dumb argument: How does that make Castlevania II a bad game? The translation is, obviously, abysmal, and the person who took the helm at translating this game was hopefully never allowed to read katakana again. But we’re talking about an individual piece of an overall experience which was worsened only by the fact that the person in charge was stoned out of their mind. Take, for example, Mother 3. I have not played it, but I do know that everyone wants to fuck this game, which is totally cool, I dig it. But if you were to decide to play it without installing any sort of translation patch, and you didn’t understand how to read Japanese, would you be critical of the game for not making sense? Would you be critical of the game failing to give you appropriate direction? I would think not. You can argue it’s different here, as Castlevania II was released for a price in the United States despite it’s sloppy translation, but at that point you are judging based on it’s value as a commodity, and I refuse to take you seriously, you consumerist scum. For what it’s worth, the original Japanese release supposedly had NPCs who would lie to you, which is also pretty bad, but at least you can do something potentially clever with that? I wouldn’t know because I never learned Japanese like I planned to in high school. Regardless, Castlevania II forces me to ask whether or not a legitimate critique can be done for any game which has been translated. Maybe that’s why I like Castlevania II? Because I despise rage-critic culture and it does everything it can to be impossible to be effectively criticized. Wow, I’m learning a lot about myself here.

Castlevania II’s challenge comes from this aggressively cryptic maneuverability, but it’s almost entirely fixed because of the Internet having numerous fun walkthroughs available to keep you from getting lost in this game about being lost. The challenge in combat is all but removed, and the level design has also taken an unfortunate hit. Enemies die more easily because there’s generally less verticality for them to work with, and Simon is almost always in an advantageous position. Similarly, Castlevania II runs into the same problems Vampire Killer did, in that the design of levels needs to facilitate progress from multiple directions, which results in the designers making some tragic compensations with a bunch of flat pathing. I like the way the world is set up because I’m just the type of person who will prefer full world design over singular level design in this type of game, but the pieces making up the world aren’t engaging enough to work well. There’s a lives system in place, but it’s pointless because you just respawn at the beginning of the screen regardless. The only real punishment is losing all of your hearts after a game over, which is annoying because all it means is that you have to spend some time grinding, but, since I bitched about Metroid already, it’s nothing compared to needing to grind health and ammo after a death in that game.

Castlevania II did absolutely everything it could to be really fucking weird, and I appreciate that in and of itself. I wish I didn’t have to also talk about all these other parts I don’t like. If I were a “phony” I would just ignore these faults and make broad jubilances of a quality I did not truly believe. But I’d like to believe I’m just a normal person. One who, potentially puts too much stock into how we should be viewing games as enjoyers of the art form, but normal in the ways that matter. Like thinking video games are cool.

Castlevania II is a bad game. To be honest, it was probably bad back in 1987. Games which can still argue to actually be good in competition with the current gaming market are slim. Whether or not that excuses it’s quality is up to you, you absolute legends. I am not quite sure I’ve found the answer to that, myself. I have spent a number of my past few months engrossing myself in old videogames. I was born in 1993, and for the first twelve years of my life, the only gaming systems I had owned were a top-loader NES with 10 games or less, a Sony PlayStation, aka the objectively worst mainstream gaming console, and every variation of of Nintendo’s Gameboy line up to that point, the model at this time being a Gameboy Advance. I am unsure if I used the original model or the SP model at this point. I didn’t start experimenting with the stranger side of gaming and gaming culture until I was in sixth grade, and at this point, I was living in the greatest time period to be enjoying video games, because this was the era of PS2 and Gamecube. I never had an XBOX, nor have I ever purchased an XBOX product, but I heard that had some cool games. I think like, Halo was one of the titles people lost their shit over? I don’t think they made any more of those… But yeah XBOX is cool (THIS IS SATIRE PLEASE DON’T TALK TO ME). Point is, I spent my high school, college, depressive post-college period, grad school, and depressive post-grad school periods of life getting caught up to where I am at and I’m still fucking behind. And now that I am playing so many games my age or older, I’m going to continue not being caught up. Why am I doing this? Why am I purposefully using valuable time which could be spent playing something satisfying to play old games which I know will be bad? I wish I could give you fair and rational answers like “wanting to experience history” or “wanting to provide a critical eye within the modern era” or “I make my living by making poop jokes on YouTube so I have to play a bad game today”. They are all fair and rational, as I said. But I need to stop being a “phony” about this. I play old games because they are far more interesting to play, even if they are not as fun. When I bought Elden Ring, I thought it was going to be amazing. When I played Elden Ring, I thought it was amazing. What did I learn from this experience? What is the point of enjoying something if all you do is enjoy that thing? I want to be able to play Castlevania II and I want to be able to score it higher than Monster Hunter Rise, because Monster Hunter Rise was a fucking boring, grindy slog of a game, and that is EXACTLY what I was expecting. The ways which Castlevania II managed to surprise me, even in bad ways, was far more of a thoughtful and engaging experience than a single minute of Monster Hunter Rise. I am being mean to Monster Hunter Rise only because it was the first major modern title which I remembered I gave a 2/6 to. I could’ve just as easily been a dirtbag toward Resident Evil 7 or something. Anyway, I give Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest a 3/6. If you think this is unfair, then I encourage you to read the entire review from the beginning, and continue to repeat this process until you agree with me.

I feel like I’ve kind of broken my brain writing this. I have spent the past three hours writing it. I do not know why I felt the urge to just start writing about this. I think about Castlevania II a lot, but it felt kind of sudden in this moment. I don’t think Castlevania II is actually the root of all of this. I think, a lot of times, I begin writing about topics, and those topics shift over the course of me working on a piece. This is, in no way, a critique on Castlevania II. We’ve flown well past that point. It’s not even a critique against rage critics. It’s a critique against myself. What can I possibly say to make my voice worthy being heard? Can I say anything? What is the point in me doing this to myself, knowing that I cannot possibly be qualified to assess this game in a way no one else has? I don’t think those qualifications exist. I think a game is meant to make you think, and I’ve done a sufficient amount of thinking about this one in particular. Though, I do wish I had the critical eye of a preteen again. Experiencing Dark Cloud on the PlayStation 2 for the first time in his life, the only critique he is able to conjure is “This game fucking rules”. Just as I’m sure many preteens did in 1987. Thanks for reading….

God, Dark Cloud might actually be more outdated than Castlevania II at this point, holy shit.