Topic: A REALLY interesting take on Simon's Quest

[Claimh Solais]

Seems I was a bit late in contributing to this topic. Regardless, I agree with uzo in that the majority of the points brought up in the OP were just attempts to justify whatever was wrong with the game. The fact that some villagers lie does not excuse the poor translation. I can get behind the fact that CV2 was never intended to be a platformer, but a survival horror game? More like a horror-themed adventure game. CV2's gameplay has more in common with Zelda 2 and even Maniac Mansion than it does CV1. It was an interesting experiment that came out flawed, nothing more. I still love the game though.

Maniac Mansion was crazy fuck scary when I first played it ages ago.





And Inccubus, I agree with you on pretty much every point you made.
Note that Vampire Killer was a much better attempt at combining RPG elements to Castlevania.

And what's this crap about "The game is not intended to be fun, it's intended to mindfuck you."?
That's a load of BS. Breakdown for the Xbox, despite having a complicated control scheme and unforgiving difficulty, mindfucked me and I had ridiculous fun with it.

Having a game that entertains you and having a game you have fun with sound like the exact same thing, but that's just me. >.>

[DoctaMario]

Oy. I'm gonna edit this down because we're starting to get off topic with certain things.

Actually, I can make that argument. All games ARE designed to be fun on some level. Even scary entertainment is fun to those that enjoy it. And to be clear I take the word as in a thing or activity that one derives enjoyment from.

I agree with you on that, but I think that to a certain degree, the designers in some games (the Silent Hill series for instance) do certain things to make you feel uncomfortable. Maybe that's fun but it's designed to bring up feelings of dread, but again, I don't see entertainment and fun as the same thing. Movies entertain you but are they fun?

It's a game, the layouts don't have to be laid out logically. Doing that makes things less interesting, which is exactly what you have throughout most of the overworld. It's pretty much like the PS2 games with long stretches of mostly flat boring areas. And the only areas that aren't flat have annoying gimmicks in play like the ridiculous poison swamps and the frustrating chains of floating blocks. The towns are all boring with basically the same 3 designs for all of them. The mansions are much better as far as platforming is concerned except that they often ruin what would be very interesting layouts with frustrating gimmicks that they always manage to take too far. The invisible floors are a prime example as well as many of the jumps that seem like they are intentionally trying to piss you off in a way that screams laziness rather than challenging design. They did use stairs to denote cross roads in the overworld, which is itself illogical, but I appreciate that. I'm saying that they should have made the terrain more interesting since you have to go over it over and over. And, BTW, there are several spats in the game's forests that have stare in illogical places.

Illogical layouts are usually the mark of lazy design. Dracula X on the SNES is a case in point. At one point of, i think it's the 3rd level, you're climbing all these platforms with Medusa heads and Bone Cannons coming at you. Then suddenly, you're inside some part of the castle with knights accosting you. Simon's Quest at least tried to make things flow well with its design. Other than the stairs in the middle of the woods, and suddenly being in Dracula's castle after crossing the long bridge (which it would have been really cool if they had had a frontal shot of the Castle like the Mansions), the design is sensible and smart much like it was in CV1. It's sprawling, but almost never nonsensical.

Of course I'm not saying that. I'm saying what I said. That a more flexible sub-weapon system is better. One of the fundamental things game design students are taught is to always reduce the number of screens and menus the player has to go through to access things. CV2 did the opposite. Now you have to buy your weapons and you have to use a menu to change them. That is not as dynamic as finding them throughout the game. There is basically only one new weapon, they removed the more interesting ones from the previous games, and the rest are derivatives of the least interesting ones. And they're incredible unbalanced to boot. So I fail to see how there is more you can do with CV2 over CV1 or VK.

With the exception of the Dagger, whips, and Holy water, you don't have to buy ANY of the subweapons, they're all found in game. You can also buy Garlic and Laurels, but these too can be found in-game.

I disagree, despite slightly darker content, the graphics are still cartoony like the previous games and that detracts from any true horror it could have effected n the player. And I think many ROM hackers have proven over and over that all the NES CV games could have had much darker, much more genuinely disturbing graphics.

We'll have to agree to disagree on this. NES game could only handle so many colors. If Simon's Quest could have had a similar palette to CV4, it would have been even better, but as it is, the NES couldn't handle that. They did the best they could with the limitations they had.

 

No it's not. That's like saying that when you're playing Zelda 2 and you're low on health and out of MP and potions and you need to get back to a town gives it a survival element akin to the survival horror genre. No it doesn't. That is not a situation a player will necessarily get into and the game isn't designed to specifically put you into it. In Resident Evil, for example, when you're low on health and you've used up all your weed you're fucked .There is nowhere for you to go. That is a position that will inevitably get into in that game because it's designed to. There in lies the true horror of the genre. Finding yourself in a situation that you have little to no hope to get out of. Why do you think survival horror games don't have a level up system to make you stronger over time or refill your health? Because that would completely destroy the sense of fight or flight that is essential to survival horror games.

Again, by comparing Simon's Quest to a game like RE, you're making the mistake of thinking that someone has said it's a pure survival horror game where no one has said that. Elements, sure. But pure SH? Not at all. And the key word here is ELEMENTS. Just because a game has a shooting scene doesn't make it a shooter.

That may be true for some people. I also happen to have played CV2 before I played CV1 and I like the game, too. But it's flaws are there and they don't go away just because you don't compare it to it's siblings. Compared to other similar games it still falls short. And making the argument that viewing at from the point of view of a genre that not only didn't exist yet, but that it also has very little in common with is little more than an excuse.

I don't think anyone is trying to make the case that it doesn't have flaws, but I think the OP advises looking at it from a different perspective. Sometimes the coolest stuff is created unintentionally. I don't think it's a perfect game, and if I did, it would be partially nostalgia talking there, but I think the CV community hasn't really given the game a fair shot because they end up comparing it to Castleroid games, or the other NES games, which were created with, I can only assume, a completely different intent.

While it's true that CV1 is an action game, I think you are seriously reading way too much into it. There is more story going on, but there's nothing to indicate that the day & night messages are being spoken by Simon. As a matter of fact your ability to sympathize with Simon is severely diminished because he never speaks a single word during the entire game. You have no idea what his thoughts and feelings about the situation are. You have no more of an emotional link to him in CV2 than you do in CV1 except for a slightly more robust story, that I might add is never even really mentioned much in-game. I will give them props for trying harder on the story and having actual endings.

Maybe I am, though he does speak when the crystal exchanges take place. I can only assume the day/night sequences are capped off with a remark by him because he's the one with the curse. I think it's possible to empathize with a character based on what they have to deal with in the game, but maybe that's just me, though I have to say the endings were part of it for me as well.

[DoctaMario]

Seems I was a bit late in contributing to this topic. Regardless, I agree with uzo in that the majority of the points brought up in the OP were just attempts to justify whatever was wrong with the game. The fact that some villagers lie does not excuse the poor translation. I can get behind the fact that CV2 was never intended to be a platformer, but a survival horror game? More like a horror-themed adventure game. CV2's gameplay has more in common with Zelda 2 and even Maniac Mansion than it does CV1. It was an interesting experiment that came out flawed, nothing more. I still love the game though.

I don't know that Obscura would have any reason to justify the flaws of a 20+ year old game on a dead system. He's a designer himself, and maybe that has something to do with it, but I can't see what would be gained from making the arguments he has. And again, he wasn't positing it was a pure survival-horror game, merely that it contains elements of survival horror in their embryonic form.

I think the style of the game still has enough in common with the first game that you'd recognize it if you saw it and didn't know it was a CV game, but maybe that's just me, though I agree that it has a bit more in common with Zelda 2 than CV1 does.

[beingthehero]

About Dracula XX, I like how in the first level you climb a tower only to appear on a street. Even I was all "what..."

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Someone has never lived on/near a mountain.
Not that they can really draw 'uphill' stages (although CV4 did it).

[beingthehero]

I don't think the village was on a mountain, though. :X

[DoctaMario]

Dracula XX had a few oddly designed levels. I remember Peklo once bringing up how you're walking up the stairs in the last level....only to see the Castle itself in the background under the moon. It looked cool, but if you thought about it for a second, it was kinda like, O_o

[Ahasverus]

Dracula XX had a few oddly designed levels. I remember Peklo once bringing up how you're walking up the stairs in the last level....only to see the Castle itself in the background under the moon. It looked cool, but if you thought about it for a second, it was kinda like, O_o

Yeah the castle was like a citadel then. Poor cleaning maid.

[Inccubus]

@DoctaMario: My final word on this is that I don't agree that thinking of certain aspects of CV2, that it incidentally shares with innumerable other games of various genres, as being similar to equally common aspects of survival horror games, that are in and of themselves not definitive of said genre, is not a valid comparison. It's tantamount to comparing the day/night cycle in the game to Ocarina of Time and saying that must make the game a proto-RPG. It assumes too many things about the designer's intentions and doesn't change any of the games short comings.

On a side note, I really don't remember Simon ever having any lines in the game at all. Can someone confirm?

[Ahasverus]

What a horrible night to have a curse?

[X]

What a horrible night to have a curse?

This is nothing more then game dialog to let the player know that night has come. Simon doesn't say a word.

[Lumi Kløvstad]

Iunno. He could just have a really limited repertoire of phrases, like those guys who talk only in ragefaces? /totallynotserious

[DoctaMario]

@DoctaMario: My final word on this is that I don't agree that thinking of certain aspects of CV2, that it incidentally shares with innumerable other games of various genres, as being similar to equally common aspects of survival horror games, that are in and of themselves not definitive of said genre, is not a valid comparison. It's tantamount to comparing the day/night cycle in the game to Ocarina of Time and saying that must make the game a proto-RPG. It assumes too many things about the designer's intentions and doesn't change any of the games short comings.

On a side note, I really don't remember Simon ever having any lines in the game at all. Can someone confirm?

Well, Obscura's point was that the game was "more AKIN to a survival horror game than a platformer" not that it WAS a survival horror game. But I get where you're coming from. Good talk!

The only lines I know of that Simon has are the ones where he exchanges crystals ("I'd like to exchange a White crystal for a Blue one") and then the assumption that the day/night change-over messages are his words as well. I guess we'll never know for sure and that's one of the best things about artistic stuff is that everyone has their own opinion of what something is/means.

[Claimh Solais]

Well, Obscura's point was that the game was "more AKIN to a survival horror game than a platformer" not that it WAS a survival horror game. But I get where you're coming from. Good talk!

The only lines I know of that Simon has are the ones where he exchanges crystals ("I'd like to exchange a White crystal for a Blue one") and then the assumption that the day/night change-over messages are his words as well. I guess we'll never know for sure and that's one of the best things about artistic stuff is that everyone has their own opinion of what something is/means.

"I'd like to exchange... blah blah" is said by the one you're exchanging it with.
"What a horrible night to have a curse" and such are merely prompts to let you know that the time of day is switching. Unless there's some way to confirm otherwise, that's the way they are.

Simon has never spoken until Judgment (not counting Captain N).

[DoctaMario]

"I'd like to exchange... blah blah" is said by the one you're exchanging it with.
"What a horrible night to have a curse" and such are merely prompts to let you know that the time of day is switching. Unless there's some way to confirm otherwise, that's the way they are.

Simon has never spoken until Judgment (not counting Captain N).

I'm pretty sure (at least from the game scripts I've read) that Simon's the one talking in the crystal exchanges because when you make the trade he says "I'd like to exchange a (color of the crystal you already have) crystal for (color of crystal you need) crystal." So I'm pretty sure that unless they got the colors backwards, Simon is the one saying those words.

The other stuff is conjecture. We'll never know for sure whether it's him saying the day/night phrases or not. I always thought he did, but I realize there's no way to know for sure.