Here we go, folks: The end. The finale. Where the rubber meets the road, and the wooden stake meets the chest of the satanic abomination determined to rise from the dead and prey upon humanity. Despite spanning the entirety of Transylvania, Simon’s Quest culminates in Dracula’s castle, or at least its ruins. In a nice touch of continuity, Simon’s mission reaches its finale in the crumbled remains of Castlevania, which collapsed at the end of the first game.

The entry way calls back to Stage 01 of Castlevania, a motif that will be repeated in practically every single sequel to follow. But once you advance a little ways into the broken hallway, you reach an insurmountable wall of rubble that hides a secret underground passage. Break through the rubble and you can descend into a basement — no word is offered on what happened to river full of fish men that used to occupy this space — and advance down, down, down well beneath the castle’s foundation.

This is the obligatory point of no return for a game like this. You’ve been able to backtrack to your heart’s content until now, but the walk down into the rubble of Castlevania is a one-way trip. There’s no way to climb back out. This lends it a sense of finality and anxiety lacking in the rest of the game.

Once you reach the bottom, there’s nothing left to be done but burn Dracula’s body bit, which causes him to return to life and fly around the room. This battle has never made much sense to me. There’s no real strategy to it, because Dracula zips around way too fast to get a bead on, spams those daggers or whatever (I always thought they looked like fingernail clippings, personally), and basically isn’t any fun to fight. Also, he looks like he’s wearing an old aviator helmet. And his hands — are they spread high above his head, or are they clasped in front of his chest? Or does it even matter if you just toss some garlic on the ground and do the usual stunlock thing? Oh well.

It’s an anticlimactic way to end the game, matched only by the hilariously scrambled endings. I’ve never been sure if this was a deliberate subversion or just a weird programming error, but the endings you receive — determined by the speed with which you complete the game — don’t seem commensurate with your performance. Blast through the game in record time and you earn a terrible ending where Simon dies. Thanks for playing! Take forever and you receive happy, uplifting text overlaid atop a bleak-looking field of grey that seems better suited for the bad ending text.

I dunno, he looks pretty surviving there.

These little quirks don’t make Simon’s Quest a bad game, but they do typify the oddball design choices and occasionally amateurish programming that keep it from being the knockout punch that its predecessor was. I really love the ambition behind Simon’s Quest‘s structure, and the overworld that binds Transylvania together remains one of my favorite video game worlds after all this time. But the deliberately opaque text, dull Mansions, lackluster enemy design, weird leveling system, and overall lack of challenge… well, Simon’s Quest is a good game with great moments, but it is not, as a whole, great.

Thanks for bearing with me as I dissected this 24-year-old game for no particular reason.

And now: The world. Or, if you prefer, ザ・ワールド

If Simon’s Quest falls apart in the Mansions and annoys in towns, it shines in the world beyond those locations. I don’t know why all five Mansions look exactly alike, or why they’re so boringly constructed, but I’m going to guess that it’s because all the detail and attention went into the overworld.

I mean, look at that. That screen is quintessential NES-era Konami right there. The deft use of the system’s minimal color palette, the minute detail and texture, the glorious contrast and outline of the distant mountain peaks, the iconic two-color sky gradient. Just wonderful.

But it’s not just the overworld’s visual design that excels — though certainly that is unimpeachable! What really makes Simon’s Quest‘s world so brilliant is its open, interconnected design. It’s not entirely free-roaming, as it’s blocked off at key spots by obstacles and puzzles that can only be surmounted by acquiring items and skills, but neither is it entirely linear. Discovering the links and connections between Transylvania’s different areas is a good part of what make’s Simon’s Quest so entertaining, and the variety of the areas you travel almost makes up for the crappy monotony of the Mansions.

Transylvania as seen in Simon’s Quest consists primarily of a single large loop that runs in an endless circle, from which a number of alternate paths and spurs branch away and lead to important destinations. Mansions, alternate towns, Castlevania. The trick is figuring out how to get there, which is to say deciphering the obnoxious lies of those creeps who populate the towns.

Transylvania’s overworld is built on more of the logic of the original Castlevania’s architectural construction than the Mansions are. There are still bits that seem like arbitrary platformer design, like the blocks hovering above the magenta swamp above (what’s holding them up there!?). And who knows why someone built staircases in the middle of the forest. But if you can look past the magical hovering platforms over the water, Simon’s Quest has some well-designed areas and interesting hazards to overcome. It reminds me of Goonies II at times — not in terms of structure or appearance, but simply in the way some of the most interesting areas appear near the end of the game in single locations that you breeze through almost too quickly to appreciate. Like the drainage system below:

Simon’s Quest consists of huge, repetitive mansions and half a dozen identical towns. But between them you have plains, and rivers, and bridges…

…lakes, swamps, wastelands, murky woods…

…(more like Mirkwoods, am I right?), rocky ravines, caverns, and cemeteries…

All interlocking, all connected, all bound together with towns and Mansions. Getting around doesn’t always make sense, but once you allow for inexplicable crystal-based pathways, the world of Simon’s Quest in retrospect became one of the first action games to try and create such an expansive, interesting, diverse, explorable world.

Simon’s Quest may seem kind of baffling and opaque in retrospect. But in 1988, this was great stuff. Big, inventive, expansive, ambitious. And you could totally whip mummies to death (re-death?) with a flaming whip. Amazing.

Let’s talk about Simon’s Quest‘s NPCs.

Long story short, Transylvania is populated by a bunch of jerks. I get that living in the shadow of a cyclical undead horror bent on conquering the world by transforming humanity into a race of snack-pack slaves can be pretty harrowing, but that’s exactly why you’d assume these guys would be a little friendlier to the one man who can save them from becoming ambulatory juice boxes. But no; something like half the NPCs in the game are either actively hostile toward Simon or simply lie to him.

I always assumed the game’s wildly inaccurate hints came from the 8-bit tradition of terrible localization, but it turns out these guys are a bunch of liars in Japanese, too. I once asked former Castlevania series producer Koji Igarashi about the possibility of him creating a game in the spirit of Simon’s Quest, with NPCs to talk to and hints to gather, and his response was a mildly befuddled, “But all of those guys lied to you!” So evidently the game’s writers were just being mean.

The idea of unreliable in-game characters isn’t a bad one, but it doesn’t work out as well here as I think the designers intended. The problem? Castlevania II doesn’t offer enough detail and clarity to help you effectively sort out truth from fiction. While it’s all well and good for someone to tell you that you should hit your head against Deborah Cliff to make a hole to mislead you, that tip would be more obviously ridiculous if not for the fact that the real solution — kneeling in front of the cliff with a Red Crystal equipped for five seconds — is no less arcane or ridiculous. Simon’s Quest employs too much 8-bit logic to give deliberately misleading tips; rather than shake your head ruefully once you figure it out, you’re far more likely to shake your fist in annoyance because the real solution is equally dumb.

By and large, you can safely ignore any brown NPC. That’s not racism! I just mean the villagers who offer primarily lies and useless remarks wear clothes in an earth-tone palette. The brown-clad folks who don’t actively mislead you mostly offer empty pleasantries that burn through your clock time.

On the other hand, NPCs in other color schemes — grey and blue, primarily — offer beneficial advice and items. In most cases, you need to shell out precious money for their help, but others will simply give you things. One dude begs you to take 50 hearts’ worth of Laurels for free. Another will turn your Morning Star into the almighty Flame Whip. A couple of tall, grey guys scattered throughout the game allow you to trade up your crystals to solve the next puzzle in the chain of progression.

Others function as riddles in themselves, like the ferryman. Talk to him normally and he cackles and takes you to one area (including a town where you can buy the Morning Star, which is right decent of him). Talk to him while holding Dracula’s Heart and he takes you to the third Mansion. I suppose if a crazed-looking man came up to me with a bloody heart in his hands and demanded a ride, I’d take him wherever he wanted to go, too.

A lot of the game’s lies can be worked through with patience and trial-and-error. I played this game enough as a kid that I tried out pretty much everything. For instance, the guy who tells you the ferryman likes garlic? If you try to use garlic while on the boat, it falls through into the river. If you drop it on the shore, nothing happens besides you having wasted 50 hearts. And others are just amusing; I always liked the lady who promises Simon a midnight rendezvous on the riverbank. Go to the river at midnight and she’s nowhere to be seen. Turns out she was just giving him the brush-off, the medieval equivalent of giving him the wrong phone number.

In the later towns of the game, the tone of NPCs becomes more directly hostile (including demands to straight-up get the heck out of Dodge). The introduction to Dracula’s Curse expands on this, describing in detail how the people of Transylvania distrust the holy powers of the Belmont family almost as much as they fear Dracula, and that the clan forever lives as pariahs in the land they protect. It’s a nice bit of world-building that begins here.

Still, you want to find the Graveyard Duck, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

So, towns.

Simon’s Quest breaks its world, effectively, into three play spaces: Towns, the Transylvanian countryside, and Mansions. Each operates by its own rules, although the general means by which Simon navigates them remains consistent. It’s not like a tactical RPG where you have battlefields, towns, and a world map, each of which you deal with in a different way. The sidescrolling platformer rubric holds fast everywhere.

This, of course, makes for some very silly-looking towns when you stop and think about it: Stacked, three-story façades, like high-rise strip malls in the middle of the forest. But, you know, 8-bit limitations and all that. You make your allowances and accept the fact that this is surely meant to represent a more logical, real-world construction.

Towns in Simon’s Quest work exactly like you’d expect to see in an RPG (EXCEPT FINAL FANTASY XIII LOL… sigh). They’re combat-free zones where you can speak with NPCs, recover health in a centrally located church, and find merchants who’ll sell you essential goods. They’re not entirely without hazards; the platforms seem to have been designed specifically for the purpose of sending you plummeting to your death in the river if you miss a jump.

Also, towns (more than any other space in the game) reflect the day/night cycle; villagers only walk around during daylight. At night, zombies appear. Zombies suck. They offer no meaningful experience points and very little cash, but they cause NPCs to shutter their doors. Towns effectively become worthless at night; Simon can’t even trade with merchants or stop in the church. What kind of crappy church keeps banker’s hours? This is exactly why we needed the Protestant Reformation.

Simon’s Quest begins in the town of Jova. Coincidentally, the game’s problems also begin in Jova. Well, maybe “problems” is too strong a term, but it’s here that you get a sense of how unconventional Simon’s Quest will turn out to be. With no preamble or foreword (aside from an attract mode enticing you to “step into the shadows of the hell house” — no thanks?), Simon finds himself simply plopped down in a village where old people wander aimlessly and a weird, low-tempo, almost harmonica-like variation on “Vampire Killer” plays. You can easily fall into the water and die. Most of the people you talk to make no sense or outright lie to you. There are no immediate threats. No score or stage info appears, only a discreet health meter. You can’t whip the candelabras! What kind of mad world is this?

At the same time, you have just enough time to thoroughly explore Jova and get a sense of how things work before the game’s first nightfall, so despite the initially discombobulating sense you take away from the beginning of the game it does its job quite nicely without ever leading you by the hand. “Discovery” is the keyword here. You begin near the west/left edge of town, but should you head out that direction you will quickly discover what a bad idea that is: A pair of powerful, two-headed, fire-breathing monsters will smash into you and throw you back into town with damage recoil before your feeble starting whip can hope to take them down. It’s not fatal, and the church “upstairs” will allow you to recover, but the message is clear: Don’t go left yet.

Inside of Jova, you find yourself forced to make your first interesting decision. You can buy three items in Jova in total — the Holy Water, the White Crystal, and the Thorn Whip — but the sum cost is 200 hearts. You begin with 50: Enough to buy either the crystal or Holy Water, but not both. The first time you play, you won’t know what either item does, so it’s all more or less the same and you’ll mostly likely stand around to the east of town farming cash. In subsequent playthroughs, however, you’ll know both the purpose of each tool and about the overall game time limit as well, so you’ll have to decide which to take right away and when it’s best to return. The Holy Water is probably the most useful tool in the game and has value almost immediately, but unless you’re very lucky or very good at memorization, you need the White Crystal to complete the first mansion. These tradeoffs in the name of efficient play help make Simon’s Quest interesting to revisit.

By and large, every town more or less takes the form of Jova. Some are bigger than others, some smaller. Some have hidden merchants. Some have more helpful citizens than other. The most interesting town, I think, is Ghulash…

…an almost completely abandoned village immediately outside Dracula’s castle. It’s desolate and grey (surely inspired by Dragon Quest‘s town of Haukness), with the cemetery immediately outside its western walls considerably larger than the town itself. The one resident of Ghulash is a crazy man who invites you to live there with him. Uh… thanks for the offer, dude.

Of course, this badly contradicts Rondo of Blood. No wonder Konami treated that game as apocrypha!

Simon’s Quest works, by and large, like Castlevania. You control Simon Belmont. He walks (hobbles) along, whips stuff, uses subweapons, jumps, gets knocked back into pits when he collides with enemies, and seeks to destroy Dracula. The general details are almost indistinguishable at a glance, except now Simon wears dark armor instead of leather.

Take a closer look, however, and you’ll find quite a few differences. For starters, the original whip upgrade system has gone right out the window. Powering up the Vampire Killer took all of about 10 seconds in most cases in Castlevania, and the second- and third-stage upgrades would be revoked upon death. Not here: Simon begins with the weak leather whip, but once he acquires an upgrade it’s permanent. The trade-off is that upgrades no longer simply drop from candles or enemies. No, now you have to buy them. With cash money. And by “cash money” I mean “hearts.”

This makes an insane amount of sense, actually. Hearts served as currency in the first game, too, but the “economy” there revolved entirely around spending hearts for subweapons. Simon’s Quest expands the number of things you need to “buy” and therefore adjusts the way hearts work, slightly. The game no longer provides candles for farming random drops; now, you can only gather hearts from enemies. (This also earns you experience points, unless you’ve exceeded the current area’s level threshold.) On the plus side, enemies don’t just drop single hearts. Multiple-heart drops appear pretty often, usually from tougher foes. So, you kill bad guys, collect hearts, and buy stuff that you keep forever (except stakes, which have to be purchased anew in each Mansion). Upgrade the Vampire Killer to a thorn whip, it’s a thorn whip forever. Get the flame whip and you will always be able to burn away bad guys with fire. Forever!

As I mentioned before, an invisible time limit counterbalances the temptation to grind for cash. It’s awfully tempting, in that very first town, to duck outside and whip dudes until you can afford a crystal and a whip upgrade (play efficiently enough and you can scrape up just enough to buy them before business closes for the night), but if you spend too much time doing that the in-game clock will turn over and you’ll get a worse ending. Or “worse” ending; more on that sometime later. I don’t think there’s any in-game indication that you’re on a schedule, but the day/night cycle does hint at it.

Yes, a diurnal cycle. I can’t imagine Simon’s Quest is the first game to include day and night, though the only prior instances that come to mind are adventure games and RPGs. Ultima III had its moongate system, for instance. But action games? I think Castlevania may well have been an innovator on that front. Day turns to night and vice-versa, each time with a memorable snippet of text, at 6:00 on the dot. Monsters become twice as powerful at night — “powerful” in this case meaning they become twice as hard to destroy — and villagers close their doors. Aside from the handful of free-roaming NPCs in the wilderness and folks in Mansions, you’re basically locked away from character interaction between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. This, more than the amped-up hostility of the bad guys, makes nighttime in Simon’s Quest feel lonely and intimidating.

The overall time limitation combined with the go-anywhere feel of the world and the steady march of day/night transitions creates what is, by far, Simon’s Quest‘s most compelling feature. The overall difficult level may skew low thanks to the too-forgiving continue system and laughable bosses, but the game nevertheless creates a sense of tension. Do you press on toward the next goal despite not having the calibre of equipment you’d prefer? Do you lurk near the entrance to town as sunset nears or sunrise approaches, or do you go about your business? Again, the way time stops ticking once you enter a Mansion does undermine this risk/reward mechanic somewhat, but the sense of safety and empowerment that cities offer makes delving into the far reaches of the Transylvanian wilderness an occasionally daunting task — not unlike venturing far from town in a game like Etrian Odyssey or Wizardry. It’s interesting that when people talk about how Simon’s Quest resembles an RPG they’re usually speaking of the light leveling mechanics or cursory inventory system, when in fact the game draws upon RPG influences in much deeper and more subtle ways.