Customer Reviews

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is my favorite Castlevania game of all time and always will be.

You are Simon Belmont with the classic whip, trying to defeat the one who wants to keep the world shrouded in darkness, Count Dracula. As Simon, you go to different towns talking to different townspeople, going to Churches to replenish life, many different mansions to gather the different parts of Dracula. You get many different kinds of whips, including my favorite, the Flame Whip. You also get the classic subweapons like holy water, knife, and cross.

The mansions that you go through have one of the best pieces of music ever in a Castlevania game. As well as the title screen where you input the password and the music Bloody Tears. This game also lets you level up but it's still the adventure game. It's more action and adventure than anything.

The classic Ferry Man is reason enough to own this game. The classic line "I'll take you to a good place, heh heh heh" was one of the coolest things in the game. Along with the lines "What a horrible night to have a curse" at night and "The morning light has vanquished the horrible night" at daylight. I'll never understand why so many people hate this game. I keep hearing "it's not like the original." Oh please! I must be the only person who doesn't compare games and just plays games as their own. Whoever cannot appreciate this masterpiece is just very closed minded.

Oh yeah, there are 3 different endings for this and this game is so much better than 99% of the games out there today. Graphics don't mean a thing, it's the amazing platforming and adventure elements that make this game a must own for Castlevania fans!

If you have never played Simon's Quest, play it! And if you've played it before, play it again! It's one of a kind!!


"What A Horrible Night To Have A Curse!" Ha Ha Ha!

Castlevania II was the first in the series to take the free roaming approach to the game, and does it quite well. Symphony of the Night for the Playstation owes a great debt of inspiration from this game. There are a great many secrets to this game, some of which must be known about to even survive. Other situations can be worked around without knowing the secrets by clever use of the inventory system, a new addition to the series. The boss battles are quite fun, resembling Mega Man and of course the original Castlevania. Also added is a time mechanic, where all the shops close down, the townspeople all stay inside their homes, and all the monsters enter the city much stronger than usual whenever nighttime begins! "What a horrible night to have a curse"

The sounds and music score are on par with most of the rest of the Castlevania series; in short, fantastic. If you are new to the series or were never impressed by other installments of the game, give this one a shot. You will not be disappointed.

When you are 7 years old in the deep south, and it's the 80's, sometimes you just have to play whatever games they happened to have at K-Mart...

For some reason, Castlevania II never seemed to be one of them. None of my friends had it either... However, they did have CV2 at the video rental store... But my mom always said that only "lower-class" people rent from video stores.

Therefore, as much as I really wanted this game. As much as I wished and yearned for it, I really only got to play it a couple of times as a child. Surely not enough to really even get past the 2nd mansion...

Oh! But the graphics! And the music!! And the non-linear gameplay!!! Ooooh it was so great in my head when I was not playing it! (which was pretty much all the time).

Well, I just scored a copy from Amazon, and I must say that it really is everything I remembered it to be! Here is to resurfaced childhood memories in a tangible format! yay!

Castlevania II is not very good, seriously, the game is so convoluted, and talking to people is no help as many of the NPCs lie to you, and the text itself is cryptic. I don't know if its a bad translation or what, but that is the games biggest shortfall, so if you buy the game, find issue September/October 1988 issue of Nintendo Power, because you won't get through it on your own.

The music is great, the first appearance of CV classic "Bloody Tears", and it sounds great rendered by the NES hardware though the Famicom Disk System version has superior sound due to the use of FM synthesis.

To sum it up, it plays like SOTN, meaning it has alot of the elements like levels, buying items....basically RPG elements, but SOTN did it better as it did stuff to compliment the boringness of such a game play style and makes the game fun.

Now that you think of it, this game is an adventure style CV which is a direct sequel to an Action Style CV. Symphony of the Night is an adventure style Castlevania game, and a direct sequel to an Action Style CV (Rondo of Blood), weird.

i love the game one of the best nes game series there is altho the first ones the best of the series

I've had a huge amount of respect for the Castlevania series. Albeit the games have been extremely difficult I thought it was truly liberating whenever you made it really far into the game, killing tons of super-hard enemies and dying like, three trillion times. It was SO fulfilling.

Then, came Castlevania 2.

Many reviews have been made about this game by many notable people. Just go on Youtube: The Angry Video Game Nerd (reviewed it TWICE), Egoraptor... it's insane. Yeah, OK, the game is fun. But it has several pretty big flaws that have plagued the game and frustrated gamers and fans of the series for years.

THE GOOD:
Castlevania 2 feels like a Castlevania game, for one. The controls and weapons all work the same, you get infinite Water and you even get to use Dracula's body parts as items! His rib acts as a shield, his nail lets you break certain blocks with your whip, and his heart makes it possible to go to another area by showing it to the ferryman at the Dead River... or whatever it's called. It's fun to wail on enemies and there are plenty OF them. The game is also much, MUCH easier than the first and third Castlevania games. This is a double-edged sword. It means you can plow through enemies MUCH faster, but they don't truly serve a legitimate challenge... until NIGHT FALLS.
The game was one of the first I remember to have day and night in it. During the day, enemies were lame and gave you small hearts, whatever. And then "WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE." appears on the screen and then the enemies' attack power doubles, you only do half damage, and they give you much bigger heart rewards upon being killed.

Also many people in reviews complain that there's no way to heal yourself in this game and that's been the killer for a lot of gamers. The "Pork Chop" is gone, but now you can go to churches in towns. That's good and all but some towns don't even HAVE churches, meaning you will have to do a LOT of hoofin' it to get to a place with a church. BUT!!! You can level up with enough hearts, and upon doing so your health will completely fill. But the more you level up the harder it is to get to the next level and the more hearts you gotta collect for it.

THE BAD:
Castlevania is a great game, but it just wasn't properly mapped out. The game designers were probably used to the Action Game formula so they stuck with it and then built the in-game world around the player. Nice and all but things are thrown EVERYWHERE and it takes a bit of trial and error to figure out where to go next, if you don't figure it out by accident which happens more often than not by throwing Holy Water everywhere. The towns are hard to navigate through and thanks to the HAZARD OF WATER, you can accidentally fall off a ledge and into some water and end up losing a life. Dang it!!!

The prompt for the "horrible night" stays up for about fifteen seconds. In the time it first appears you can calmly set the controller down, walk to your refridgerator, drink a Dr. Pepper, crush the can, and come back and it will be night/day... Everybody knows this is annoying but when I was playing the game I thought it was a good thing because I was able to take a swig o' my drink or adjust my position on the couch to be more comfortable. You'll have plenty of downtime with that prompt, so make use of it!!!

As stated you can stock up on hearts. They act as not only your currency, but also as the ammo for certain weapons like the flame and the Daggers. What? Y'all didn't realize that? Yeah, it's just like the first Zelda with the stupid bow and arrow which drains one rupee with each arrow fired! What I think sucks the most about the hearts, though, is not the fact that it takes so long to grind for 'em, but you can only - ONLY - hold 256. There are FOUR zeros in that slot. Looks like this on the inventory screen: (<3 -- 0000) Now my question is, if you wanna save up money for a bunch of awesome equipment and stuff and there are FOUR freaking zeros in that slot, why can you not even hold five percent of what would potentially be 9999 hearts??? It's probably the same flaw that most 8-bit games had at the time, like Mario. Or Pac-Man. 256 was the killswitch number. Fortunately if you game over you respawn on the same screen in which you were killed, but your hearts are wiped out. ALL OF THEM. Even your EXP tally is reset to 0... how unfair. Just try not to die, that'll teach you a lesson, won't it??? Oh well, MOVING ON!!!

Another thing that really sucks about this game is the difficulty. It's NOT hard, it's EASY. Not that having an easy game is a bad thing, but when I spend ten seconds killing a boss in this game that took me eleven days in Castlevania 1 (I'm referring, of course, to Death), it's a HUGE letdown. Dracula isn't hard either, thanks to the AVGN showing us that. Enemies freeze when you hit them, allowing for an easy finish. Some enemies, early on, if you aren't strong enough, will WIPE YOU OUT. Totally unbalanced. This is another common complaint: The crystals. At first I had no idea I needed a white crystal. Later on you trade for a blue one, and it's use is lost on you. Then later on you get a red crystal (if you haven't given up by then) and you haven't a clue what to do! If it weren't for the internet this game would be impossible. Not because of the difficulty but because of the obscurity of direction. Also I wonder why you have to buy an Oak Stake in MANSIONS and then shoot them at the ball at the end of the stage to get Dracula's body part then backtrack out! That's another thing--the mansions. Not complicated, just deceitful and frustrating. Have your Holy Water handy.

OVERALL: I still think this is a great game, and only if you let the negative get to you, it will. Sure, it's TOO easy to just upgrade your whip and slay the bosses for the cross and the Golden Dagger, but it's pretty hard to complete the game and get the best ending unless you actually TRY. I passed it once with a walkthrough on the Wii, and again on an actual NES without a walkthrough. Surprisingly, I got a better ending on the NES version because I just played straight through. So yeah, it's a love it or hate it game. But my point is this: Konami makes ACTION games. This game would have played out better if it was an ACTION game, which it is, but it focuses too much on the RPG element, and that was a new, unexplored world for Konami. Epic fail. I have to say that if you're debating on getting this game, buy it and try it. It's only disappointing if you let it be. It's still an intriguing, interesting game with many positive features and that good ol' Castlevania flavor. So sink your teeth in and draw BLOOD!!! >:)

First of all, I love this game. The exploring aspect of it is fantastic, the music is awesome, and the visual presentation is great too.

That's not to say it doesn't have flaws though. For one, this game couldn't be any more cryptic (the townsfolk certainly don't help). Admittedly, I needed some assistance from an online guide for a few sections, and anyone who was able to get through this game without help has my respect. I also take issue to how easy the bosses are, all three of them (seriously, only 3 bosses?!). In the first Castlevania (and the other entries in the series that I own), beating the bosses is so satisfying, because of the difficulty. It made me feel like I accomplished something. This game's bosses just don't give me that same feeling, and you can even skip Death altogether (You can skip that mask thing too, but if I remember correctly it gives you an item that you need). Like the other two bosses, Dracula was all too easy to beat. It seriously took no effort to beat him.

I really just wanted to establish the negative aspects of this game in the review, because others have explained far better than I can the positive aspects that Castlevania II has to offer. Though it is flawed, it is worth the purchase anyway.

Simons Quest is also a very good castlevania
in my opinion the graphics are much better
than the first and third castlevania in
the nes series it also has some role playing
elements (Which i love!)the forest is very very
nicely done castlevania 2 simons quest
you should pick it up!

The music and graphics are great, it is a fun game, but I find a major problem: the secrets are too hard to discover. Oh, so I have to equip Dracula's heart to get the ferryman to take me to where I need to be to continue the game? That makes no sense, and many are the times I've gotten so frustrated with nonsense like this that I end up turning off the game and going to an online walkthrough to tell me what I need to do next. Other than that I think it is a great game, one of the best for NES.

OIKX KQAU RT2S S5AA..... there, check if my memory is ok after 20 years or so (oh my GOD over 20 years since I first played!!). Anyway, I'm pretty sure that's the one, go all the way to your left.... then down the stairs, and all the way to your right and you'll meet with the guy, you ARE fully loaded at this point so go ahead and just unleash hell to Mr Dracula!