One of the old video game review sites I read posted a review of this game a year and a half ago and I remember getting a little riled up about it. He talked the game up as being one of the hardest on the SNES, then gave up after getting killed repeatedly about 4 monsters into the game. At the time my memory of the game wasn't one of a hard game. I know my brother used to rent this a fair bit and we were both pretty good at it. Of course we'd played a lot of the C64 Ghosts and Goblins game and maybe we're just really, really good at games? I don't know.
Unhand my blue haired beauty!
I loaded the game up and got right into it. The first level started with a rock I couldn't jump over. I mashed some buttons, discovered I had a double jump, and was off to the races. I was double jumping all over the place because that's what you do when you can double jump. Of course it turns out you can't change direction while in the air (except by jumping the second time which defies the laws of physics in many ways and lets you change direction). So I quickly started dying by coasting into enemies during my second jump. Ok, lesson learned... Only double jump when you have to, and never double jump at maximum velocity toward the edge of the screen since enemies could spawn where you can't avoid them.
Green armour!
Ghouls 'N Ghosts features a lot of power-ups you can obtain as you play. You start with silver armour which absorbs one point of damage. You can get green armour which powers up your attack but still only absorbs one hit. If you have green armour you can get gold armour which really powers up your attack and still only absorbs one hit. Then you have a wide variety of primary weapons. Lance, dagger, bow, magical fire... Magical fire sounds awesome but has the real problem that you can only have 2 of them on the screen at once. So if you throw two of them to your right you actually have no way to damage enemies from the left until the old ones completely finish their animation. It sucks! Well, you have to adjust to it, anyway.
A very popular screen in this game.
The early platforming part wasn't too bad. I got the hang of using the weapons properly. I got the hang of being careful with my jumps. I learned the patterns of all the enemies and could make it to the halfway point of the level pretty handily. At the halfway mark a giant wave sweeps up from the background and wipes out about two-thirds of the land. If you were standing in a spot that got wiped out you were instantly killed. There was no warning. There was no way to know which spots were safe. If you died you had to go back to the very start. And while I could beat that stuff it still took a fair amount of time and was by no means guaranteed.
So I had to memorize safe spots from the wave. Fine, got it... And then died to the next wave. Ok, get back there, live through two waves... Get hit by a clam which knocks me backwards into a pit. Dead. Ok, get back. Manage to survive the third wave without warning... And then double jump my way into a pit. I give up.
Take a listen to the first stage music. This music is awesome. It properly conveys the feeling of being in a graveyard, attacked by zombies, but has an uplifting beat because you know you can win if you work at it. Which is how I feel about this game. It's hard, but it isn't exactly unfair. On the one hand it sucks that the wave thing will instantly kill practically everyone who gets to it the first time. But on the other hand it doesn't take out random sections of the terrain. It takes out precise sections and you can totally memorize where to stand. This game feels a lot like pattern recognition. Demon dogs will kill you when they first show up but you learn how they jump and then can beat them pretty easily.
Maybe that's why I remember my brother and I beating this game as kids? We had the time and the inclination to die over and over again while adding new patterns to our memories? It certainly helped that we had the video game motor skills to pull off the moves needed once we figured out what those moves were. And plenty of spare time to sink in.
When I think of video games of my youth this game actually really personifies the era. You die a lot. And that's ok! Just keep trying. The game doesn't apologize for what it is. And while I don't currently have the time or inclination to get good at it again that's not a flaw in the game itself. I like that the game is hard, but ultimately beatable. Video games today have fallen away from this point of view (look at 'looking for raid' raids in World of Warcraft, for example) but that doesn't mean I have to like the change. I liked the way games were and I'm going to reward this game with a good rating for really following the old school way.
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