31 MORE Days, 31 MORE Screams: Day 7 (Demon's Crest)

I picked a screenshot this time to show how
danged pretty this game is. 

It is time once again, as so often happens this month, to dive headlong into the world of the monstrous. The Demon Realm, even. Those who know me and know of my weird gonzo hard game prowess know that I eventually took some sort of liking to the Ghosts n Goblins series. So much so that the original game was an immediate pick for last year's marathon, and was written about here. Logically, I could have jumped to one of the other core entries for this year... but there isn't much more meat on that bone. Oh, they added in lots of new mechanics and whatnot as the games progressed. New armors, weapons, magic spells, a double jump, all that good shit. The core of its chaotic quarter-munching nature never really left it, and that whole "beat the game twice" bullshit actually stayed around. Hell, the only game to really evolve that chestnut is the Wonderswan one which added in a singular branching path to make you take a different stage 3 on your second loop. Funny how that works, huh? No, I've spilled enough complaining about the random chaos and the horseshit ending requirements for these games... for now, anyway. Let's take a different approach. Let's talk about Ghosts n Goblins games for normal people.

I feel that I should clarify that previous sentence. I do not intend it as some gatekeeping bullshit to keep "the normies" away from my elite hard horror-themed video games. Rather, I mean it in the sense that us folks who play/enjoy/do well at what are considered to be some of the hardest action plaformers of all time are fucking monstrous. "Normal" in this case means "a game with a goddamned reasonable level of difficulty not made to siphon quarters". In this particular case, Ghosts n Goblins has seen two spinoff side series over its 30+ year run. The latter of these, Maximo, is basically just a spiritual successor that plays out as a 3D platformer. There are only two Maximo games and they're both pretty solid, though the first is a bit rough around the edges with a paid save system and somewhat uncooperative camera. Check them out if you so choose, but it's the spinoff series which came out while Ghosts n Goblins was still a thing that we're peeking at today: Gargoyle's Quest. The first two games in the series came out on the Game Boy and NES respectively, and in them you play as the demon Firebrand. Firebrand's a Red Arremer (aka those swoopy red devil shitheads from the main series) and you adventure with him in the Demon Realm as you fight other demons, do platforming stages, and gain interesting new upgrades and powers to make yourself stronger. They're quite good, but I wanted to focus on the third and final game in this series. 1994's Demon's Crest for Super Nintendo is somewhat different from its predecessors, but it makes up for these differences by being quite fantastic. Another wide-angle lens as we zoom out and take stock of this.


Demon's Crest is somewhat of an open-ended affair, with more focus on being an exploratory platformer. Immediately this makes things far more palatable than its core series, as any fancy upgrades to your offense you might fine won't be taken away in literally one hit. No, you keep what you find and what you find is vast. Coming from Capcom, it's hard not to call it a gothic horror-themed Mega Man X. Firebrand starts off shooting a piddly little flame blast and being able to hover indefinitely with his wings, but gradually you power up and get ever stronger. Elemental crests change you into different demon forms with different abilities and attacks, there are bottles and scrolls that can be used as potions and spells if you find a magic shop and pay up, and you've got talismans to give you more reliable drops and whatnot. Much like its exploratory platformer kin, there's a real sense of power growth that comes from gaining these items and being able to blast everything to bits. It also helps that, of the three games, Demon's Crest is the most visually stunning. That 16-bit power does its work, and you can tell the little system that could is chugging in particularly busy places... but by god, does this game look good. Its story, such as it is, has some interesting beats about the demons warring over the magical crests and betraying one another for power and whatnot. This is the only game in the series not to have any cameos from Ghosts n Goblins series bosses as NPCs or enemies or anything; everything here is quite original, save Firebrand himself... and even he's a Red Arremer in name only. Hell, he ended up in Marvel vs. Capcom games! That's not a generic Red Arremer; it's Firebrand. It's not a perfect game; some of the powerups are a little too well hidden, and it does have some teeth to it. Still, it's solid! If the mere thought of playing a Ghosts n Goblins game sends you running for cover, I'd say you should check this out. Hell, do all of the Gargoyle's Quest games as they're all quite good in their own right; I just picked the SNES one for simplicity and because it's an easy "pick up and play" sort of thing. It's Ghosts n Goblins for a regular person who likes old video games but doesn't want to have their sense of being destroyed by a hard motherfucker. Hard not to like.