Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters (Gameboy) Review
Date Released: November 1991
Date Played: 1 March 2022
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters is the sequel to the classic game from the NES. It was the last game in the series for 21 years until the 3rd game in the series arrived on the Nintendo 3DS. While the game is obtuse, clunky, and not the most fun experience by today's standards, it was highly venerated at the time of its release and was even voted as the 18th best Gameboy game of all time by Nintendo Power.
Once again, you play as the classic protagonist, Pit, who is more well known from his presence in the Smash Bros. franchise than he is from his own game series. Gameplay is pretty much the same as the original NES game where you platform your way vertically upwards as the screen infinitely scrolls horizontally. For example, if you were to just walk to the right, the game would just loop forever. As you jump upwards from platform and platform you can work your way upwards towards the stage's exit. It's a unique approach to gameplay and I have always thought of it as working your way up a series of platforms on the outside of a cylindrical tower. You can work your way left or right as you circle the outside, but will have to eventually make your way to the top. It's the biggest feature of the 8bit Kid Icarus games and is synonymous with the series. The real question is whether this system is any good. I can't help but feel that if it were more fun we would have seen it in a lot more games that came afterwards.
In his search for 3 treasures, Pit will have to fight a wide variety of enemies by shooting them with his bow and arrow. Many of the enemies you face will be familiar if you've played the first game. You'll encounter the fear inducing reapers, upside down pots of infinitely falling snakes, the ever present 8-bit bats, and plenty of other odd monsters from mythology. As you work your way to the top, you will be entering many different doors that contain puzzles, challenges, shops, and the necessary upgrades. Sadly, many of these upgrades can only be acquired if you've completed some sort of task in the game's level before entering. I'm not exactly sure how these work, but it seems that it has something to do with how many enemies you've killed in the stage. Since you have no way to know what type of room is behind each door, it's a crap shoot when you enter. Of course, the doors close after you leave the room, so If you accidentally went into the shop without enough money, too bad. You're not going to be able to buy anything. Need that important arrow upgrade from your father? Too bad, you accidentally walked into the room before killing enough enemies and you get nothing. It's all extremely frustrating and if you haven't memorized all of the room locations, you'll need a guide to help you. You basically need to begin every stage by farming up a bunch of money so you'll have it already if you accidentally walk into a shop. This should also help you grab those upgrades from your father because you've already spent 15 minutes mindlessly killing the same snakes over and over again so, hopefully, that will fill the requirement for you to get an upgrade. It brings the pace of the game to a crawl and some sort of different door sprite for each type of room would have made the game much better.
Speaking of guides, the game is broken up into 3 worlds of 3 stages with a final dungeon at the end of each of them before going into the final boss encounter. These dungeons are convoluted mazes with traps, ruthless enemies, and paths that loop back on themselves to confuse you even more. So once again, you're going to need the power (NINTENDO POWER!) to help you through them. While this sort of thing was very common back in the 8-bit days, I feel like most people don't really have the patience for it these days. It really pads out the game and makes it feel like a slog. I thought about pulling out some graph paper to make my own maps, but then I remembered there are plenty of walkthroughs online. Needless to say, I was shocked to see that the dungeons were so complicated that they couldn't even put them into a text format and instead had to make bespoke maps of each one of them. After looking at one of these maps, I had to laugh to myself because it's just so blatantly designed to troll the gamer. To add to this, the bosses at the end of each stage are incredible bullet sponges taking around 75 hits each to kill. It's almost a comical how long these fights take and it's more of a battle of endurance rather than skill. If you die, you're sent back to the beginning of the stage which can be a little demoralizing, but at least you have infinite continues. So, if you're willing to just bash your head against the wall until you get it right, victory will eventually come.
The gameplay is fine but is nothing to write home about. Pit feels a little slippery and some of the trickier platforming is more harrowing than it needs to be. Also, the game suffers from a fair amount of slowdown and screen flickering when there are too many enemies on the screen. The graphics look fine for a Gameboy game and it's nice to be in a the setting of ancient Greece instead of the standard fantasy and sci-fi settings of so many other games. The music is upbeat but not very memorable and can be a very repetitive and grating on the ears. I eventually turned down the sound so I wouldn't have to listen to the music anymore. On a positive note, the game isn't as brutally difficult as the NES game, but it's still quite a challenge and you'll die a fair number of times. As you clear each world, you'll receive a health upgrade which will help out a good deal. However, you'll still feel underpowered and ill-equipped most of the time unless you're able to fully find all the upgrades and grind out enough money to buy plenty of healing potions (You'll have to kill 250 snakes to buy a single potion, by the way).
Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters just isn't a very fun game. The normal stages of each world are mostly tolerable, but each world's final dungeon is painfully frustrating. There are enemies that turn you into a helpless eggplant with no ability to attack until you find a cure somewhere else in the dungeon. Many times you'll get transformed, be forced to back-track 5 screens to get cured, fight your way back to where you were only to get transformed again, forcing you to repeat it all over. This honestly happened to me almost 8 times in a row in the second dungeon and almost drove me mad. It's a baffling mechanic and the fact that it's featured in every single dungeon is shocking. If it weren't for these maze-like dungeons the game would be ok, but considering they take about half the game, it really brings down the whole experience.
The older I get, the more I realize that a lot of these handheld games we played as kids just aren't as good as we imagined. While I never played this game as a child, I firmly believe that this game would fall into that same category. If it really is the 18th best Gameboy of all time, that makes the Gameboy one of the worst systems ever made with hardly any good games. Is that the case? I don't think so. I just think this game was highly overrated at the time.
Final Status: Played
Final Score: 5/10 (...meh)
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