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NES #10: Castlequest

Poor, misunderstood Castlequest...

Sep 23, 2009 10:22AM PST

Well, I finally finished Destiny of an Emperor on Friday afternoon; with the help of a dozen power pills and sheer luck, I finally killed Sima Yi and restored the Han Dynasty. Oh, how I love rewriting history... for those who don't know the original history of the Three Kingdoms era in China, Shu, the kingdom under Liu Bei, was actually the first of the three kingdoms to fall, yet in this game they are the final victors. And yet Capcom claims this is the "true story" of 2nd/3rd century China. This is somewhat like making a game about the U.S. Civil War and having the Confederates win (which can actually happen in the NES game North and South, but at least the programmers point out that you've rewritten history if you play as the South and beat the game).

(And in the time it took me to actually post this, I also beat Dr. Chaos... you'll notice a fun little contradiction in the text down below as a result. It's not too hard (played it on and off during a 24-hour period and got through the whole thing), but frustrating at times and plagued by permanent slowdown. That's FCI for you. Same people behind Hydlide and Phantom Fighter, which are also on this list... but in the words of Richard Nixon, "more on that later.")

Also, I finally tested all six new games, and sixteen off-brand Q-tips later (and a little bit of 70% rubbing alcohol... hasn't hurt any of my games so far), they're all working just fine. I played each one for a few minutes; Yoshi's Cookie is a little more ghetto-tastic than I remember (it reeks of "this is a so-so NES version of an SNES game," much like "Mario is Missing" does), Gradius is going to kick my butt, Silent Service is about as counter-intuitive as the flight sim portion of Infiltrator (don't throw away that instruction manual, people), and Dungeon Magic will probably require graph paper to survive. None of these fall into the "absolutely awful" category... yet. We'll see what happens when we get to them.

As for Top Gun and its sequel... well, they aren't quite as bad as I thought they would be. I sat down long enough to play the first mission of Top Gun, and after getting missile'd a couple of times (once from a guy on my six), I got to the plane landing sequence...

...and landed safely on the first try.

I'm not sure what happened. Maybe it was luck; maybe I'm just awesome; maybe everyone else is a wimp. I'd rather go with the first option, as it's the least egocentric one, and it leaves me with a little intrigue for when I get to those games again... which will be awhile, since they're #79 and #80 respectively at the moment...


But anyway. You came here to find out about Castlequest, right? Right? The famed NES game that has terrible music, lots of spikes, and will probably force you to throw in the towel after you realize you wasted a few keys? Yes, that's the one. My purpose here today is to give you the *true* story of Castlequest, but that's debatable, since my opinions are still opinions despite being based on a full playthrough of the game. All in all, I would rate it a pinch higher than most people would since I actually stuck around to beat it, but... well, I'm probably getting ahead of myself.

So what is Castlequest, you say? It's another one of those "save-the-princess" side-scrolling games, and part of a brief series that started on the MSX computer over in Japan. Margarita has been captured by the Mad Miser and is wasting away (searching for her lost shaker of salt?) in a cell in his castle. You, as Prince Raphael, must rescue her; rather than going after the Miser himself, though, you weave around through dozens of rooms in a gigantic labyrinth, solving puzzles, killing enemies, and collecting keys. Lots and lots of keys. Collecting keys is one of the main things you'll remember after playing this; if you don't believe me, check out the status bar in the screenshot below:

Starting screen

As you can also see, there are various other goodies to collect, and a few types of enemies to block your way. Not all are pictured here, but there are knights, which walk back and forth and occasionally fire an arrow at you; giant cats, walk around, jumping when you do; bishops, which cannot be killed with your sword; fire spirits, which float up and down when you jump (and are also immune to your sword; wizards, which summon enemies; killer plants, which pop out of the ground every once in a while to take a bite out of you. I think that's it, but it's been a few months since the full run... anyway, some of these can be killed with your sword (more like a dagger if you ask me), while others must be crushed by slow-moving elevators, crates, jars, or other things that just happen to be lying around.

Like I said, though, the primary point of this game is to collect lots of keys and make your way through several dozen rooms without wasting too many of them; if you find yourself short a key or two towards the end, you're basically screwed, and you'll have to start the whole thing over from scratch. This alone is enough to turn most people away very quickly; although the game is extremely generous with lives (you start out with 50 in the NES version, but only 4 in the Famicom version, which is still enough to get an experienced player through), you will, as GameFAQs reviewer ASchultz puts it, "probably throw in the towel before you get to 30." If the game were a little less open-ended, this might be less of a problem, but you have to be very careful about how you spend your keys, and the best way to keep track of the 100 rooms in the castle is to map them out on paper. Since most gamers these days don't have the patience for that (except the ones who play games like Etrian Odyssey, where the "graph paper" is built into the game as a feature), many have dismissed this title as "Castlecrap" and moved on with their lives.

I, however, beg to differ. Sort of.

If you map things out, the game is a lot more reasonable, and it is in fact possible to beat without following a guide from beginning to end. After making some decent headway I skimmed ASchultz's map of the game to get a general idea of where the princess was, and after a particularly frustrating hour-plus-long run in which I was two pink keys short of winning (and I knew of at least one spot where I had wasted one of those), I went into his indepth guide and back to the map to figure out which side of her room I needed to enter in order to waste the fewest keys.

There are a few "keys" (aside from the colored ones you collect) to beating this game with minimal frustration and assistance, and they are as follows:

1. Get used to the slightly awkward yet very predictable jumping physics.

In Raphael's world, gravity does not cause objects to accelerate or decelerate as they rise or fall; rather, when he jumps, he goes up at a consistent rate, hovers in the air for a bit, and then falls at the same rate he rose. That "hovering" period is critical for jumping over certain enemies (particularly bishops, which don't go down with a stab of your sword) and getting over spike pits. It feels weird at first, but since jumping is a fairly slow process, it's quite predictable after you've played for awhile, so even the tricky jumps aren't terribly hard; you just have to "calculate" to see if they're possible, and then time them accordingly.

2. Know the finer points of block-pushing puzzles.

Most objects in the game behave in a somewhat predictable fashion, but the pulleys are a bit confusing at first, and most screens involving them are pretty daunting at first glance:

Block puzzle before

However, using them is a much simpler matter than you might think. In order to use a pulley, that grey block with arrows *must* be under the horizontal portion of the pulley. Pushing to the left moves the lift up; pushing to the right moves the lift down. If the lift cannot move further, you can still push the block, but the lift will stay put. With that in mind, block-pushing puzzles can be solved with a little bit of patience.

Block puzzle - after

Note that the blocks now stack up to the door; one funny (or perhaps annoying to some) thing about this game is that you must be standing next to a door to open it. You cannot merely jump into a door and unlock it, or else this entire puzzle would have been pointless.

Also note the block in the lower left corner. It is possible for a block to rest on the edge of a platform like that, with half of it dangling off the edge. This is *extremely* important for some puzzles later; you can actually stack a bunch of blocks in this manner and defy the laws of physics in some interesting ways.

3. Draw a crude map of every room you can.

This may seem tedious, but it's going to be difficult to remember every single room and what keys it holds. Some rooms are a waste of time and keys to even enter, but it's good to map those as well on your early runs. That's why it's important to...

4. Know how to "restart" rooms.

This can be the difference between life and death in Castlequest. If you are in fact stuck, there is a way to undo your previous moves. In fact, for those who save their manuals (or download a manual scan online), there's this little tidbit that will save your butt on several occassions:


Sub-Command Mode
them wherever you can.


Granted, it would be nice if you could press select while paused to do this (select while unpaused brings up the map if you have it), but if nothing else, you can unplug your sole controller, plug it into slot two, press A or B, plug it back in slot one, and continue onward. This is one of the more nagging flaws of this game that I have trouble excusing, but it didn't affect me too much at least, since I have two working controllers. Anyway, this brings up a menu that lets you revert a room to its condition upon you last entering it, or go back to the previous room and revert *both* rooms to their condition upon you last entering them. Like I said, this will save your butt big time when you're dealing with rooms you haven't visited before, or when you squander a key to go into a room that's a complete waste of your time.

5. Learn the tricks to saving keys.

There are several ways to do this, but I will mention only a few. First of all, take a look at this room:

Note the yellow door in the middle. Is there any reason to enter it? Of course not; you can just use the safes to jump to the platform above and go around it. Several doors can be avoided in this manner, although figuring out which ones this applies to is not always that simple.

Also, keep in mind that if you go in a room, get a couple of keys, and die, you'll appear at the start of the room, but you'll have the keys you got. Below is my favorite example of this.

Saving keys 1


Saving keys 2

Grab the keys, then kill yourself...

Saving keys 3

And presto! You appear at the start of the room, one life less, but with keys in hand. We can avoid using the green door that way, since we will otherwise be short on green keys later on.

Lastly, not all keys are created equal. The yellow ones are super-common, but the dark red are pretty rare. Keep this in mind, as there will be times where you can "trade" a more common key for a rarer key by going in a certain door. However, I have been in situations where I had enough of the rarer keys but was missing something more common, like a light blue, since the doors for rare keys seem to be a little more common as well.

It is actually possible to bypass over half the rooms in the game and still beat it; I read somewhere that there was a speedrun someone had done that only took a little more than 20 minutes, and I think my final solution was somewhat similar to this one (although I can tell you it took me a lot more than 20 minutes, not counting all the retries and trial-and-error beforehand). I haven't seen the speedrun myself, though, so I'm not sure.

The game is more likely to get you stuck than kill you off, but enough patience and enough affinity for puzzle-solving will get you successfully to the end. Also, the beginning is not as much of a crapshoot as the first few minutes of Dr. Chaos are (which I am about to start playing in a bit, with the hope that I can find the first warp zone without wondering around aimlessly for an hour), although the rest of the game is not so nice. Castlequest is very nice to you at first, but after that, it can be a pain to navigate.

This was my experience, though: after mapping out the early rooms, I found a room with a bunch of doors requiring rare keys, and this made me suspicious. In time I figured out where these keys were and figured out how to best ration out my common ones, and I made it to the lower-right corner of the map with quite a few keys in my arsenal. I wrote down my key totals at that point as a reference, knowing I was probably about 1/3rd of the way through. After that point, it's difficult to get stuck until the very very end, where the game suddenly throws a bunch of doors at you just to hack you off (seventy-something rooms of exploration, culminating in failure), but with further mapping, a bit of assistance, and some further deductions as far as key efficiency, I had a solution. Unfortunately, I had to play through the game several times to get it just right, but it is, in fact, possible. A stronger person than I could have done it with no assistance, perhaps... maybe.

It also doesn't help that oxygen tanks, once collected, do not reappear, so if you get across a body of water, you may not be able to cross it again. Invincibility rays, however, you can go back for, and they actually protect you from water; this is important, as some of the faster solutions to the game involve backtracking through water after touching an invincibility ray.

The other thing I forgot to mention, though, is the music. Most of the tunes are in the same key, and they are rather short. The main one you'll be hearing is roughly 20 seconds long, and, although it's kind of catchy, it repeats over and over. And over and over and over. And over and over and over and over and over and over and... well, you get the idea. There are a few other tunes, though, for the title screen, invincibility (yes, there is an invincibility power-up in this game, but you'll probably give up before you find it), grabbing an oxygen tank, finding a fairy, and rescuing the princess. The scary thing is, I've heard worse NES music in two places: from certain NES hacks or pirate carts, and at least one game further down the list... but I won't spoil the surprise.

All in all, it's not a bad game; it's just so unforgiving that most people will give up on it. Your typical neo-retro indie sidescrollers that you see people churning out in Game Maker and the like are more likely to embrace the kick-your-butt difficulty that Battletoads displays; obscure, difficult solutions to complex puzzles, however, are not really in style anymore. Oh well. I still place the game at a 5 or so, since it takes more than that for a game to truly be bottom-of-the-barrel...

On a lighter note, Clash at Demonhead is next; this is one of those gems that everyone should give a shot, even though certain aspects of it feel a little dated. Somewhere in midst of the Dragon Warrior trilogy my blogs should be caught up...


Where/when purchased: Game Force... I think.

Cost: $5.

Date Started: 7-16-2009, 3:24 AM

Date Finished: 7-19-2009, 3:26 PM

Space in the NES notebook: Over two pages for a really crude map of most of the castle, and several more lines for footnotes on particular rooms. And even then I still got some help.

FAQs/assistance used: After figuring out about 1/3rd of the game, I referenced a map a couple of times to see where my final destination was, and towards the end I used that map (along with another guide) to unravel the puzzle of the last room. Figuring out which keys to save where, however, was mostly a journey of my own... a long, tedious journey.

Favorite part?: Probably solving some of the trickier block-pushing puzzles, or finding another spot where I could save a key. That and realizing

Hard mode?: No.

Play again?: Not planning on it; once is enough.

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Comments (3)

  • *Remembers the music in his head*

    Posted: Sep 24, 2009 12:00AM PST by  DTJAAAAM

    I generally don't side with the majority, but I'd have to agree when they say that this game is crap. Once again, you're a braver soul than I for tolerating the game long enough to finish it.

  • sluddgetrough
  • map?

    Posted: Mar 10, 2010 12:00AM PST by  sluddgetrough

    I have been google searching my butt off for a map of this game, but can't find one.  I know the game bundles with a map, I remember it from when I was little.  It even had little arrows on it suggesting different ways to go (though they never helped me get anywhere near the middle of the castle)  I find it hard to believe that no one on earth has scanned and posted that map online.  Even a homemade map would do, I just need some help.  Any ideas, guys?

  • Darkmetaly
  • I like it

    Posted: Feb 06, 2013 12:00AM PST by  Darkmetaly

    I played this game alot when i was a kid me and my dad spent hours in it. Its a good game its just very hard. I didnt give up on it esaly but dam this game is brutal. I played again not so long ago but it still kicked my ass congratulations on beating this game Elkovsky thats quite an accomplishment. this is propoply the hardest game i ever played.

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