The Lying Bastards of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
** Originally published at Collider in September, 2021 **
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest arrived on the Nintendo Entertainment System in December of 1988. Its predecessor had arrived the year prior, establishing what would become the roots of one of the longest-running franchises in gaming history. But Simon’s Quest was a different beast than its older sibling. Instead of featuring structured levels and traditional platforming elements, players were presented with an open world, complete with a day-night cycle, a modest inventory, and a game that relied more on puzzle-solving than on precision combat. It’s hard to argue Simon’s Quest wasn’t ambitious.
I am not here to give a review of Simon’s Quest, just the lying NPC bastards littered across its Transylvanian populace, how their presence destroys many of those aforementioned good intentions, but also it kind of defines everything wonderful about the game.
Several of the towns scattered across Simon's Quest have a church within the city limits, so I know the townsfolk are familiar with the Ten Commandments in some capacity. Add in the fact that their cursed countryside rests in the shadow of a vampiric realm and it becomes reasonable to assume that many of these people have spent at least some of their time in the pews.
Apparently, they missed a few Sundays, as they have zero qualms about bearing false witness —to neighbors, vampires, or the one, sorry loser —Simon Belmont— who has shown up to deliver their putrid, forsaken hellscape from the eternal darkness. Sometimes, they talk cryptically. Other times, they just make shit up.
Unreliable characters are a crucial aspect of storytelling. That Simon’s Quest has such characters isn’t the problem; it is the lack of context that the player is provided to help untangle fact from fiction that creates the chaos. The nonsense starts right from get-go in the town of Jova. The first person you talk to says, “First thing to do in this town is to buy a White Crystal.” Fair enough. But then the next guy says, “There’s a crooked trader offering bum deals in this town.” And then right on cue, you stumble into the trader who is ready to sell you the White Crystal for 50 hearts. So, is this a scam?
The kink in the hose is that the localization of this game was notoriously brutal. Here is what these lines of dialogue were supposed to say: The literal translation of the first citizen should read, “Go and buy a White Crystal. Everything begins from there.” This sounds much more like a kind nudge from an NPC to help a new player get their bearings. The next line about the “crooked trader” should read like this: “In the towns, there are sellers who do business in hiding.” This essentially changes the meaning from “there’s some guy selling magic beans in the alley,” to “there are some potentially black-market merchants, who prefer not to advertise, in our town.” A small change this is not.
Next, we come to the ferryman at the river. Another citizen of Jova gives you this nugget: “Rumor has it, the ferryman at Dead River loves garlic.” Now, this translation is not terribly far from the literal translation: “I have heard that the favorite dish of the ferryman at the Dead River is garlic.”
But here’s the problem: The ferryman has exactly zero interest in garlic. If you try to give him garlic, it, like my faith in humanity, just vanishes into the river below. It must be mentioned that there is actually a puzzle to be solved concerning the ferryman, and that the solution has nothing to do with garlic. It’s little wonder that this, according to Castlevania Fandom, “was one of the main reasons why many players from the era couldn't finish the game.”
The nonsense continues. Sometimes it is harmless, but annoying, misdirection, like the woman in the town of Aldra who says, “I’ve been waiting for a good-looking guy like you...I’ll see you at midnight on the riverbank.” Again, this has the sound of a quest. And again, it’s a total lie.
One of the more famous encounters with localization madness is the citizen who tells you to “Get a silk bag from the Graveyard Duck to live longer.” There are several things that come to mind from that statement and most of them are wonderful, but sadly, it’s just an old guy dressed in green. No harm, I suppose, seeing as it does make good on something being there, but then again, I was expecting a mystical, avion, undead mascot of the Strigoi Graveyard; that's a long-distance fall of disappointment. Some claim this wasn’t actually a mistranslation, while others claim the confusion came from some type of verb usage about the man “waddling around.”
Perhaps the most infamous part of Simon’s Quest is the debacle at Deborah Cliff. What appears to be a dead end is pitched to Simon as holding some sort of secret: “Hit Deborah Cliff with your head to make a hole.” The literal translation doesn’t offer additional help: “Open up the Deborah Cliff by headbutting, and a large hole opens.” This doesn’t sound particularly misleading on the surface, especially in a game that features hidden secrets inside of walls; it sounds more like a colorful way of explaining you should be suspicious of that cliff.
At least until you stumble on what you’re actually supposed to do: Kneel at the cliff with the Red Crystal for five seconds and wait for a whirlwind to whisk you away. The closest clue we get is the “Wait for a soul with a Red Crystal at Deborah Cliff.” The literal translation would have helped: “Hold a red crystal in front of Deborah Cliff and wait for a wind.” That “the wind” translates into “soul” just ruins the whole deal. The best part of this entire thing is that the misleading clue is literally telling you to bang your head against a wall, perhaps the most thematically appropriate thing I have ever heard.
The key problem that plagues Simon’s Quest is that the quests do not offer enough logical progression to overcome the constant lying antics of the Transylvanians. According to J. Parish of Gamespite, “Simon’s Quest employs too much 8-bit logic to give deliberately misleading tips; rather than shake your head ruefully once you figure it out, you’re far more likely to shake your fist in annoyance because the real solution is equally dumb.” These solutions don’t create the sort of eureka moments you hope would accompany such puzzle-solving. Instead, the solution to the puzzle is somehow more baffling than the puzzle itself.
The lackluster translation was long blamed as the culprit for the chaos. However, it’s possible that some of it was intentional on the part of the developers. In an interview with Parish, Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi was asked if he might consider making another Castlevania game in the spirit of Simon’s Quest, complete with clue-dropping NPCs. He responded by saying, “But all of those guys lied to you!”
In that case, if you could never finish Simon’s Quest, and therefore never saved the Transylvanian population from their curse, don’t feel too bad. Those punks reaped what they sowed —another Sunday morning lesson they could have stood to learn.