Retroview - Gargoyle's Quest 2

Source: Youtube Channel nesguide

 So the day after I finished Gargoyle's Quest 1, I decided to play the 2nd one.  To be honest, I didn't know there was a second one.  I always thought Demon's Crest was the only sequel Gargoyle's Quest ever had.  Gargoyle's Quest 2 was developed on the NES and released two years after the first one.  To get straight to the point, I didn't like the sequel as much as the first one.  GQ2 had many similarities to the first one in gameplay, concept, and premise (story); however, the changes and "lack" of changes to problems from the first one made it less entertaining and more frustrating.  Instead of starting the combat immediately, the main protagonist Firebrand starts off in a town getting ready to be initiated as a warrior.  From there, problems already arise.  There are a lot of empty houses in the town and NPCs that block your path with their "randomly generated move sets."  Thankfully, two things also have been fixed and improved.  The text doesn’t move in an odd staccato of a pacing like the first one did and everyone speaks at a normal pace.  Also, Firebrand walks faster during the overhead view which is good for this game as I'll explain later.  I have to correct something I said about Gargoyle's Quest 1 on yesterday's post: after you lose all your lives, you just start from the level you had died on rather than the whole game over.  It's the same for GQ2 as well.  I guess I was complaining about that tid bid before since it felt like starting the whole game over when I was playing the first one as a kid (I never actually lost all my lives when playing GQ1 and 2 this past weekend, so I didn't know until I checked just now).  Now onto the actual game:

 The gameplay is essentially the same with platforming, flying, and shooting at enemies.  One surprising element they took out in GQ2 is the random enemy encounters in the open world map.  Instead, players choose to fight an enemy or not to receive vials to exchange for "lives."  If they were going to do that from the beginning, they should have made the world map smaller.  The world map is like a lot of the towns: empty and boring.  You'll walk around a lot with very little to do or fight.  This is why it’s good that Firebrand can walk faster now, because there’s really nothing to do on the world map.  What made walking around the world map in GQ1 scary is that you never know when you'll suddenly encounter a formidable foe that's going to eventually use up all your lives.  It had a "tension enticing" or "fear" factor into the world map.  But in GQ2, the world map was just there for the player to explore (sort of) and get from one place to another.  It was boring.  Level designs still had the same problem from the first ones in that you can really see what's up ahead or down below unless you dive right in; this sometimes results in death.  I suppose this is why the player can accumulate up to 9 lives, so that they can continually make mistakes and learn from them.  There are still problems with graphics lag and hit-box obscurities.  It's consistent throughout the series (all 3 games) that the graphics will slow down at some point, hit-boxes aren't very clear (especially with spikes), and that enemies will always be faster than the player's character.  There are multiple situations where a player can react fast enough to an enemy attack, but the character is simply not fast enough to perform that reaction.  The game, boss battles especially, require a lot of foresight and fooling the enemy into moving or attacking a certain way in order to beat them because Firebrand is sadly a slowpoke.  I find this ironic seeing how he's one of the fastest characters in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.  So the rest of the game is very similar: walk back and forth through a lot of empty maps and towns, collect items, fight through enemies and bosses to get to progress, and stop the destruction of the demon realm.  The abilities, enemies, level designs are all very similar to GQ1 from the gameboy.  I would say that GQ2 is more of a remake than a sequel to GQ1 (somethings better, others not).  The one new ability introduced is the tornado.  It allows Firebrand to spit a temporary platform to reach higher places.  One of the new level designs that weren’t in the first one is the Mirror level.  There are tons of mirrors everywhere and the player has to find the right ones to get to the main boss.  It doesn't hint at which ones are the right one, the player just has to experiment and see which one brings them forward and which ones just take them back to an earlier part of the level.  Some bosses seemed a bit difficult at first, but they were a push-over after figuring out their patterns compared to the bosses in GQ1.  Even the last boss was laughable after figuring out how his projectiles move.  After about 3-4 hours, I completed the game (it might have been less; I didn't keep an eye on the time attentively).  I was disappointed with the 2nd one.  The game was challenging at some points, but it wasn't as fun.  The music wasn't as memorable or appropriate.  In fact, some of the music I found to be really cheesy for the game.  I felt as if GQ2 was a cheap rehash of GQ1 and didn't have as much thought put into the development as much as GQ1 did.  Still, I'm glad I got through the game and knew that it at least existed.  It had a lot of great ideas, but executed poorly and made it boring.  GQ2 was definitely the weakest out of the Gargoyle's Quest series.