It's new to me: Demon's Crest

The third and final game of the Gargoyle's Quest spin-off series meaningfully changes the formula and naming convention, while still very much fitting in with its predecessors.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Gargoyle’s Quest debuted on the Game Boy, and it was an ambitious little title spun out of the popular Ghosts n’ Goblins series, one that felt like it deserved a console version. So, Capcom released Gargoyle’s Quest II for the NES, which was very much like the original game, except colorized and with better, less cramped resolution owing to being on a much bigger screen than what the Game Boy came equipped with. In 1994, the third entry in the series released for the SNES: not only did this bring the series to a 16-bit system, but Capcom revamped the look, the feel, and just what it is you’d be doing in the game. Like with the transition of so many other 8-bit series to the 16-bit realm in this time period, Demon’s Crest is both familiar and something entirely new, owing to both the more powerful hardware behind it as well as new ideas to evolve the series. It’s hands down the best of this trio of titles, and that’s without there being anything meaningfully wrong with the other two.

Right off the bat, anyone familiar with the pair of Gargoyle’s Quest games will see a difference. This was far from Capcom’s first entry on the SNES, and they absolutely knew what they were doing and what the system was capable of at this point. There are killer character and enemy designs, like the half-rotting dragon chasing you in the opening of the game. The backgrounds are full of details, big and small, that breathe life into this world and make it all feel complete. Firebrand, the protagonist, is taller, leaner, but still muscular: he's just less compact, less cartoonish than in previous entries, which works well here considering the transition from oft-cutesy hell world to a more serious gothic realm.

Firebrand can still jump and hover, shooting off fireballs while suspended in mid-air, allowing him to bob and weave and hang where needed in order to avoid being hit while delivering his own blows from a safe distance. He can still hang on walls, too, allowing him the chance to attack enemies that way, or just make climbing tall passageways possible. That’s all part of the usual Gargoyle’s Quest package. There have been some changes to the overall formula, though, that make this feel significantly different in your approach than in the previous two outings, and in more ways than just removing the more role-playing-style elements from the equation.

Image credit: MobyGames

There’s a little bit of the Wario Land 3-style of pathfinder in here, where you need to unlock specific items to open up new pathways in previously explored levels. Wario Land 3, specifically, and not a Metroid or Castlevania, because this isn’t one giant interconnected world. There’s a map that you fly around, sure, thanks to the power of the SNES’ Mode 7 tech, but you’re zooming around that like you would in, say, Final Fantasy VI, in order to head to the location that actually contains the places you’ll be exploring. These items are “crests,” which are both MacGuffins and usable tools. Firebrand had collected all of these crests years and years in the past, but was then attacked by powerful demons and wounded; he dropped the crests to Earth to keep them from being taken by his foes, and then was imprisoned. The game opens with you escaping this prison, and then setting off to recover the crests and exact revenge for your defeat.

The six crests allow Firebrand to take on different forms, which have their own positives and negatives: a significant focus of the game is figuring out when it makes sense to use which crest, which will allow you to see more and more of the game, which — more on this later — will also determine what kind of ending you get. There’s the fire crest, which is Firebrand’s default form: you find pieces of this broken crest lying around instead of the whole thing, and each piece you recover gives you a new or enhanced ability, like the ability to fire off more powerful blasts, a claw to help with your climbing, or the ability to make tornadoes that create platforms that aid in jumping. The fire crest version of Firebrand is also able to deliver a powerful headbutt to background objects, which is useful in levels as well as in some optional mini game settings with rewards.

There’s also the air crest, which allows Firebrand to fly rather than just float. The water crest grants a form that lets Firebrand swim: normally, that’s not a thing he can do. The Earth crest removes Firebrand’s wings, leaving him grounded, but he can run quickly with a powerful dash that can break certain walls and objects, opening up new areas of the game. Then there’s the time crest, which is just like a souped up fire crest that grants doubled health, and the infinite crest, which you actually can’t access on your first playthrough. You’re given a password to unlock it after completing the game, and by then donning the infinite crest, you’ll be able to battle the game’s true final boss, which leads to its true ending.

Speaking of the endings, you can very easily, and even accidentally, complete a Demon’s Crest run. Since you have total freedom of where to go from the map, it’s possible to complete the game’s levels without returning to them a bunch of times with your new crests — or without even earning all of the crests — which will then open up an endgame battle against the general of the demon army, Arma. Defeat Arma in this scenario, and you’ve completed the game, sure, but it’s very obviously not a satisfying ending. The game openly wonders if the world would have been better off if Firebrand hadn’t even bothered trying to stop the demon army! So, point taken, you can go back in for another run, and understand that you were not nearly thorough enough this first time around. There’s a bad ending — that one — as well as an incomplete ending where things are better than they were in the bad, but still not quite finished, and then the best ending. Which isn’t really, but it’s the only way to get you to the true one, so roll with it.

You have to get all of the crests, which can take some work, since you’re required to open up all kinds of secrets to even make your way to them. Keep returning to old levels when you get new powers, so you can now swim through this passage that would have killed you before, or fly past this obstacle that was previously stopping you dead in your tracks, or to destroy this wall that was not breakable in your previous form. Manage to get the best of the initial three endings by collecting everything — not just crests, but all of the power-up items for Firebrand, too, the vellum that lets him cast spells, the urns that store the various magic potions, the life extends, the talismans that improve his stats or give him unique powers — and fighting everyone, and you’ll get that aforementioned password granting you the infinite crest. And then you can use it to match up against the game’s true final boss: you’ll restart the game again, but with every single item and crest already collected, and a new area has also opened up that contains said true end boss.

The game’s boss fights are a true highlight. There are some huge enemies here, but also just fast, multipart ones that require strategy, and there’s no shortage of these foes, either. Demon’s Crest might be a short game — three hours if you’re rushing around a bit, six if you’re doing literally everything — but in that runtime there are a ton of these boss fights. Experiencing them all is reason enough to want to keep going back to these levels to fully open up the world and play all there is to play.

Demon’s Crest looks excellent, and sounds just as good. The gameplay has opened up and been modified, too, in ways that keep it feeling like part of the series but also giving it clear separation in quality from its predecessors. The only real complaint to be made is that Capcom just stopped making these games after figuring out how to make a truly great one, but that’s because Demon’s Crest, for all its greatness, was a notorious flop. In Nintendo Power’s 100th issue, they ranked the 100 best games of all time (on Nintendo systems, of course), and Demon’s Crest made the cut, at number 90, with a write-up that claimed, “The graphics were great and the gameplay varied and intense, but Demon’s Crest never sold well. One week it actually managed to generate negative sales. How is that possible? More people returned the game than bought it.” Whether that’s true or not is… well, it’s a citation needed scenario. But the fact that idea exists at all, whether because it’s real or it’s believed to be real, should tell you quite a bit about how Demon’s Crest did at retail.

Luckily, Capcom might have stopped making games in this series, but they have made this one available again. It was one of the Virtual Console titles you could purchase on the 3DS and the Wii U, and now it’s not available to buy with those shops shut down, but you can play it on the SNES portion of the Nintendo Switch Online service, at least. It’s not a perfect solution, no, but better that than nothing at all. If you’ve never played Demon’s Crest — and history tells us that most people have not — then you’re missing out. Fire up that Switch, open up NSO, and give Demon’s Crest a try. It’s a truly great SNES title that never got its due 30 years ago, and probably never will, but that shouldn’t stop you from knowing that to be true firsthand.

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