It's new to me: The Quest of Ki

The third entry in The Babylonian Castle Saga is a prequel, with you playing as the character Gil rescues in The Tower of Druaga in yet another different genre for the series.

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.

Namco’s Babylonian Castle Saga is quite the thing. Beginning with the astoundingly influential The Tower of Druaga, the series then shifted from tower-ascending dungeon crawling action RPG to a cooperative, magic-focused action RPG — The Return of Ishtar — that had you descending that same tower, in a much different way and form. And, as first player, you controlled Ki, whom protagonist Gil had rescued in The Tower of Druaga, while Gil took more of a backseat role here; useful still, but if relied upon too much, your quest would actually fail.

Two years after The Return of Ishtar landed in arcades, and — like The Tower of Druaga before it — received a Famicom port, an exclusive, from-the-ground-up Famicom game was developed in the series. This is Kai no Bouken, or, The Quest of Ki, which is a prequel that goes through Ki’s attempt to ascend the tower on her own to retrieve the stolen Blue Crystal Rod, which the goddess Ishtar had asked her to retrieve. Since Babylonian Castle heads already know Ki ends up trapped in the tower — turned to stone, even, and not like in a statue way, but in a “now she’s a literal rock with a magic tiara resting on top” fashion — there is no happy ending waiting for you here in The Quest of Ki, but it does at least give you an opportunity to play a game that’s even further removed from the series’ origins, and an enjoyable one at that.

The Quest of Ki isn’t a dungeon crawler nor an action RPG. It’s not co-op, and it’s not magic focused: in fact, there are no attacks you can perform at all, magical or otherwise. Ishtar has gifted Ki the aforementioned tiara, which allows for flight of a sort: it’s more a tiara that lets you float, or, as far as the player is concerned, continue to jump upward so long as the button is held. It’s a sidescrolling platformer, and the physics are weird, but not bad. Just strange, and unfamiliar, until you’ve familiarized yourself with them.

Said physics were less confusing back in 1988, however, as The Quest of Ki takes its influence from a 1984 Atari, Inc. arcade game, Major Havoc. Major Havoc is primarily a platformer, featuring some shoot ‘em up elements. You play as the titular Major Rex Havoc, fighting your way past the defenses of various space stations in your ship, and then landing it on them before entering for the platforming segments. In these, you collect oxygen in order to be able to keep breathing, until you can find the station’s reactor. Once you interact with that, you have to escape: in both directions, you have enemies to avoid, and physics that are very reminiscent of what would end up in The Quest of Ki. In Major Havoc, that you’re in space is explanation enough for the very low-gravity style movement that has you jumping, slowly, for as long as you sustain a button press, with slow floating back downward. In The Quest of Ki, you need a magic tiara, but the result is the same.

Above is gameplay footage from Major Havoc (captured on a Nintendo Switch running Atari 50), from the first platforming section. It’s quick, and simplistic compared to later stages, but you get the idea of floating, timing your very lengthy jumps, avoiding enemies, escaping before the timer runs out, and so on. The Quest of Ki uses just the one timer, and its levels are just as quick: there are alternate exits and items to collect, but if you don’t process what you need to do quickly enough, and can’t also do what you need to do quickly enough, you’ll struggle with that timer.

In both The Quest of Ki and Major Havoc, running right into a wall at full speed, or crashing into a ceiling above you, will temporarily stun your character. Touching an enemy will kill you — in Major Havoc, your suit and skin burns away, leaving your skeleton behind, while in Quest of Ki, her spirit floats above its former vessel. The many connections between the two isn’t happenstance nor a secret, either: Game Studio, the developer founded by Druaga creator Masanobu Endō, included Major Havov’s creators in The Quest of Ki’s Special Thanks section, as “Atari Major Havoc kaihatsu team,” and the working title of the game was reportedly “Minor Havoc” (though, direct confirmation of this has proven difficult to find).

Those thanks are kind of sweet to see, really, as they came at a time when clones were rampant and licensing was a little more wild west. Game Studio and Namco could have left the inspiration a secret, or let it be assumed. Instead, they announced said influence by something a little weird to give it the credit it deserved, then cranked the weird up alongside what was very much their idea for the mechanic at play and its challenges. An impressive showing all around.

Here’s how The Quest of Ki works. You control Ki, holding down the A button to “jump” higher and for longer, and you let go to descend again. You keep rising after you release the button, based on how much momentum you picked up, so it’s not as simple as just letting go, but is instead about the timing of it. The B button lets Ki dash, and this is often as fraught with danger as it is useful. Like the stair car from Arrested Development, Ki’s momentum can be an issue, and it takes practice to find out when you should probably just be walking or letting go of the jump button. Here, read this in Michael Bluth’s voice: “In order to get Ki up to a minimum speed, you’ve got to jam on the B button for about a minute, okay? But in order to slow this thing down, you’ve got to get almost immediately back on the brake pedal, ’cause you’ve got 1980s video game cartoon physics behind you.” At least there aren’t any hop-ons here.

You are trying to accomplish a couple of things in each stage, which range from short to shorter, before the timer runs out. You’ll avoid enemies and obstacles — like spike pits that blend into the floor a bit if you aren’t paying close enough attention — and try to make your way to a key that will open the door to the stairs that lead to the next floor. Or! You will attempt to find the hidden warp that exists in quite a few levels, to speed your ascension of the tower’s 60 floors. There aren’t warps on every floor of the tower, but you can still chain quite a few together, as they drop you off onto other floors that also have warps to find. So you can go from floor 1 to 6 to 11 and so on and skip quite a bit of the game this way. Like with something like Super Mario Bros. 3, though, you end up missing out on a ton of game if you do this, so maybe save that for after you’ve already completed things the standard way, as a speedrun or expert challenge or what have you, or to get back to whereabouts you left off on a previous run. And one other consideration: you don’t score any points for completing a level with a warp, only for clearing it the “true” way.

Though it’s still in its original Japanese, including scans of the actual manual for The Quest of Ki in the Namcot Collection release of the game is a nice touch.

The warps, which are guarded by the friendly dragon Quox, are sometimes easy to get to, at least early on, but, as with everything else, the challenge rises the further into the game you get. More enemies, more projectiles, more traps, just more and more to avoid and consider as the clock ticks away, in a way that will often have you just looking for the key and the exit to try to limit your exposure to the elements. There are quite a few items you can attempt to collect, though, and they could either help or harm your quest: you won’t know until you open the chest containing them.

There are the warps, but also gift boxes that are worth 10,000 points. A flag — it’s a Namco game, you know the one — that grants you an extra life. Extensions to your time, or, in the case of the poison vial, a shortening of your remaining time. A barrier to protect you from a single hit against everything besides spiked floors and the always dangerous in any Druaga-affiliated title Will O’Wisps. A cross for vampires, a spell of silence to keep enemy magic at bay, or a chest with nothing in it at all, besides the regret you’ll now feel for wasting your precious time getting to it. While quite a few items are optional, the feather must be found in the stages it’s in, as it lets you navigate areas you otherwise wouldn’t be able to, as it lets you continually float and reascend without descending all the way to the floor once more first. Observe:

There are more items besides these, too, some with specific use cases like the ring that lets you safely pass by Will O’Whisps, and they’re worth seeking out. Just know that, on occasion, you’ll end up with nothing, or poisoned, in your attempt to find secrets or points or assists.

While The Quest of Ki is in Japanese, it has been unofficially translated: this shot is what you see when you find a treasure chest containing a warp item. Image credit: Romhacking

While Ki will die if she touches an enemy, the one you crashed into or landed on or what have you usually does disappear afterward (with some enemy-specific exceptions, such as the vampires you need a cross to actually defeat), so they won’t be in your way on your next attempt through the floor. This does cost you a life, but hey, it beats losing a second one at the same exact spot on a particularly tricky bit of navigation. And you’re sure to encounter plenty of situations like that, given the way you control jumps, with movement in multiple directions possible after you’re already airborne, would surely make Michel Ancel develop a twitch. Bump your head on the ceiling because you ascended for too long, then accidentally land on a foe underneath? Dead. Mistime your jump and get shot by a projectile as you ascend? Dead. Miscalculate an enemy’s location as you descend and end up smacked by them? Also dead. Lots and lots of opportunities to die: if there’s a consistency to the Babylonian Castle Saga games, it is certainly that. When you lose all lives, your score resets, all defeated and “defeated” enemies return, and you start over from that stage. Not the worst punishment going, but the base game can be tough enough without going harder there.

While you can complete The Quest of Ki’s story by getting through the 60 floors, the game doesn’t actually end there, though, the rest is non-canon, just-for-funsies. Ki is turned into stone after retrieving the Blue Crystal Rod, as already stated, and there she waits (as a rock) for Gil to save her from Druaga, who is responsible for her current state as well as the stealing of the Blue Crystal Rod that started this whole ordeal. The end! Unsatisfying if you wanted something nice to happen, but hey, the Star Wars prequels end with a bunch of death and betrayal and Vadering to setup the original trilogy, that’s just the way with prequels sometimes.

There are actually another 40 stages to complete, and I like to pretend, given the way they are, that Ki is just kind of dreaming them in her living rock state. By “the way they are” I mean that these floors of the tower now include things like Namco characters from other series:

Yes, that’s Inky from Pac-Man, and the blue ghost is far from the only cameo that’s now out to kill Ki/haunt her waking nightmare. In addition, Quox’s warps are still around, but Quox is not, and he’s been replaced by less friendly dragons who will warp you backwards if you find one now. And this is your reminder that you don’t know if it’s a warp in that chest until after you’ve opened it.

The Quest of Ki is a rarity among Namco’s long list of rarities, as it had its initial, Japan-only release, and then… that’s it. As it was a Famicom original and not an arcade game ported to Nintendo’s home console, it’s never been part of the standard, generation-by-generation Namco Museum releases, and it didn’t receive a Virtual Console release on the Wii or Wii U, either. In 2009, before everything was developed for iOS and Android, there was a mobile phone remake of The Quest of Ki, but that stayed in Japan, as well. The Famicom original did, at least, receive an unofficial English translation patch, so it can be emulated and you can also understand the in-game text, though, the game can be played start to finish without any of that, as well, if you’re not the patching or emulating sort.

In 2020, The Quest of Ki was released on the Switch as downloadable content for the Namcot Collection. While it’s officially a Japan-only release again, practically speaking, this isn’t the case. If you have (or care to make) a Japanese Switch account — which is easy to get, and worthwhile, too — then you can download the Namcot Collection for free: it’s a virtual “shelf” that games you buy then sit on. While most of the available titles are simply ones available through the worldwide release, two-volume Namco Museum Archives, which collected many of Namco’s Famicom releases that consisted of both arcade ports and originals, there are a few exclusive to Japan’s Namcot Collection. The Quest of Ki is one such title.

The Quest of Ki wasn’t the success that The Tower of Druaga was, but it’s still a fascinating little trip to the past, and unlike most games, either of the time or made since. The physics are a bit weird and take time to get a handle on, but they’re also what makes the game so enjoyable. Like with Major Havoc, The Quest of Ki is still a good time today despite its relative simplicity: if anything, the simplicity is what makes it easy to dive into and helps you feel prepared for the many challenges that await. Like with its predecessors, The Quest of Ki probably isn’t for everyone, but I’ve played through the base 60 stages a couple of times now, went digging for warps, and plan to get through the full 100 at some point. There’s something here, for sure, and it’s a shame that it’s only technically available worldwide at this point, as more people who might find it enjoyable should be given the chance to know for sure.

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