Reader request: Gargoyle's Quest

Now here's a series that could use a revival.

This column is “Reader request,” which should be pretty self-explanatory. If you want to request a game be played and written up, leave a comment with the game (and system) in question, or let me know on Twitter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The real tell for the age of 1990’s Gargoyle Quest doesn’t come from knowing the date it released. It’s in the speed — or the lack of it — with which the text in the game is delivered to you. Dialogue boxes have just a few words at a time in them, and they might as well be spelled out letter by letter. That, plus the kind of menu shortening that you know from older games — LVL, CHK, etc. — are the most obvious cues that this Capcom platformer is from a different time than the one you’d be playing it in.

Otherwise — well OK, besides its monochrome nature, too — Gargoyle’s Quest still feels pretty fresh and relevant, more than you might expect from an early life Game Boy title. It owes that to how layered the platforming was back in 1990: you don’t just run and jump while shooting projectiles at enemies. The titular gargoyle, Firebrand, can grab on to walls, making climbing a possibility, as well as camping out to attack some tougher foes from afar. There is floating in place and flying, the time with which you have to do so can be extended by upgrades found throughout the game. Generally speaking, you spend a lot of time upgrading Firebrand’s powers, be it to fly for longer amounts of time, increase his health, or to find other projectiles that are more powerful or serve some kind of platforming purpose, like breaking through weakened walls or building temporary blocks to grip onto for climbing on walls you otherwise could not.

So the platforming isn’t standard, and feels like it belongs right in the middle of this renaissance of the genre we’ve been seeing of late, with the rise of independent, digital, and retro-focused releases. Throw in, too, that there was ambition elsewhere in the design, and it’s no wonder Gargoyle’s Quest can, in some ways, feels like it’s fibbing about its age.

Said ambition has to do with just how the game is structured. Firebrand will spend a lot of time in the aforementioned platforming stages, fighting enemies and traversing environments full of pits, spikes, fire, and the like. In between those stages, though, is more of an RPG-style overworld, where Firebrand will travel from town to town and dungeon to dungeon, interacting with the goblins of the world, answering their challenges, solving their problems. The problems are pretty basic, and usually amount to “retrieve this item I will then bestow unto you,” but still, there was at least an attempt here to flesh out the quest a bit, instead of just moving from stage to stage or putting all of the backstory and story story into the instruction manual of the game.

There are also random encounters on this overworld map, but, unlike in RPGs of the time, finding one doesn’t start a turn-based battle. Instead, it brings you to a mini platforming stage, where you’ll fight a group of opponents or one particularly challenging one. It’s reminiscent of the kind of system used in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, but I find the combat here less frustrating, and the platforming elements really give it that something extra.

Win those random encounters, and move on with your adventuring. If you lose, you still get to move on, but you use up one of your precious extra lives: there are not a ton of them in the game, as the in-game cost for buying them goes up with each purchase, so try not to lose. There aren’t even that many health recovery items scattered throughout Gargoyle’s Quest, so extra lives are not a thing you’re going to have an abundance of.

Some of those late-game bosses, too, have extremely small hit boxes for you to aim for with your projectile attacks. The challenge there is in finding the weak spot, while also dodging whatever attacks are chasing you across the screen. Overall the boss fights are enjoyable, tough but not aggravatingly so, so long as you don’t let them touch you. That’s where those health upgrades come the most in handy, because they hit harder than your average foe.

Gargoyle’s Quest, if you weren’t aware, is a spin-off from another old-school Capcom franchise, Ghosts ‘n Goblins. The parent series is legendary for its difficulty, but while Gargoyle’s Quest certainly has some 1990s-era challenge to it, it’s nowhere near impossible. Early on, it can be a bit much, as it tries to beat into you the kind of gameplay it has, all while you have your weakest attack and just two bars on your life meter. By the end of the game, though, you should have five bars. Of course, some late-game enemies are taking at least two bars of health from you at a time, or killing you instantly in one case, but hey. You learn to make do.

It’s pretty easy to see, given the ideas Capcom put into Gargoyle’s Quest, why the sequel to this game (that is actually a prequel) released on the NES instead of on the Game Boy again. That’s not to say the Game Boy wasn’t worthy of big ideas — there are probably more of them on that big gray brick than any of us remember offhand — but handhelds can often be something of an experimental place for established series to take chances and make changes, and success in that space can lead to console iterations of those now-tested ideas.

Gargoyle’s Quest is one such series where that occurred: not only did the NES receive Gargoyle’s Quest II, but the Super Nintendo has Demon’s Crest, the third and as of now final entry in the franchise. Though it’s been 27 years since Demon’s Crest, always possible in this day and age of reboots and remakes and revivals that we haven’t seen the last of Firebrand and his platforming adventures through the Demon Realm. Ghosts ‘n Goblins did just get a sequel earlier in 2021, in the form of a 35th-anniversary-celebrating game designed by series creator Tokuro Fujiwara, so maybe in a few years’ time we’ll see a new Gargoyle’s Quest, too.

In the meantime, Gargoyle’s Quest is available on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console for $3.99, and its NES sequel is $4.99 on both the 3DS and on the Wii U shops. The low price points should help quell any concerns over how much value you’re getting over the short platformers, especially when you take a look at Ebay pricing and see that a cartridge-only copy of the Game Boy original will cost you $35-40, never mind one that comes with a manual or box. Demon’s Crest, meanwhile, is available to play for free if you have a Nintendo Switch Online account, so the entire series is legally within reach if you happen to have Nintendo’s two most popular platforms of the last decade. That feels like a situation I don’t get to comment on nearly often enough, so take advantage if you can.

Thanks to @TheJWjr on Twitter for the game request

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