Wednesday, 3 March 2021

I Didn't Like Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection And Here's Why

So a new Ghosts n Goblins game came out last week, and I spent that week playing through it to completion. I don't like it. Let me tell you why, in my usual rambling verbose long-winded way.


A month shy of ten years ago, a funny thing happened. I was on a drive to my usual vacation getaway spot, and on the way we drove by a mountain. I had been listening to a gaming podcast that mentioned how hard a game Super Ghouls n Ghosts was, and for some reason a thought hit me as we drove by that mountain. I wanted to beat that game. I wrote about April 2011 in this post from April 2016, and marvel at the horror of time: the post about this event that happened is as old as the gap between the event and the first post. Anyway, over the next ten years, I delved into hard game monsterism. Many accomplishments, many a hard game toppled... but for the purposes of this writeup, that includes all the mainline Ghosts n Goblins games. I beat them all, and God help me I kind of like them in their own special way. 


So it was that, when Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection was announced a few months back via a Nintendo Direct, my notifications absolutely blew up. @FREZNO HEY LOOK IT'S A NEW GHOULS GAME, HARD GAME HARD GAME HARD GAME! I just found it funny that I got a brand such that I could get tagged like five times by different friend groups about a new GnG game. Regardless, I knew about it! It looked good! Unique art style but also it looked to play like the old games. I like GnG games, I should like this! So it was that I pre-ordered the damn thing, preloaded the download, and on Feb. 25th I was ready and willing to play some new old horror-themed hard game! What follows is not a review in the typical sense. More of a trip report/ranting into the void about hard game expectations. Buckle in.

Right out the gate you're given four difficulty options to pick from. From hardest to easiest we have Legend, Knight, Squire, and Page. I never touched Squire and Page at all, but from what I gather you get less enemies coming at you in Squire and in Page you revive instantly upon death. The game's gracious enough to do away with lives, but there are checkpoints in the levels you'll be sent back to on death. Anyway the game defaults its selection to Legend, and just to your right should be its description. As a veteran of the series, I thought "Yeah! I can do that! True GnG, let's go!" and selected Legend. This was the first of many mistakes. Here's where I play my hand. Those of you who know Ghosts n Goblins by reputation would expect it to be a hard game. I did too. What I did not expect was this, and this is again coming from someone who's beaten the other games multiple times. Ready?


Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection is the hardest Ghosts n Goblins game. Even though this game has concessions and accessibilty options left and right, its design decisions easily make it the most aggravating in the series for me. This is not a good thing in an "ultimate challenge" sense, it means this fucker made me want to tear my hair out in sheer frustration. One could argue that's what the other games made you do, but they're on totally different levels and difficulty design decisions. I'll get into it, but for now... Level 1. Which you actually get a choice of this time! You can play a level 1 that's a homage to the level 1s of past games; either Ghosts n Goblins or Ghouls n Ghosts. I went with the Ghosts n Goblins one and dove right it, and... well, it was hard! 


Again, however, it was hard in a weird way. I wrote about this as well in the past, so here's a writeup on the original Ghosts n Goblins I did for a Halloween marathon. In just a few words, I pinned down what makes the old games hard; the balance between order and chaos. Your protagonist, representing order, has a rigid jump and a few weapons to choose from. The titular ghosts and goblins, agents of chaos, spawn and move randomly and can screw you over at any moment with a bad roll. The difficulty of the game comes from managing the chaos with the rigidity of order. So it went with the other games in the series, and at first Resurrection is no different. It's spawning way more random zombies and birds and stuff, but I was on Legend. Nevertheless, problems began to present themselves. I was getting farther and farther into the levels, but the core rule of the series was hurting me: two hits and you're dead. Back to the start. I was making it pretty damn far into the stage, but no checkpoints? What gives here?


Herein lies a problem with the game in general, but especially on Legend. The older games had relatively short stages with checkpoints here and there, but compensated for this with the chaos factor. A stage in Resurrection is long as almighty fuck. It's not just the chaotic factor, but there are static placed enemies and triggered spawns you have to deal with as well. You need to take your time in places and do crowd control, such that the levels take longer, and you get two mistakes to do it on Legend. Make two mistakes and it's all the way back to the start with you. This culminated when, after fighting through three segments worth of hell, I reached the infamous nastiest guy in Ghosts n Goblins: the Red Arremer. Oh, god, can we talk about Red Arremer for a bit here?


What makes Red Arremer hard in the older games is that he flies out of reach of your weapons, and he's also fast with a rapid swooping attack. Over ten years of muscle memory I've learned ways to deal with him. Magic spells in the later games, but in the original Ghosts n Goblins you can hit him a few times as he ascends and then jump backwards while he's swooping, pelting him with weaponry as he divebombs in and hopefully killing him. This ends up being what you need to do for Resurrection, but it's made worse. In the old games you could sneak a hit on Red Arremer. Not the case here. He will perfect dodge anything and everything unless he is swooping... and the swoop's arc is much wider. If he decides to swoop low enough and you don't kill him, you're taking a hit. Two hits send you back to start, by the way: the checkpoint here is just after Red Arremer. How did I end up dealing with this relentless challenge just before my well-deserved checkpoint?


I didn't. This is another weird new mechanic that will become very important later in the writeup, but I tried running from the Red Arremer to maybe hit a checkpoint before it killed me. I did not, but I instead found a dark treasure chest spawning. Inside was a magician enemy who I killed, but he looked a little different. Then the Red Arremer got me. When I got back to just before the Red Arremer, though, there was this hole in the ground with a purple portal. Hopping in, I found an enemy survival gauntlet. I survived it, got a treasure, left the area... and was warped past the Red Arremer. Just ahead of this was a checkpoint. I'll take it, but what was all that shit? It'll be important later, but let's talk about checkpoints for just a minute.


I'm jumping ahead a bit here, but Legend just was far too brutal for my first run. We're something like 90 minutes into the game and I'm at the halfway point of Stage 1. I'm not having fun, I'm being aggravated. A difficulty drop could be just what the doctor ordered. As it turns out, the second highest difficulty of Knight gives you three hits and adds extra checkpoints each stage, called Banners of Rebirth. At first I found this a little disappointing. Three hits in a GnG game? That seems a little too easy. I would be thankful for this by game's end, but the checkpoint thing really gets me. Legend mode literally has two checkpoints per stage; a midway, and one just before the boss fight. Doing the harder stages on Knight was an ordeal akin to metaphorically crawling through glass to get to a single Banner of Rebirth. The thought of doing three of these sections in a row with harder enemies and only two hits sounds like the worst hell imaginable. No, thank you. I don't have much else to say on Stage 1. I beat it on Legend out of stubbornness and bragging rights, and once I came back on Knight I used my knowledge (and extra checkpoints) to get through a little faster.


To really get into the fucked up gameplay loop of this game, we need to jump ahead to level 2. Well, one of them. It's again a split thing between a Ghosts n Goblins homage and a Ghouls n Ghosts one, and again I'm talking about the Ghosts n Goblins homage. This one's a homage to level 2 of Ghosts n Goblins, but with the twist that it's an ice level. Okay. We're slogging along through it, get to the actual halfway point, and then... the tower. Right. So in level 2 of Ghosts n Goblins, there are these big troll dudes patrolling a climbing section with ladders. They throw spike balls at you from above, and charge the fuck out of you if you're on the same floor as them. It's a hard section. The latter half of Resurrection's Level 2 has a section like this... except the troll men can randomly spawn. There are situations where you are just totally fucked due to RNG here; if they spawn from a gate close to you and decide "and now I will charge the fuck out of you", you cannot fire fast enough to avoid damage. It is a fucked up segment, and I was still on Legend so I had one less hit and had to endure the tedious first part of the latter half of the level to get back to it every time. 


What do I mean about a fucked up gameplay loop, though? Well, it's time to talk about Resurrection's other new mechanic, the Umbral Bees. As you play the stages, you'll uncover these little bees flying around. They're collectibles, and a lot of times I found myself intentionally taking a death just to grab them. What do they do? They unlock magic spells, and this is the weird bullshit I'm talking about. I beat level 2, and officially went the hell with this and did it all again on Knight. By the time I beat Level 2 again, I had enough bees to unlock the Transmogifrog spell. Cute pun, but what this does do? It turns every enemy on screen into a frog. This spell saved my ass in the later levels as it swarmed me with enemies, and turning every "I MUST SWOOP AT YOU FROM AN AWKWARD ANGLE" fucker into a helpless frog is very good! The level 2 version of this spell works on the big trolls. I had to go back to that stage for more bee searching, and the frog spell made it much easier... but I had to beat the stage to have enough bees to get it. I noticed this in level 1 too, when I got the fire spell with my bees and went back and had an easier time. It's weird. As it turns out, you can quit out to the map anytime, spend your bees, and go back to your last checkpoint. So that's accessible and I could have bought/respecced my magic to have frog magic for that part. Didn't know that my first time, though!


It's here, two thousand words in, that we can mourn the death of brevity and also get to my main gripe with the ethos of the game. Past level 2 the game stops offering branching paths and is just straightforward. It also ends at level 5, so that's 7 stages total. That's about the right length for a Ghosts n Goblins game, but as things got harder and harder it dawned upon me what was wrong. Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection was, for me, the wrong kind of hard game. I went in expecting the difficulty of a Ghosts n Goblins game, order against chaos, randomness aplenty but able to be overcome with skill and very few situations where the dice roll isn't in your favor; a lost hit here and there from a bad spawn, but not every life. Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection is not that kind of game. It is a masocore Ghosts n Goblins game, or as I call them, a "gotcha" game. It has more in common with I Wanna Be The Guy or the AVGN games, design-wise, than with Super Ghouls n Ghosts. On a good day, when I'm expecting it, I can deal with that kind of game. Resurrection hoodwinked me into one, and it soured me on it totally. Let's talk examples!


Level 3 is a dark cave level with candles illuminating the place that can be shot out, and a gimmick where "light" zombies can only be seen in the light and "shadow" zombies can only be seen in the dark. Taking a side path, you come to a small platform between two candles. Shooting out the right candle spawns a stronger version of the Red Arremer. In past games, the Red Arremers were carefully placed in plain view, put in places where you could always retreat and have space to deal with their bullshit. Not this Red Arremer. The design decision is clear as day with this enemy. The point is not an enemy for you to surpass on your way to the checkpoint. The point is for this Red Arremer to kill you for shooting out this random unassuming candle, and for you to remember not to shoot that random unassuming candle. The point is that the game just gotcha. Go back and do it again. That just isn't Ghosts n Goblins to me, and the fact that series creator Tokuro Fujiwara is on this project has me baffled. I don't know why he and his team changed this shit, but I don't like it. Level 3's latter half is a riding on dragons segment, and... Look, just check out my Twitter video of the final bit of it below:


If you had told me, just a few months ago when I was playing the 2020 Battletoads game, that a new Ghosts n Goblins would be out in the near future that was more in line with the difficulty of Battletoads than Battletoads 2020, I would have laughed at you. Now I believe it. There just weren't this many moments like this in the older games. I even went through Super Ghouls n Ghosts, in my head, mentally; how many parts of these stages are preplanned traps that will get you if you don't have the second of reaction time or prior knowledge to survive? The most I could think of was one or two a stage, and Resurrection is throwing moves like this at you a few times per checkpoint. Moving along, level 4's gimmick are eyes in the background that, if shot with a weapon, spawn a bunch of enemies. Some even spawn Red Arremers, and again the intent is YOU FUCKED UP, WE GOT YOUUUU. Really, though, the enemy spawns aren't even the worst with the frog magic or something. The Arremers are nasty, though. Level 4's latter half is a slow autoscroll that's a little tedious, but the other games had moments like that, too. If we want to get to poorly designed tedium, let's go to level 5. 


Level 5's the final level, and a sort of boss rush wherein bosses from the other levels pop up and try to get you. At about the halfway point there's this segment which begins with a refight with the stage 1 boss and continues into a climbing platform segment with swarms of bees and the platforms vanishing under your feet. You're going to need to remember what's coming up in order to properly platform, but watch what happens when you fuck up and fall down:

There is no way I can fathom this as anything but a terrible and utterly tedious decision, rather than making anything "harder". The boss only takes 7 or 8 hits to kill, but you have to wait around for him to attack you with his big tree club. You cannot just ignore him because he will throw the tree club in the air and it will land on you as you climb the deliberately designed very tall ladder. Your punishment for fucking up the platforming segment is not just doing it again, but having to deal with deliberately designed tedium of a boss refight that cannot be skipped. It's fucking bad! Despite that, I made it through. I got through even more platforming and made it to the final bosses. Two of them that you don't have to fight in a row, thank God, and they're not even that terrible once you learn them. That was it! I'd beaten the game! Congratulations! Except, of course, it's Ghosts n Goblins. I think you're all aware of the biggest trick of the series, born in 1985 out of a need to siphon quarters and continued onwards as series tradition to this day. Yes, that's right. You have to beat the game twice.


Boy howdy, if I thought this game was insufferable before, the claws really came out here in loop 2! A valid criticism that can be levied at the previous games is that it really is just beating the same game you just cleared again. There's an extra hoop or two to jump through involving a magic weapon or collecting stuff in later games, and this one's no different. We are getting ahead of ourselves, though. Point is, this game at least offers something new. That something new is making the levels harder with new obstacles and enemy spawns and traps. Level 1, for instance, has those candles and the light/shadow zombies. Oh, and Arremers that come out of them. One of them is avoidable if you take a convoluted upper path, but the second one is a candle you have to put out to get past and putting it out will summon the Arremer. I just took the hit from the flame and damage boosted my way to the checkpoint, for what it's worth. 


While we're on the subject, a note on Red Arremers in the past games. Starting from Ghouls n Ghosts with the introduction of magic, you could nail them with it. It was a skillful exploit/reward for making it to the Red Arremers with golden armor intact. Charge your magic, position yourself just right, and you could blast them away without any of the hassle. That approach does not work in Resurrection because the Arremers are immune to every magic spell but one. The only spell that will work is the third-level lightning magic, and to get that you need an absolute shitload of Umbral Bees to unlock it. Again, it's that weird gameplay loop: deal with the bullshit Arremers to unlock the ability to deal with the bullshit Arremers. So it goes with the rest of loop 2. The Shadow stages are harder versions of the same levels you beat, with new traps. We are talking really insidious shit, and let me show you one that made me the most upset. Remember back to level 3? The high-speed dragon segment that ended with a split-second jump or you're dead? Here's... here's what it looks like on loop 2.
I. They. They fucking... they fucking played on my memorization of the previous loop's equivalent segment to put an enemy there this time and score a TEE HEE HEE GOTCHA kill. Insidious trolling level design bullshit! This is par for the course in a masocore game. Like I said, I wouldn't bat an eye if this was an AVGN game, they do this 30 times a level. When it's this game in this series, though, a game already disappointing me with its differing difficulty philosophy, I can't help but be extra infuriated. I'm already not having fun and now I'm being kicked while I'm down. So it goes for the rest of loop 2. Those eyes in level 4? All of them spawn Red Arremers now. The tedious stage 1 boss thing in level 5 has some added skeletons on the ground which feel perfectly placed to score an extra hit on you as punishment for falling down, and you still have to deal with the boss respawning. This was a full-on masocore game at this point. I was, to reuse my metaphor, metaphorically crawling through glass to struggle my way through all the bullshit and just hit a checkpoint. Die to a trollish trap, go back, make it back there and deal with the trap in the appropriate way, get a little farther and die to another trollish trap. Rinse and repeat for an hour and you have a Shadow stage in Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection. Of course, I had made my way to the final level eventually. I had beaten these bosses before, I could do it again! And I did! I beat the game twice, and what did I get?


Booted back to the start again for loop 3. Here's the thing. Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection absolutely has a true ending requirement. As you beat stages, you obtain these things called Demon Orbs. 7 stages plus two loops equals 14 Demon Orbs. There are 17 in total, and you need them all when you beat the final boss to unlock the true final boss and get a good ending. Not having them all and beating the final boss boots you back into a new, somehow even harder loop. I am going to get into what I had to do to find the Demon Orbs I was missing in a moment, but I have to complain yet again. This is dickish to the extreme, and in a way that not even the previous games were. Let's just recap the true ending requirements and explanations the older games give you regarding this stuff, shall we?


Ghosts n Goblins: You straight up just have to beat the game twice to get the good ending. Additionally, beating level 6 without using the shield weapon boots you back to level 5 and tells you to use the shield weapon next time.

Ghouls n Ghosts: On completing the first loop, a screen appears to tell you that you need the power of the Psycho Cannon weapon in order to proceed to the true ending. On the second loop, collecting treasure chests while in gold armor will drop the Psycho Cannon weapon. Beating the boss of stage 5 with it unlocks the final boss.

Super Ghouls n Ghosts: Like Ghouls n Ghosts, when you completthe first loop a screen appears to tell you that you need the power of the Goddess Bracelet weapon in order to proceed to the true ending. On the second loop, collecting treasure chests while in gold armor will drop the Goddess Bracelet weapon. Beating the boss of stage 7 with it unlocks the final boss.

Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins: A much more convoluted sort of treasure hunt exists in this game to unlock the true ending, as you have to find hidden items, magic, and Light Rings in order to fully clear the game. The game does tell you, upon making it to the end, how many Light Rings you need to collect to open the final gate and fight the true final boss.


With all this in mind, what does Ghosts n Goblins Resurrection have to say about the Demon Orbs? Nothing. Fucking nothing. You get a cutscene where the Demon Orbs swarm the final boss, but they just swirl back into you and you go back to the start of the game. No Princess telling you to collect all the orbs, no hint about where to find them. Nothing beyond this ambiguous cutscene to clue you into the fact that they're all required... and the punishment for beating the final boss without them all on loop 2 is the most severe the series has ever seen. You're not just booted back a level or two for not knowing this shit, you have to do a whole harder loop again. I would have dropped the fucking game right then and there if I hadn't found Reddit posts and guides on just what it is I was supposed to be doing. Okay then, here we go. The story of what I had to do to beat the game thrice.


The key is those dark treasure chests. Beating the magician inside unlocks a portal called a Hell Hole in the stage, and in the Hell Hole is an enemy gauntlet. You either kill X amount of enemies or survive for 30 seconds against a swarm of things. Beating that gives you a treasure chest and warps you ahead. In addition to that, however... on each loop, one of the Hell Holes contains a Demon Orb. Which one? Here's the cute part. As near as the folks online can tell, it is randomly selected when you start the game. So, in effect, you have to uncover and find every one of them. This isn't such a pain in the ass when you have a guide and the magic which uncovers a treasure chest, but beating the levels when they're even harder is. Thankfully, dying so many times unlocks the option to lower the difficulty for that stage. I took that option this time, since if the game had bothered to tell me I needed to do this shit I'd have been doing it on loop 2 anyway, so I was fine lowering the difficulty back to loop 2 standards. It was still an utter pain. 


In the end, it was my own bad memory which screwed me here. I must have gotten an orb in loop 2's stage 1 and not realized what I'd done, because my count was 15 on loop 3. That left me to dig through the regular levels, which you can thankfully swap back to on another loop (though they're harder than they would have been on loop 1!) As it turns out, I had opened the Hell Hole in level 4 but not jumped into the portal. There was my orb, and after a hellish full day of digging through these levels and beating the gauntlets multiple times to make sure the Orbs weren't random spawns, I got it. Some of this is on me for being forgetful, but this wouldn't have been a problem if the game telegraphed any of this shit! Oh, speaking of telegraphing. 17 orbs. 14 gained by clearing each stage in loops 1 and 2. 1 each hidden in a Hell Hole, randomly chosen on one level in each loop. That's 16 orbs. Where's #17? You'll love this. Just randomly chilling out in a hidden treasure chest on Shadow level 4. Now it's probably one you could trigger easy enough, but the fact that the last one just breaks all the rules and is hanging out there is fucked up. If you don't know by looking it up or finding it, your only other option is combing all the levels. It's just way too cryptic with little explanation.


Okay fine. I spent a Monday playing a masocore gotcha game treasure hunt, got all the orbs, and could now fight the final boss. Well, he's actually the second form of the final boss. Dying on him meant fighting the final boss again and hoping you didn't take a hit. The final boss wasn't too bad, so this wasn't an issue really. More tedious than anything. The final boss wasn't even that hard, either. Just a matter of learning attacks and ranges. There is one, though, that got me. One last masocore game HEE HEE GOT YOUUUU bit of bullshit. Take a look.



Now, in hindsight, you can see the dude is glowing and that's a tell for a fireball shot. On your first time seeing that though, you've no idea that a massive fireball is about to instantly spawn a giant hitbox just under the only spot you can deal damage to the boss. There's no avoiding that your first time. You just have to die to it, TEE HEE GOTCHA, and then remember it. Bullshit, but the last bit of bullshit. I beat the game then, got the true end. This is not a game I will be revisiting any time soon. This massive god knows how long screed is my honest experience with this game, and I'm incredibly let down by it. It can be challenging and interesting to overcome a masocore game, and lord knows I've done it before. It isn't what I come to Ghosts n Goblins for, and that switcheroo of design decisions blindsided me and soured me on the game. If you enjoy it, I'm happy for you. It's definitely got great accessibility options like difficulty selection, lowering, checkpoints and all that... but it's a hateful designed gotcha game at heart. If you can have fun with that, more power to you. I did not, sadly, and the words above were me expressing that. One more disturbing thing, before we go, related to accessibility... Check the description for the lowest difficulty:




Is it just me or is that implying you can't get a true end on Page difficulty? Christ, it's Cuphead easy mode all over again. Let them have their ending on the easiest mode, for God's sakes. If you're going to go with accessibility, go all the way. I think I've rambled enough, but I will say this for Ghosts n Goblins on the Switch. If you're interested in them, you can do better on Switch. Capcom Arcade Stadium can net you the older arcade games for about $15 USD, and if you've got Switch online then you have the (admittedly kind of jank) NES port of Ghosts n Goblins and the SNES Super Ghouls n Ghosts. Mighty fine games that will challenge you in a chaos vs order way. Not like this. Then again, if masocore's your bag, grab this. If not... steer clear. I kind of wish I did, but we put all that to bed with this. Okay. That's all. See ya. 


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