Shades of Resonance: Second Chances - Memory Log #32

Kid Icarus

If you were around during the NES' glory days, then you probably remember how every single one of your friends and relatives seemed to own the same core group of games. Any time you were looking through a game collection and reading through the labels, you were likely to identify names belonging to the same ten ubiquitous games: Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Contra, Mega Man 2, Bionic Commando, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania and Double Dragon.

And you remember, also, that each collection, no matter how bog-standard it was, always had one special quality. It had something that made it truly stand out to you: a handful of curious outlying games--two or three less-common or obscure games that captured your interest for a variety of reasons.

The outlying games were the ones that helped you to see the collection's owner as a unique individual. They, much more so than the common titles, told you a lot about who that person was and how his or her tastes differed. And ultimately, they became the games with which you associated him or her.

For each person, the outliers were different: One of your classmates might have owned, say, Metal Gear, Faxanadu and R.C. Pro-Am. Your cousin from upstate surely introduced you to Blaster Master, Mighty Bomb Jack and Karnov. And that weird kid on the corner of your block was always begging you to come over and play Adventure Island and Cyrstalis.

That's how it was with my friends and cousins. Each one owned a handful of outlying games. Each one introduced me to games that I'd never heard about and thus helped me to gain a greater understanding of the NES scene and expand my interests. And consequently, I came to closely associate each one of them with his respective outliers.

For my closest friends, though, the situation was a bit different because there was some crossover. They all happened to own the same outlying game. For that reason, I came to regard the game in question as the most famous of its kind--the king of outliers.

It was a little game called Kid Icarus.

By 1989, I'd been around the NES for a couple of years, though, in all that time, I'd never heard of Kid Icarus. As far as I knew, Nintendo hadn't produced any large-scale games beyond Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Metroid.

So when my friend Dominick introduced me to Kid Icarus, I couldn't claim to know anything about it: what its story was, how it played, or what genre it represented. Hell--I didn't even know how to pronounce its title! (Neither Dominick nor any of my other friends knew how to pronounce its title, either. For the longest time, we all assumed that it was pronounced "Kid Eye-car-us.")

Going in, I was told that it was "created by the same people who made Metroid" and that its gameplay was somewhat similar to the latter's, and that sounded amazing to me! "The creators of Metroid, my new favorite action-adventure games, made another game that plays just like Metroid?!" I thought to myself. "How in the world did such a game elude me for so long?!"

So I was excited to play Kid Icarus. I was certain that it was going to be a great game and that I was going to love it. "If it was made by the Metroid team," I thought, "then surely it's going to be of matching quality!"

Unfortunately, though, Kid Icarus wasn't able to live up to my expectations, and I came to understand, pretty early on, why I'd never heard of the game and why it wasn't very popular.

And I was sad to come to that realization because I felt as though the game's opening moments were so very promising. They spoke of greatness.

The game's title-screen theme and opening-stage music, for instance, were amazing. They were beautifully composed and highly inspired, and their rousing energy evoked the same type of emotions I'd felt when I listened to Metroid's music. They filled my mind with the same images of heroism and grand adventure.

Also, I thought, it was a neat idea to apply Metroid's control and gameplay mechanics to a more-action-oriented vertically scrolling platformer. I could see the appeal in a platformer-shoot'-em-up hybrid. Just thinking about the concept stirred me to envision scenes in which the Samus-like Kid Icarus (at the time, we didn't know that his actual name was "Pit") deftly and athletically negotiated his way around waves of enemies and projectiles and creatively used the game's wraparound mechanic to solve complex environment puzzles.

"This game is going to be so much fun!" I imagined.

But as I was advancing through the game's opening stage, my enthusiasm waned at a gradual pace. More and more, I didn't like what I was seeing.

My biggest concern was that I'd been at it for only a minute or two, and Kid Icarus, in that very short time-period, had already established itself as one of the toughest NES games I'd ever played! It was relentless in its difficulty.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't make any meaningful progress. Something would always come along and stop me from doing so: A procession of floating-eyeball creatures would fly in and undulate unpredictably and consequently collide with me and quickly reduce my already-inadequate health-total down to a mere sliver. Snakes would suddenly begin to drop down from out of nowhere and land on my head. Or a random enemy would bump into me as I was jumping and knock me into a death pit.

And what annoyed me most was that the majority of the death pits were traversable surfaces just seconds before. In this game, for whatever reason, you couldn't scroll the screen downward, so any previously traversed terrain suddenly became out of bounds. "What kind of nonsense is that?" I angrily questioned each time I died by falling into a space that was previously occupied by a traversable surface. "Platforms don't cease to exist just because they've moved offscreen! I should still be able to land on them!"

It didn't help that platforms' bounding boxes were poorly defined. There were so many instances in which I walked off platforms, to my death, because I assumed that their edges were traversable. Usually they weren't.

Also, I couldn't figure out what was going on with the Grim Reaper enemy. I wasn't sure why the music would suddenly change anytime I got near him or why, seemingly, I couldn't damage him with my arrows. I'd always pay the price for engaging him. It was either that I'd be killed by repeated contact-damage or I'd be overwhelmed and destroyed by his offspring, who would begin to spawn in endlessly the moment the music changed.

Eventually I decided that engaging him was pointless and that it was better to simply ignore him and try to tank my way past him.

And, well, that also became my strategy for dealing with all of the game's enemies, since my stopping to fight them would usually end in disaster. "It's not even worth trying," I felt.

Another problem was that the game's systems didn't make any sense to me. Each stage contained multiple doors, but entering into most of them seemed pointless. The majority of the time, there'd be absolutely nothing in the rooms beyond. And in other instances, I'd be immediately ambushed by swarms of materializing insectoids, and if I somehow survived the attack, I'd walk away with nothing but an ailing life meter. "If there's no reward for destroying these enemy swarms," I wondered while in a state of puzzlement, "then why should I bother engaging them?"

There were stores that sold some important-looking items, but all such items were ungodly expensive. Each one was in the 400-500 heart range, which was ridiculous because, by that point in the game, you were unlikely to have more than 30. "So if I'm serious about buying anything," I concluded, "I'll have to obtain hundreds of hearts and do so by standing outside a door and battling snakes for several hours." (I have to note that this was more an issue in my subsequent experiences, in which I actually progressed further into the game.)

To me, that didn't sound very fun.

Certainly I would have had an easier time understanding what was going on in the game had I been able to read its manual, but I didn't have that option because Dominick no longer had the manual. He lost it at some point. But even if that wasn't the case--even if I had read the manual and gained an understanding of the game's systems--it wouldn't have mattered. It wouldn't have done anything to convince me that the game's design choices weren't unappealingly arcane.

That wasn't the case with Metroid, whose complexity, in great contrast, was naturally occurring. It was born from the game's organic-feeling world design and its demand that players figure out how to progress by experimenting with the hero's weapons and abilities.

Kid Icarus ignored all of Metroid's lessons and inexplicably decided to generate complexity in an artificial manner. If you wanted to meaningfully advance your way through its world, you had to somehow obtain esoteric knowledge. And I didn't care for that type of complexity. It was too confusing.

And in the end, I never made it past the first stage or came close to seeing its exit. The platforming was too difficult, and the hero simply wasn't equipped enough to capably deal with all of the enemies that were being thrown at him.

So the experience was a total bust. And nothing that I saw that day convinced me that Kid Icarus was a game that I needed to own.

I wasn't done with Kid Icarus, though. I returned to it a couple of times over the years, and I did so because I really wanted it to be a part of my life. I genuinely wanted like it and form a connection with it. That's why, in those subsequent sessions, I tried to look past its shortcomings and focus all of my attention on its most appealing qualities. It's why I did all that I could to search for and discover the great game that surely existed somewhere within that cartridge.

I went to this trouble because I wanted Kid Icarus to be what Nintendo intended it to be: one of the company's core group of mid-80s releases and an important part of its DNA. I wanted to find reasons to celebrate the game. And I wanted so badly for the game's hero, Pit, to emerge as one of the company's most visible all-stars--mostly because I was a fan of his character and I'd get excited whenever he would appear alongside other Nintendo personalities in places like Tetris B-Type's victory screen or in mashups like the Captain N cartoon.

Because Nintendo, observably, treated Pit with some importance, I was certain that one day he'd get a second chance and return to action in a more refined game.

While I waited, I kept Pit's lone NES game in my periphery and enjoyed my favorite parts of it via video play-throughs and music files (in the early 2000s, someone sent me a collection of MP3 files that were ripped directly from Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka's spectacular Metroid / Kid Icarus Arranged album, and I listened to and enjoyed them for years). I made sure that the game continued to have a presence in my life.

At one point, I decided to give the game another chance and finally play it to completion. And as I did that, I found the hints of greatness that I'd long been looking for.

I enjoyed, in particular, the labyrinth stages, which, excitingly, were much more in line with Metroid's explorable world areas (they reminded me, also, of The Legend of Zelda's dungeons). They represented the game's best element. "If only it had done more of this!" I kept thinking as I played through them.

I was happy to see that the game had greater depth than I originally thought. Mainly, it had other types of stages: horizontally scrolling stages, the aforementioned labyrinths, and even an auto-scrolling shoot-'em-up-type stage. And they were all creative and unique!

And the soundtrack, as those album files suggested, continued to be excellent. Over the course of the game, the music grew more rousing and evocative, and at all times, it did a fantastic job of stirring emotion and conveying information: what the mood was like and how you were you meant to feel about your current predicament. It did what you expected a Metroid-like game's music to do, and it did it at a high level.

I remember, also, being surprised at the appearance of a certain enemy type. "Wait--there are Metroids in this game?!" I shouted at the computer monitor when familiar-looking jellyfish creatures flew onto the screen. I was shocked to see them.

The Metroids popping up in a closely related game was super-interesting to me, and it really got my imagination stirring. It made me wonder if Metroid and Kid Icarus were connected in any way and if they somehow shared the same universe. I'd think about those things quite often.

And by the time I finished that play-through, I could see that there were indeed plenty of good reasons to return to Kid Icarus.

The problem is that I never got the chance to do so. I never had convenient access to the game (particularly after I started moving away from emulation).

Ultimately, I did reconnect with Kid Icarus, but I did so in a roundabout way.

The journey started with the Game Boy-exclusive Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, which, for a long time, I was hesitant to go near because of how strikingly similar it looked to its predecessor. I feared that it would be equally rough and arcane.

Though, because I was desiring to enjoy some Kid Icarus action in a convenient fashion, I decided to give the game a chance and buy it when it came to the 3DS eShop in July of 2012.

And I was happy with my purchase. Of Myths and Monsters was a solid game, and I had a great time with it. It was exactly what I was looking for: a refined version of Kid Icarus. It addressed and remedied almost every issue I had with the original game, and consequently it became an accessible, realized version of it. That's what made it so appealing to me.

So Of Myths and Monsters turned out to be one of the most enjoyable Game Boy action games I'd played in years. And the positive impression that it made on me went a long way toward convincing me that the allegedly improved 3D Classics: Kid Icarus, which was frequently appearing as a Club Nintendo reward, might also be worth my time (and its being free to download certainly didn't hurt its cause).

I was, to be honest, a bit suspicious of the game. I had the feeling that its "improvements" would be limited to a few visual and sound upgrades and that it would basically be the original Kid Icarus with a fresh coat of paint thrown onto it.

But that wasn't the case at all. 3D Classics: Kid Icarus was, in actuality, much more than a cosmetically enhanced version of the original. It boasted a number of technical and mechanical refinements as well. And those modifications helped it to be a more-accessible version of Kid Icarus. Most notably, its controls were tighter and smoother, and thus Pit's movements were less slippery; it allowed you to fire your arrows at a faster pace; and its difficulty, at least at the start, was toned down a little. (The only downer was that it still had that aforementioned bounding-box issue.)

It helped, also, that the game came with a digital manual and that I was now able to find out how its systems worked and what its shop items were supposed to be! (It's amazing how much more playable a game becomes when you actually make the effort to learn how it works.)

And the best news was that I was finally got the chance to play and experience the refined and idealized Kid Icarus incarnation I'd been seeking since 1989.

As for the NES original: I don't dislike it, no, or think that it's a bad game. It's just that it's a bit too rough, especially in the early going. Its main problem is that it has a "reverse difficulty curve," in which the challenge is largely frontloaded. What that means is that it's hard to survive the opening stages because Pit is so under-equipped in his base form. He can't adequately deal with what the game is throwing at him. And that leads to nothing but aggravation and demoralization.

The challenge becomes more manageable by the time you reach World 2, yes, but to experience that change, you have to first make it that far. Chances are that you won't. You'll probably give up on the game before you reach its third stage.

Its other problem is that it exhibits all of its worst flaws, also, in the opening stages: Its slippery controls and bounding-box issues become obvious because most of the action entails jumping from one extremely narrow platform to the next, and consequently you spend most of your time sliding and accidentally walking off of platforms. Enemies are annoyingly positioned, and most of the time, they suddenly fly or drop in from out of nowhere and bump into you before you have the chance to react. Pit's starting health is entirely inadequate, and thus it becomes a major struggle to survive for long periods. You can't afford any of the items. And any death, even if it occurs within pixels of a a stage's exit, will send you all of the way back to the stage's starting point (there are never any checkpoints).

And that's the Kid Icarus conundrum: The action in its second world and beyond is definitely worth experiencing, but to advance to that point, you have to endure some of the most hellish opening stages in gaming history. And in all likelihood, you probably won't want to do that. You won't want to put up with being overwhelmed and destroyed early and often. And you'll quickly reach a point which you're ready to abandon Kid Icarus and move on to another game.

That's how the average Kid Icarus experience transpires. And it's a shame that it does because the result is that players are pushed away from what ultimately develops into a good video game.

That's the sad reality of Nintendo's most undervalued core game.

The good news is that Kid Icarus hasn't been entirely forgotten. Its legacy lives on in the form of Pit, who has gained newfound popularity in recent years thanks to his appearances in the well-received Kid Icarus: Uprising and the popular Super Smash Bros. games. He has, at long last, taken his rightful place as an upper-tier Nintendo mascot.

Though, still, he deserves more. He deserves the opportunity to become a star character for Nintendo and to do so by returning to his side-scrolling roots and becoming the lead player in a fully realized Metroid-inspired action-platformer. Such a game will surely bring the Kid Icarus series to the next level and finally place it where it belongs: at the top of Nintendo's pantheon.

Here's to hoping that Pit will soon return in the glorious Kid Icarus sequel that we've been anticipating for more than a quarter of a century.