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"Not as difficult, but just as fun and stupid, as you've heard."

There's a tried and true method of masquerading braggadocio as modesty: pretending that difficult tasks are easy to accomplish.

"Yeah, benching 400 lbs. was good for a warm up, but I'll have to try something heavy next time."

"Yeah, I aced the test, without studying, but the material's not too complex if you understand a few basic concepts."

"Yeah, I baked and personally decorated that ten-layer wedding cake, but it's all just following the recipe."

Please understand that I am not doing that when I say that I beat Ghouls 'n Ghosts shortly after I bought it, and that it wasn't very hard.

The defining feature of Ghouls 'n Ghosts (and really, the entire Ghosts 'n Goblins series) would seem to be ridiculous difficulty, if we were to judge by popular reviews. On GameFAQs, there aren't any other reviews of the Virtual Console version (as I'm writing this, at least), but of the dozen or so reviews listed under the identical Genesis version, a dozen or so speak of the high difficulty level of the game, using phrases such as "tough," "difficult," "hellishly difficult," "extremely difficult," "frustrating difficulty," "Difficulty: Off the charts!", "five of the hardest levels you will ever play," "VERY HARD," and "hard...from beginning to end." The unanimous opinion, from the game's fans and critics, is that Ghouls 'n Ghosts is not an easy game.

Well, it is, for two simple reasons. 1) You get infinite continues. 2) The distance between continue checkpoints is small. In other words, you have as many chances as you need to make it past a short series of obstacles, and if you do it once, you never have to worry about it again. (Or, rather, if you do it twice, depending on how you look at it.)

Infinite continues don't guarantee success, of course. Megaman provided infinite continues, but I could never make it past that damn cyclops robot thing; and Ninja Gaiden gave you unlimited chances, but only about five people in the world have ever beaten that game. Ghouls 'n Ghosts, however, doesn't contain any challenges on par with those games. Ordinary enemies generally die after one hit, and bosses aren't very strong or aggressive. Rather than presenting specific, insurmountable challenges, Ghouls 'n Ghosts provides a series of potentially fatal obstacles, and requires you to clear a small number of them near-perfectly in order to progress.

Make no mistake: You will die. You will die often. You will die more often than your little brother playing Contra with the Konami code. The amount of time you spend dying will far outweigh the time you spend succeeding, and you probably will die dozens of time after making a mistake that you vowed never to make again after it killed you the third time.

However, if you didn't die repeatedly, the game would last about half an hour. Repeated, frequent death is the deliberate choice of the designers; and it is that death, rather than difficulty, that defines this game. Dying in Ghouls 'n Ghosts does not carry the usual stigma of defeat as in other games; it's more like shooting a basketball from midcourt and bouncing off the rim. The game is designed around the premise that the player will repeatedly try to accomplish a difficult, but perfectly plausible, feat, and will fail most of the time.

To make an end of this belabored point: I'm about as bad at video games as they come, and I was able to finish this game pretty quickly, even on the hardest difficulty level. I anticipate that the majority of gamers could do the same. Unless you're easily frustrated or unusually careless, you can beat this game.

Given the denunciation of this game's mythical difficulty, the question we're left with is the question I should have started with: Is the game any good?

As far as story and emotional impact go, Ghouls 'n Ghosts is about as successful as a game of Yahtzee. You will not care about Arthur (the protagonist), his quest, or the girl he's supposed to save. You won't hate the villain (Loki, or Lucifer, or whoever), nor make any attempt to comprehend his undefined motives. When the game is over, your emotional reaction to overcoming the ultimate evil will pale in comparison to your amusement at the ending text's poor translation and the inane animations that accompany the final credits. In short, the story serves as a feasible conduit for the gameplay, and nothing more.

The gameplay, however, is fantastic. The controls are simple: run, jump, and hit stuff. Enemy assaults are constant, but can be dealt with by quick, calculated reactions. (Or, you can just jump around and shoot.) Arthur's limited agility (he runs fairly slowly, cannot change course in midair, and cannot turn while ducking) isn't usually a source of much frustration, because the game is designed to require nothing more of Arthur than what he can do. When you are able to make it past a section without dying, you will be amazed at how fluid and skillful Arthur's actions seem. Arthur's abilities, and the challenges before him, are perfectly matched, such that you will almost always know what you need to do to survive, and will know what mistake you made that caused you to die.

That sort of praise is fairly opaque (if not flat out incomprehensible), but I'm trying to explain something spot-on about Ghouls 'n Ghosts that is a rare virtue, even among good platformers. Super Mario Brothers, for instance, although the archetype for the genre, did not have as tight a match between the protagonist's abilities and the environment's challenges. Slipping past the hammer brothers often involved as much luck as skill; the spinies fell in random patterns, and could thus be either very simple or very tricky to bypass; fish may either swim right past you, or come right toward you; the fire flower was such a game-changing item that the difficulty of entire sections can be removed by its acquisition. In other words, Super Mario Brothers did not present a hero with a specific set of abilities, and a set of challenges that tested those abilities in deliberate ways. Super Mario Brothers presented a series of mishmash challenges that could be simple or frustrating, depending on luck and the ability to hold on to power-ups. Moreover, Super Mario brothers would play essentially the same way, even if Mario jumped 10% higher, ran 10% slower, were two pixels taller, or fell more slowly.

Not so Ghouls 'n Ghosts. If Arthur could run faster, or jump higher, or were taller, much of the game would have to be redesigned. The relative speed of Arthur to his enemies, his limited jumping ability, and the size of his hit zones, are all accounted for by the environment. If he were improved, the game would be too easy. If he were weakened, he wouldn't stand a chance.

If none of that makes sense to you (and it probably shouldn't), you can simply take me as having stated that the game is well-designed and a lot of fun.

It's no spoiler by this point that you have to play through every level twice in order to beat the game. What's interesting is that this gimmick, no doubt created for the arcade version as a lazy way of getting more quarters, ends up working very well. You'll be amazed that the levels you swore were impossible the first time through are now pieces of cake (unless you're playing on practice mode, in which case you'll wonder why the hell the game just got harder). Yes, it's still a cheap trick to draw out an underdeveloped game. But the fact of the matter is that it's still fun to play through the second time, and it's even more fun if you know there's an ending coming up. Frankly, they could have told me I had to pass every level five times and I would have done it.

Ghouls n' Ghosts aims pretty low, but essentially scores a bullseye. This is as good as this type of thoughtless, soulless, viscerally-appealing game gets. The game has its problems, but even with eighteen years of hindsight, I don't have too much bad to say about this game.

One seemingly insignificant, but genuinely bothersome problem is the lousiness of Arthur's arsenal. There is simply no reason to bother with any weapon besides the knives. (Until a specific weapon is needed later on, anyway.) There will be plenty of situations in which other weapons may work as well as the knives, but you will never find yourself in a position in which you'll think, "I wish I didn't have these damn knives." The sword is fun, but its limited range is as real a defect as it initially seems; the axe's upward trajectory is likewise undesirable, and not balanced by any real benefit; the shield's ability to glide along the ground is of little utility; the blue fire is at best manageable and at worst useless; the javelin's essentially a slow knife. Obviously, the precise ranking of weapons is a matter of personal preference, and one would have to take into consideration each weapon's magic ability as well. However, the unimaginative-yet-quick-firing knife is so clearly superior to every other weapon that the variety of weapons available adds little to the game.

In fact, the addition of multiple weapons actually detracts a bit from the game when one considers that a weapon, once acquired, cannot be dropped until a new weapon is found. This means that picking up a lousy weapon by accident is a mistake that could haunt you for levels. (You'll have plenty of chances to pick up new weapons, but you never know when you'll get the knife back in particular.) Picking up a bad weapon is literally a fate worse than death, since your bad weapon will stick with you even after death, and make it all the harder for you to stay alive. Whenever I have the knife, and some other weapon is in my path, such that there is a chance that I might bump into it, I promptly kill myself. It simply isn't worth the risk to go on.

The gold armor ends up being a wasted idea as well, since it really doesn't do much for you. 1) Unless you've played the game a thousand time, or are related to god, you will get hit so quickly that the gold armor will make almost no difference for you. 2) The golden armor only unlocks useful magic for the lousiest weapons. It's not worth carrying around the blue fire just so you can use kickass magic on the rare occasions that you find yourself with gold armor. You'll have golden armor handed to you on level 5, and you'll have some use for magic there, but for most of the game the gold armor will be a non-factor.

Hit detection is remarkably poor, but errors generally occur in your favor. Your weapons will frequently kill enemies they clearly didn't touch, and enemies will brush over your head, feet, or backside while leaving you unscathed. The only real unfairness with the hit detection is that it will often seem that you cannot escape from a given situation without getting hit, while in reality you can, if you know which enemy can touch you where without hurting you. Overall, though, the faulty hit detection mostly functions to give the player the occasional "gimme," and there's nothing unfair or unwelcome about that.

The game is far too short, even though it requires you to play every level twice. Replay value is high, since the game is such damn fun, but that's little excuse for making a game this short. Ghouls 'n Ghosts was originally an arcade game, and anyone who spent a hundred bucks in quarters to beat the game probably thought the game was plenty long; but that feeling doesn't carry over to the home version. After you beat the practice difficulty level, you still have professional; however, the professional difficulty level is the same as the second time through on practice. So, really, nothing new. This game will seem exciting and fun and great for a week, but then you'll probably be done with it, for a few months at least.

The text is the usual sort of trash, mistranslated or grammatically incorrect even in the rare instance that it isn't irrelevant.

7/10 isn't a great score, but by no stretch of the imagination is this a great game. It's fun, and worth the eight bucks or whatever that it costs, but when Roger Ebert makes a stink about video games not being art, no one is going to hold up a game like Ghouls 'n Ghosts as counterargument. It is, however, a standout game from a time when no one gave a damn about whether video games were art, and just wanted to give kids something to do besides play outside and have friends. Give it a go; it's better than anything on the TurboGrafx.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/12/07

Game Release: Ghouls 'n Ghosts (US, 08/27/07)