The Haunted Hoard: Ghosts ‘n Goblins (Arcade)
The Ghosts ‘n Goblins series is renowned for its brutal difficulty, and considering the first game was released in the 1980s when many games weren’t afraid to be unfair to earn more quarters or make a short NES game artificially longer, standing out for that is an impressive feat. That doesn’t mean the first Ghosts ‘n Goblins is above such tricks itself though, leaning on ideas like denying you the true ending until you’ve played through the game twice and had the right item with you to even be allowed past a certain stage that will only tell you the item is required after you’ve finished that stage without it. An arcade game still needs be drawing in quarters or the owner will swap in something more profitable, and this side-scrolling platformer isn’t above stooping to certain tricks to keep you stuck in since you don’t want to lose your hard-earned progress against such tough opposition.
Things start difficult but promising in the game’s early moments. The knight Sir Arthur sets out to save the Princess Prin-Prin after she’s captured by the leader of a group of demonic creatures, Arthur hurling an endless supply of lances at anything in his path to fight his way through seven distinct stages. The enemies he encounters are mostly monstrous, things like zombies that emerge from the dirt or skeletons that pop up from skulls you otherwise did not have to worry about making for the common riffraff you’ll easily put down with your weapon. Flying foes can be a bit peskier, many of their movements or attacks determined by your positioning but they have reliable behaviors so you can get around the crows, hooded ghosts, and flying knights once you know their preferred way of posing a threat.
Sir Arthur can only take two hits before dying, his armor popping off after the first injury and there being remarkably few chances within a stage to get a second pair. Even if there is a secret armor pickup it can be rather unlikely you’ll come across it or it might even be somewhere rather useless like right near the start of a level, the game at least gracious enough to give you armor back if you beat a stage while Arthur’s been reduced to his undies. Your lance is a fairly simple but reliable attacking option, but as you break open pots in later levels you’ll be offered new weapons you can swap in that will even be kept after a death. You can only use one weapon at a time though and can only swap when you find a new pick-up, so if you get something like the torch you can be in for some trouble. The torch is a fairly strong weapon admittedly, but you can only have two active at once and if they miss an enemy they’ll hit the ground and leave a lingering fire. The fire will hurt enemies if they go through it but also enemies seem fairly good at avoiding that flame, this also not helping much against abundant flying foes in levels that can become vertical climbs where foes attack or approach from every angle. The dagger is a fast-firing alternative to the lance though for quicker damage and the axe can pass through foes if you need some help in vertical layouts, but the shield is an interesting tool. Firing a small shield a bit in front of you while equipped, it has bad range but protects against projectiles while active. You’ll have to get close to enemies to kill with it, but it’s the only real defensive tool in the game, and with Arthur having fairly high jumps that leave him vulnerable to certain enemy attacks even with your helpful degree of aerial control, it is nice to have at least one more active way to reply to the threats you encounter.
The early stages have you running forward and facing the creatures who serve the dark lord in what are mostly fair situations. Level 2 does have a platform you have to land on that falls so quickly it will probably kill you the first time you leap to it, but you at least learn that feature of it and can hop off quickly enough next time. You’ll probably learn a few enemy behaviors to dying to them, but it’s not as likely to occur as the platform trick, and these early stages instead have very specific enemies who are meant to hit you even if you’re excellent at watching and reacting to the other enemy types on offer. The first you’ll face is the Red Arremer, a red devil as big as you are and often flying out of reach while swooping down to hit you or spitting fireballs down at you. The Red Arremer chases you unless you can get it pretty far off-screen and its movements are rather unpredictable, this facet of their design to become a common feature of the game’s more dangerous enemy types. It has a run across the ground that you can try to jump over but maybe it will take to the air as you do so, it moving based on your actions at times but not in the way where it’s easy to trigger it to behave reliably. For a tough fight you encounter at least once or twice in a level though it is at least more of a fight compared to the regular enemies even if it is too chaotic to predict at times, but the problems emerge from transferring this design to other creatures.
The first boss, a cyclops, already hits on an issue where he has a charge you can’t jump over and just have to hope will stop before he reaches you. He also can jump fairly quickly, and if you were leaping over one if his fireballs he can trap you in a no-win scenario once you’re in the air. He’s not too bad in your first encounter though, but he’s encountered more than once and in a particularly bad case, there is a point where you need to climb up a ladder and two cyclopses are on the small platform above you need to get on. Outside of videos of runs using cheats or extra tools that achieve the best scenarios through brute force you’ll find players accepting they have to be hit by these two cyclopses in order to continue forward, although it is at least at the start of a later level and the one easy armor pick-up in the game is a bit after that rough scenario. Elsewhere, climbing ladders can still be an agonizing process when monsters like the muscly ogres patrol above them, shooting projectiles down or just refusing to be lured away so you can actually make progress. There are still a few more bosses who move in unpredictable ways, the player often forced to guess if they think the boss will keep coming towards them or change direction and taking a hit they can’t afford if they’re wrong, with some bat-like bosses known only as Satan in particular having swoops so fast you would be needing to move properly before it’s even possible to see it to avoid it. Where these reliable behaviors you learn that would be one thing, but it’s hard to gauge how the flightier monsters will act, meaning you’ll often find yourself dying again and again because you had little hope of anticipating how you needed to move.
Most levels do have a mid-level checkpoint at least and they’re often not too long provided you’re always moving forward. There are some legitimate challenges, the final boss actually being perhaps the most fair boss of them all as you can see his attacks as they come and move appropriately and more importantly the game guarantees you bring the shield to the fight so you’ll be inevitably blocking some attacks. That shield requirement is because the game won’t let you progress past level 6 unless you have it (although there is a shield pick-up in that level so you’re not doomed if you got there without one) but that same shield also makes foes like Satan who move in such flightly and hard to track ways even more difficult as you have to get much closer than you would with something like the knife. To rub some salt in the wound though, once you have beaten the final boss, the game tells you that you didn’t actually beat it, and you need to restart the journey from level one and beat every stage again with the same shield conditions near the end as well. The enemies are harder and faster too, with some already having problems with moving too fast for reactions, but if you don’t need to see a lightly altered final scene at the end you can bow out knowing you missed very little unique content.
Even with that devious trick to basically just keep a player on the hook for more quarters without offering any appreciably new content, Ghosts ‘n Goblins would be a rough game with some clear moments where it breaches into unfair territory, but ideas like the checkpoints and some legitimate challenges along the way mean it isn’t a totally lost cause. If you want to subject yourself to something that doesn’t hold its punches even where it maybe should, it feels like it would do the job… but then the levels had to have timers that kill you instantly if they run out. Most levels will give you somewhere between 2 and 3 minutes to complete them, and while stages with mid-level checkpoints will refresh your time when you reach that point, it doesn’t fix the moments where this timer becomes a major problem. Those ogres guarding a series of ladders earlier wouldn’t be as much of a problem if you could spend the time needed to act only when they’re positioned properly. The cyclops pair you have to accept you’ll be hit by could gradually move into a position where they won’t hurt you, but that would use up too much time in the penultimate level that has no checkpoints and yet has you rematch every boss save the final one. Red Arremer and the Satans could be handled from afar with careful choosing of when to move in and strike, but waiting too much means the clock ticks down and you won’t have time to finish the stage. Timers are a way to keep a player active and moving along and in the arcade they are a pretty basic tactic to keep the quarters coming in at reliable intervals, but it undermines so much of the game’s design and makes problems bigger issues than they need to be because you can’t afford to approach the dangers in appropriate ways.
THE VERDICT: The incredible speed and unpredictable nature of certain foes in Ghost ‘n Goblins undermines its moments where it can put together more legitimate challenges to your progress, the game already providing suitably tough situations before it throws in foes who move in ways where you won’t always have the time to react as needed. This approach to difficulty could have been easier to stomach if not for the timer pushing you into situations where you can’t take the time to bait baddies properly or fight a foe carefully, and sprinkle in unambiguous tricks to increase the difficulty like forcing a second run for the true ending and not letting you past the hardest level unless you use a suboptimal weapon during it and it’s hard to enjoy those brief decent periods amidst the crueler moments designed to kill a player no matter how prepared they were.
And so, I give Ghost ‘n Goblins for arcade machines…
A TERRIBLE rating. I do wonder if I should have checked out the NES port over the arcade version, because while it has less visual appeal, it also seems to have more chances for extra items, longer time limits on stages, and fewer enemies on screen due to hardware limitations. That pair of cyclops atop a ladder is whittled down to only one (which also seems true of some arcade revisions) but the existing problems of Ghost ‘n Goblins are really hurt hard by the addition of ticking timers. It wouldn’t make the inhumane reflexes needed to avoid a Satan swoop any fairer, but you can keep your distance and try to strike after the swoop and then scurry away without concerns about the timer running out. The ogres ambling around near ladders you can’t climb due to their presence wouldn’t be draining the time you need to face a boss pair afterwards. If the timer had to exist, extra time would at least give you some elbow room to better handle these obstacles, and while that doesn’t make some of the seemingly random behaviors of the toughest enemies fairer, it could let you breathe a bit and consider what to do since you won’t have to barrel through the stage to make up for taking a little time on these foes who demand it. The final boss shows a fair fight can be compelling but difficult and the enemies encountered in most portions of the game can be dangerous while still having clear patterns or weaknesses, but a few enemies do ensure that even without a timer entirely, you’d still be dying to situations you don’t have enough control over.
Those moments where you have to rely on luck like if the cyclops will keep charging or not do make Ghost ‘n Goblins the kind of difficult that isn’t exactly the most interesting to overcome. Some of your fate is in your hands, but not enough to really make that victory as satisfying as it would be in a game with the room to recover from a slip up. The time crunch and only two hits before a death shove you into situations where you can’t eat the moments where chance isn’t on your side, but luckily, this was only the first step in this spooky series. Even series not known for difficulty could have tough and unfair elements in their first outing, and future games would learn how to balance things better or offer ways to tip things in your favor. This brutal first outing can be pushed through if you’re a bit masochistic, but time has provided many more legitimately difficult games in a similar mold that don’t need tricks to be satisfying to overcome. Ghost ‘n Goblins is a part of a well-loved series, but it’s not necessary to say every game in the franchise is good just because it would go on to have a respected pedigree thanks to future installments.