The Haunted Hoard: MediEvil II (PS1)

Sir Daniel Fortesque was a knight undeserving of legend, but nepotism had given him fame without any deeds to back it up. In the original MediEvil game though, the knight gets a chance to prove himself, fighting a battle against an evil warlock who accidentally revived him. Dan uses this fortunate bit of circumstance to try and truly earn his place in a special afterlife known as the Hall of Heroes. With that adventure complete, Dan seemed set to enjoy his eternal rest, but MediEvil II sees him called into action again, not really to prove himself, but because this knight seems to have poor luck when it comes to death.

 

In this hack-and-slash action game, the MediEvil series has truly left its namesake time period behind. Set in 1886 in London, MediEvil II is a more Victorian adventure, but Dan himself is still a knight of the Middle Ages. After laying back in his crypt following his efforts to foil the warlock Zarok, Sir Daniel’s body was moved to serve as a display at the British Museum, and as fate would have it, some of the magic of his old nemesis has found itself to England as well. Pages of Zarok’s spellbook fell into the hands of Lord Palethorn who aims to use its magic for a campaign of conquest, but once again, Dan ends up caught up in its magic and accidentally revived. Heroism seems to come more easily to Dan the second time around, the skeletal knight not needing much prodding from the ghost of a street urchin to set out and try and stop Palethorn so he can get back to his eternal rest.

MediEvil II certainly enjoys its new London setting and is thankfully creative in mixing up where you’ll explore in this action-adventure. While you do get to carve your way through zombies in the streets of London, you’ll also find yourself in more unique locations like a carnival or a greenhouse. Many levels are about simply reaching the end, the action complicated by the foes in your path or the need to find important items to open the path onward, but MediEvil II can also be a bit more playful in the problems it puts in your path. One memorable diversion from the main sword swinging adventuring occurs when Palethorn and Dan’s ally The Professor almost seem to forget about the larger dangers at play and instead set up a boxing match, Palethorn’s mechanical fighter the Iron Slugger taking on Sir Daniel with a beefed up body. Seeing the sometimes strange and silly diversions is sometimes better than the reality of them, the somewhat sloppy boxing match requiring the manual to understand its control since the game’s otherwise decent tutorials from that urchin ghost Winston come up short there, but levels can end up fairly creative like a level where you can’t beat vampires directly so you need to move their coffins near sunlight without disturbing them and making them leap out prematurely. This supernatural tour of London can involve puzzles, platforming, and combat, the mix making you ever curious to see how the city’s been corrupted next.

 

Dan’s main concern in a level will often be combat, the knight quickly acquiring a simple sword that he can swing fairly quickly or charge to slash in a circle around himself. The gangly knight is fairly swift, allowing him to weave around enemies to move in to strike or back off to flee, but a lot of what you face will be speedy as well or have some trick to attack from afar. Individual fights end up slotting into a nice spot of not being too demanding or brain dead, and special enemies start to become more common that encourage you to play around with your slowly expanding arsenal. Over the adventure, Dan will eventually get new attacking tools like a hammer and crossbow, but he’ll also get some weaponry that matches the new time period he finds himself in. Pistols, bombs, and even a gatling gun can sit alongside his more mystical tools like lightning, projectiles limited in their ammunition so they’re better saved for foes that require it while your melee options can give you different advantages in range or damage output. You can set two weapons to swap between midfight and the inventory menu freezes things if you need to swap in another, messing around with your arsenal keeping the combat interesting even when it’s not exploring as wide a range of ideas as the puzzles. Bosses can still be impressive though like the Museum’s cobbled together dinosaur skeleton shifting its body to require different attack approaches, although the anthropomorphic minions of Palethorn, Mander and Dogman, have a fight that feels a bit hectic since camera angles aren’t always on your side.

For the most part, level navigation in MediEvil II will go fairly well, encouraging you to explore for a few reasons. Sir Daniel’s life can be expanded if you find life bottles, each one essentially a reserve health meter meaning you’ll be much harder to kill as you acquire them. Even in moments where you can fall to your doom, you’ll usually just have one life bottle emptied as punishment before the game sets you back to safe ground, and when you do find means to heal, you can fill those reserve life bottles back up, MediEvil II providing some wiggle room so rough moments like fighting Mander and Dogman don’t slow things down. This definitely helps with the times the camera sometimes adjusts suddenly when attempting a jump, the player not knowing they’ll need to adjust their movement because they didn’t expect the sudden shift in perspective. Thankfully, more often than not, the levels are enjoyable spaces to explore, particularly thanks to the Chalice system. Defeating enemies isn’t about just clearing away danger here, as each foe’s soul will work towards making a special Chalice available for collection. These Chalices are not only what you need to keep getting Dan new weapons, but they work towards the game’s true ending, giving you an incentive to not just find every villain in a level but defeat them. This means even tamer foes have their chance to get in their licks as you won’t just ignore them, although a fair few levels do include more monsters than needed to make the chalice available or ones that will respawn some time after their first death. This does allow the game to keep some danger present so you can’t just clear out every concern in a level and then explore at your leisure, and in its continued pursuit of creative twists, there are even moments that shift up the soul system like at the greenhouse where you have to save innocent humans from being slain lest their lost souls count against your Chalice progress.

 

One mechanic new to MediEvil II and apparently deemed interesting enough to grace the box art of every region’s version of the game save the U.S. is Dan’s ability to pull his head off and place it on a wandering zombie hand. The Dan-Hand is unable to fight and mostly used for crawling through small spaces, the player sometimes needing to get Dan’s body to cooperate across two locations to solve a puzzle. It is perhaps overemphasized for something that often amounts to activating switches or locating important info for the body to use, but it does add a bit of extra variety that doesn’t hurt. That adventurous spirit in trying new things here and there helps MediEvil II overcome the moments where things are a little rough around the edges, the player given time to engage in regular battle and explore the sometimes wide open levels with many paths to go down while a new idea focuses things in a bit to provide more memorable moments. MediEvil II doesn’t deviate from the core design ideas of its predecessor too much, sometimes feeling like a pretty straightforward continuation of what was seen there despite its new setting, but its more whimsical deviations do help it find its own identity in its gameplay as well as its aesthetic.

THE VERDICT: An entertaining eerie romp through a monster-filled version of Victorian London, MediEvil II does a good job diversifying its levels in both theme and action. The Chalices encourage you to always engage with the creatures you encounter, allowing the fighting to stay present and important even against lesser foes, while some shifts in play style and a range of puzzles and platforming challenges keep you moving through new ideas regularly. Some sections do stumble when the camera angles blindside you or deny you info, but between swinging your range of weapons in quick skirmishes you’ll still find some creative and unusual diversions that make Dan’s second accidental revival an entertaining albeit not quite explosive evolution of what you faced in the first game.

 

And so, I give MediEvil II for PlayStation…

A GOOD rating. MediEvil II’s sometimes simple combat does benefit a great deal from the company it keeps. You still get to enjoy playing around with the new toys your Chalices unlock, later weapons definitely giving you special edges against foes that could have been pesky otherwise. Ammunition isn’t too much of a limiter since the gold you collect goes solely towards refills bought from a sketchy man in a trenchcoat, and it ends up much more interesting to engage in battle when you know you’re always working towards a clear reward. However, if it was all slashing and shooting, MediEvil II would definitely lose its charm, but the cartoony horror is complemented by the strange deviations in play that come from moments like placing your skull on a little walking hand. Not all deviations are too involved, the boxing match perhaps the most extreme compared to brief moments of unique puzzle solving, and the moments where the camera does feel uncooperative could have likely been smoothed over with some slightly smarter level design. Bosses tending to lean less on mad slashing are why Mander and Dogman feel like they’re also exceptions to a normally well handled side of the adventure, the player more often able to enjoy a strange idea like a steam-powered circus elephant and a fight that encourages different play than the regular monster encounters. While it has clear rough edges to smooth out, the level variety is a clear benefit that makes MediEvil II the interesting adventure that it is.

 

It is quite a shame the MediEvil series came to a stop with II, the franchise mostly limited to remakes of the first game from then on. MediEvil II was starting to stretch its creative legs while also keeping effective ideas like the Chalices motivating clearing levels, the game able to balance action and other activities rather well. Like the unexpected hero Sir Daniel Fortesque though, the series has a special charm to it, goofy but spooky, a bit off kilter but entertaining. Sometimes as awkward as its gangly hero, MediEvil II may not always do the right thing, but it’s willingness to plunge into the unusual is what helps it be an enjoyable but not quite legendary video game adventure.