Retro spotlight: Kid Icarus

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Ask about the quality of Kid Icarus, and you’re sure to get a range of opinions in a way that you wouldn’t for a number of Nintendo’s other newer franchises that popped up between 1985 and 1987. Super Mario Bros.? Vitally important all-time classic. Metroid? Sure, it’s not Super Metroid, but what a proof of concept and enjoyable ride in its own right. The Legend of Zelda? It’s literally The Legend of Zelda. Kid Icarus, though, is not a beloved classic. And to be fair, it’s not exactly on the level of those games, either. That it’s so often outright dismissed, though — and that includes by Nintendo itself, which released a Game Boy sequel in North America and Europe but not Japan, and then didn’t bother with another game in the series until Masahiro Sakurai wanted to make one for the 3DS in 2012 — is a little unfair. There’s a good game in here for those who are fine with taking a beating, and those folks have and will tell you as much.

The start of Kid Icarus is the most difficult part. You play as Pit, who is attempting to help rescue the goddess Palutena from Medusa after her army has been defeated and turned to stone, and it sure feels like you’re controlling some random dude who has been left to fend for himself. Your health is low, your damage output is lower, and oh, you’re platforming vertically and if you fall, you die. There might have been a platform underneath you before, but if you can’t see it on the screen, then you’re doomed when you fall there. In addition, the left and right sides of the screen are connected, which means enemies on the left can get to you on the right if they exit the screen, so you’re not actually safe over there. Though, in fairness, they aren’t safe from you because they are on the opposite side of the screen, either.

Despite this being an action platforming game, your health is tied to combat. You need to rack up a higher score in order to receive health upgrades — points are experience here. So you can’t just jump and climb as quickly as possible to reach safety, you need to hang around and not avoid enemies, instead defeating as many as possible, in order to receive health boosts in between levels when your score is compiled. That doesn’t solve the automatically falling to your death thing, sure, but it is going to make the dungeons and boss fights something you can actually complete.

Speaking of those dungeons, it would not be surprising to find out that a number of people who dislike Kid Icarus — and this is by no means a generalization or accusation that everyone who isn’t into it hasn’t bothered to actually play through it — aren’t even aware that the entire game isn’t like the beginning. It starts out with Pit vertically climbing because he’s leaving the underworld. You transition from these first three vertical stages to a fourth, which is a dungeon that’s like a cross between what you’d find in The Legend of Zelda and in Metroid. Single-screen rooms in an 8×8 dungeon, designed to be a labyrinth, where the first thing you need to focus on is finding a way to illuminate and author a map so that you can get a sense of where you have been and where you still need to go, in order to find the exit located where the dungeon boss is hiding. There, too, will be one of the three sacred treasures: equipped with all three, Pit will be able to battle against Medusa and rescue both Palutena and Angel Land.

That’s not the lone switch in genre or orientation. After you leave the first dungeon, Pit is out of the Underworld, and hey, the game is side-scrolling now. You can still fall to your doom here, sure, but there is a lot more ground here to walk on, and fewer holes to infinitely fall through — plus, if you’ve been doing the fighting you should (or got lost in the dungeon long enough), your score has begun to progress in a way that means you have more health than you did. Suddenly, Kid Icarus is much easier to handle — it’s not easy, not by a long shot, but it feels manageable. So long as you aren’t turned into an eggplant by a wizard shaped like the vegetable, anyway.

There is a complexity to Kid Icarus that, understandably, turned people off from it. Super Mario Bros. was tough at the time of its release, but the concept it had refined was so engaging and welcoming that people were hooked, anyway — it helped that it was difficult in the way that arcade games were, and you overcame its difficulty in the same way you did those types of games: by playing more of it. The Legend of Zelda was for action-adventure games what Dragon Quest was for role-playing ones, in that it was both something new and a more approachable smoothing out of existing concepts that made it less intimidating and aimed at a broader audience than what came before. Kid Icarus stacked systems and genres on top of itself and made dying and getting lost common occurrences — also you could be turned into a walking eggplant by wizards and then have to go looking for a place to cure yourself before advancing, even if it happened, say, right before the dungeon boss for maximum aggravation.

You have to engage with the game in the way it demands — fighting enemies you aren’t strong enough to defeat at first without risk of serious harm and quick deaths — in order to get stronger. The game does not always make this, or really any part of it, easy.

You have to complete training rooms where Zeus throws a bunch of garbage at you continually to see if you can survive the assault, before relenting and saying hey good job, pick an upgrade, all of which puts your health at risk in the process. Your enchanted weapons are temporary, not permanent additions — they can be stolen by a particular foe, and if your health is low enough they won’t be active even if you do have them — so you’re always at risk of going back to your base strength (or, at least, a weaker, basic bow and arrow instead of one ringed with flame or magical abilities). There are rooms filled with pots where you can keep breaking them open to find the treasures inside, but if you open the pot with the little reaper dude inside, guess what? You give up all of those treasures, and also you don’t get another shot at the room. There are rooms you will risk damage and death to get to, only to find out that there is nothing inside of it — it’s supposed to grant you an upgrade to your damage if you’ve done enough to impress the gods, such as by defeating enemies or not opening those aforementioned treasure pots or having a ton of the game’s currency, hearts, in your possession, but sometimes you find the room before you’ve done enough for a reward. There is a shop in the game with fair prices, but also a black market where everything costs far, far more, and it can even put you into credit card debt by letting you pay for things you don’t have the hearts to buy. In the standard shops, you are able to haggle using a second controller, but beware: if the shopkeeper doesn’t like you and you attempt to haggle, the prices will go up instead of down. Reapers, if they see you, continually call down reinforcements that fly around making further progress difficult, and once they are gone, the reaper can call down some more if they see you again. This game does not want you to succeed.

You can, though! Equip that sacred bow and keep your heath up so you have a larger attack range instead of Pit’s pitiful one. Stick it out in the training grounds each time to claim the reward. Make sure you’re doing as much as you can to impress the gods in case you end up in a room where an upgrade to your bow’s damage will be available. Don’t shy away from fighting, in order to receive boosts to your health after you finish a stage, and because if your power level is higher than the stage number you’re in, the items in the shop will be even cheaper than they already are. Make note of where the hospitals in dungeons are, so you know how to get back there after you’re turned into an eggplant, and also remember where on the map the hot springs are — you’re going to need to go there to refill your health when you’re lost in the labyrinths, and it’s always going to be worth the backtracking to do that. Use your mallets that you find or buy throughout the levels and dungeons to free the Centurions from the statue form Medusa cursed them with, so that they can help you fight the bosses at the end of each dungeon — bosses that can take a serious beating, especially if you haven’t bothered to upgrade Pit like you should. I cannot stress enough how much you want to rack up a high score here, if only to make the rest of the game that much more manageable. You wouldn’t skip as many random encounters as possible in Dragon Quest to just to get on with the game, would you?

On that same note, Kid Icarus is a series of solvable problems that seem impossible to solve at first, but that’s only because it’s a role-playing game dressed up as an action platformer, and if you engage with it solely as if it’s the latter, you won’t be able to figure it out nor proceed within it. It’s the kind of ridiculous layering of rudeness and complexity that allowed Xanadu to become a classic on Japanese computers, except Kid Icarus released on the console that brought the masses to gaming in your living room, and the same kind of praise and patience for it just wasn’t going to be there given the differing audiences.

It’s almost entirely rough edges, and you can see why the Game Boy sequel did things like eliminate the falling deaths, instead opening up the size of the rooms you were navigating just like Metroid II: Return of Samus did for the original Metroid, and allowing the penalty for falling to just be “well that’s a long way back up.” You can also see why it entranced Sakurai, though, he of the “actually, there’s a lot going on here” game development philosophy. Kid Icarus: Uprising? Now there’s a game that can’t stick to a single genre and hoo boy is there a lot going on there [complimentary].

While Nintendo has mostly ignored Kid Icarus in terms of new entries, it has actually done a lot to keep the original available over the years. It was given a re-release on the Game Boy Advance like so many other NES titles were, despite the fact that its re-issue was met with a lot more “but why though?” than for its mid-80s cousins. It was included on Virtual Console on both the Wii and the Wii U, and was part of the NES Classics mini console lineup. The best re-release, though, and one you hopefully already down because you can’t legally pick it up anymore, is the 3D Classics version of it on the 3DS.

This is still the NES version of Kid Icarus, and it still features 8-bit sprites of both Pit and all of his foes, but the backgrounds have been completely redone. No more blank, black backgrounds in the Underworld — now, when you enter a room, you can see that it is a room, with bricked up walls, and there are all kinds of visual additions to liven up your climb, too. It’s all very different visually from the original, but not in a way that’s necessarily ill-fitting: think of it like the difference between an actual NES game and a modern throwback game that borrows the style of those titles.

The one issue here is that the true look of the 3D Classics remake can’t be replicated in these digital pages, as the true power of it came from turning up the 3D slider and seeing everything pop off the screen. The level of depth that provided to the visuals was the real draw — it made the game that much more visually appealing, and allowed the enemy designs to really pop.

Those enemy designs, by the way, are so emblematic of Kid Icarus’ whole deal. It’s a weird game, in terms of its design and its many, many little guys that you have to fight. Again: Eggplant Wizards. It’s just such an oddity, and difficult to replicate, that it’s really no wonder that it took Sakurai to be the one to finally go, “Listen, I have an idea for what to do with all of this nonsense” in the present. It is nonsense, but that’s part of what makes it so fun to play, even as it is actively trying to ruin your life.

Of course, the original idea for Kid Icarus wasn’t Sakurai’s — this all predates his time with the company. Kid Icarus was Toru Osawa’s first credit as a game designer, and his work would not get less odd or streamlined for some time. Osawa also served as the director on For the Frog the Bell Tolls, another genre-defying classic that hasn’t received enough love from Nintendo over the years, directed Mario Clash on the Virtual Boy and indiezero’s “internet simulation game” Sakura Momoko no Ukiuki Carnival on the Game Boy Advance, produced Electroplankton on the DS, has been a part of the Famicom Detective Club development team from the beginning and into the present, and has been a producer on the various Fatal Frame games that Nintendo has had involvement in, too. Osawa was also the script director for Ocarina of Time, if you need to hear about something far more mainstream that he worked on, but by and large his body of work over the last four decades has been more oddball than anything.

Maybe you have given Kid Icarus a chance before, and you just couldn’t get into it. Totally understandable, but consider this: this is a game I have always had a fondness for to some degree or another, but I find that as I’ve gotten older and been exposed to more and more games, my appreciation for it has only grown rather than diminish. This game is weird, sure, but that’s part of the appeal: it was not meant to be a smoother version of an existing experience, but is instead coarse and rough and challenging and new. That Nintendo has barely revisited the concept over the years, and that it lacks the kind of industry-wide influence of its peers on the NES, means that it can still feel like all of those things to you now, nearly 40 years later, just as it did when it first hit with the kind of thud that only eventual cult classics can.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.