Ghouls'n Ghosts
Hyper Spooky Game #3
Type of game
A museum of horrors mixed with a burlesque show, constantly vacillating between driving us mad with terror and making us howl with laughter.
Release date on our machines
November 1990, not long after the arrival of the console.
Developer
Capcom Co., Ltd. for the arcade version, port conducted by SEGA Enterprises Ltd.
Publisher
SEGA Enterprises Ltd. So they only have themselves to blame if the port is screwed up.
Ghouls'n Ghosts : available on the Mega Drive Mini, and the Mega Drive of the Nintendo Switch Online.
Like a handful of other Mega Drive games, I'm sure my father-in-law acquired it for his own personal enjoyment. For a few months, he acted as if the console belonged to him. Hahaha! Well well well! Dis he buy it for himself, disguising it as a Christmas present for my sister Elena and me? Yeah, right! Well, joke's on him when he lost ownership the day Sonic showed up, more or less. As for Ghouls'n Ghosts, I've no idea why he picked up that particular cartridge. Perhaps he'd discovered the original arcade version, although I doubt he'd ever been to an arcade room, not even once. He'd have been kicked out of there in a hurry, in my opinion. Why? No, nothing, I just wanted to put a stray bullet in him. Anyway, Elena and I already knew that we'd make it our own in a matter of days. Talking about the game, of course. And so, still before the Sonic hurricane came to reshuffle the deck, Ghouls'n Ghosts did indeed occupy the podium of our favorite Mega Drive cartridges. For a total collection of around three games, but podium all the same, eh?
Whass'adist
I'd be hard-pressed to know which to place where between him, Super Monaco GP, and Mystic Defender. In any case, I immediately adored the grotesque and horrifying universe of this platformer. A little less so its difficulty, which boasts a penchant for psychological torture of the most abused kind. Even the feeble-minded me at the time felt fooled, going so far as to scream out loud that it was pure and simple bullshit.
Ghoulshog Day
No muscular, polymorphous protagonists like in Altered Beast there, nor crazy animals like in Psycho Fox. Instead, a knight (okay, nothing original), skinny (ah, now that's a change) who wears red-hearted underpants (hahahahah so fuuuuuuunny). Unless it's strawberries (someone rightly pointed this out to me), but it's impossible to define properly, given that the motifs are two and a half pixels long. This increases the sense of vulnerability tenfold, and the ability to launch projectiles along the four cardinal points - a super-cool feature, by the way - fools no one. Our brave King Arthur risks his life every second. Demons everywhere, safety nowhere! We feel that our avatar is suffering at every turn. Not like in Castle of Illusion, where Mickey, even though he's on the same mission to rescue a girl, wears a disturbing smirk on his face.
Arthur doesn't smile. He stresses, he flees, he... turns into a skeleton, crushed by the infernal grip of a giant hand with a half-cute, half-angry face on each finger (I'm not making this up). I never got to the end of the game as a kid. Well, yes, I once faced the filthy fly that defecates moldy eggs on us. I've even beaten it once or twice! And then, just when you think you've reached the grail of victory, a stupid old wizard tells you that you've got to do it all over again, in hard mode, and you've got to find a special weapon without losing it for the whole game if you want to see the REAL ending. Oh yes, and keep your golden armor for earning the right to discover the truest of the true endings. Otherwise it's all over. By ticking all these boxes, you'll be able to face the super real final boss, and save the princess. I obviously didn't understand a quarter of this crazy list, but my mega-cool neighbors Nelson and Mortimer explained it to me.
The jovial, galvanized air that characterized them at all times, even in the face of this absurd challenge, spurred me on. Without success. Granted, other criteria weighed in the balance, such as being able to choose our favorite toy from among a dozen or so different weapons. Well, choosing sometimes came down to seeing the item appear under our feet, while juming mid-air and having to land on it. And now I'm stuck with the extremely slow axe that doesn't even fly straight, even though I'd managed to hold on to the small knives for half the game! Well, at least the famous golden armor unlocks a kind of charged super attack for each of these weapons. And thanks to this, no two games were the same. It took me an emulator and overuse of the save system to get to the end of the absolutely true true ending, twenty years later. And I rejoiced as if I were still six or seven years old.
No matter how smart I was, no matter how much I bragged about it like the Paprika brothers, I was still pretty freaked out when I tried it alone in front of my console. But I felt a positive fear, a bit funny and invigorating. Quite the opposite of Diablo, which would send me plopping into a corner a few years later. Case in point: a humanoid boar vomits a torrent of cement at you (laughter), before leaping twenty meters to crush you with its bottom (terror, and a bit of laughter too, alright), all while skulls spat out by huge flowers with sharp teeth fly in all directions (pure terror). The sets are incredibly original, at least in the morbid register: a village set on fire by pyromaniac gargoyles, a ruined elevator infested with living armor... not forgetting the final castle; labyrinthine, revealing foul aberrations on every floor. What kind of sick psychopath came up with this stuff, serisously?
From possessed pillar to zombie post
So when you find yourself in your trunks facing a cyclops cloud three times your size, enraged and indisposed to boot, it puts a lot of things into perspective. Especially if your only equipment happens to be a kind of flammable radish that's impossible to throw properly. I just realized that I used to call them radishes, like in Super Mario Bros. 2. I swear, this weapon only serves to make us rage even more, inevitably. So, to compensate for my frustration and fear, I invented stupid names for the monsters I came across. The bouncing clouds of the second stage, the cream puffs of the boss guarding the entrance to the final castle, the flying hedgehogs, the chickpea worms... it only half worked.
Super terrifying Opera
In all this humorriblistic quagmire, it was perhaps the music that kept me going. I find it neither unpleasant, as has happened more than once on Mega Drive, nor incredibly visionary and beyond the sound capabilities of the console (Streets of Rage, you know I'm talking about you). This O.S.T. could represent the median musical quality of this machine, the one we'd use to compare all the others. That said, it's a wonderful accompaniment to the various sections of the game, giving us a lift one moment, only to send us curling up under the bed the next. So, we love it, don't we? Well, I do. Each track maintains a kind of fairy-tale (and demonic) tension that still transports me to this phantasmagorical world, many decades later (and nostalgia makes me launch into indigestible logorrhea, my apologies). Each theme perfectly illustrates the level that accompanies it, and... uh no, stop. In fact, it's all completely wrong, because a single title can be played over two consecutive stages, which sometimes look very different. One of my favorites, the one in the second stage, isn't scary at all! It's the perfect embellishment for a bucolic stroll through a sunny, flower-filled forest. But it's probably playing it cool, the more likely to surprise us with atrocious infernal beasts, hidden behind every edge of the ledge, ready to spring up and rip our throats out with their powerful jaws. Worse still, the theme of the first stage, in keeping with age-old tradition, has been found in various forms in every iteration of the franchise since Ghosts'n Goblins. So you could listen to any composition, not only in any level, but in any game! But it still works, because it's a well-crafted old platformer, with catchy, universal melodies, love of the past, distrust of the present and fear of the future, blah, blah, blah. All in all, what I said before would be wrong turns out to be right. Except for the last point, of course. Oh, and I can't explain it any better than that. Just go and listen for yourself.
Green from fear
Every time I think about Ghouls'n Ghosts, my mind goes back to the early nineties, to weekday evenings when it got dark early. This memory isn't going to look for coherence anywhere, given that I played it all year round, but linking it to winter makes it more compelling. Perhaps because the cold nights transcended the game's haunting atmosphere. My best moment on this title doesn't correspond to one of the times I reached the fly that ejects blobs with a noise worse than the worst fart ever heard, just to get executed in two seconds (and all to learn later that it's not really the real final boss, as already mentioned above). All I had to do was go off and play LEGO or Dino Riders for a quarter of an hour to digest the defeat before doing it all over again. My real favorite memory came in the Crystal Forest level, by chance. As I was running to reach the second section with the icy slopes, a basic skeleton managed to keep up with me and... it turned all green.
That's it, nothing more, my favorite part is a display bug. Does it bother anyone? I've worked too hard to do it again! That stupid skeleton goes back underground by itself most of the time. I must have done it twice in my life, tops. There too, I needed to go and do something else to calm me down if the monster didn't do what I wanted. I'd draw things like a completely deformed dragon or half-paraplegic knights, but I never knew how to do any better than that. My room was full of ways to escape from the real problem, which had nothing to do with video games, but rather with the often stifling, if not downright unhealthy, climate of real life in the house.
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