A few days ago I saw a video map of "Milon's secret castle" and I tend to get micro obsessed with Hudson games like Bomberman and for some reason my hyper fixation kicked off with Milon's secret castle for the NES and Gameboy
You already clicked the title of this thread, it's too late you're gonna sit there and read my stupid cat girl thoughts on this game.
I have THOUGHTS and I'm gonna just spout out my stream of consciousness on this and see how far I get with it.
So like, I feel like most of you probably seen the AVGN episode where he covers the start of the game and calls it bad.
I feel like a common thing is that most people take the AVGN's reviews to heart and not as a piece of satire like most of his reviews are intended to be, to not be taken too seriously and as such there's a few games he's ragged on that people end up defending and saying are actually good, in fact you probably see some of these if you look up Milon's Secret Castle.
They're wrong, this game sucks, it puts down it's worst foot first by explaining nothing and expecting you to understand it's moon logic for "puzzle" solving.
If you wanna have fun with the game you NEED to read a strategy guide for getting started, like once you get past the first floor you can actually intuit what you're supposed to do for the rest of the game and it's pretty smooth from there (besides finding out you need the canteen from the ice dungeon to even be able to defeat the crow enemies)
so alright I got that curiosity bite, I play the game, I beat it and some of the decisions left me scratching my head.
the play through
Show More
So yeah, you gotta push random blocks if you wanna progress, it's not too bad honestly, like you'll blast away blocks and there will be one that sticks out or one that's a different colour, wouldn't be so bad if it didn't need you to push for a few seconds, like yeah reward the player but only if they do the solution for more then a few seconds good game design.
Other then that it's pretty neat, starts you off with 2 main powerups you gotta get, spring shoes and a potion that let's you shrink and you immediately have access to how these powerups work.
So you beat the first boss go to the second level of the castle, get overwhelmed by the amount of new doors you can enter, but hey there's something interesting you have access to you didn't have before, there's a well to the right, you go in, it's pitch dark, so you climb back out with the new goal of finding out if you can light it up.
So you go into one of the doors to see if you can find a new shop and then you realize.
You entered the door of the swirl path and the exit door is all the way on the other side, so you have to slowly make your way across the tedious room to find the shop, find out you don't have enough money then have to find the key and then find the exit door.
Be careful of the traps that make you repeat the whole path again too!
Why is it set up like this? For finding the key you get the great reward of being able to leave. Wouldn't it be better if you needed the key to go into the shop and just have the exit door at the enterance of the room.
Jumping ahead a lil, It gets even worse when they actually do this in the elevator room where you have to climb back up to get access to the enterance door you just fell down from, but you still gotta get the key in the other side of the room.
So ok you probably got the vest and the lamp, find out the well's lit up now progress as usual and then most likely die and find out you don't have any lives.
If you saw the AVGN review you probably remember that he mentions that to hit continue you need nintendo power to find out you hold left then press start. However this information is actually told in the game's manual, something that most people renting the game probably didn't have, it's almost like they should have just had a "continue" option or something wow. (this manual thing was actually figured out by my partner, I wanna give em a wink)
The well is generous, when you get a game over and continue you actually get to continue from there! And for some reason it gives you a different song. No I don't know why.
And then you find out that whoever was doing the boss designs wanted to call it a Friday and go home.
After beating this thing I actually love completely. You get given a hammer which can open some walls!
Then you gotta get out of the well! And then you find out that the reason you start in the well when you continue is because they want you to take the long way out... Backtracking, unless you can kill the eye enemy and use their balloon which is... honestly that's kinda fun?
so cool more tedium, first it's shooting bubbles everywhere to reveal doors now you gotta press up on all the walls to find the passageways, you'll find out that it's actually on the first floors balcony bricks!
The first one will... just take you right out of the same door... why?
If you were exploring the doors before, you probably remember the "find the saw" hint... I think the logic of this hint was that because it on the first floor someone would use the hammer around this area? It's kind of a stretch but hey the secret shop has the saw! which can open dark windows! which makes me ask this next question...
Why is the saw here? you immediately get it right after the hammer, why not just give you the saw straight away, there's no challenge to it, like maybe the saw is in a room that can only be found with the hammer.
So anyway you use the saw on the darker windows and find out that most of these windows are fake.
Cool, so you see all these doors and windows that just kick you out immediately until you hit upon the boss then find out that all the fights are the same but each boss fires a little faster and has a new graphic to look at.
So you beat the third boss, figure out that if you did some good routing in the first room you could have avoided the vest and that you didn't really need the lamp if you knew the layout of the well which means you just wasted all your money and now that you're on floor 3 you finally have access to powerups that actually give Milon upgrades, mostly, you need a feather just to ride an elevator, said elevator is pointless because you can just jump into the door it leads to anyway.
while you're doing this you probably found out something else while checking the other doors on the outside.
SOME OF THE DOORS ARE FAKE AND JUST SEND YOU BACK TO THE FIRST FLOOR
THAT RIGHT! Nothing to it, just go back to the start and waste your time (probably so you can get struck by lighting for daring to take your time)
This just, frustrates me so much, this completely destroys the trust between the player as any door or want to explore has a chance of being punished now and flat out lies about it's content.
And why are there gates that are completely function less on the side towers? You have to break open the walls instead, how does that makes sense why are the gates even there?
But beyond that floor 3 is probably the meatiest part of the game, nothing feels too obtuse, it's not that hard to figure out what item does what and what the hints actually mean (the canteen tells you that you can kill fire but not the crow enemy despite never having to actually beat any of the fire enemies)
I actually didn't mind some of the puzzles here, the stair well puzzle actually cuts the tedium if you can figure out how you're supposed to get out of it and takes you to the boss straight away, the fireplace puzzle tests your memory with the push puzzle from the first floor and there's even a hint for it.
There's a lot of choice in items to buy to the point it actually finally lets you go in collecting things in any order you want, it actually approaches the point of being a metroidvania and beside the canteen, you don't actually need to get any of these to beat the game, none of them feel like they're just a key (again, beside the canteen) either they actually change how you play or make you more powerful.
So, last floor... It's kind of a wet fart, the final level is just the same room with 4 different colours and the same final boss in each room who just bounces around firing fire balls at you, and you have to guess which boss is the real one. Great, the final boss is so meh that it's more of a puzzle then it is a final confrontation which is kind of disappointing after finally getting a boss that's not just the hopping ones that spit fire balls faster and faster.
So like, imagine if in mario 64, you beat bowser and then the final star you collect does this
That's it, beat the game, there's a second loop I'm not doing the second loop bye.
Extra fun stuff
Show More
Something I kinda skimmed over is the bonus games, I'll give the game credit they're completely optional, if you route your game right you don't even need to see it but it can be really helpful in getting more cash.
The weird part of it is that at first it's just some drum loop, but if you actually manage to find all of them, the musicians at the top actually start getting more instruments until you actually have a bonus stage song. I'm sure that 90% of the people who've seen a play through of the game haven't seen that.
Speaking of the music bonus stage, there's a hidden violin in the HUB map. I'll just link the TCRF article for it instead of just brainlessly repeating it https://tcrf.net/Milon%27s_Secret_Castle_(NES)
While looking around I actually found out that there's a gameboy port of this game, and to my shock it's actually a lot better. You can see it in the video, milon's a lot more responsive, going from 0 to 1 a lot faster and jumping has a more immediate responce to left and right movements, the enemies are slower and give you more time to react (this might be incidental since it's on the gameboy)
The game actually has a proper password system and continue option meaning you don't gotta remember a cheat code to continue.
there's a new intro and ending cinematic to the game (There's some articles that say Milon marries the queen in the gameboy ending but I didn't see any indications that that's what happens?)
What's probably the coolest part to me is that on the upper floors they actually introduce new songs, which caught me completely off guard, there's still issues in the design but the new music makes it at least fun to see new places.
It's kind of a whiplash as you can really tell these songs were actually made by composers with a lot of experience compared to the original game's simpler soundtrack.
besides fixing a few issues, it's still the original game which means it still has it's inherent puzzle design issues so you're still going to need to understand some of the obtuse design of the first floor on your first playthrough.
This game is weird, it feels like Hudson was really trying to bank on this being their Super Mario Brothers, even naming the name of the world "Hudson" and has the bee plastered everywhere, heck the health upgrade is a honey comb, I'm too tired to look it up but I"m pretty sure this got dropped in the SNES reboot (from what I've seen that game just pretends secret castle never happened)
TL;DR if you want to play a better version of Milon's secret castle play the game boy version, if you want a good Milon game play doremi fantasy on the SNES
