Milon’s Secret Castle (NES & Game Boy Reviews)

Milon’s Secret Castle
aka Meikyuu Kumikyoku: Miron no Daibouken
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy
NES Version Released November 13, 1986
Game Boy Version Released March 26, 1993
Developed by Hudson Soft
NO MODERN RELEASE

At times, Milon’s Secret Castle is one of those abstract treasure hunt games that you need a guide for, unless you want to spend the next week jumping around while trying to figure out what item does what thing. Let me assure you this isn’t as bad as, say, Vs. The Goonies where stuff is hidden in completely arbitrary locations and must be collected by performing completely arbitrary button inputs that nobody should have ever been able to suss out. Seriously, when I read a guide to a game like Goonies, I assume one of two things happened. Either the developers leaked the locations of the hidden stuff or someone out there wasted their once-in-a-generation brain on video games instead of quantum physics and set humanity back a century in the process. Thinking about that sh*t leaves me unable to sleep sometimes. “Well, we’ll never figure out how to make a warp drive in my lifetime, but at least we have a full walk-through for Tower of Druaga.” And then comes the crying.

While Milon isn’t as extreme as those games, I also can’t imagine being able to play it without a guide. The idea is you’re supposed to hop around a series of rooms while shooting every hard surface with bubbles. Some of the walls and floors might be hiding money under them. There’s also hidden shops, hidden honeycombs (which increase your health by a single meter), and occasionally the Hudson bee, which grants you a shield. But, there are no key items hidden in the blocks. Until the end of the third world, all those have to be purchased in stores. Enemies don’t drop currency, so there’s only two ways to get cash. One is to find it in the rooms. The catch there is once you’ve collected a money tile, it never comes back. There’s a single room on the game’s third world (well, third floor) where, for whatever reason, some (but not all) of the money tiles respawn. It’s this room:

When I played the NES game, I was certain this was some kind of glitch that wasn’t deliberate. But, that room gets a refill on the Game Boy version too. So, if you do want to grind, that’s eventually an option at around the halfway mark of the game. The other method is to enter the bonus rooms. There’s one hidden within each of the seven “normal” rooms in the game that you have to find by Mario-bonking blocks instead of shooting them. Find the right block and it reveals a music box. Touch the music box to enter the bonus room. In them, you have to collect music notes that fly up onto the screen. Notes are worth one point, sharps (they look like hash marks) are worth two, while flat notes (they look a lowercase b), subtract a point. You get $1 for every four points you get, unless you get 50, at which point the payout doubles. I never did this once on the NES even when I tried to cheat it. On the Game Boy, I did it twice without the need for emulation tomfoolery. That’s because on the NES version, the movement physics change in the bonus rooms, becoming slow to respond to your inputs, something that doesn’t happen on the Game Boy.

I kind of wish that Milon ditched the bonus rooms and the ability to grind the stone room, because early in the game, the hunt for money was actually pretty damn fun, as were my searches for the doors to the shops. The titular castle serves as the overworld. The doors aren’t numbered, nor are you prevented from returning to any level. When I attempted to play without a guide, I found myself enjoying shooting all the various walls, smiling with delight when I finally found a buck or two I missed the first time. There’s a nice little “puff” effect when you find a destructible tile, which also carries over to the Game Boy version.

Technically you’re locked into every room and have to locate a key before being allowed out. This mechanic wasn’t as successful as the other treasure hunting aspects. I don’t remember ever struggling to find a key. What could have made it work is having the key and the exit move around every time you reenter a stage, but actually, once you have a room’s key, you never need to find it again. However, you do need to reactivate the hidden doors. This is one of many areas where the Game Boy version falters. Making the invisible doors visible was never an issue on the NES. If anything, it felt like it was too easy. On the Game Boy, the collision box on the hidden doors must be pretty damn small because I could shoot the correct tile and sometimes it didn’t appear. Which actually is in line with all the other problems the Game Boy port has with doors. More on that later.

What’s most remarkable is that, despite the repetitive enemy and boss design, each room in Milon’s Secret Castle feels distinct. It’s not just the color schemes, either. It’s the general architecture of the rooms. The layouts. No new room feels even a little close to being like any previous one until a pair of twin rooms near the end of the game. Given the time frame and the limitations of the NES/Famicom in 1986, that’s an amazing achievement that I wasn’t expecting going into this review. It certainly helps with the exploration, as well. Unless you use a strategy guide, you’ll no-doubt miss things and have to backtrack, but you should be able to know which room is which. Plus, it just makes for a better game because it’s hard to get bored when every room feels like a new experience.

So, what’s the problem? You mean besides the fact that both games are riddled with technical problems? Because that’s not a nothingburger. On the NES, you can.. and will.. be damaged by enemies when the game is caught in an animation of you entering and exiting a castle door. You are NOT invincible when the game mechanics take over. It’s certain to happen at least a couple times in a typical session and I even ate a GAME OVER from it at one point. On the Game Boy, it happens a lot less. In fact, I only had this happen once, but the delay between the act of being damaged and registering the damage was jaw-dropping. Still, it seems like the Game Boy should be the stronger version of the two. It had an extra seven years to fix all the problems, right? Well……….

SPLIT DECISION: GAME BOY VERSION

The Game Boy version of Milon’s Secret Castle is a direct port of the NES game, but it does have some advantages. Money is easier to come by, some items are cheaper (the thing that doubles the damage of your bubbles especially), bosses can only shoot one projectile at a time (this might be a negative if you want more challenging boss battles), bosses can be shot anywhere (ditto), and the castle doors aren’t as spread out, making memorizing the layout a cinch. BUT, activating the castle doors is borderline broken on the Game Boy. I had to press UP multiple times more than once to actually get myself to go through a door. Sometimes it took me so long that I triggered the lightning storm and had to move out the way to dodge the bolts flying at me several times in a row before it finally let me in. I just went back and checked it to see what the hell happened, and I take it you have to be dead center on a door. I honestly wonder if it’s a single pixel wide. See this door?

In the following screenshots, pressing UP could not, did not, and would not open the f*cking door.

And I actually think the gates are worse. Here’s the gate:

In the following screenshots, pressing UP could not, did not, and would not open the f*cking gate.

That wasn’t a rare occurrence. It was like that from the start of the game until the finish and it’s so far beyond irrational that I wanted to pull my hair out. By the way, that wasn’t the deal breaker, nor was the cramped screen. The deal breaker was the Game Boy version of Milon’s Secret Castle suffers from slowdown constantly, even when there’s hardly anything on screen. By 1993, I feel a developer of the caliber of Hudson Soft should have been able to do better than this. Maybe for 1993, it was cool to have a close approximation of a 1986 NES game in portable form, but it’s not 1993 anymore and there’s no reason to play this today. It’s certainly not a good version of Milon’s Secret Castle. It feels like the whole game could crash at any moment. The “improvements” aren’t so much “improvements” as they’re the easy mode of the NES game, but their gains are negated many times over by the problematic mechanics.
Game Boy Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.

SPLIT DECISION: NES VERSION

I made a good faith effort of beating Milon without a guide, and I did figure out a lot of it on my own. I Like I figured out on my own that, once you have the right item, there’s hidden doors in the overworld that you smash through with the right item. But, that came after a part I got stuck on. There’s pushable blocks in the rooms, only they don’t push right away. You have to walk up against them for longer than you would expect to activate the move, and I needed the guide to tell me that. I also needed the guide to explain the items before I bought them. Maybe the instruction books had this information, but I absolutely did need an assist playing Milon.

With that said, I have zero objections to using strategy guides, and StrategyWiki has a highly detailed one for this game. Very nice. Plus, Milon isn’t so abstract that I needed it from start to finish. Actually, the climax of the game kind of threw me off. Because the fourth and final floor I finished in maybe two minutes, if that. I really wondered if I’d gotten the “correct” ending because it seemed too easy after everything that came before it. Well, it turns out that the ending is based on blind RNG luck. There’s only one door to enter on the fourth floor, and it brings you to a room that’s one color, and at the top of that room is a boss. Only, there’s a 75% chance it won’t actually be the final boss. It turns out there’s four rooms that are mostly identical except what color they are. You enter them by going left and right in the starting room, but I didn’t get a chance to do that because, on my first AND second times beating the game, the yellow room was the correct room.

It’s a dumb way to end the game. Stop and think about it: since there’s no way to logic-out which is the correct color room, ANYONE is just going to systematically clear out each room before moving onto the next. All this “twist” does is randomly decide how many times you have to do that before it counts. In the one and only time I beat the Game Boy version, it was the third room, and it was boring after the first room. So, Milon’s Secret Castle doesn’t stick the landing on a satisfying ending, but what led up to it wasn’t a bad game, actually. Okay, so there’s a lot of head-shaking dumb choices. One of the items is the feather. What does that do? See this elevator:

The feather allows you to stand on it. Otherwise, you clip through it. There’s a hidden shop at the top of the elevator shaft that contains the upgrade to your weapon. By the way, that is literally the only elevator in the entire game. But, like, getting the weapon upgrade makes it worth it, right? Well, sure. Except, you know, you don’t actually need to be on the elevator to enter the shop. A well placed jump from either side works just as well. Unlike the overworld, you don’t have to hold “up” to enter a door in the rooms. It’s automatically done when your sprite hits the right spot on the door. They needed to come up with something better for the feather, which is a relatively expensive item. Maybe make it spawn the door itself?

Milon has even more problems that would be deal breakers in most games. The combat is just not that good, in my opinion. Hell I’d even go so far as to say that element is well below-average. Your bubbles can be aimed high or low, but they never feel like they pack a punch. Enemies can be cheap, but even when they’re not, they don’t have memorable design or complex attack patterns except a single fireball that’s indestructible unless you possess a specific item, and even after you do it takes sixteen hits to kill and doesn’t pay off. It feels like something that was meant to be important, only the important part was left on the drawing board. Worst of all is that the bosses are not fun. Okay, maybe the first is, but since they’re all kind of samey, that wears off since they all have, more or less, the same attack patterns. The controls are a little stiff, especially the jumping before you get the power-ups that fix it. This is a fairly early NES game, and the developmental learning curve is plainly visible.

But Milon’s Secret Castle never feels like a game that you would play for combat anyway. For all badly designed mechanics, the exploration and startlingly well-done level design make it all work. Seriously, this is a 1986 NES game. Having every level feel unique didn’t happen all that much back then. Even Super Mario Bros. didn’t pull THAT off. But, because such care was taken to make each room feel different, Milon aged better as a fantasy experience than most games. A lot better, in fact. Hudson didn’t come out of Adventure Island: The Definitive Review looking amazing, and a lot of their early NES games were rougher than sandpaper. Milon’s is just as rough as any other game from this stage of the NES’ existence. But Milon’s Secret Castle makes it clear: someone at Hudson Soft knew what they were doing.
NES Verdict: YES!