The thing about having ADHD is that you get distracted way too fucking easily. I’ve been replaying various Castlevania titles for an upcoming post, which was actually supposed to be this post, but I got distracted. Because it’s October, and I’m playing games with spooky Halloween stuff in it, I remembered another game that I thought I would go back and play for the first time in well over a decade. That game of course being Majou Ou, The King of Demons.
When I first played Majou Ou, right after it got a fan translation back in…holy fuck, 2003, I hated it. Thought the game was fucking dogshit. Thought it was too hard. Didn’t like the way it handled. Couldn’t stand that mid-boss music. I ended up save-stating my way through it and complained about it on the blog I ran at the time. Then I never played it again, never even bothering to give it a second chance many years later. Until now, obviously. So here we are, twenty-one years later, revisiting Majou Ou.
So what is Majou Ou? It’s a horror-themed action game on the Super Famicom that is frequently compared to Castlevania, and honestly, that’s not too far off the mark. I will say that it is most like Castlevania in the sense that this is a game where you also play as a stubby little guy and where you also have to commit to your inputs, like jumping. Otherwise, there are multiple differences, like being a depiction of Hell rather than Dracula’s Castle, and focusing on ranged combat. Plus a little, tiny bit of body horror.
Upon replaying the game, I find myself marveling at just how fucking good it looks. I’m no longer some dopey teen that can’t recognize the subtleties of good sprite work. The use of color and shading on display is downright gorgeous. Take a look at that screenshot above. The way the lighting bounces off of that stone bridge. The fact that even the boss sprite has proper shading in the context of the level. The artists didn’t even have to do that; not one single player would have complained if a mid-boss was lacking in this exquisitely detailed shading, but the game is all the better visually for it. Like, there are late-era Squaresoft games on the Super Famicom that don’t even have this level of detail.
But there’s more than just some good shading. Majou Ou’s depiction of an Earth overrun by Lucifer’s army is grim, with menace and dread. The Super Famicom is no stranger to post-apocalyptic worlds full of demons; it plays host to multiple Megami Tensei games, but Majou Ou is a lot more dirty in its portrayal. Megaten tends to be fairly plain and clean, which leads to an unsettling atmosphere, whereas Majou Ou is straight up Hell On Earth, with dirt and rubble and blood. Even the cleaner levels hide some sort of horrific being in them, or are on the verge of completely falling apart.
Long story short, Majou Ou is easily one of the best looking games I’ve seen on the system. But the graphics weren’t really an issue I had when playing this many years ago. I hated the way it played! How do I feel about that now? Well, if I ever needed yet another reminder that I was a stupid, stupid motherfucker in the mid-2000s, the fact that I hated this game for being too hard is one of them. No patience, no willingness to learn a game, just needing immediate gratification and not getting it. If I wasn’t immediately entertained, then I spent a few hundred words to complain and call it THE WORST THING EVER, not really separating myself from the large number of similar writers who called everything they didn’t like gay shit for homos. Majou Ou is a good game. A very good game! It feels good to press buttons and move around. The action is frenetic, with the game rarely succumbing to the technical issues so many SNES action games fall victim to, like slowdown.
This is a game about a muscular dude with a small handgun managing to survive the resurrection of Lucifer, and the subsequent demon takeover of Earth. It’s fairly standard for the time, at least until you kill the first boss and pick up the gem that it drops. Depending on what color it is when you get it, you mutate into one of three demonic forms. You can stick with one color, and become a powered up version of that demon, or collect one gem of each color to reach your ultimate demonic form (my recommended order: blue, red, then green). The only way to fight a demon, is to become one yourself. It’s a cool feature, but what really makes it special is that you are not just a guy with demonic powers, or a guy who looks like a freaky monster. No, you are a Capital-D Demon. There are certain enemies that, when killed, do not immediately disappear from the stage. You can walk over to their corpses, crouch down, and eat them to recover any lost health. Granted, there aren’t that many enemies you can do that with, since it would make the game too easy, but it’s still really fucking cool that it exists, this game mechanic that reinforces the fact that you have given up your humanity in exchange for the power you need. You need power to seek revenge for your murdered wife, and power to rescue your kidnapped daughter. Power above all. The power to kill and dethrone Lucifer to become the titular King of Demons.
Majou Ou is a cool game that plays a lot better than my teenage self thought it did, and looks amazing while doing it.
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