I don't really remember what exactly prompted me to pick up and play Maximo, but 300 yen was too low a price to turn my nose up at at the time. The result of an effort to bring Ghouls 'n' Ghosts into the 3rd dimension, Maximo began life as an N64 game before being converted into a Dreamcast game and then FINALLY being turned into a PS2 game once the Dreamcast was deemed too dead to release it for. This strange life cycle leaves its marks all over Maximo, but this weird freak of a game still manages to be good fun regardless. It took me about 10 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game.

Maximo, a brave king, gets back from the war to find an evil wizard has kidnapped his queen. He's struck down at once, but the friendly grim reaper saves him, telling him that the evil wizard is stealing dead from the underworld and putting him out of a job. The two team up and get to work freeing the four sorceresses and saving the queen from the wizard's evil clutches. It's a pretty simple story, but it's just Ghouls 'n' Ghosts. It doesn't have to be complicated, and it does just what it needs to while succeeding to be entertaining in its brief, silly cutscenes.

Maximo is a 3D action platformer of five worlds of five levels a piece with a boss at the end of each. The bosses and stages are quite fun and well designed, if pretty brutal in their difficulty at times. Instead of the "two hits and you're dead" thing of its retro inspiration, Maximo takes a more generous and clever approach to updating that old health system. Now you still have armor, and you can even get a third piece of armor, but these each have a health bar. If you find a potion, the health bar of your currently weakened armor will be refilled, but if that armor breaks, it's gone and you'll need to find more armor. There is also a system of powerups to make your weapons swings and shield more powerful, ranging from a sword range extension to being able to throw your mighty shield (just don't use to it too much, or it'll break!). As nice as these things are, you just need to be weary of dying, as take too much damage or fall down a pit and you'll lose nearly all of your powerups and gotta start collecting them fresh, although they thankfully drop fairly frequently.

There's also a money system where you can buy more health, armor, or even collectible underwear (changing the type you have when you lose your armor) when you find the little single-use kiosks in the stages. You could also horde that money for saving (it costs 100 gold per save!), or try to collect fairies from glowing fountains in each stage, as 50 fairies gets you another continue. If you're feeling really up to a challenge, there's even a special reward for collecting 100% of the treasure in every stage. I wasn't unhinged enough to try that, but honestly the game was so fun to go through once, I haven't totally dismissed the concept of going through again and trying for 100% completion someday XD. All in all, it's a really nice upgrade of the old 2D games, keeping the difficulty and iconic elements while upgrading it to make more sense in both 3D and in the world of game design in 2001.

The biggest control and design issue is a relic of this game being a Dreamcast game: the right stick does nothing. Maximo must've been basically finished on the Dreamcast before they decided to make it a PS2 game, because the right stick doesn't control anything, let alone the camera, so the only way you have to redirect the camera is by holding R1 to slowly realign it behind you. It isn't a game breaker, and the game generally does a good job at keeping the camera behind you, but getting used to realigning the camera is a must for conquering this game and its oodles of platforming. Other issues the game has are some bosses that have pretty poorly signposted weaknesses, and the difficulty curve is good but starts pretty darn high as you get used to the controls. It's a game you really need to get into the spirit of trying to beat, as it's not gonna hold your hand through things as you learn the ropes of how best to approach platforming and combat with the somewhat particular way Maximo controls.

The presentation is really nice. Enemies and allies alike have very distinct designs to them, and the homages in especially Maximo's design to original Ghouls 'n' Ghosts aesthetics are really fun. The music is also excellent, with tons of new takes on old Ghouls 'n' Ghosts tracks populating each world.


Verdict: Recommended. The awkward way that the game controls, particularly its camera, will likely turn off a fair few people, but if you're a 3D action platformer fan, there's a lot to enjoy with Maximo. It may have its fair share of problems, but its very deliberate design makes it work well within the confines of its own game, and it's well worth checking out~.

A 3D spin off of the Ghosts N Goblins franchise, and a very worthy one at that. Maximo is one of the most punishing games I have played - and let's not confuse hard with punishing - compared to it's big brother franchise, the gameplay of Maximo is challenging and very fair. There is no bullshit in it's design, it is a well designed 3D action platformer at it's best. The punishing aspect comes from the fact that if you want to actually beat this game, you cannot make many mistakes; this is because the game actually has limited continues, in the sense where if you lose all your lives you have to start from the beginning of the game (or your last save)... The problem is that if you want to save your game, you need to pay 100 coins each save, which is not quick and easy to get. However if you take your time to learn the game, you will be able to get through with no issue. If you just want the challenge without the worry that you'll need to replay the game again if you die enough times, I recommend using an unlimited continues cheat which actually makes the game still challenging but less punishing. It's a shame Maximo didn't quite take off like Ghosts and Goblins did as I actually prefer it to it's big brother. It is a true underrated gem on the PS2.

Whenever Maximo swings his sword, it can either rebound off of hard surfaces or get stuck in wooden ones as he has to take a second to wiggle it out again. It begs the question: why’s this niche 3D platformer from when the PS2 was still new, about a cartoon Roman fighting the skeletons from Army of Darkness, making me think more about when and where I swing a sword than most games wholly predicated on smacking things with a sword released in the decades since?

This emphasis on positioning’s essential to what makes Maximo such a great translation of Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins into 3D. As early on as its second set of levels, which introduces barriers of thorny vines you can only safely cut down from a certain range, it becomes apparent that the difference between life and death’s often something as seemingly negligible as knowing that Maximo remains stationary if you slash once but takes a step forward if you slash twice. Even small interactions like that distinguish themselves from equivalent moments in other platformers because you can’t rely on your depth perception as much, given that Maximo’s camera is at a Dutch angle, sprinkling in perpetual spatial discomfort just in case the trademark difficulty inherited from its sister series wasn’t already giving you the business. It sounds dissimilar to how slight inclines or dips in the road often spell doom for Arthur, as does stuff like luring enemies out into open areas to minimise the risk of Maximo’s sword getting caught on something, but these things are really just a different execution of the same key principles – making virtually every second of getting from point A to B an exercise in problem-solving and demanding an intimate level of familiarity with your character.

To go along with its extra dimension, Maximo adds an extra layer of decision-making to the above in the form of its randomised ability system. It’s drowning in bonus moves you can obtain as random drops from defeated enemies or chests, which range from making your ground pound’s shockwaves do damage or unveil hidden treasure to turning your shield throw into a lingering hazard by holding down the button and transforming into an invincible skeleton who dishes out OHKO contact damage, among enough others that I was still finding new ones in the final levels. There are two catches to this, though, the first of which being that you can only have up to 12 abilities at a time. It seems more likely that this limitation was created intentionally rather than a result of technological restrictions, given that it might detract from the difficulty if you’d access to them all at once and forcing the player to adapt through RNG elements is G‘n’G 101. Even if the latter’s the case, though, the game still deserves credit for how they’re designed in such a way that none are unambiguously superior to the rest and all are heavily subject to the player’s circumstances. I regularly decided to forego abilities (or locked treasure chests which might’ve contained some) in certain stages where I might’ve coveted them in others, which speaks both to that quality and the wealth of variety present in its level design too.

The second thing to consider is that all abilities you haven’t selected as permanent are lost upon dying (which happens, a lot). Losing them, a life and your maximum health limit definitely makes you feel about as helpless as I felt in the car accident I had the morning prior to writing this, the frosty field I stood in for an hour afterwards incidentally giving me a greater appreciation for Red Dead Redemption 2’s shrinking horse bollock technology, the random nature of these drops counterweights frustration in that there’s inherently always a chance you’ll end up with abilities more appropriate for the situation at hand than those you had initially. As much was my experience with the final set of levels, in which an abundance of enemies whom you have to repeatedly stun with ground pounds were made significantly easier to deal with after I’d died and subsequently got one that increased my shockwave’s radius. Dynamic or what? If that sounds exploitable then worry not, because losing all your lives results in having to pay the medium’s most charismatic interpretation of Death an increasingly high amount of special coins each time it occurs (and which each take collecting 50 other items to obtain). They were one step ahead of us, gamers.

Charismatic’s a good summation of the whole package, and not just thanks to the cartoony art direction which is realised fully enough to be used as a selling point on the back of its PAL box. As indicated by the tagline at the top, the love of all things old school was one of the core sentiments behind Maximo, such that its director David Siller (whose role in the creation of Crash is keenly felt) went as far as illustrating the design of each of its levels on pen and paper like some kind of scribe. Enough time’s passed since its release that Maximo itself, and contemporary reception of it, now feels representative of that on some level; as standardisation's entrenched over time, you have to wonder if current audiences would be as open to a game so boldly off-kilter that its camera isn’t even screwed on straight.

It all makes for some short, sweet, replayable arcadey goodness wrapped up in the same wonderfully slapstick spookiness that makes Medievil such a visual delight. Start your year off right: the next time you come across some old game on here with a (bizarrely, as per) subpar average rating and a number of plays fun-sized enough to suggest it wasn’t a big deal in its day, please take a chance on it regardless, because you just might walk away with a new favourite.

Pretty good for its time period. More interesting than I thought as a kid. Back then I couldn't get much past the first level.

Difficulty feels a bit unfair at parts. And can be very frustrating. You have to commit to playing through a lot of the game at once to get to a save point. Very confusing mechanics that it doesn't explain well. Once I looked up "how to play" basically, it all made a lot more sense.

The cutscenes and character designs aged very poorly (the female character designs are absurd). It is very obviously pre-feminist video game critique.

Classic review move, but it honestly feels like a really simple, arcade-y Dark Souls. There are long sections between checkpoints, so you memorize the level layouts and enemy locations, and how to easily defeat them.

Strangely, the bosses are really easy, especially in comparison to the regular levels.

The best way to approach this rather difficult 3D platformer is to remember that it actually began development on the Nintendo 64 despite being a PS2 game. Yes, the camera is admittedly pretty crappy and you'll need to get used to tapping the shoulder button to re-center it, but there's a fun time to be had here once you get used to that. Although the hero is different, this is quite literally Ghouls n Ghosts in 3D and considerably more forgiving.

One other criticism commonly brought up with this game is that you have to pay coins to save your game. I thought this was stupid when renting the game as a kid, and I still don't think it was a smart design choice. That said, the game rewards exploration in a way few in the genre do. As long as you're not bum rushing, you'll be able to find plenty of armor as well as perks and coinage.

One other thing- don't forget to "lock" the perks you like. You can store up to three to hang onto upon death from the start, and you'll be able to save more as you rescue the maidens at the end of each world. This is one thing I really, really wish I would've paid more notice to on my first run!