Giving one of the mightier enemies from Ghosts N’ Goblins their own game is bizarre enough. Extending that game to a full-blown trilogy that spans three different consoles is something to behold. That is what became of Capcom’s menacing, flying devil Firebrand as the Gargoyle’s Quest trilogy closed out with Demon’s Crest on the SNES in 1994. Demon’s Crest is by and large considered to be the best installment of this trilogy. With the added flair of being featured on the graphically superior SNES, this common assessment is understandable. While this game garnered more praise than its predecessors, Demon’s Crest still flew under the radar throughout the SNES’s lifespan, giving it a “hidden gem” reputation. This could be attributed to the fact that Demon’s Crest doesn’t bear the same namesake as the previous games, but it’s not as if the previous two entries are highly regarded. Demon’s Crest is the shining example to those few who have played this franchise. It’s a shame, really, because Demon’s Crest holds so many exemplary features to just be confined to cult status.

The narrative of Demon’s Crest is a simple enough premise that establishes the game's lore. In the Demon Realm that makes up the setting, six crests with different elemental properties are scattered across the land. If combined, the six crests accumulate enough power for someone to conquer entire worlds like the Chaos Emeralds. Firebrand has all of the crests at the beginning, but the crests are stolen by another demon named Phalanx. Firebrand must adventure across the land of Demons to recover the six crests and defeat Phalanx before he harnesses their power and takes over the realm.

For being condemned to relative obscurity, Demon’s Crest blows many other SNES titles out of the water in many aspects. For one, the presentation here is fantastic. The grandiose fantasy world of Demon’s Crest is depicted with a range of lurid colors with an impressive amount of detail. As early as the first level, the misty water surrounding the dark bog with leafless trees evokes a spooky atmosphere. Skeletons can also be found entombed in dirt casings to give off the impression that this is an ancient land with a horrific history behind it. One section of a level has Firebrand soar over a platformless sky, and the color scheme between the layers of clouds with the sun setting over them is utterly sublime. The submerged ruins consist of towering columns with gothic gargoyles pouring green water from the tops of them, flooding the ruins with the remains of a city in the background. These are a few major examples, but every level of this game has the same consistent, A-grade attention to detail and graphical output. The gothic spectacle presented here makes the one in Super Castlevania IV look half-assed and amateurish by comparison. It’s a high compliment considering Super Castlevania IV is one of my favorite games on the SNES. The character animations also uphold the same impressive attention to detail as one can hardly detect the 16-bit pixels behind the animated sprites. One example is the dragon boss that chases Firebrand at the very beginning. It’s a marvel of detailed animation. The player can discern every fissure of flesh deteriorating from its bones.

Playing as Firebrand is also quite the spectacle. He’s a muscular demon that can fly and shoot fire from his mouth, so I can’t imagine anyone wouldn’t want to play as him. Those few with some discrepancies might feel like playing as an imposing beast wouldn’t offer the player any challenge. He’s a big red pain in the ass in the Ghost’s N’ Goblins series, so one might assume that he’s overpowered, resulting in a facile experience. Admittedly, Demon’s Crest is not as hard as Ghosts N’ Goblins, but what is? It’s not as if Firebrand is continually perched in the sky, breathing fire down at knights that take a mere two hits to die. He’s in the demon realm now and an even more hostile place that Arthur probably couldn’t endure for more than two seconds. The environment has been upscaled to appropriately fit Firebrand’s stature. His standard offensive power is shooting fire from his mouth. While it’s fairly effective against enemies, the player has to be somewhat accurate with their shots due to the less-than-firepower speed of flaming spurts. Firebrand also has a headbutt move, but it’s only used to destroy objects in the immediate background. Firebrand can also hover in the air after jumping for as long as the player desires. In the previous games, the ability to hover was finite, making platforming challenges perilous in some cases. One could argue that being able to hover in the air forever may make the game easier, but the game opts for something else completely. Instead of platforming challenges, the game tries to overwhelm the player with enemies from all angles. Firebrand’s hovering will often be interrupted by flying enemies careening towards him, or an ax lobbed at him from below. Firebrand can only also hover over heights he can jump, which aren’t far off the ground.

As his base level, Firebrand still has one of the most versatile movesets of the 16-bit era. The main objective of finding the crests even increases Firebrand’s versatility even further. With each crest obtained, Firebrand gains another form that coincides with the element it’s named after. The earth crest form allows him to break large obstacles by charging into them and spit a wave of energy that ripples on the ground. The air crest allows him to fly upward. One would think this would complete Firebrand’s flight range, making him unstoppable, but the air form only flies upward incrementally instead of continually, making it somewhat awkward. The water crest allows Firebrand to swim. It’s the lamest crest in terms of offense but considering all other forms take damage from water, it’s made incredibly useful. The one crest that does complete Firebrand’s move set is the time crest. The form is essentially a stronger base Firebrand rendering the initial Firebrand form obsolete. Once I received this form, the game did start to feel much easier. The challenging boss battles that were once tests of endurance went down in seconds thanks to this form, and I’m not sure I benefited from this.

Each of the crests in this game is retrieved from thoroughly exploring each level. This is also how the player finds health upgrades, urns to carry potions, and talismans that give Firebrand specific perks. With all this exploration-intensive progression, Demon’s Crest should’ve been a Metroidvania game. Sure, Demon's Crest came out in 1994. Super Metroid hadn’t laid the foundation for the genre yet, and Symphony of the Night hadn’t popularized the genre. However, there were already games before Demon’s Crest that had a vague understanding of seamless world design and a Metroidvania-esque sense of progression (Ufouria: The Saga, Wonder Kid), so I can surmise that possibility for Demon’s Crest appropriately. I don’t expect the developers of Demon’s Crest to be visionaries. All the same, I wish they had done something different with the overall cohesion between levels because what they came up with isn’t great. The previous game opted for a traversable hub world for Firebrand to walk around with the sublevels. It kind of came across like the towns from Zelda II. The main map in Demon’s Crest is a tiny mode 7 maps that Firebrand flies around in, swooping down to start the levels. The world map is easily the least attractive part of the game, and controlling Firebrand here is nauseating. He mostly misses the marked areas, and directing him back to the areas feels like using tank controls. A seamless design between these levels would’ve been a giant improvement. Considering the game already has the player backtracking between them to uncover items and crests they couldn’t get to before, a Metroidvania-styled world would fit this game like a glove.

The world map also makes progression confusing to follow. The player can access the first four levels of this game at any time, giving the illusion that they can be completed in any order like in Mega Man. The game does not make it clear that while this is true, each level has different paths that need to be searched to progress through the game. I had gone through the first four levels thinking I had beat them, but I still felt like something was wrong, and I wasn’t ready to fight Phalanx yet. Upon discovering that sometimes crests and essential items were found off the beaten path in each level, more levels were unlocked, giving me the impression that I was finally on the right track. How was I supposed to know this without a map or any direction from the game? The progression in this game isn’t free-flowing and non-linear as it seems; it’s actually obtuse and sloppy. Fighting Phalanx is also available right from the start, and defeating him without receiving all the crests will prematurely end the game, also giving the player the “bad ending.” Let me ask you this: if Dr. Wily’s castle was available from the start and the player was able to defeat him, why would the player be punished for doing this when the game gives them a chance to? It’s like putting a steak in front of a dog and batting them with a newspaper when they start to eat it. The dog will be upset and confused like any player in this game. It’s not like the directive to not do this was apparent.

Demon’s Crest is a prime example of a hidden gem in the SNES library. It may not be as readily recognized or lauded as Super Mario World, A Link to the Past, or Chrono Trigger, but it’s a game that’s worth the effort to uncover and play. However, does it deserve to be ranked among the greatest in the system despite its lack of notoriety? Sadly, no. The strengths of this game cannot be overstated. It’s a gorgeous 16-bit platformer that offers a lot with its short playtime. Plus, Firebrand is a delightful character to play due to his eclectic moveset. However, I cannot excuse the progression of this game as I find it unfair to the player. The world here had a potential that the developers were too near-sighted to see. As a result, Demon’s Crest had the potential to be one of the greatest games on the SNES but falters due to its shortcomings. Maybe this game is best suited as a suitable alternative to play when they get tired of Mario and Zelda. However, I think this game should at least have more acclaim than its parent franchise, Ghosts N’ Goblins.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com

A long while back, I claimed I was going to do a playthrough of this game only after beating Gargoyle's Quest 2. Well, I found that game kind of boring, so now, a few years after saying that, I've beat Demon's Crest. I think I'd say this game was a fun experience overall, its definitely better than Gargoyle's Quest but still has some sore spots and signs of missed potential. Its a bit of a shame how this game removes a good amount of the RPG elements from Gargoyle's Quest, for example, although I think that's ultimately for the better since they were usually more annoying than interesting in the previous games (stuff like random encounters, a more involved overworld, minor side quests, etc.).

Demon's Crest is a pretty standard platformer. Firebrand can float in the air and shoot fireballs, just like Gargoyle's Quest except you no longer have a gauge for it so you can just fly infinitely. One could argue that this change removes some challenge from the game, but trust me, Demon's Crest is still tough even with unlimited flying. Most of the difficulty is with the bosses, though; its not often that I died to the actual levels. I see folks criticize the game's length since it only consists of 7 levels, but I feel like Demon's Crest still makes good use of these levels, especially if you're trying to grab everything (which this game is pretty much built around encouraging you to do). You can do the levels in whatever order you want except for Level 1, but it does seem like the game has a certain order of progression you're intended to do. If you really want to, you could go straight to the final level and beat the game right there, but you get the bad ending for doing that and the final boss is incredibly difficult to beat without any upgrades. It's already tedious enough to beat him when you're supposed to fight him in my experience. Something cool that Demon's Crest does is that each level (except for Level 1) has at least two different paths, some may be hidden and others are available in plain sight. Level 5, for example, has an area you get to with a green tornado you can fall through to reach the hidden area; if you instead just keep going forward, you get the normal path. Demon's Crest sometimes does an almost sort of Metroidvania thing by gating those extra paths in levels behind the transformations you get. A good example of this is how, when you get the Earth Gargoyle form after beating the first level, you can then use the Earth Gargoyle's shoulder bash move to open up a few secret paths in other levels. The Tidal Gargoyle form is also used to hide a few underwater paths with their own bosses to fight. The only problem with this more free-form structure, in my opinion, is that it isn't clear which order is best to beat the game with. Sure, you can skip areas or do them in whichever order you want, but some bosses will be WAY harder without the moves they're more susceptible to. It's not quite a Mega Man style weakness chart, but the bosses do take more damage from certain powers; Gwemon, the white wolf boss in Level 6, takes a ton of damage from the basic fireball you start the game with despite being a boss I thought the game wanted me to beat later on, which actually probably makes him a decent boss to start with aside from his annoying invincibility gimmick. Flame Lord in the forest level takes a ton of damage from the Earth Gargoyle's earthy fireball that travels across the ground and I fought the final Arma battle (he's a recurring boss you fight a few times) with the Demon Flame and destroyed him like it was child's play. I watched videos where people do the final Arma fight without it and it takes forever in comparison. Because of these hidden weaknesses the game never tells you about, it can feel like you're wasting your time fighting these bosses without them. Nonetheless, I mostly enjoyed the open-ended system this game abides by, and its a big reason why I think its short length is actually a good thing. I used a guide and the game still took me around 9 hours to beat since I wanted to get everything...well, I ALMOST got everything, but the game locks the final health upgrade to a stupid headbutting mini game that is ridiculously hard and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. No secret final boss for me, I guess.

The game really doesn't have much of a story, so I'll move on to other parts of the game. One thing I will complement the hell out of Demon's Crest for is the visual and sound elements. They really nail that spooky gothic vibe, everything from the character designs to the level aesthetics. The music is also great, I love listening to many songs in the OST and even the ones that I'm not as big a fan of are still quite atmospheric and interesting. If you guys ever want to check it out for yourself, I recommend the songs Beyond the Colosseum, Metropolis of Ruin, Caverns of Ice, and The Hell of Civil War (bad ending theme).

Overall, I had a great time with Demon's Crest. The core gameplay is fun, exploring the levels fully bit by bit as you get more upgrades is fun, the visuals and music are immaculate...only thing is, if you don't want the bad ending, you might need a guide on you, and the game doesn't tell you things that would be nice to know. Admittedly part of this might be me being stupid, but I had no idea that the Earth Gargoyle can shoulder bash or that the Aerial Gargoyle can flap its wings straight up, so I wasn't getting full use out of those forms until quite a bit later in my playthrough.