There exists in the world of the NES a strange and largely undocumented phenomenon. Yet for all that there seems to be little written about it, most every Gen-X’er who grew up on Nintendo’s iconic little grey toaster probably knows about it. It’s something that is emblematic of the era the great 8-bit games of yore were created in, a time when it wasn’t necessarily considered marketplace suicide just to experiment with an established game formula.

This phenomenon, which I’ve dubbed the “First Sequel Syndrome” because it always seemed to happen on the second game in an established series, is well-known to NES gamers even if they don’t recognize this bizarre quirk for what it is. But mention games such as Simon’s Quest, Snake’s Revenge, and The Adventure of Link to anyone who lived through the Silver Age, and chances are you’ll be regaled with vivid tales (and perhaps more than just a few words they don’t teach you in Sunday School) of just how inferior those games were to their predacessors, and how grateful they are that the companies in question went “back to the basics” for the next games (provided, of course, there was a “next game” in the series).

It’s a weird little thing, this. It’s based on a premise that, although it may appear faulty to anyone who subscribes to the “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” axiom, is nevertheless a sound one if you value originality in video gaming. That being, with technologies and gaming tastes constantly evolving even during those halcyon days of the 1980s, it might not be the best idea to simply take the previous game, dress it up with new screens and new graphics, and call it a sequel. That could be seen as mere laziness. (This argument does bear some fruit, as anyone who looks at the 8-bit litany of the Mega Man series can surely attest. Although absolutely a classic formula, by about the fourth game – some might even argue by the third – the rot really began to set in on the Blue Bomber, along with the whole “Been there, done that, got the souvenir shotglass” feeling of sameness across the games.)

It’s a delicate balance to strike. If too little is changed you might as well not even have bothered. On the other hand, if you change too much in a sequel, you run the very real risk of breaking any connection to the familiar characters and/or backstory that may exist in the player’s mind, which then begs the question of why this wasn’t just a new game from the keel up to begin with. Which then led to mixed reviews, a lukewarm reception compared to the first title, and (in most cases) a return to the series’ roots if game #3 got the go-ahead.

What follows are quick looks at a few NES cartridges – most released here in the US, along with one that never quite made it out of Japan – that fit the “reinvent the wheel” descrption.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1988): The original Castlevania is one of the all-time classic NES games, and really needs no introduction to my current audience. Enough to say that when it comes to whip-toting action heroes, even that certain famous archaeologist might have to take a back seat to Simon Belmont. However, the follow-up game lifts the vampire hunter out of the arcade-action trappings of the original and plants him in an item-hunting, clue-finding adventure (with action elements) that mostly ended up frustrating people. Among the complaints: Many of the puzzles are too obscure, with hints too few and far between; the level design is both uninspired and unforgiving, loaded with false floors and frustrating jumping/timing puzzles; a day-night progression that both interrupts the game flow during the transition from one to the other and is a needless complication to already frustrating gameplay; and perhaps the easiest-to-kill Dracula on record. Even the concept of the game is logically flawed; the titular quest involves your going hither and yon collecting all of Dracula’s body parts for the express purpose of resurrecting him… just so you can flame-whip his undead posterior back into the oblivion he spent the entire game in! Truthfully, Simon’s Quest is not that bad on its own merit – it’s more frustrating than it is actually bad, at least until you figure out its more maddening puzzles – and it clearly had an influence on later Castlevania games in terms of the adventuring elemnts that were added. But let us say that few tears were shed when Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse marked a return to the candle-whipping fun of Simon’s original quest.

Final Fantasy II (Japan only, 1990): Actually, Final Fantasy II almost was released on the NES here in the States; at least one complete prototype is known to exist and Nintendo already had boxes and marketing material printed and ready to go. The impending release of the Super NES, however, shunted most of the N’s 8-bit projects to the back burner, including this one, leaving the first SNES Final Fantasy game (FFIV) to see an American release under this title. The real FFII, the NES game, was a departure in many ways for the franchise – although to be fair, Final Fantasy seems to always reinvent itself with every new entry. But even by series standards, this particular First Sequel is a bizarre aberration. There is no traditional EXP system whatsoever; instead, your party members grow stronger in their abilities as they use them, and atrophy in others that aren’t used as much. In other words, if your primary magic-user spends most of her time physically attacking (to conserve her MP), you will find, usually to your horror, that her spell-casting abilities will be far lesser than they probably ought to be by that point in the game. Even worse, she can actually lose spells she previously knew how to cast if she doesn’t keep up with them! As well, the only way you can raise your characters’ DEF and HP maximums is to end battles with low HP. Healing is a luxury that should be employed only when absolutely necessary to keep a character alive. What it all added up to was an overall frustrating experience for many gamers, who rather quickly found that the traditional JRPG strategies didn’t work here. Luckily for them, Final Fantasy III (the last 8-bit incarnation of the franchise) saw a return to “normal” EXP-earning and stats that only increased (unless you equipped lower-quality items, of course)… but as we all know, Square was hardly done with their “innovations,” for better or worse…

Snake’s Revenge (1989): I’ll probably do a full Retro-Active column on this soon (in fact, I already have an outline for it on my HD), so my comments here will be brief, as I’m saving them for the full-blown article. For the moment, I’ll just hit the high points. Metal Gear was a suprise hit when it bowed on the NES, all the more so because Konami really didn’t put much of a marketing push behind its Stateside release. Naturally, a sequel was called for; only problem was, there wasn’t one. So a sequel was developed specifically for the US market, one that took what were thought to be the gameplay elements that made Metal Gear so popular with gamers and combined them with new tricks and traps, including some side-scrolling areas and a highly simplified transceiver. Long story short, Snake’s Revenge was a commercial and critical bomb, to the point where the game has been officially retconned out of the Metal Gear backstory – it is, in other words, the Highlander II of video games. But it’s safe to say it had an important impact on the seminal “military RPG”; the Japan-only MSX sequel, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, was developed by the original Metal Gear team as a response to Snake’s Revenge and its shortcomings, and today it is that game which is considered the “true” sequel to Metal Gear, quite in spite of the fact it has never been officially released outside Japan (although a reprogrammed port does appear as a bonus in one of the recent PS2 Metal Gear Solid packages). But is Snake’s Revenge really as bad as all that? …Stay tuned…

Super Mario Bros. 2 (1988): I think we all know the story here, but just in case… Nintendo believed the true sequel to the classic Super Mario Bros. (now more popularly known as The Lost Levels) was either too hard for us Western gamers, or way too similar to the original game to really sell. (I’ve heard both explanations.) Thus, Nintendo took a totally unrelated Famicom game, Doki Doki Panic!, and did what countless ROM hackers and pirates would do in later years… namely, swap out the game’s original cast of characters with Mario and his crew. Voilá, instant Super Mario game. To be sure, the US Mario 2 is still a fun and eminently playable game, and the altered game mechanics (instead of jumping on enemies and busting blocks, you toss foes around and pull power-ups out of grass in the ground) provided a new kind of challenge. However, once word spread among gamers that Mario 2 was a fraud and there was a real sequel in Japan that looked and played much more like the already-classic original, its stature was decidedly diminished. Not only that, but for simply paving the way for about eleventy-two gadzillion graphics hacks to stick Mario/Sonic/Mega Man/your choice of mascot into everything from Adventure Island to Zoop, this game deserves a special place in infamy.

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1988): This game is the red-headed stepchild of the Zelda series and is not generally regarded well by fans. A near-total departure from the format that came to define the so-called “action RPG” subgenre, Zelda II instead offered up side-scrolling palaces, an experience-point system not unlike a traditional RPG, an Overworld map that (quite aside from being the one of the “blockiest” game worlds on record) serves merely as a device to travel from one sideview location to another, and virtually no “optional” items or subquests. Players who became addicted to the first Zelda‘s unique-at-the-time gameplay were quite frankly stunned at how little the sequel resembled its forebear, and many of them have never quite gotten over it. Often cited as criticisms are a greatly simplified game mechanic that emphasized combat over exploration (indeed, Zelda II might well be the most linear of all the Zelda games), a leveling-up process that serves mainly to artificially lengthen about two hours of gameplay into eight or nine, and Link’s decidedly lackluster jumping ability that more often than not led to the stupidest of deaths. On the other hand, almost as many players praised Zelda II for its attempts to greatly expand the scope of Hyrule; for the first time, there are towns to explore, a real magic system, and a solid backstory that went far beyond the perfunctory inroduction text to create a true legend, and after all isn’t this series called The Legend of Zelda in the first place? Despite the fact it breaks nearly every rule of the franchise’s signature format, many see Zelda II as a worthy NES classic in its own right, and that it remains such an aberration in the Hyrulian mythos only adds to its mystique.

Then, of course, there are the First Sequels that didn’t deviate from the norm, that really did give you “more of the same.” This list would include the likes of Mega Man 2 and Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos. Granted there were enhancements in those games (including a much-welcomed password system in MM2 and some new “toys” for Ryu Hayabusa to “play” with), but overall these games looked and felt like true continuations of their predacessors, almost to the point of “same old, same old.”

So which way is better? That really depends on your own taste in gaming. Myself, I always like to see experimentation in games, but I freely admit that when I pick up, let’s say, a Zelda game I have certain expectations going in of what I want it to be, and if the game doesn’t meet those expectations I’m somewhat disappointed. However, if the game is still good on its own merit, I’m more willing to overlook that disappointment and appreciate it for what it is, or at least what it tries to be. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Naturally, today’s gaming market seems to actively discourage experimentation of this sort, at least with established franchises. Probably because hardware has gotten so powerful and complex, and each game is literally a multi-million dollar investment by the publisher, the pressure is on developers to make sure everything they put forth can turn a profit, and if that means maintaining the status quo of a popular series then that’s what it means. You’d never see, for instance, a Castlevania game that broke the mold of what to expect from the series the way Simon’s Quest did two decades ago; the risk of profit loss is just too great.

So go ahead, try out some of these First Sequels, even if they deviate too far from the norm. You’ll never see their like again, and who knows? They might just surprise you.

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