Majyuuou (King of Demons)

[gameoverDude]

How's this for a bad start to your day? You are Abel, whose best friend Bayer has sold his soul to the devil. Soon you find out that he just sacrificed your wife Maria to the devil so that the King of Demons may return. He's got Iria held captive. What next? He attacks and leaves you for dead. When you come back, you're pissed. REALLY pissed. At least Iria is still alive, and Maria's ghost will accompany you and help in your fight.

Majyuuou might be compared to Super Castlevania IV, but it is a bit of a darker game. There's some blood, but not a whole lot. When you shoot a zombie with your gun while in human form, his head pops off with a splash of blood. The spider mid-boss you encounter early in the game loses its limbs and sprays bucketfuls of the red stuff out when it dies. Some of the bosses are quite ugly, like the slithering giant worm that shoots its jaws at you to attack, and a huge bloodshot eye that rotates in Mode 7 to aim lasers at you. Later on, you'll fight a huge dragon and then walk through his carcass to snag a key. These ones are actually just mid-bosses. Other enemies include flowers that open up to reveal an evil face that spits bullets, nymphs that can be eaten after you kill them (just get beside them and crouch, and you'll regain some life), female zombies with machine guns, and flying imps.


(Note: Above Youtube video used a translation patch which converts the game into "King of Demons". The actual cartridge uses Japanese language for the title and ingame dialogue.)

After a prologue scene in which you fight Bayer, Majyuuou's six stages take you through some rather seedy locales for a SNES/SFC game. You'll find yourself dropped into a decaying sewer of hell with hanging skinned corpses and zombies. The next stage is a wasted city overtaken by plants, where you end up fighting the Orchid Empress- a demoness who rides on a flower, flails you with whip-like arms and fires away with lasers. Later, you'll catch a train over the pits of hell- walking atop the rusty trailers, being careful to not fall between the couplings between the cars. This train is guarded by "death's head" machine guns (these even spit the spent shell casings out when they shoot at you). You'll find a woman who is crucified. Two horseheaded Goliaths are beating her senseless. Blast away all you want, but your attempts to rescue her are futile. She dies with a rather bloodcurdling scream.

You can double jump, dive kick, shoot charged attacks, and perform a special evasive maneuver. When you've transformed into a demon, you swap out the gun for a projectile attack based on which form you're in- and the Hadoken-like fireball will similarly be replaced by an even more powerful magic attack. If you've got Maria's spirit with you, she'll kamikaze enemies to attack them for decent damage. Die, and she can sacrifice herself to revive you once- keeping you from losing a life and going back to the last checkpoint. Some end-of-level boss battles will end with you getting a transformation orb. When the gem inside turns the color you want- shoot it and grab the gem. This adds some Altered Beast elements. As your score increases, your life bar's maximum will increase and you get extra lives. If you hit a Game Over and get to the continue screen, you may as well start a new game. This is because your lifebar's max will be reduced to its original amount- making the later stages a bit too tough.

The graphics are colorful especially in the ruined city stage, but they don't detract from the dark theme at all.

Composed by Tomohiro Endo & Hiroshi Iizuka, Majyuuou's soundtrack is somewhat like Magic Sword's - sometimes eerie, and other times stirring or suspenseful. The Hell Train BGM is outstanding. While fairly brisk, it still fits with the grim mood of the game. The lava cave's BGM doesn't really convey a sense of peril, but it in fact sounds almost cheerful. I guess they were going for a "fight on, you're almost there!" theme with that one.



The default difficulty is almost too easy, but bumping it up to Hard will help this considerably. One of the later stages does suffer a mild case of Ninja Gaiden Bird Syndrome (ugh!). You're on a collapsing metal bridge, and you need to keep jumping to safety as the sections fall underneath you. Meanwhile, some winged gremlins dart in from the right. If one hits you at the wrong time, you've had it- the resultant hit recoil leaves you falling to your doom.

With Majyuuou being a hard to find game, a complete copy in good shape can command a high price (I've seen it for around $190, but would not pay THAT much- even as good as the game is). Be warned: you'll probably storm through the normal mode on a couple plays. It's best if you start on Hard. It's a solid game, if not the best platformer out there.

[NeoZeedeater]

I agree with your review. It's not worth $200 to me but it's a solid game worth playing if you get the chance.

[Low]

Nice review, I remember seeing this in Steve's Super Fami thread:

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/board/s...=super+famicom


Looks like a interesting late cycle action game like Hudson's Milon (and equally insane price).

[Son of Bryce]

I don't ever expect to see "mature" looking SNES games. I guess it wouldn't be as surprising if it was on Genesis because I remember playing stuff like Chakan on that system.

This looks pretty interesting but it looks like a pretty standard platformer to me. Like a Mega Man without the crazy platform hopping. A very superficial opinion, as I think a lot of the value of the game is the depth of the environments and enemies it seems to have.

If I had a good place to find obscure roms I'd check this out.