Nintendo has unveiled the next games getting added to the Switch Online Service. The NES service gets The Mysterious Murasame Castle (Nazo no Murasame-Jou) and Devil World, while the Game Boy gets Castlevania: Legends.
This is a fantastic set of games, even if you maybe haven’t heard of some of them. I’ve even written in-depth features of two of them here on Destructoid, and have mentioned the remaining one a few times.
The first (and best) of the bunch is The Mysterious Murasame Castle which was initially released in 1986 for the Famicom Disk System as part of the launch lineup alongside Metroid and The Legend of Zelda. Being shoulder to shoulder with those releases should have guaranteed it immortality, but Nintendo never released it outside of Japan until 2014 on the 3DS Virtual Console. It’s perhaps not as inventive as Metroid or Zelda, but it’s still a very fun retro romp.
Devil World gets talked about a bit more, as it includes Shigeru Miyamoto, Takashi Tezuka, and Kōji Kondō. It was released in 1984 for Famicom, and despite the cast of legends behind the development, it never got released in North America. This is largely because Nintendo of America at the time had a strict policy against religious imagery. Aside from the obvious Devil who dances on the top of the screen, there’s also a Bible. That’s okay, however. Devil World is largely a maze game in the style of Pac-Man, and personally, I don’t think it’s all that great.
Castlevania: Legends is definitely not all that great. I wrote this up as part of my kusoge column, but I also said in that article that it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. One of the main reasons for its bad reputation is that Koji Igarashi, who helmed the series after Castlevania: Symphony of the Night booted it from canon because it contradicted some things in that game. Otherwise, I don’t see how it’s any worse than the other Castlevania Game Boy titles.
So, while I’m sure many gamers out there are wondering how these games got priority over the ultimate classic Bubsy, if you haven’t tried these games, I urge you to take them for a spin. All of them are rough-cut gems that deserve a better legacy.
