I like to think every castle has secrets like this.

They never show above the castle during the game, just here.

To Beat: Reach the ending
To Complete: Beat the game twice to see a special message
My Goal: Complete the game and beat the first loop without dying
What I Did: Met my goal
Played: 9/8/18 – 9/17/18
Difficulty: 7/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Milon’s Secret Castle Longplay

Here we are at triple digits! It took nearly three years to get here, but now that I’m at Game #100 there’s really no turning back. I could have picked any game I wanted to play here and I don’t think anyone would have complained. Instead I decided to keep on trucking with whatever happened to be here on the list. Milon’s Secret Castle is not a flashy choice for a milestone game whatsoever. The good thing for me is that I grew up with the game and have played and beaten it quite a few times before. For this special occasion, I was successful in beating the game without dying for the first time. I even learned a few things in the process. Let’s get started!

Milon’s Secret Castle first appeared on the Famicom in November 1986 titled Meikyu Kumikyoku: Milon no Daiboken. That translates to The Maze Suite: Milon’s Great Adventure. The NES version was delayed almost two years, appearing in September 1988. The game was both developed and published by Hudson Soft in both regions. Milon’s Secret Castle was re-released on Wii Virtual Console in Japan and North America in 2007 and in PAL territories for the first time ever in 2010. There was a sequel on the Super Famicom in 1996 called DoReMi Fantasy: Milon no Dokidoki Daibouken that made its North American debut on Wii Virtual Console in 2008.

Milon’s Secret Castle is a platformer game that takes places inside many rooms of a large castle. In the story, people communicate exclusively through music. Milon is unable to make music and can’t communicate with the people in his land, so he decides to leave hoping to find others like him. Before leaving he decides to visit the queen in the castle, which was a good thing. An evil warlord has stolen all the musical instruments, taken over the castle, and locked away Queen Eliza. Milon volunteers to resolve the problem. The castle’s magician provides Milon the ability to shoot bubbles. He also tells Milon that Eliza has left tools and money throughout the castle to help. Milon must seek and defeat the seven demon monsters inside this maze of a castle before taking on the evil warlord himself.

The scale of the size of the castle here is not too far off.

The game begins with Milon outside the castle. With limited abilities, he is restricted to the first floor for now. He can walk around, jump, and fire bubbles even though they have no use outside. Milon can enter doors by standing in front of them and pressing Up. The first floor has three doors. Two of them lead to maze rooms, and the third leads to a shop. You may also discover that you can enter windows outside the same way you enter doors. The solitary window of the first floor leads to an empty room and you can’t do anything here for now. The action takes place within the maze rooms so this is where you start.

Controls are basic, but movement takes some getting used to. Move left or right with the D-pad and press A to jump. You discover right away that Milon is slow to accelerate from standing skill. Once you get him moving by holding the directional button, he can go pretty quickly. You jump up quickly enough, but side-to-side movement depends on how fast you are moving before jumping. You need to get a running start to make far jumps. Milon can adjust left or right a little bit while jumping or falling. The B button fires bubbles that move in the direction he is facing at a slight upward angle. If you hold Down and press B you will shoot bubbles with a slight downward slope. Bubbles are used to defeat enemies and break blocks within the maze rooms. They travel a short distance before popping, and they also travel through walls unless they hit something significant.

Who knew bubbles were such a good weapon?

The maze rooms for the most part have several things in common. There are different enemies wandering around that you can fight off with bubbles. Most enemies in the game take one hit to defeat, but some take a lot more. There are breakable blocks all over the place in this game. Usually they block off some path within the room, but other times you’ll find money tiles inside. Collect the money tile to add a dollar to his stash as indicated in the upper left of the screen. To exit the maze room you must find the hidden door that is revealed by firing a bubble at its location. You need the key to take the exit to go back outside the castle. The key appears within the room in one of a few predefined spots after defeating enough enemies or breaking enough blocks. The collected key is displayed in the upper right of the screen. Once you collect the key, you keep it permanently and can take the exit anytime. All this means you really need to cover these rooms in bubbles to reveal all of their secrets.

There are other items to collect besides money. Defeated enemies may leave hearts behind that restore a point of health. Milon’s health bar is the vertical bar on the left. After defeating several enemies, an umbrella may appear. This powerup floats up and can get away from you. Grabbing it lets you blow an additional bubble on-screen. Milon starts out with having one bubble on screen at a time and you can shoot up to three at once if you collect two umbrellas. Milon goes back to one bubble whenever you enter a maze room from the outside. Most maze rooms have a honeycomb hidden within a breakable block. This increases your maximum health while also fully restoring Milon’s health. You definitely want to find these. Shooting certain locations may also reveal the Hudson bee. This powerup flies away and can get out of reach like the umbrella. Collecting the bee produces a shield around Milon that lets him take a couple of hits without losing health. You can also collect hearts while holding the shield to strengthen it.

Item shop, hints, and an inventory screen all in one.

Spend Milon’s hard-earned cash within the shops. Some of the shops are found through doors or windows into the castle. Others are hidden within the maze rooms themselves. The shops double as an inventory screen, so you can see the items you’ve purchased and collected throughout the adventure. Milon can walk along the bottom of the shop and jump into a button with his head to interact with the shopkeeper. In addition to purchasing items, you can get hints here for locating items you need. The Power option in some shops let you buy health. You can even get free money occasionally. The main draws here are the permanent items that increase Milon’s abilities.

One of the first-floor shops contains the hint “Bump head to find box.” In each of the maze rooms, there is a music box. There is a specific solid tile that you need to jump into from below to reveal the box. Touch the music box to go to a musical mini-game. Musical icons will arise from the bottom of the screen and you want to grab as many notes as you can. There are three kinds of icons to collect: Notes, sharps, and flats. Sharps count as two notes, while flats take away one note. The number of notes collected is displayed at the top. After some time, the bonus game ends and you earn money. You get a dollar for every four notes collected. If you somehow grab 50 notes or more, then you get a dollar for every two notes. This is a good way to save up for expensive items. A great detail about this mini-game is that every time you play it, the background song gets more and more complex each time as new instruments are added. You can only use each music box once, so to get the full effect you have to find them all.

Stay sharp and don’t fall flat.

Armed with all this knowledge, it’s time to clear the first floor. There are two items you must collect to proceed, which are the shoes and the medicine. The shoes let you bounce up high on certain floor tiles, allowing you to reach areas too high to jump normally. The medicine causes you to shrink whenever you touch a green glove present in some areas. A smaller Milon can fit into tiny gaps to reach previously inaccessible areas, and also gives you a smaller hitbox. For some reason acquiring these two items allows a demon monster boss to appear in the empty first floor room through the window. Go there and beat him by shooting him a bunch of times in the head with bubbles. These bosses are no joke and quite challenging. The defeated boss drops a crystal ball that opens the door to the second floor. There are seven bosses and seven crystal balls in the game. Not only do the crystal balls open pathways deeper into the castle, but they also gradually enhance your bubble by making it bigger, faster, and travel farther.

Access to the second floor starts to open the game up more. Now there are more maze rooms and shops, as well as more money, items, and powerups to go with them. You also have access to the well in the lower right corner of the castle. This area and others like it don’t count as maze rooms. There’s no key and hidden door to be found, instead you exit off one of the sides of the screen. The areas often consist of multiple, connected rooms. There are still items to be found there, as well as money, honeybees, honeycombs, etc. The well in particular has a unique way to exit. There is an enemy resembling a small octopus that takes several hits to defeat and drops a balloon. Grab it before it floats away and it will take you up out of the well.

The well is the first real challenging area.

There are some inconsistencies and a couple other miscellaneous points I want to mention. In addition to the crystal balls, there are two secret items you must track down to beat the game. Money can only be collected once, which is a problem as some items are expensive. Fear not, for there’s one room in the game that replenishes most of its money each time. It does get tedious farming money. One of the maze rooms does not have a honeycomb in it. I went crazy looking for it until I gave up and looked it up after I beat the game. They made up for it elsewhere as another area holds two honeycombs. Another area has a hidden exit that is really tricky. This secret castle does have some baffling mysteries to it.

Milon dies when he loses all his health. Normally the game starts all over again when this happens. There are continues in the form of a continue code, but luckily for us it is spelled out plainly in the manual. On the title screen, hold Left and press Start to continue. This only works after you have collected the first crystal ball. It seems to me there are two different types of continuing. Sometimes continuing plays a different introductory tune and you get dropped off in the same room you died in. Other time, it plays the normal intro song and drops you off at the starting position with all your collected items and money intact. Either way, continues are unlimited and better than starting over each time.

Milon’s Secret Castle was a game I’ve had since childhood. It was bought used since I only had the cart and I read the manual for the first time playing it here. I remember seeing this game in the rental stores and reading about it in some old gaming magazines we had. That was how I knew about the continue code and how to make progress in the game. I distinctly recall getting stuck on the first floor for a long time until later seeing how to proceed in one of those magazines. The game is inexpensive at around $6 and easy to find.

Milon used Bubble Beam. It’s super effective!

Even though I picked the game up for the first time in many years, I still knew enough to clear the game on my own over a couple of hours. I tinkered a little bit more to locate all the hidden music boxes and honeycombs, and then set out to try and beat the game 100% without using a continue. It took a few attempts but I was able to get it done. Some minor missteps in routing and a little bit of health farming are the only issues with my recorded video. Somewhere in post-completion research I found out that there is a hidden ending screen if you beat the game twice in a row. The second loop is hard mode. The differences I noticed are that both the bosses’ attacks and the umbrella powerup move much quicker. Continues still work here thankfully because I needed them. Beating the game the second time gave me the additional screen for what I consider the best ending. It’s underwhelming but still a decent achievement.

In the interest of full disclosure, as well as make an interesting discussion point, due to my inability to set aside a large block of playing time, I used a cheat code to enable hard mode. This is a good of a time as any to talk about NES cheat devices. The most popular one of the era was the Game Genie. It is a passthrough device that you put your cart into and then insert the connected cartridges into your NES. A menu comes up when the game is turned on and you enter either six or eight letter codes to get different effects to appear in your game. You can get more lives, skip levels, jump higher, etc. I have a little bit of expertise in building my own Game Genie codes by using an emulator and debugger to find parts in the game code that I can change to trigger the desired effect. In this case I couldn’t figure out how to enable hard mode with a Game Genie code. There is another NES cheat device called the Pro Action Replay. It functions similarly to the Game Genie but uses a different set of codes. The primary difference between the two devices other than the code format is that the Game Genie can set different ROM addresses while the Pro Action Replay can set RAM addresses. The NES Ending FAQ author did some legwork for me by figuring out that setting the RAM address $00B8 to 01 enables hard mode. Don’t worry if I’m going a bit over your head here. The takeaway is that the Pro Action Replay is the more appropriate device for turning on hard mode. Now I don’t own the Pro Action Replay, but the AVS console I use does accept its codes. Even better is that the AVS also accepts what it calls RAW codes, which I figured out means if I enter the code 00B801 (meaning set $00B8 to 01), I can get hard mode like I want. I played normal mode and hard mode two separate nights and then combined the footage into one longplay video. I hope this was an interesting look into NES cheat devices. I also hope that this doesn’t cast any doubt into the validity of my playthroughs. I don’t use cheat devices even for practice and I didn’t know how to enable them on my AVS until now. You will have to take my word for it though, so I do hope you believe me!

Disappearing floors make this maze room frustrating.

Milon’s Secret Castle has the reputation of a difficult game and I can see why. For a long time, I could not figure out how to get out of the first floor. I bought the medicine, but I couldn’t reach the green glove to use it. I believe the upper portion of the second maze room on that floor is unreachable from the start. It’s too high to reach with even a running jump. I found out there are shoes in a hidden shop up there, but I don’t see how to reach that shop without the shoes! The place I buy shoes is in a hidden shop in the first maze room. On the bottom right there is a discolored block next to two breakable ones. What you are supposed to do is push the block by walking into it for several seconds, then shoot a bubble to reveal the hidden door to the shop. I get that this discoloring is the tell, but this is a terrible idea. There’s no indication at all you can even push blocks, and then you have to push for what seems like forever before it actually moves. If you didn’t already know what to do, it would be hard to stumble upon it. There are other things about the game that can cause issues. Using the hammer item is not exactly obvious to me. The third floor has some rooms that are hard to understand without having certain items or seeing the proper pathway. Combat also proves challenging sometimes. Milon has a ridiculously short invincibility period upon taking damage, so if he gets stuck on top of an enemy his health drains fast. Bosses are difficult because they throw projectiles at random and Milon lacks the mobility to dodge them effectively. He jumps fast but otherwise accelerates slow, so quickly jumping to dodge projectiles is the only way. There are items later that allow you a different, safer strategy to boss fights. Until then, you either get lucky or get good at dodging.

I think Milon’s Secret Castle is an interesting NES game that was released too late on the NES. I’ve seen this happen quite a lot in this project already. For 1986, this is a complex game that plays pretty well. For 1988, while it still has good secrets and complexity, the controls and movement feel like a significant step back. The graphics and music are both pretty good. I like the different items and the effects they have on both Milon and the world around him. The main issues I have are the controls and the obscurity of some of the secrets and traps. Though they diminish the experience a little bit, I have seen far worse things already in NES games than this. This is probably nostalgia-tinged, but I do like this game. It’s worth a look for fans of Metroid.

#100 – Milon’s Secret Castle

#100 – Milon’s Secret Castle

Demonstrating that assassins for hire must be versatile to be effective.

The intro screens are even better than this title screen.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 7/24/17 – 7/27/17
Difficulty: 8/10
My Difficulty: 8/10
Video: Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode Longplay

When I was a kid, I would read whatever gaming magazine or tip guide I could get my hands on. Golgo 13 was a game that would show up often and it always looked like a fascinating game, but maybe too advanced for my age. Later, when I got a copy to try, I didn’t really give it much of a chance. I wrote it off as not my style of game, and I don’t think I was ready for it anyway. Now I’m old enough to give it a fair shake. Golgo 13 is rough around the edges, but it turned out to be a fun game with significant variety.

Golgo 13 is a Japanese manga series written by Takao Saito. It centers around the assassin for hire Golgo 13, who is also known by his pseudonym Duke Togo. The manga began in October 1968 and it is still an ongoing series nearly 50 years later. The series has expanded into various other forms of media, such as a live-action movie, two animated movies, an animated TV series, and several video games.

Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode is an NES game released in North America in September 1988. It was published and developed by Vic Tokai. It is both the first NES game published by Vic Tokai as well as the first Vic Tokai game I have played for this project. The Famicom version of the game is the original version, released in March 1988. In Japan, it was named Golgo 13: Dai 1 Shou: Kamigami no Tasogare. There is also a sequel on the NES named The Mafat Conspiracy, which I will cover in the future.

You might as well just fire away.

Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode is an espionage action game. You play the role of Golgo 13 who is framed for the explosion of a helicopter containing a biological weapon named Cassandra-G. A vaccine and plans for Cassandra-G were taken from the wreckage and Golgo 13 is blamed for the whole thing. An international organization named FIXER believes that the DREK empire is ultimately responsible for the event. The FIXER group recruits Golgo 13 to investigate a lead on recovering the vaccine, eventually leading him to assassinate the leader of DREK.

This game takes on several play styles that appear as needed through the course of the game. The first of these is the horizontal side-scrolling mode where you directly control Golgo 13. Here you use the D-Pad to walk left and right. You may encounter people on the streets. Some pass by, some will talk to you, and others are enemy agents that will shoot at you. Contrary to most action platformers, you use the B button to jump and the A button to attack. At first you don’t have any weaponry, so A deploys a jump kick instead. After defeating an enemy, you will acquire bullets and you shoot them with A instead of kicking. You can kick by pressing A while jumping, or you can shoot with A by standing on the ground. You can also press Up to either enter doorways or progress to other areas you see in the background.

In all play modes, on the top left of the screen you will see two displays. The first is labelled L and this is your health meter. You begin with the maximum 200 health that dwindles away like a slow timer. You also lose health when you take damage from enemies. The second display is noted with the letter B and this indicates how many bullets you have. For every enemy you defeat, you automatically gain both health and bullets. How much you recover differs by enemy. You can hold as many as 400 bullets so you are encouraged to shoot everything.

This first-person mode shows up all the time in Golgo 13.

As you move around in most modes, sometimes a gun will rise from the bottom of the screen or an explosion will appear in front of you. This engages the play mode called pan and zoom. In this mode, the action switches to a first-person perspective and you control a crosshair. Use the D-Pad to move the crosshair in all eight directions and press A to shoot. The screen scrolling loops all the way around to the left and right, and also scrolls partway upward. At the bottom of the screen, you see an indicator showing one or more enemy types and how many of each enemy type there are. You must defeat them all to continue play in the prior mode. There is also a meter that shows which compass direction you are aiming. When there is only one enemy remaining, arrows are shown indicating the direction of the final enemy threat. Some enemies will appear for a brief time and fly off in the distance, and others stay on and keep attacking. Some enemies fire missiles at you that you can shoot before they hit you. They do a lot of damage so it is best to shoot them first if you can.

Another recurring feature in Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode are the cutscenes. You find these when you enter certain locations. They always begin with a close-up of Golgo 13 facing the screen. Press A and he will turn toward the background. If no one is there, play goes back to the previous screen. Otherwise a person will walk up and start talking to you. At the end of each text block you are prompted to press either A or B. The prompt for A means press A to advance to the next block of text. The prompt for B indicates the end of the cutscene, so pressing B will return you to the action.

Golgo 13 also gets to assume control of a helicopter, and this play mode is like a horizontal scrolling shooter. In these sections, you automatically scroll to the right with the goal of surviving until the end of the scene. You can move the helicopter in all eight directions with the D-pad. The helicopter moves faster going left or down and slower going right or up. Press A to shoot the gun. Like Golgo 13’s pistol, it only shoots a single shot straight ahead, but here you can rapid fire many shots quickly.

Golgo 13 is also a professional scuba diver, evidently.

Another play style appears in the underwater sections. Golgo 13 takes to the water with scuba gear and is armed only with a spear gun. Use the D-pad to swim in all eight directions and press A to fire spears. Golgo 13’s sprite changes significantly between swimming horizontally and swimming vertically. This is important when guiding him through narrow passages. It is also important in that Golgo 13 can only fire spears when swimming horizontally. You can fire either to the left or right. Here there are other enemies with scuba gear as well as aquatic creatures to fend off. Mines are a recurring nuisance that bob up and down underwater. They cannot be destroyed and they do heavy damage if you touch one. There are also plants that look harmless but actually damage you on contact.

Finally, perhaps the most involved play style of any in the entire game is the action maze. This play mode takes place from a first-person perspective and you explore a series of corridors. Most areas like this have multiple branching paths like an actual maze but some are more linear. You navigate the maze step by step. Every time you either take a step forward or switch direction, the screen goes blank very briefly before displaying the new location. This is a bit jarring when moving quickly through the maze, but under the restrictions of the NES it’s about the only way to do it quickly. Since every step is deliberate it helps you plot your course more accurately.

You will use the D-pad to move through the maze. Press Up to advance one step forward. Pressing either Left or Right will turn you in place. Pressing Down will let you face directly behind you also keeping you in place. Up is the only button that moves you to a different square in the maze. There is a compass along the bottom of the screen indicating which direction you are facing. This is invaluable to let you map your way accurately through the maze.

Enemies appear suddenly, but they are easy to dispatch.

The mazes have enemies. As you perform movements, sometimes an enemy soldier will be standing in front of you. Press A to bring up a crosshair. There are only three positions you can aim, either in the middle, to the left, or to the right. Use the D-pad to choose one of these locations and press A to shoot. You have to be quick to take out a soldier when you see one or you will take some damage. Many enemies will leave behind a grenade that you will pick up automatically. You can hold up to three of them and they are displayed at the bottom of the screen. They are not used for attacking like you might think. I will explain what the grenades do shortly.

Mazes can be complicated to navigate for several reasons. There are multiple doors that appear in the maze. Just walk into them to move to the room behind them. I had a hard time keeping my bearings after moving through doors while trying to go without a map. There are also ladders. Yes, the mazes can have multiple floors. Each level of the maze is in a different color to help distinguish them and you use the ladders to switch between floors. Sometimes when taking a step, a wall will appear right in front of you. If you have a grenade, you can throw it near the wall to break a hole through it allowing you to pass. The worst aspect is the trap door. Some squares of the maze will reveal a trap door and you fall to the floor below. Typically, the top floor holds what you are looking for within the maze, so falling always represents a step backward.

Contrary to the other modes, there are some pickups in the maze. You can find a life potion that fills your health and an ammo box that replenishes your ammo. You can find a key that lets you unlock a locked door. All doors look the same and a blinking key icon is displayed at the bottom of the screen if you are trying to go through a locked door without the key. There is a set of infrared goggles needed to go past the laser walls. This is yet another obstacle you will encounter within the maze. If you are equipped with the goggles, you can see the lasers beaming down. You can try to walk through the laser wall without the goggles if you wish, but you will suffer heavy damage by doing so. With the goggles and proper timing, you can pass through unscathed. I found the timing tricky to master and there is little room for error.

The lasers deploy randomly, so you need good reflexes and timing.

You can continue playing if you die in this game, and Golgo 13 has an interesting way of representing the continue system. Each life for Golgo 13 is represented as an episode of a TV series. On the title screen, there is a #1 written on the left at the start of the game. If you die, you get a screen saying “To Be Continued…” instead of the traditional Game Over screen. You go back to the title screen and now you see #2 meaning Episode 2. You can keep continuing all the way to #52, but if you die there you must start the entire game over.

Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode is a long game. Naturally, there are 13 acts in the adventure. Some of them go by quickly, and others, like the ones with mazes, last a long time. There are no passwords and no saving in the game, and you are left at the mercy of the continue system. Completing Golgo 13 is more than just an endurance test; it has some challenging moments that take learning and practice.

This was my first time playing Golgo 13. It’s a common cart and one I picked up early on during one of my waves of collecting. With cart in hand, I remembered my impressions of the games from those old magazines. When I finally got to try it out, I was less than impressed with the first few minutes of the game. I would not have sat down and tried to get into it had I not started this project.

What doesn’t Golgo 13 do?

Golgo 13 started to impress me the more I played it. The first scene has you walking on the streets of Berlin. I thought the first-person shooting segments were a neat diversion. Soon you play a helicopter portion, and I had no idea that Golgo 13 had shooter sections. Each mode is a little bit clunky in its own way, but the game does a noble job of including several variants of game play. It’s a surprisingly deep game for the NES in 1988.

The manual is invaluable for this game because it contains maps of the mazes. Only the basic layouts are included, but all you need is a few missing details you can fill in yourself and you have a complete map. I got stuck in a maze on my first time playing, and I come to find out that it’s meant to be a fake base that is not necessary at all. If I had read the manual first more clearly, I would have known that.

One night I ended up with a lot of free time and I was able to complete the entire game with some continues to spare. It took me around three and a half hours to beat Golgo 13 on that playthrough. I didn’t think I’d be able to beat the game that night so I didn’t have any of my recording equipment set up. I had to play through the entire game again the next night to get it captured. It took me half the time to beat the game a second time with many fewer deaths. I’m satisfied with that result from only playing the game for a few days total.

Suggestive content was toned down for the US release.

Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode had some content censored for the US version. The most significant change is that the Japanese version features brief nudity. In an early scene of the game, Golgo 13 meets with a female agent in a hotel room and at the end she sheds her clothes. In the US version, the scene cuts away to an outside view of the hotel where you can see the two characters get close and the lights go down. Golgo 13 then has his life refilled to the max, which clearly suggests what they were up to.

There are a few other things included in the NES game that the censors missed. Some of the enemies in the mazes briefly show bleeding when they are shot. In one act, Golgo 13 can find a pack of cigarettes on the ground and he helps himself to a life-refilling smoke. There is also a stray swastika that should have been removed. My guess is that since these events are deeper in the game, the censors didn’t play long enough to notice them.

There are many things happening in Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode that are worthwhile, but sadly the game suffers from a lack of polish. The hit detection is off in several places, such as when landing jump kicks or shooting targets in the first-person mode. The jumping is a little too slow and his jump arc doesn’t feel right. Enemies attack faster and with more complex patterns than you, causing frustration. You can shoot bullets right through enemies in the helicopter, which makes it appear you are not doing damage when you actually are. Now the graphics, music, and presentation are overall good, especially considering the age of this game, and there is a deep story with many different characters. Kudos to Vic Tokai for making a huge game with so many different play modes that all play well enough. For that, I can look past these issues and say that I enjoyed Golgo 13.

#55 – Golgo 13: Top Secret Episode