Quest For Camelot

There are good Zelda clones and bad Zelda clones. The good ones are few and far between. Things like Golden Axe Warrior or 3D Dot Game Heroes. Those stand out to me as games that sort of understood what makes Zelda great. And then there are others that just go for a similar look or playstyle and hope for the best without really grasping what makes a great game. Quest For Camelot is pretty much the latter.

Having said that, I still think that digging through old licensed games is a pretty interesting thing. You find these games made based on random movies or whatever and you never really know what they'll be. More often than not it's a collectathon platformer. But every once in a while, you'll find that a developer used a license to just make a tribute to a game. It's sort of a backdoor way to make a sequel to a series you wish you got to work on.

I've never seen the movie Quest For Camelot. I don't even remember it. Apparently it was a late 90's thing and must have been fairly big budget as it's got a decent enough voice cast. It looks to me like kind of a Disney wannabe deal. Also the art reminds me a bit of Dragon's Lair.

Anyway the game is a total Zelda ripoff. But not in a good way. For one thing there's no overworld, so each area is just its own thing. You start in a village, and that's one level. There's a few tasks you'll need to do to advance to the next. So in the village I had to find five chickens (boring) and then get a sword and then learn to use it and then kill all the knights in that area (boring).

The battle system is pretty meh. But at least you can upgrade your sword's power by killing more enemies. By far the worst thing here is the menu system. The music is awful - that's a close second. And it's repetitive so after a while I just shut the volume off. But the menu... Okay, so to save your game you need to equip "SAVE" by mapping it to one of the buttons. So press Start, and select Save, then Start to get back to the game and hit the button you mapped Save to. Then you wait a second and asks if you want to save. Then you wait a second and it confirms it saved. So every time you load a saved game you immediately have to go into that same menu and unequip the Save thingy. It's so so bad. OH! And it costs you 30 gold to save! Which wouldn't be so bad if my cart didn't seem to have some issues causing it to glitch randomly making me paranoid of losing any progress! UGH!

The second level is a castle. In here I had to find a guy's dog (boring) and then I got a shield and then I had to kill all the ghosts (boring) and then I could open a magic door to get the hookshot to get to the roof to the dungeon key which let me fight the boss. He... did nothing. I just hit him over and over and he just kinda walked around. On to level three.

So yeah. This game sucks. It feels like a poor man's Crystalis. It's janky and clunky and bad. But... I might stick with it. How Long To Beat says it's like a four hour game, and I'm a sucker for short games. Also, I happen to have the issue of Nintendo Power that contains a walkthrough. So it should be a breeze? We'll see if I can hang in there long enough to finish this bad game.