This is a “retro review” I wrote for GamingFurever.com which, for a while seemed defunct to me, but now I guess it back up again (I just checked now)… however, my reviews don’t seem to be there anymore. I searched “Olympus” in the games and I didn’t see this charming review.
The date on the txt file I found this in was September 14, 2019, but that is not accurate at all. This was written during my deepest depression of two years about 16 years ago. That would more like 2009, not 2019.
Anyways, here it is until I have any additional info:
RetroRodentia’s Battle of Olympus Review
Remember everything I said about Blaster Master? Forget that, ’cause now there’s Battle of Olympus. You want an engaging even engrossing game, AND a gouge your eyes out challenge? This is your game. I originally played this on cartridge (with my handy-dandy red-gold retro console), but upon visiting the first boss and defeating it I lost interest. This was a year ago (which is like fifteen years in rat years) and now today is all about Battle of Olympus. Here’s some info on the game:
What is Battle of Olympus? It’s a side-scrolling action/rpg in the vein of Zelda 2 (though no overhead map) and Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest diznick. You adventure through screens defeating monsters, collecting items and weapons, entering doors to other regions, and visiting ‘townfolk’ to learn of clues about the game’s mysteries.
Battle of Olympus was developed by Infinity and released in 1988 by Imagineer for the Famicom as Oryunposu no Tatakai: Ai no Densetsu (“Fight of Olympus: Legend of Love”) Broderbund released the NES version in North America in 1990. The game centers around a Greek named Orpheus, and his love mate, Helene (which really, people, should be Eurydice. See this rat knows things… many things.) Although, you can totally change the names of the characters at the beginning of the game, so I changed the hero to my name, and in tradition, the heroine became my least favorite sister-in-law. Anyways, Helene was bitten by a snake and died. Yay! Her corpse is mine! I mean, uh, ooooh. She goes with Hades to the underworld to be captured and become queen, or some such. Knowing that Helene is recoverable Orpheus decides he must save his love mate. Don’t worry if you didn’t catch that or skipped this paragraph, this is all explained by Helene in the first “fragment of love” you retrieve.
There are some things I like about this game. The side-view map of interconnected areas was one of them. It was very Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest-ish, or Metroid, or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (you know my fantasies). The other thing is something I’ve written about before: the game integrates with the story well enough that the two seem as inseparable as a two day old grilled cheese sandwich. To me a good game integrates its story with the game, so that there is one cohesive world-whole. I believe that’s what helps create an engrossing experience that comes together. Battle of Olympus does all this well.
Most of the time you walk around with a limp (don’t even mention hopping, or should I saw humping, on the dolphin) collecting olives (which look nothing like olives, but rather glowing red orbs) and bay leaves (to up your lifemeter) from the enemies in the different regions. That is until you start your quest to Laconia and Phrygia, then you’re on a focused quest as the layouts and enemies there are too difficult for casual play. Additionally, bosses and mini-bosses (which come back when you exit the screen) take up the rest of your time as you’ll try to defeat them over and over and over and over. Did I say over and over?
The difficulty of this game is almost insurmountable. Placement and timing are everything, seriously everything. From killing the little blue things falling from the tree, to nailing just the right pixel of the minotaur as he charges at you, timing is tantamount. I should’ve suspected something when I came to the first boss battle: Lamia. Lamia requires you, under the barrage of arrows, to step forward and jump just at the right time, hit her, and then retreat and turn around before another arrow hits you. This doesn’t sound difficult, but I dare you to try it.
Future bosses aren’t any better, and enemies aren’t better either. You start to encounter almost impossible to hit bats, difficult to dodge monkeys, and near the game’s end, enemies with their own shields (when I couldn’t hit them I thought my game was broken). It seemed to me, unless I was doing something wrong, that the hit area, or collision area, for each boss got tinier with every successive creature. You had to eventually start hitting just the right five pixels at the right time, over and over. I want to know when, during quality assurance, who decided people were going to play this on a password basis? It’s a good thing they have continues and retry’s, though I don’t know how many you get. I more than once tried the same screen ten times just to get something right. I must’ve tried Lamia and Cerberus combined fifty times! I’ve seen Let’s Play videos which would put me to shame, but I think I’m an above-average gamer and this was Nintendo hard.
One of the difficulties in the beginning is always having/ending with a low lifemeter and lacking any real way to boost it besides this game’s version of leveling (there are no levels) killing enemy after enemy hoping for bay leaves. This sounds oddly like my life. Until you get your first ambrosia things are stacked against you, and until you get the flask do you really achieve a normal relationship with your lifemeter.
Another difficulty is that you end up wandering around the map endlessly trying out your special item, like the eye of graeae, over and over again to find the ‘hidden’ things populated throughout the game. Luckily, the townspeople give you clues on where to look for things. The game also seems to favor maze like setups for their levels, particularly Phrygia, which I actually find refreshing, requiring some mapping skill on the part of the player (or photographic memory). I guess it just reminds me of the mazes back in the lab.
These difficulties actually can be quite charming in their own way, but there are other not-so-savory items as well. You don’t really have any means of defending yourself against enemies when first entering a screen. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but I found in Laconia there was one screen where I’d walk up the stairs from the fountain only to be impossibly accosted by a monkey. Or in Phrygia, there’s one unforgivable door that if you go through (after defeating the ‘salamander’) you get no where, but when you come back, you’re right on top of the same ‘salamander’ you defeated. Better have a high lifemeter. Another thing are the ‘salamanders’ themselves. You have to block their fireballs with the Salamander Shield and when possible jump and shoot a lightning bolt at their head (four times). But jumping isn’t made easy, with non-pattern forming fireballs, and the fireballs not even matching the opening mouth of the salamander fifteen percent of the time. I yelled more than once at my CRT, “You call that fair???”
There really isn’t any veins of humor throughout the game, but there were a few instances. Strangely placed ‘ha ha ha’s and other text tricks are a little nifty, however I think the humor of this game comes from some questionable design choices. For instance, no matter where you go, there’s always at least one person living behind a door. Why are there people living in the caves of Argolis with bats and snakes outside? Or Phrygia, or Crete? When you’ve played these areas the ridiculousness will confound you. Another point, a couple of times you’re told that ‘peace will return’, however there continues to be monsters running around the area, so what the fuck does that even mean?
In the end, on my twenty-fifth try on Cerberus it struck me. I’m struggling every step of this way so I can rescue my least favorite sister-in-law? What twisted mind sets that up? Oh yeah, never mind.
Shitlist rating? This one’s tough, on one hand it’s a gem of engrossing gameplay and world building, on the other hand it’s very difficult (causing you to get uber-skills by the time you get through it all). The password system definitely gives it kudos, and raises the bar, however the only reason I was even able to make it through was the liberal use of my save game states on my handy game machine. I’ll say that this is a gem in a pile of shit, high quality, but still struggling to remain on top.
Thanks for reading!
RetroRodentia