I’ll be perfectly blunt here. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is normally one of those games that is nearly impossible to complete under normal circumstances and without a guidebook. It’s almost as if the Konami of America design team went out of their way to make sure almost every person in every town you visit says something either completely irrelevant, or something that’s just explained so badly, you couldn’t make sense of it even with a multiple degrees in both cryptography and linguistics. The Almighty Guru decided it was high time to do something about it.

With his hack, there is no more inane nonsense about bashing your head against a cliff wall. There is no more random babble about this-or-that. There is no more useless trivia or pointless storyline. And that’s where the problem with this hack lies. The Almighty Guru changed every bit of dialog in the game to not just give you hints, but blatantly tell you where to go, how to get there, and what you should do when you arrive!

I’ll admit, it would be nice if everyone could play Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest without getting lost in the gobbledegook of what’s either an bad translation or intentional silliness, and The Almighty Guru approached the problem with the right attitude… but the execution is somewhat lacking for my taste. The game essentially turns you from a lost hiker in the desert into a tourist on one of those rail carts at Disney World. No twists. No turns. No surprises. And as a gamer who takes exception to being lead around by the hand in games, that really rubs me the wrong way.

On the bright side of things, The Almighty Guru did change a few things that were bugging gamers the world over about this game. Aside from changing almost all the text in the game (and a majority of the dialog), he made text appear faster and knocked the day/night transition time down by 60%. However, the rapidity with which it happens is very disorienting and combined quick text and near-instant day/night transition interrupts the flow of the game even further than before, as a lot of people won’t be able to read the transition text before it disappears and would be left wondering what just happened, even if only momentarily. I personally would have left the day/night cycles speeds as they were, but removed the text boxes. Then again, is it really Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest without the classic line, “WHAT A HORRIBLE NIGHT TO HAVE A CURSE”?

My recommendation? No, on this version. A few things need more love and this version is almost devoid of any real character. If a version with a little more life to it comes out at some point in the future, I’d love to see it, but as it stands, it’s a very bland, very cut-and-dry attempt at trying to give some sense of direction to a game with almost none.