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One of my big Christmas gifts was the gold Zelda 3DS XL. I never had a 3DS before now, but was excited to hear about this particular 3DS, which comes with a voucher for the digital version of A Link Between Worlds. Of course, the eShop has been screwed up for the past few days, so I used some gift money to buy a couple more 3DS games I've been hankering after (on cartridge): Fire Emblem and Kid Icarus: Uprising. Playing the latter game, and the discovery that the other two Kid Icarus games are on the eShop, inspired me to want to write a blog about this unsung Nintendo series.

The Kid Icarus series, a brainchild of the same team that created Metroid, is a platforming/shooter series that's based very loosely on Greek mythology with plenty of Japanese culture mixed in. In all three games, you are Pit, an angelic warrior in the army of the goddess Palutena, which is actually a Japanese misromanization of "Pallas Athena", the famous Greek goddess of war.

Kid Icarus (NES, 1987)

Kid Icarus was originally made in Japan for the Famicom Disk System, as were games like The Legend of Zelda, and ported to cartridge for the US release. It went on to become one of the NES's early hits.

In Kid Icarus, Medusa has invaded Angel Land and imprisoned Pit in the Underworld. Pit must battle his way through the Underworld, Overworld, and Skyworld, and confront Medusa in the Palace in the Sky, where she holds Palutena hostage. Along the way, Pit battles a host of enemies and bosses based on Greek mythology (often in name only), gains experience, collects weapons and armor, and prepares for the big final battle.

Kid Icarus was an ambitious project with varied gameplay for a NES game. It had vertical stages whose sides wrapped like the corridors in Pac-Man combined with horizontal stages and maze like fortresses similar to the dungeons in the Zelda series, at the end of which one of three bosses awaited - Twinbellows, an obvious take on Cerberus, the hellhound in Greek Mythology, Hewdraw (another misromanization, this time of the Hydra), and Pandora, each carrying a sealed casket containing one of the Three Sacred Treasures. The first three stages, the Underworld, Overworld, and Skyworld, contained three segments with a fourth fortress segment at the end, while Stage 4, the Palace in the Sky, was an automatic scrolling shooter. Pit starts out the game with one life bar and a bow with a very short range, so he'll need to really beef up to survive the game's later stages. There were a number of chambers like shops, hot springs, and training rooms scattered throughout the stages. In all stages, falling off the screen through the bottom would mean instant death. Unfortunately, this also applied to the vertical stages as well, so if the platform you were on disappeared below you, you would fall to a cheap death. This design oversight made Kid Icarus a frustrating game for many. You could find angel feathers which would let you escape death by falling one time per feather, but these were very rare and expensive. Also, you could have your special weapons stolen by Pluton in the Overworld and Skyworld and fenced on various Black Markets. The game would even give you a chance to negotiate lower prices with the Black Marketeer by pressing certain buttons, and you could even buy things using a credit card! As befitting the sister series of Metroid, there were even Metroids in the Sky World, though they didn't latch onto Pit the way the Metroids in Metroid did.

The fortresses provided a different challenge. Divided into chambers, death by falling was not something you needed to worry about there, but there were plenty of other hazards. The fortresses were huge mazes, and unfortunately the mapping tools weren't the most helpful. One of the biggest hazards of the fortress was the infamous Eggplant Wizard, who would turn Pit into an eggplant, severely curtailing his abilities. Only by finding a hospital could he be cured. The Eggplant Wizard was such a notorious bad guy that he even made it into the Captain N cartoon. Pit could use mallets in the fortresses to rescue allies to help him fight the bosses.

Kid Icarus's scrolling problems unfortunately made the game very difficult. While it's always remained one of my favorite NES games, I can see that it was a very flawed masterpiece. Still, it captured my imagination in much the same way that Zelda and its sister-series, Metroid, did. It was also quite successful in its time. Kid Icarus had some memorable tunes from Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka, but the NES version took a hit in quality from the Famicom Disk System version, since the FDS had additional sound hardware not present in the core NES.

The original Kid Icarus is readily available, being sold through the Virtual Console Services for the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS.

Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters (Game Boy, 1991)

The original Kid Icarus would prove to be the only console KI game ever made, and after that, Pit would only appear on consoles as a playable character in the Super Smash Bros. series. Instead, the series' following incarnations would be on handheld.

In 1991, Nintendo released the second Kid Icarus on Game Boy. While the Game Boy was largely used as a low-budget port-dump, even by Nintendo, Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters bucked that trend by being a massive improvement over the original in almost every way other than color.

Kid Icarus: OMAM is set up the same way as the original, with Pit fighting through the vertical Underworld, horizontal Overworld, vertical Skyworld, and horizontal Palace in the Sky, each of the first three areas with three scrolling segments and a fortress at the end. One improvement right of the back is the fact that you can't fall off the screen and die instantly. The game allows you to travel freely through each area as long as you don't leave the stage, and the game's mechanics even play with this. You can also use mallets in the scrolling stages as well as the fortresses to break walls and reveal secrets, although OMAM removed the Centurion allies during boss fights. If you find and open every door in each stage, the game gives you a hidden "Palutena's Key" which allows you to re-visit every door you've opened in that area. In fact, finding secrets is the key to Pit being allowed to use all three of the Sacred Treasures in the Palace of the Sky. If you don't have enough "Secret Points", Pit starts out with only the Pegasus Wings in the Palace in the Sky and must earn the other two treasures through training chambers. These changes made Kid Icarus: OMAM easier than the original, but it was a far improved game for the changes.The game's look was also quite detailed and the music was as catchy and memorable as the original.

Heck, Nintendo even designed the fortresses so that the Eggplant Curse could actually be helpful by letting you take shortcuts.

Kid Icarus: OMAM is generally seen as one of the best Game Boy games ever made, and seeing what Nintendo did with it on Game Boy only makes me wonder more what Nintendo could have done with a SNES Kid Icarus built along the lines of A Link to the Past or Super Metroid.

Instead, Nintendo would not revisit Kid Icarus again, except through Pit's appearance in Super Smash Bros, for 21 years.

Kid Icarus: OMAM is available on the 3DS Virtual Console.

Kid Icarus: Uprising (3DS, 2012)

Pit's next appearance was as a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee for the Gamecube, and he would become a playable character in Brawl. Pit's appearance apparently piqued enough people's interest that Nintendo decided to give him another game, this time on the 3DS, and one created by Masahiro Sakurai, designer of the Smash Bros. series.

Kid Icarus: Uprising is a 3-D shooting game with several styles of play. I haven't played through all of it yet, but the first part of each stage is an automatic-scrolling 3-D shooter, a la Star Fox, while the second half of the stage is a platformer. The game's story is an affectionate sendup of all the tropes of the original games, keeping all the misromanized names and with a lot of humor surrounding Pit's limited abilities as an angel, his long absence from the gaming scene, and his enemies. The game looks very nice for a 3DS game. However, its control scheme, combining the Circle Pad, the L button, and the touch-screen, takes some getting used to to the point where boxed copies of the game came with a stand to hold the 3DS in place. Despite its troublesome control scheme, the game is very fun and well worth a place in any 3DS owner's library. Nintendo went all out on the soundtrack, hiring a number of well-known Japanese composers, including Motoi Sakuraba.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, Sakurai stated he was not working on another Kid Icarus sequel. Hopefully, however, Nintendo will revisit the series in the future, as it really is one of the company's classics.

Thanks, as always, for reading!