Willow (Arcade Review)

Willow
Platform: Arcade
Developed by Capcom
First Released June, 1989
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

It looks like it’s going to be so fun. You know what else does? Slot machines. Blackjack tables.

Capcom is credited with keeping arcades alive with Street Fighter 2. Fair enough. But, didn’t they also kind of help usher in the demise of arcades by making games so hard that it’s almost farcical in how money grubbing they are? And it’s not like it’s just the ones you’d expect, like Ghosts n’ Goblins or Gun.Smoke. I just played through Willow, their 1989 coin-op based on the 1988 movie. It’s a highly critically acclaimed game. I have a question, though: did they actually play it past the first two levels? Because after the first two levels, it gives up any sense of fairness or balance or gamesmanship and just becomes a straight-up shakedown for quarters. Capcom had a tendency to do this with their coin-ops, but few are as brazen about it as Willow is. This isn’t a video game. It’s a robber baron.

I preferred using Madmartigan to Willow, even though Willow fires projectiles.

Now mind you, this absurd hardness was after I tinkered with the settings. I dropped the difficulty to the lowest possible. I raised my vitality to the highest possible. I turned on continues. This should NOT have been that hard. I’m fine with a challenge, but there are several sections of Willow where I’m absolutely convinced that there’s no humanly way to get past them without taking at least some damage. This is done so that you have to spend your gold on health upgrades. Yea, this is the rare arcade game that has shops and RPG-like upgrades. At this point, I’ll note that Willow’s levels run on one of the fastest timers in gaming, and that timer doesn’t stop inside the shops. Shops that have eleven items that you need to read the descriptions of. Even cheating, I only had two seconds left when I beat the first boss. It’s not like I was wasting time exploring the level, either. There’s no bones about it: Willow is a greedy game that wants you to keep putting in quarters and will go to shameless lengths to force it.

Buzzer beater.

It’s best to think of Willow as a close cousin of Ghosts ‘n Goblins, only with two characters to play as instead of one. In level one and three you play as Willow. In levels two and four, you play as Madmartigan. Players can choose who they want in level five, while level six has sections for both characters. To Willow’s credit, every major set-piece from the film is here, including a scene deleted from the final film that sees Willow on a rowboat get attacked by a giant fish. So that’s neat. Plus, the play control is tight and responsive, and the attacks are satisfying enough. Willow fires magic projectiles while Madmartigan uses his sword, and both attacks can be upgraded in the shop several times. The combat would be sweet if enemies weren’t so spongy from level three until close to the end-game. You absolutely HAVE to spend your gold on weapon upgrades or you’ll time-out just from the combat alone.

Speaking of timing-out, one of the main ways Willow screws players is by having bosses and mini-bosses hover well out of range of your weapons. It’s not a one-off thing, either. Even the last boss does it. Few arcade games use the timer to squeeze players for lunch money quite like Willow, and it’s not better for it. It’s agonizing to watch them linger and linger and linger, unable to do a thing about it. This dragon here isn’t even the level’s boss. This is basically how the stage starts, and it’s hugely spongy and it will take its sweet time.. well, actually it’s YOUR time.. before it opens itself up for counterattack.

Again, it’s baffling that this got critical acclaim, but if you look at the Wikipedia page for it, it’s one of the most revered arcade games of the year I was born. I wish I played the game those critics played. The one *I* played had cheap shots galore, a short timer and spongy enemies up the wazoo. The third level saw me pump one of the first enemies with so many full-strength magic blasts that I questioned whether it was even possible to kill it. And that enemy was heaving grenades at me that had splash damage that covered nearly a third of the screen. It did die eventually, but as soon as it did, another took its place. Without exaggeration, there were bosses that I took down easier than many of the so-called “basic” enemies. Later in the game, even when I had upgraded the sword as much as possible up to that point, these enemies pushed spiked walls into me while other enemies ran in from behind, all of which took several hits to kill. It wasn’t even pretending to be a game by that point.

The spiked wall guys AND the guys behind you respawn quite a bit too. I imagine if you played this in front of a real Willow cabinet, it would have a boxing glove punching players in the face while telling them “stop hitting yourself.”

Was it fun, at least? Well, no. Satisfying as the combat is, it’s too basic to overcome the unfair design. Maybe the first two levels were fine, but this is a six level game. Even when you’ve fully upgraded your weapons and the sponge goes away, the levels are still tailored towards cheap shots and quarter shakedowns. The final level’s Madmartigan section really goes overboard by having the level be a “maze.” It’s actually not a maze. It’s a blind random chance of selecting which door is the correct path. Not just once, either. It does it with two doors, then three, then four. Pick right, with no clues to help you (I bought a hint in the shop and it didn’t help at all. It just told me this would happen, and nothing more) and you move on. Pick wrong and you go backwards. How far backwards? It depends on the door. Some will send you all the way back to the beginning of the level. By this point, I had long since quit trying to beat the game on its terms. It wasn’t playing fair, and so I didn’t either. Good thing, because each time, I literally opened every wrong door available before I chose right. I even tried to play the meta game of figuring out which one the developers would have chosen. I guess I chose poorly. Wait, wrong George Lucas movie.

I literally LOLed that the final boss’s final attack is an invincible possessed barbecue running around and shooting six projectiles at a time while you wait for her to lower herself enough that you can barely reach her with your attack. You do have a tornado spell that can reach her IF you time the meter right, but the BBQ is designed to make sure you can’t actually get a shot off without taking damage. It’s such a stupid thing, but by this point in Willow, I expected stupid. I realize the evil barbecue is from the movie, but really? You’re finishing on that? Then, queen just floats away and the end credits begin immediately.

There’s a lot of quality licensed games that haven’t been re-released since they first came out that I weep for, and even though I hated it, I still weep for Willow’s status as a lost game. Now that the Disney+ show didn’t do so well, I’m guessing this is low on anyone’s priority for a modern re-release. Apparently the NES game is better, and one of these days, I’ll get around to reviewing it. As for the coin-op, it’s just not fun. And that’s a damn shame because I think the level design is well done and, again, they got all the action set pieces from the movie. They’re not just in the game, but as accurate to the film as a 2D platformer is capable of being. That’s admirable. This is one of the closest-to-the-film licensed games of its era. And, like the film it’s based on it: it’s kind of a disaster. The best thing I can say about it, besides having nice sprite work and a really good soundtrack, is that it has a couple okay boss fights. It’s just too bad you have to play Willow to get to them.
Verdict: NO!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.