But First, a Quick Poll
Thanks for your feedback!
Milon’s Secret Castle
PUBLISHER/DEVELOPER: Hudson Soft
RELEASE DATE: Nov. 13th, 1986 (JP), September 1988 (US)
Love ‘em and Hate ‘em
When the NES first appeared around the United States in 1985 and ’86, the games were simple, often one-screen affairs. Arcade ports like Donkey Kong, Balloon Fight, and 1942 peppered the lineup. Sports titles like Baseball and Tennis provided exactly what they promised, the best renditions of those sports to date on a home console, but still not deep in any way. Super Mario Bros. was the anomaly, a revelatory platformer that signaled where console games were going rather than where they’d been.
In 1987, however, developers’ ambitions were on full display. Non-linear adventures like The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Deadly Towers, The Goonies II, and Super Pitfall challenged players in new and radical ways, not always to their liking. Only two of the five games listed here – Zelda and Metroid - are revered. Two others – Deadly Towers and Super Pitfall – are often cited among the NES’ worst games. But all five have one thing in common: they force the player to experiment, to think outside of the box.
Burn that random bush. Knock on this specific wall with the hammer. Jump in this one spot to make an item appear.
How would the player know to do these things?
Trial and error. Perhaps a glimpse into the Official Nintendo Players’ Guide. Whispers among the other gamers on the playground. If you’re lucky, the instruction manual might provide some solid tips.
For better and for worse, these games don’t hold your hand. They expect the player to bring their intelligence and problem-solving skills, and if you don’t have any, you’ll acquire some or break the controller in the process.
Milon Busts Loose
1988 brought its own fair share of non-linear adventure titles, including Rambo, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (we’ll get there) and today’s entrée, Milon’s Secret Castle. I don’t believe the retro gaming community hates Milon’s with the same passion as, say, Deadly Towers, but I rarely hear anything positive about it either. I remember hating it ages ago, but our younger selves are so seldomly right about anything. Time for a replay.
You play Milon, a young boy whose goal is to rescue Queen Eliza from the Evil Warlord in the Secret Castle. In the manual, Hudson Soft provides Milon a whole backstory about how he lives in a world where people communicate through music, but he’s tone-deaf or something so he can’t understand people. His journey initially kicks off with him searching for others who are like him, so that he can have some people to connect with, but he gets sidetracked with the whole Queen Eliza deal. This backstory is not critical to the game in any way, but damn, Milon’s plight is real.
Milon starts at the bottom of the castle, like a true peasant, equipped with a standard jump and a weapon that blows bubbles. Once you enter into one of the gigantic castle rooms for the first time, your goal is to search the area for money, find shops where you can purchase items needed for future areas, and destroy enemies to find the exit key. The Castle rooms often feel larger than they are, and the further you progress, the more complex they appear. Don’t let their imposing size intimidate you. The goal is almost always the same in every area of the game.
As ridiculous as it is, Milon’s bubble weapon is the key to progression. It slays demons, destroys blocks in each area, and reveals the hidden exit door. Blow bubbles at everything. You never know what you’ll find. Getting rid of the blocks in any given environment provides alternate pathways and can reveal essential items like money and honeycomb. We know what money does (makes the world go round), but honeycomb adds an extra line on your life bar. Also, it’s delicious, and Lord knows Milon needs a little sugar to keep his spirits up.
Once you clear the rooms on an entire floor of the castle, the boss will appear in a specially designated boss room. All of the boss battles are exactly the same. He hops around (usually in dragon form, but not always), blows out fireballs, you avoid them, blow bubbles at his face, he dies, the battle is over. Even the final battle with the Evil Wizard is just him bouncing around in his chamber, occasionally releasing some projectiles. Pathetic.
Boss battles aren’t why you play Milon’s Secret Castle, though. You play to explore, to uncover, to reveal. The Castle is one giant mystery, and every door, window, and even the well in the corner hold secrets for you to find.
And this, friends, is the crux of the entire game. Do you enjoy exploring the Secret Castle? Do you like blowing bubbles at every surface in order to find the last couple dollars needed to buy the fire vest, so you can survive in that one flaming area in the bottom of the well? Do you not mind revisiting rooms because you missed a necessary item? Sometimes shops have items that you don’t necessarily need to buy, like Shrink Potion. But if you don’t know that the boxing glove located in various rooms shrinks you, free of charge, you’ll buy the shrinking potion and waste five precious dollars.
There are four floors in Milon’s Secret Castle, each with multiple rooms and areas. On the first two floors, any annoyance I faced was outweighed by the satisfaction I received in figuring out how to progress. By the third floor, however, my annoyance reached peak levels and at something seemingly small and insignificant: I couldn’t figure out how to enter a room. Did I miss something? Was I supposed to have some item that I didn’t have? I didn’t know. After weighing whether I wanted to go backwards and search through previously explored areas, I declined and turned off the game for good.
“But Dylan,” I hear you typing, “Why not just use a walkthrough?” Well friends, I was using a walkthrough. The only written walkthrough on Milon’s Secret Castle anywhere on the Internet that I could find. And trust me, I scoured. Even old game magazines, like Nintendo Power, didn’t provide a bit of help. And unfortunately, this walkthrough, for whatever reason, did not solve my problem.1
I don’t hate Milon’s Secret Castle anymore. Its unique ideas, like the bubble-blowing mechanic, aren’t always well-implemented, but I can see what Hudson was going for. That said, I understand why American retro gamers are generally put off by the game. Milon’s provides some limited satisfaction when you uncover hidden areas or items, but I never felt any true sense of accomplishment for my actions.
With Metroid, Samus finds additional weapons, energy, and skills along the way to assist her going forward. With Zelda, finding the dungeon, killing the boss, and getting a heart piece feels almost triumphant. Milon’s Secret Castle’s sole reward, such as it is, is just more exploration. And when you finally save Queen Eliza, you’re not done. The true ending is still one more full playthrough away a la Ghosts N Goblins. That’s a hard no for me in 2026, but even in 1988, even with gamers expanding their palettes with other non-linear adventures I can’t imagine many picked up what Milon’s Secret Castle was puttin’ down.
C
I just now, while editing this post, realize that I could have looked up a walkthrough on YouTube. How on earth did I forget that this was an option?!
Whenever I look at Milon, I can't help but think of Mario as a wizard. I think it's his name starting with an "M" and his colors.
Looking forward to your Simon's Quest post, that game is fantastic(think Castelvania 3 was by far the best of the NES games) but you need a walkthrough to get through it. My 8 year old self was forced to rent a video tape walk through in order to progress because who the hell knew you had to kneel by a cliff wearing a ring in order to generate a tornado??? Apparently there were mass translation errors that caused the NPCs to spout nonsense in English rather than give you real info.