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Battle Princess Madelyn is an enchanting Ghosts N Goblins tribute that’s hard to recommend

by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Battle Princess Madelyn
  
• Developer:
  
• Publisher:
  
• PC, PS4, Switch
  

Born of a daughter’s request to have a version of Ghosts ‘N Goblins with a playable girl, Battle Princess Madelyn carries both the spirit of that childhood desire and the series it pays homage to. This results in a game that both challenged and charmed me, bringing spooky character designs with a sense of cuteness, alongside familiar chaotic action.

It leaves a good first impression. I was drawn into the world and simple joy of warding of the assault of the undead. Changing the damsel into a pup that needed to be avenged (and watches over you as a spirit) was a cute, if sad, touch. But as I went on it slowly dawned on me that it wasn’t the game I wanted. The levels were unfocused, too often full of sprawling areas that felt barren and tedious to navigate. Alternate paths and secret areas seemed promising but often led to…dead ends? Or side quests with no tangible reward.

I felt pretty down on it. Until I was met with the realization that Battle Princess Madelyn was actually two totally different games.

It’s true! Selecting Story Mode from the main menu gives you a sprawling quest, complete with dialogue, cutscenes, collectibles, side quests and a non-linear hub world that unlocks as you gain new abilities. Selecting Arcade Mode, however, leads you to a very different game based on the arcade Ghosts ‘N Goblins style! The stages here are remixed from the Story Mode into more compact stage designs with a straightforward action game approach.

I stuck with Story Mode for a few more bosses to get a better feel for it and see if it could impress me, but ultimately I didn’t enjoy it. Simply put, it’s not very good. Battle Princess Madelyn namedrops Wonder Boy 3 as its secondary inspiration, and while I can see its influence here it doesn’t take any of the elements that game successful. Wonderboy 3 uses its different abilities to recontextualize the world and force you to play differently upon revisiting other areas. Metroidvania style games has a different approach, gradually unlocking the world with each new ability.

In either case, it results in a world that gradually begins to feel bigger as you gain new abilities. Battle Princess Madelyn fails to resolve either of those approaches, instead feeling as if it was designed with a moveset in mind then had the character stripped of those moves to crush down the world. It doesn’t feel empowering, just restrictive.

By contrast Arcade Mode gets off to a much better start. You aren’t given a very extensive moveset, but having the double jump and chargeable ghost dog attack from the go allows for better navigation and stage design. Immediately I was leaping around, changing course mid-air and dashing through its spaces while tossing lances and ghost dogs around. It definitely captured that arcade sensibility, and the more compact level design kept it dense with action and demanded my attention at every second. I was having a grand time, but there was one problem: I couldn’t get past the first level.

I don’t mean that the first stage was too hard. It was difficult, but not unreasonably so. Instead I was stopped in the first stage after defeating the boss, with the victory screen just hanging there announcing how legendary my battle was but refusing to move on. This didn’t happen on every playthrough, but it did happen a few too many times and made me terribly anxious that the same thing would happen after each boss. Thankfully it didn’t, but another major obstacle stood in the way instead.

Stage 2, to put it mildly, is a massive, unfair difficulty spike that almost made me quit the game entirely. I eventually got through it after literal hours of practice, but it was a huge early roadblock that kept me from seeing most of the game. A combination of projectile enemies that never let up and a long precision platforming section repeatedly aggravated me until I could find a solution. The archers in the stage barely give you a gap to retaliate once they become active, and the platforming section involves climbing on precarious platforms with snakes around them who also spit venom as bats fly around you, with a single hit sending you falling for seconds to an instant death. This section tormented me with its cheap deaths, leaving me with barely any health to try to figure out the boss. And if I died? Back to the start of the level.

Worse, there was no coming back to this stage later after a break. Unlike Story Mode, if you quit in Arcade Mode you need to start the whole game over. So I decided fuck it, I’m going all in and completing as much as I can in one sitting.

While the game can apparently be completed in less than an hour if you know the stages, I didn’t and there wasn’t exactly a way to practice them. Instead I spent several hours grinding through the stages. Completing Stage 2 confirmed my suspicions that it was out of whack with the rest of the game, as most of the following stages were more reasonable in difficulty, and I even defeated a few bosses within a few or even the first try. Plenty of these stages are memorable in their own right as well, with stages set during storms as you cross on a rickety boat, or one set in a snowstorm, prompting Madelyn to change into a winter coat for its duration.

The bosses are enjoyable as well. It’s a familiar bestiary, with large wolves, crabs, possessed trees and the like, but they often have a fun gimmick for taking them down. For instance, you might have to drop a load of cannons onto the crab, or distract the wolf with a large chunk of meat. These gimmicks aren’t very involved, mostly requiring you to shoot something to open up a vulnerability, but they add variety and remind me of some of the cool boss fights in something like Dragon’s Crown.  

Despite enjoying these later stages it became really hard to ignore Battle Princess Madelyn’s faults. There are many bugs that make it more difficult that it already is. Objects frequently get stuck in walls, at times I repeatedly became stuck in a ladder climbing animation or had the walking animation freeze to a single frame. Your ghost dog is also the only way to attack at oblique angles, but it frequently fails to detect enemies, wasting your charge and leaving you defenseless as enemies approach.

The camera is by far the worst offender, constantly obfuscating platforms from view despite having plenty of screen estate to work with. A certain area on the pirate ship area kept having the camera briefly flicker to a different view, and jumping on a ladder causes the camera to instantly snap to it in an unpleasant and distracting way. All these problems mean it frequently forces blind jumps, which become more of a problem as the stages progress. One later stage even has an area where a horizontal platform you need to jump on isn’t synced up with a vertical one, forcing you to go to an area above where the horizontal platform is totally out of view, forcing you to make a jump with nothing but a guess of where it is based on the timing of its movement. If you miss you of course die and start the section over.

Even the once charming art started to wear on me. The heavy use of glow effects to simulate lighting isn’t my bag, but I can take it or leave it. What looks worse are some of the background art, which don't’ seem like they were originally created as pixel art but are rather higher resolution art that’s been scaled down. This gives it a highly compressed look not unlike the use of pre-rendered backgrounds from the PSX or Saturn era. It’s just a blurry, hard to look at mess.

This is especially true for the title screen and opening cutscene, which were clearly lovingly hand animated. You can see the high resolution art of opening scene in the trailer, but in the game it’s inexplicably compressed as if run through a terrible ancient codec. My guess is that this was an attempt to make it feel more in line with the pixel art aesthetic but it doesn’t work and ruins perfectly good looking artwork.

I hate to admit it, but Battle Princess Madelyn is hard to recommend. The initial charm wears off quick in the frustration of trying to overcome both its daunting challenge and technical issues. You might argue that this brand of frustration is in line with its source material, but the best of the Ghosts ‘N Ghouls series, as well as spiritual successors like Prinny or Maldita Castilla bring a consistency that’s missing here.

Even as I began to enjoy Battle Princess Madelyn my run was eventually ended by sheer randomness. A random weapon drop gave me a leg up early in my run, then a subsequent drop cut my range short and made ever encounter more difficult. Unlike other games in the style drops are inconsistent and you retain weapons after death, so a bad pickup means you’re forced to play with a disadvantage for a while. After hours of struggle this finally killed my run.

I kept playing after, but the decision of choosing between the meandering stages of the story mode or the forced marathon of arcade, stopped my momentum. Between that, the bugs and the inconsistent general direction, Battle Princess Madelyn has too many caveats to recommend. Maybe you could argue its lack of saves in Arcade Mode and unrelenting difficulty are in line with the games it draws from, but it’s hard to stomach that excuse when it so many other problems plague it. There’s a core to the game that might be salvageable, but as it is Battle Princess Madelyn brings back the frustration of the arcade without its magic.