Golvellius: Valley of Doom

Sega always seemed to be playing second fiddle to Nintendo during the 80s, despite having better hardware and some great first party titles. With The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo had a massive title with a unique feel that seemed to come out of nowhere, and few companies had much success trying to replicate it. Golvellius: Valley of Doom for the Master System is often touted as Sega's answer to Zelda, but truly, they are quite different from each other beyond being overhead action adventure games.

The best part of the game is definitely the audio and visuals, which were top notch for the time, looking and sounding more like a Genesis title than Master System. There's lot of color and large sprites, and it even supports an FM soundtrack if played on Sega's Mark III variant of the Master System with the FM Sound Module or through emulation or console modifications. Even without the FM soundtrack, though, quality is pretty good. The compositions are great, too, and it has a nice feature in which the overworld music changes as you gain different swords and shields. This stands in nice contrast to Zelda's limited number of tracks, and the different tunes are quite varied as well, making each section of the overworld feel distinct from each other as a result, with the opening tune seeming to be full of hope and later songs sounding more aggravated.

Despite the excellent presentation for the time, Golvellius is far from being flawless. I strongly dislike the combat in the overworld sections. Your character's only attack is his sword, and its blade is far too narrow. Enemies move freely on the plane, but you have to be lined up perfectly for your sword to hit them, and there are no subweapons or alternate attacks of any kind. It doesn't help that enemies in the overworld spawn continuously and move quite randomly, so it's really hard to prepare. Golvellius also lacks a map, but the design is intuitive enough and each area distinct enough, that getting around the world really isn't a problem apart from surviving the onslaught of enemies. One thing that I actually do like is that every screen on the map has a cave. Some of them are pointless, but most of them will have shopkeepers for purchasing items that allow you to progress to new areas or other cave dwellers that provide hints or even restoration of health. Most importantly, some of the caves contain dungeons, which I will get back to later. I really like the idea of a secret around every corner, but some of the caves are more difficult to unveil than they really should be. Most of them are revealed through killing a set amount of enemies, but others require a bit more detective work, which essentially amounts to hitting any object in sight with your sword. One puzzle requires that you hit a certain blue rock 5 times, but there are many blue rocks on that screen and the in-game hints would never lead you to believe that 5 strikes are necessary. It's like if Zelda required you to bomb every rock in the game, and certain rocks took multiple bombs to reveal their secrets. These overworld puzzles can be extremely unintuitive. Still, having a cave on every screen does give more incentive to explore the world and leave no stone unturned, which adds to the spirit of adventure. Towards the end of the game, certain items help you to have more options for exploring the world and things becomes a bit less linear, but by that point you are almost finished. It would have been nice to have seen more elements along these lines from the start.

To speak more of the dungeons, they're probably the best part of the game, and they do the most to make it stand out from Zelda. The type of dungeon first auto-scrolls vertically, a bit like in Knightmare or King's Knight, but the scrolling is more forgiving here. As you move along, you have to find the correct path and attack or avoid enemies. The enemies are surprisingly easy to defeat and do little damage, but if you do not take the intended path, then you will be kicked out of the dungeon and you will be required to begin again, which is marginally frustrating and means that level memorization is required. The upside of this is that the player will never receive a game over for taking the wrong path and only the player's progress is reset. The other type of dungeon is a 2D platformer with an emphasis on jumping puzzles. Like the vertically scrolling sections, if you fail to take the correct path, you will have to restart the whole dungeon. In a few cases, this is quite unfair, especially since you do not get much practice to perfect the timing of your jumps, but the combat again is a lot more satisfying than that of the overworld. One strange thing about this mode is that your character is only animated facing right, despite being able to scroll at your own pace, but this is a minor flaw. Both types of dungeons include mini-bosses at certain points, but these are real pushovers. Once reaching the end of the dungeon, you will face the main boss, which allows you to move on to the next area of the game's overworld, at which point the whole process begins again. The bosses look pretty good, but due to being limited to melee attacks, there is not a lot of strategy involved, and whether you can win mostly comes down to your equipment. If you have enough health restoration items, it's simply a matter of endurance.

Although I want to love it, make no mistake. Golvellius is good but not exceptional. Given that it is an 8-bit title, though, it's quite impressive from a technical standpoint, and there really isn't much that's comparable for the Master System. Any fan of the platform would do well to add it to their collection. I'd also recommend it to people who enjoy a good challenge. The difficulty curve can be a bit harsh at first, but most of the challenge can be overcome through persistence, and later in the game, it balances out a bit more as your character becomes more powerful, so it feels about right to me. If Golvellius's developers had just refined its overworld combat a bit more and had made the puzzles slightly less obtuse, I think it really could have been the Zelda killer that Sega fans seem to have wanted it to be. All the same, it's a solid title that holds up well and should probably be a bit better known. Though it's not their shining hour, Sega and Compile would do well to reissue Golvellius either as a Sega Ages title or, better yet, in a compilation with the MSX "Golvellius" titles. One can dream, right?