Tedium - Willow’s Second Wind 🗡

Today in Tedium: As video games go, franchise games are often seen as the worst of the worst—they seem to exist to sell a product first, rather than being driven by being a good game. It is no coincidence that some of the worst video games of all time—think E.T. or Superman 64—are based off of existing movie or television franchises. So, perhaps it’s a little weird that this evening, I come not to bury a franchise game, but to praise it. It came out of a fantasy film directed by a major Hollywood director and produced by another. The film wasn’t the hit that it could have been, but it inspired a pretty good game. And that game is Willow, the NES action RPG that I have had a love-hate relationship with over the years, but I think I’m finally coming around to the “love” column. Today’s Tedium, in honor of the new Willow TV series on Disney+, talks about why the Willow NES game somehow transcended the film that inspired it. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s screenshot is from the intro for Willow, which conveys a serious vibe.

One of the most powerful elements of Willow is the way the music shifts the overall vibe

If you look at game design as a set of decisions, you can argue that Capcom chose to prioritize two things about Willow that Nintendo didn’t heavily prioritize in The Legend of Zelda—tension and mood.

The limitations of the NES were such that you could only realistically fit so much onto a cartridge, which meant that you had to make certain choices in development to make it all work. In the case of Zelda, the choice was clearly predicated around exploration, with a goal of encouraging people to get lost in the many secrets and castles. Some of the mazes were so unclear, especially in the second quest, that you could be bypassing an important shortcut just because you weren’t told that this is where you need to drop the bomb.

Willow is more linear, but it does something very effectively that Zelda does not—it attempts to scare you. What I mean by this is that, you may be walking screen through screen trying to find the next path forward, but inevitably you’re stopped by a series of enemies that might appear. At first there are small semi-transparent blobs, but the enemies get larger and more complex from there.

The music changes, becoming more dramatic every time you’re pulled into a fight. (An example of what I mean is here.) The grass starts moving, and it doesn’t stop until the last enemy is removed from the screen. Even though the effect can at times get repetitive, the fact of the matter is, it can still catch you off guard, and I think that this tension is in many ways at the heart of what makes WIllow a good game and differentiates it from Zelda. Sure, Zelda has the heartbeat when your life bar gets low, but it doesn’t try to build that tension into every single fight. Willow does, and during the right battle, it can really set the mood.

Sure, it has some weaknesses. Willow’s attack motion—which relies on a sword and shield, rather than the stick he’s famously associated with in the movie—is a bit broad and takes a little time to get used to. It is one of two primary attacks he has, and it can at times be a little frustrating to use in practice.

Convinced that the DNA of Breath of Fire’s caves (below) originally appeared in Willow (above).

The level design is a bit repetitive, but it is most assuredly reflective of the NES’ limitations in structure. Even in this context, however, one can see the trademarks of Capcom’s corporate design sense in some of the designs, even here. Breath of Fire, arguably Capcom’s greatest gift to the RPG genre before the year 2000, featured cave designs that look like polished-up versions of the caves in Willow.

I can quibble a little about some of the music as well, which can get repetitive just because it’s so aggressively there, particularly in the town section. But on the other hand, the music is asked to do more in this game than in many similar titles. It is asked to build tension, reflect whimsy, and convey an air of seriousness when necessary. It has more shapes than many NES games do, and given the RPGs were not a frequent genre for Capcom during the period, it was a chance for the company to flex its muscles in a new genre.

Nobody in the entire Dragon Warrior design process was like, why do we have five options to do different types of actions, when we could just have a single action option?

There are things about certain games that seem poorly thought out from a design standpoint—for example, the original Dragon Warrior has always-visible options for “Talk,” “Take,” “Search,” and “Stairs,” and “Door” in its interface, despite the fact that you only need to do these things occasionally, and they could all be managed by the a single action button without an extra menu. But I have the benefit of 30+ years of playing video games with which I can make this case; the makers of Dragon Warrior had not had a chance to play with the form very much at that point, so what seems obvious to me now probably didn’t seem that way to them.

What a dreadful password screen.

One of the biggest faults of Willow on this front, besides the quibbles with gameplay and music, is that it relied on passwords rather than save states, but there was a good reason for this at the time—there was an ongoing SRAM shortage that probably made it too costly to put a battery backup in the cartridge. (Nintendo probably needed to save the ones it had for Zelda, after all.)

I think you can defend a lot of the choices that Capcom made in building Willow, though—and that’s why it still holds up today.

Willow’s most grating song has a surprising source

The music in Willow is largely quite good, but I must quibble about the town music, which, while it properly portrays the vibe of a town, is quite grating, in part because the NES’ sound chip just was not that friendly to the whistle-like sound effect the game relies on. It turns a sound that is meant to be relaxing into something grating.

In my esteemed opinion, it just doesn’t work. But the composition, as it turns out, is the most interesting song from a storytelling perspective because of its source material. As the Video Game Music Preservation Foundation notes, it’s effectively a Nintendo version of a popular instrumental from the 1950s, the theme song to the film A Summer Place, which you can hear over this way:

However, the Max Steiner composition does not track as famed Percy Faith version from the movie, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. Instead, it sounds like something else entirely, even though the melody seems like it’s there. I think the reason for that comes down to the version Fujita appears to have used as source material—the 1962 vocal version of the hit, as performed by Andy Williams:

It is clear, from listening to this, that the whistle-like melody line is trying to mimic Williams’ vocal line. Additionally, the key of Williams’ version of the song, lowered to match his vocal register, is much closer to that of the town music.

So, in case you’ve ever heard this song and wondered to yourself, “Where did this annoying music come from?” there’s your answer: Capcom’s composer appears to have been directly inspired by Andy Williams’ cover of a chart-topping hit based on a completely unrelated movie.