Title: Palutena no Kagami
Genre: Action
Developer: Nintendo
Released by: Nintendo
Date: December 19, 1986
Japanese level: 2
MSRP: 2600 yen
Current Price: 700 yen

By the end of 1986, Nintendo's fantastic expectations about Disk System sales were apparantly coming to fruition as millions of units were being sold. Their coding efforts were just coming into stride, too, with Metroid and Volleyball and so on. In that atmosphere truly heavenly games like this came into light. Both Metroid and this game did pretty well; by mid-1988 half a million copies were sold, and the game was copied onto disks another 500,000 times via Disk Writers.

The Mirror of Palutena is essentially the same as the closet NES hit. The rather evil Medusa has kidnapped the Goddess of Light, Palutena (I'm gonna have to check my copy of Ethel Merman's Mythology to confirm these names) and it's up to the angel wannabe Pit to save everyone by going through 4 levels and 13 different stages.

The Disk System version has a name entry and save-game feature quite similar to Zelda's, making one wonder why Nintendo decided to put a battery in the NES version of Zelda but skimp out on Metroid and Kid Icarus.. I know it certainly would have saved me some anguish when the password I'm sure I wrote down correctly didn't work.

In the end, when I think about Kid Icarus I think about two things: one, the surprise twist at the end when the game suddenly turned into a side-scrolling shooter for a few minutes, and two, the Eggplant Wizard. Argh. The most humiliating moments in video history would have to be walking around as an eggplant, finding a nurse... although one could always try defeating bosses as an eggplant (this is indeed possible; just get a lot of the statue fighters and jump around a lot)...


Arrrrrgh!
1999.4.30

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