King of Demons / Majyuuou (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of KSS's 1995 horror-themed action-platformer for the Super Nintendo, Majyuuou (魔獣王).

The game was a Japan-only release, so this playthrough was done using a fan-made English translation patch made by Aeon Genesis.

If Castlevania, Altered Beast, and Blackthorne were to have a three-way love-child, it might very well resemble Majyuuou. With a name that literally translates as "Demon King," you don't go into this one expecting sunshine and rainbows, and the game happily obliges that expectation.

It begins with your playable character, Abel, being betrayed by his best friend Bayer. Bayer sells himself and Abel's family to aid in the resurrection of the devil, and so Abel journeys into Hell, with the aid of the spirit of his dead wife, to save his daughter.

Abel, in his clothes straight out of 1995, begins as a mere human armed with a pistol, but as he defeats the bosses in his way, he can assimilate their spirits, trading his humanity for more and more power the deeper he goes.

The entire game is incredibly dark in its themes, and the graphics do a fantastic job of mirroring this. There are several bosses throughout, each of them uncomfortably disgusting in their own respective ways, and many of the stage's backgrounds rival ActRaiser 2 in their sheer beauty and artistry - much of the game looks just as good as the early 2D 32-bit system titles. The soundtrack is also pretty good - it's a bit hit-and-miss, but quite a few of the songs have the potential to get stuck in your head long after you shut the game off.

For as much as it amazes, Majyuuou is disappointly short and easy, but it is truly a top-tier game through and through. It's just too bad that by 1995 the SNES already had one foot on the banana peel in the west. Combine that with the dark nature of the game, and it's pretty clear that this was never going to see an official English-language release.

Thankfully, the efforts of Aeon Genesis with their excellent translation job have finally made the game accessible to English-speaking gamers, so if you haven't played this one before now, you really ought to go do so. It's an experience you aren't likely to soon forget.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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