User blog:Reinhart77/Simon's Quest First Run

This page tracks my progress through my first complete run attempt of Simon's Quest for the Virtual Console.

Background
Simon's Quest is one of the few older Castlevania games that I have still not beaten. Growing up, I never owned this game, although I did own an NES. I rented this game once growing up and I believe I got about as far a Deborah's Cliff, but it is possible that I got stuck somewhere else earlier. Shortly after college, I had an emulated version of the game, but didn't play it very much. When I started making money, I bought all the Castlevania games in existence, including all three NES Castlevanias, but spent most of my time playing Dracula's Curse instead. My roommate at the time played it a lot (it was the only Castlevania game he seriously got into growing up), and I just watched the master play from time to time, but didn't start my own game. Eventually, getting the NES to work became a pain I didn't want to deal with, so I got rid of my NES. When Nintendo was releasing its classic Nintendo series on the Game Boy Advanced, I enjoyed playing the original Castlevania I and decided to wait until Simon's Quest was released for GBA before making a serious attempt to play the game and beat the game. That never happened. So, finally the game was released on the Wii Virtual Console, so I am finally trying to play it from beginning to end.

Wiki as I Play
I decided to create Castlevania Wiki pages as I went for items and places I encountered during my first run of Simon's Quest on the Wii Virtual Console. I created a long article about the Leather Whip and Holy Water in all their incarnations in all games when I obtained those items and slowed my progress until some of those pages were complete. I also created some in-depth pages for some of the early towns, Java and Veros. When I discovered some maps on the internet from various gaming magazines, I started making stub articles for each location, using names from those maps when it wasn't clear from actual gameplay.

Initial Progress
I started out in the town of Java as everyone does. I quickly learned that it was a bad idea to head left into