Picture this, you’re a flightless angel (you have wings, but they are particularly weak) and your deity caretaker (Palutena) has just been put under house arrest. She had a rather inflammatory argument with her co-deity (Medusa) about how crappy people are. Medusa, with her strong distaste for people, turned them to stone, dried up their crops, and probably called them some mean names too. Palutena, fed up with Medusa’s unwillingness to be civil with people, turned Medusa into a monster and had her banished to the underworld. This argument spiraled into a full-blown war in which Medusa contracted monsters of the underworld to fight against Palutena and her forces, eventually imprisoning both Palutena and yourself. Now you have been tasked with breaking out of the prison you were brought to in the underworld, traveling across the earth, and eventually, the heavens, where you aim to save your goddess and all of Angel Land (the name of this universe) from your spiteful, stubborn, people-detesting adversary.
This hypothetical tale is actually the dramatic story of Pit, the flightless angel, and how he must scavenge his way across worlds on the lonesome to save Palutena and all of Angel Land in an epic struggle against Medusa and the evil forces of the underworld.
For some background, Kid Icarus plays out like a platformer with some elements of a role-playing game. You begin with the basic controls of being able to move left and right, jump and crouch, and shoot arrows from your bow. You can then acquire various permanent power-ups and upgrades as you progress through the stages and defeat enemies. These upgrades are sometimes purchased, and at other times earned, making Pit a more capable adventurer/fighter/hero. When I mentioned earlier that you struggle against Medusa and the monsters under her command on your quest back to Skyworld, I really did mean struggle. This game is hard, somewhat ludicrously hard if you are going into the game blind, and I would imagine near impossible if you are not familiar with platformers in general beforehand. Enemies appear in hordes at a time, flying across the screen erratically, yet also with speed and precision towards you. Much of the earliest stages require you to either narrowly dodge enemies and hope the game’s random spawn rates have the benevolence to let you reach safety, or be highly adept at shooting targets just pixels away with consistently good timing.
Palutena was noted to use the last of her power to send Pit the bow he uses on the quest, and while helpful, it is important to note that it really is not as much of a “game-changer” as the player might hope for it to be. I often found my best bet for survival to be completely ignoring the bow and just focusing entirely on fleeing the enemies. With that said, fleeing enemies in this game is its own type of ordeal. One of the most prominent innovations of this game not seen in many other games that came out around the time was the incorporation of expansive vertically scrolling stages. With this constant focus on upward progression, many of the enemies interact with the vertical aspect of the maps. Most of the movement of both Pit and enemies is facilitated through jumping on platforms or paths of flight at various angles. Many attacks have long arcs that test your innate understanding of virtual kinematics. The labyrinth stages require a myriad of displacements up and down ladders, and to rooms on either side.
Pit is angel-kind’s last hope, and he valiantly defies the odds to make things right and just in a broken world.
Well, that is what I would like to say, but that might not actually be the case. Maybe his cause to save the celestial world he belongs to, and humanity with it, is a common case of the individuals in power taking advantage of their pawns and servants to keep the hierarchical status quo in place. After all, humans in this world are notorious for corrupting nature and fighting wars with each other endlessly that are founded upon insatiable greed. It seems like not too many other deities really care about people; Zeus seems impartial about the whole war going on between Palutena and Medusa and honestly seems to be having a pretty chill time just watching Pit’s adventure for entertainment. Palutena benefits from their prayers though, so of course she would want to keep enough of them alive and in good standing to reap the rewards. Maybe Pit is just caught up in the middle of the struggles of the greater beings, constantly being pulled back and forth to fight their battles. It is possible that Palutena is driven by her desires enough to impose them on the world, inconsiderate of how they affect those caught in the mayhem, “those” mainly equating to Pit in this case. This is moreso a topic that comes up in Kid Icarus’ sequel, Kid Icarus Uprising, but the ideas remain prevalent here in the original.
