Ghosts ’n Goblins vs. Nintendo’s Ban on Religion
If you’ve followed my work over the years, you may not be surprised to hear that I have a contrarian streak. In my head, it makes perfect sense that I’d spend the Christmas holiday researching Satanism in video games. To others viewing from afar, it may seem like a cry for help. Whoever is correct, here we go nonetheless.
In the previous post, I talked about how Nintendo of America’s alleged ban on religion in video games was inconsistent. And I don’t state that as a fault so much as jumping off point for discussing how interesting it is to see what arguably religious icons made it into video games anyway, either because they slipped through or because they somehow got the stamp of approval. Thinking about how such a ban could have worked, my mind went immediately to Capcom’s Ghosts ’n Goblins series, which is all about the world of devils and demons yet somehow saw release on the NES, Game Boy Color and Super NES — all during the time when Nintendo’s anti-religion rule was in place.
The series follows Arthur, a lance-chucking knight who is not King Arthur but instead a generic, hapless armor-owning dude who just happens to share his name with the most famous character in medieval folklore. In any installment of the series, Arthur is running, jumping and lance-chucking to rescue Princess Prin Prin, who has been kidnapped by some emissary of the underworld, as if having one of the the dumbest names in all of video gaming weren’t bad enough. (I’ve actually written a whole follow-up on her, in case your interested.) The big bad changes from one installment to the next, but the objective and setting remain more or less the same.
Depending on the English localization, the hellish landscape that Arthur ventures through in order to rescue the princess is either the Demon Realm, the Ghoul Realm or Hades, but in in the original Japanese, it’s makai (魔界), which is usually translated as something like “world of demons” but could also be read as “magical world,” 魔 (ma) being translated as “demon, evil spirit” or “sorcery, witchcraft.” It’s not actually hell, in the Christian sense, but it is often conflated hell. (Apparently meikai (冥界) is closer to the land of the dead, but it’s also perhaps less fun and therefore less a staple of popular culture.) It’s this setting that gives the series its Japanese name, Makaimura (魔界村) — literally “Demon World Village.”
The makai of Gargoyle’s Quest, a spinoff to the Ghosts ’n Goblins series, looking very much hellish despite technically not being hell.
As far as Capcom games go, the makai realm is arguably more famous for its connection to the Darkstalkers games. In this version, it’s ruled by several dynastic families, of which series star Morrigan Aensland is the heiress to one. (The series lore is denser than you might expect, and apparently the various other ruling families are detailed, although the characters mentioned don’t appear in any of the games.) But it would seem like the Darkstalkers makai and the Ghouls ’n Ghosts one are different places altogether, because the latter is depicted with an entirely different hierarchy into which Morrigan, Jedah and other of this series’ nobility don’t appear.
The rulers of the Ghosts ’n Goblins version don’t do much to differentiate this makai from hell because they’re all named after figures associated with Christian conception of the underworld. As a result, they also seem like they should conflict with Nintendo of America’s policy against showing God, the Devil and basically all religious figures. However, if the previous post has taught us anything, it’s always surprising to learn what Nintendo approves and what it doesn’t.
In the first game, the big bad is Astaroth (アスタロト), who shares his name with a demon cited in various historical texts. I wouldn’t say Astaroth exactly a household name in the way, say, Beelzebub is, and that’s why it’s so surprising that the NES port of the game changed his name — and then it’s all the more confusing when you see what it gets changed to.
Yep, they just called him the Devil outright, which seemingly makes the English version of this game more in conflict with Nintendo’s policy, and needlessly so. This is further complicated by the existence of a second character, called Satan (サタン) in the NES port as well as the original Japanese arcade version, who’s the villain who kidnaps Prin Prin in the first place and also a boss Arthur fights before he gets to Astaroth. (He’s a red, flying guy who’s not Red Arremer, the gargoyle mascot who’d later be named Firebrand for the spinoff games. More on him later.) What’s especially weird about Astaroth being referred to as such in the NES port is that he’s called yet another thing in other a version of the game that wouldn’t have been subject to Nintendo of America’s strict ban of religion. Take the flyer for this version, which was apparently licensed for North American distribution to Taito.
The big bad is dubbed Argon, the “Lord of Goblins,” argon being which is a chemical element with no Satanic associations that I know of. But at least whoever wrote this attempted to justify the clunky western title for the game by putting the big bad in charge of goblins. (Do goblins actually appear in this game at any point?)
The original Ghosts ’n Goblins hit arcades in 1985. Three years later, an arcade sequel followed — Ghouls ’n Ghosts in the west, Daimakaimura (大魔界村, “Great Demon World Village”) in Japan. This game’s end boss is Lucifer (ルシフェル) and, being a demon made out of fire and sitting on a throne, has an appearance that recalls the western Devil more than Astaroth did. He’s also supposed to be Astaroth’s successor as the king of the demon realm. While this title did not receive a Super NES port, it did get one on both the Sega Genesis and Master System, where he was identified as Loki, not Lucifer — and even then it only appears in the lengthy text you get upon defeating the game.
The English manual for the Genesis port, meanwhile, refers to the end boss as the Prince of Darkness, which is about as close as you can get to just calling him the Devil without actually calling him that.
I’m honestly not sure if Sega of America had an official ban on religious elements. It would explain the name switch, but if you know, please tell me.
Lucifer appears as a supporting character in the the first two installments of the spinoff series, Gargoyle’s Quest for the Game Boy and Gargoyle’s Quest II for the NES — but his name is localized as Rushifell, which is a mangled romanization of the Japanese rendering of Lucifer, Rushiferu. It remains to be seen if it was an intentional obfuscation, but given Nintendo’s policy at the time, this would have been a handy way to do it.
Despite what the title might imply, the next game in the series, Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts, is not a remake of the previous one but in fact a wholly new game in which yet another monster has taken the throne of the demon word: Sardius, who looks like Astaroth’s relative and whose Japanese name, Samael (サマエル), is taken from an archangel who is sometimes associated with and identified with Satan but is sometimes seen as an agent of God. (Religion is complicated, it turns out!) But the satanic associations were enough that the North American release swapped out his name for something associated with a certain biblical gemstone.
The remaining two side-scrollers in this series don’t rename their final bosses, presumably because 1999’s Makaimura for Wonderswan didn’t make it outside Japan — its end boss, Azazel, takes his name from a fallen angel — and 2021’s Ghost ’n Goblins Resurrection was released for the Switch after Nintendo had abolished its ban on religious references. In both Japanese and English, this game’s boss is Hades, which once again makes it seem like the setting of this game is actually, literally hell — and which is also confusing since certain translations of previous games identify the setting as Hades as well. But then again, the Greeks used the same name for the god of the dead and the domain he ruled over, so I guess it’s not Capcom’s fault.
I started out this piece saying that Nintendo’s enforcement of its own rule against religious depictions seemed confusing, given that so many North American versions of these games would seem to violate the rule. I still think that, of course; the ban was both wrongheaded and so inconsistently enforced as to be pointless. In putting all this together, I guess I was just interested to see how a series would fare when its setting was… if not hell exactly, then something so close to the bad Christian afterlife that it could be easily mistaken for that.
At first I was tempted to guess that Capcom, being among Nintendo’s most valued developers back in the 8-bit days, might have been allowed greater leeway with its content, and that could explain how the English version of the instruction manual just plainly says that the end boss is the freaking Devil. However, I don’t necessarily think that Capcom was getting special treatment. In 2010, Kotaku published a post on Nintendo’s religious taboo that quoted an interview with Darlene Waddington, who produced Capcom’s DuckTales game, and she complains that the removal of the crosses from gravestones in the Transylvania stage seemed pointless. “[T]he crosses on the coffins had to go,” she says. “Don’t think any publisher would let that go back then. Don’t know about now. Seems a little silly to me, but apparently this is the world we live in.” But Ducktales was released in 1988, two years after the NES port of Ghosts ’n Goblins, and perhaps during that passage of time, Nintendo of America better clarified what was allowed and what wasn’t.
For what it’s worth, the graveyard stage of the NES port of Ghosts ’n Goblins definitely has crosses on the tombstones.
But in Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts, they’re inexplicably replaced… with ankh symbols. (They’re very much so crosses in the original Japanese version.)
Let’s take a moment to appreciate the mental gymnastics needed to decide that while crosses shouldn’t be allowed in a video game, ankhs (which were a sacred symbol in ancient Egypt) make sense in a medieval graveyard. I guess the difference is that there weren’t any ancient Egyptians around to complain, whereas North America was full of Christians eager to jump on any given moral outrage.
Neither crosses nor ankhs appear in the graveyard stage in Ghouls ’n Ghosts Resurrection.
And while I agree that the removal of these symbols seems silly. I’m at least glad that this rule isn’t in place anymore, at least officially — at least for now. I’d like to think that we have more pressing issues than crosses on gravestones in video games, but then again, we did in the 1990s too.
From bottom to top: a lowly zombie, Red Arremer, Astaroth, Lucifer, Sardius and Hades.
Miscellaneous Notes
I couldn’t find an explanation for how the western title was decided upon. My guess is that Capcom assumed American gamers would balk at a video game that was just called Demon World, but Ghosts ’n Goblins doesn’t seem to nail the tone of the games, which are decidedly more sinister than what that title gets at. I wondered if the name might have had something to do with the movie Labyrinth, where David Bowie plays the Goblin King, but that film didn’t open until June 1986, about nine months after the arcade machine first appeared in North American arcades.
Whatever the case, the western title is officially written as Ghosts ’n Goblins, with just the one apostrophe before the n and not one after, even if apostrophes are supposed to show you where a letter has been deleted. (There’s one in ma’am because it’s showing you where the d in madam has been omitted.) But not only does this title not have that, most renderings of it lack a space before the n, so it looks like it’s part of the ghosts part.
That’s when they remember to put the second s in. Sometimes they don’t. Maybe Ghost’n is an abbreviation for Ghostin’?
It’s weird trying to distinguish the video game character Astaroth from its namesake because I was initially tempted to call the latter “the IRL Astaroth,” which makes sense but which is also complicated because that makes it sound like I’m saying the demon Astaroth actually exists. He may, for all I know; that’s just not something I can really weigh in on with any real gravity. However, I was curious to find out where this entity comes from. The oldest demonology text mentioning Astaroth is apparently the 1458’s Book of Abramelin, which is an entirely different rabbit hole to fall down. But the name, separate from this entity, is far older, because historians assert that it comes from Astarte, the Phoenician goddess associated with the Babylonian Ishtar and, to an extent, Venus and Aphrodite as well. Which is to say that the source material is actually very far from both the masculine depiction of Astaroth in demonic literature and the furry, two-mouthed beast man in these video games. A Phoenician person would probably be very confused by this, but they’d also be confused by a lot of other things, including video games.
This sort of flow of ideas from one place to another, to the point that the thing becomes unrecognizable, actually happens in video games a lot, most often thanks to the process of transliterating words into Japanese and then into English. Take the name for the Ghosts ’n Goblins breakout character: the red gargoyle who’s sometimes referred to as Firebrand. His Japanese name, however, is Red Arremer (レッドアリーマー, or Reddo Arīmā). And the term arremer is used generically in this series for various gargoyle enemies. You’ve got arremers of different ranks and colors, for example, and sometimes the name is even localized as reamer — hilariously, I might add. However, arremer is not a term you’ll find in grimoires, because it’s specific to Ghosts ’n Goblins. In a 2009 interview with Ghosts ’n Goblins director Tokuro Fujiwara, it’s explained that the gargoyle monster was named after Toshio Arima, who worked as a programmer on the title. In fact, they even made the gargoyle character *look* like Arima. From the interview:
When Capcom first started developing games, he was one four staff working on game design, and the programmer for Commando. Someone had already done concept art for the monster, and we still had to name it. Somehow, we ended up calling it Red Arima. You can sort of see the resemblance if you look closely. Once we realized that, there was no going back. The name stuck. Perhaps that was a little unforgivable on our parts.
I think even those aware of Arima’s video game work would be surprised to learn of this connection, as it’s just not apparent looking at the character name at all. Like I said, sometimes the adapted thing ends up pretty far from the source. I’m not completely sure on this, but it seems like Firebrand, the playable gargoyle in the three spinoff games, is one singular Red Arremer among many, kind of like how Yoshi is one singular Yoshi among many. However, in the Japanese version of the Gargoyle’s Quest trilogy, he’s not given a unique name. He’s still just Red Arremer — again, kind of like how Yoshi is not distinguished by a unique name. I would guess that Firebrand works more like Kamek, who doesn’t have a unique name in Japan but does in other territories.
It’s not canon, but one game that links the Darkstalkers universe with that of Ghosts ’n Goblins is the crossover fighter SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos. In that game, if you’re playing as Demitri and you beat the “hell” boss, Firebrand, the ending shows him asking to be taken to Firebrand’s superior. In this case, it’s Astaroth.
And if you instead pursue the “heaven” boss, Athena, you ask to challenge her boss. It’s God. Demitri wants to fight God. I would imagine this would not have gotten a pass from Nintendo of America back in the day, but then again? It’s really anybody’s guess.
