The History of Willow

The film got two Capcom games in one year. This is the odd one, and the better story.

Willow reached the Famicom on July 18, 1989, and the NES that December, developed and published by Capcom from George Lucas's 1988 film. It was the second Capcom Willow game of 1989: the arcade had already received a side scrolling platformer, a completely different game. The home version is an action role-playing game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, with Willow Ufgood traveling largely alone through a world the film only sketched.

THE MAKING

Capcom's licensed character strategy, stated on the record

Capcom director Yoshiki Okamoto explained the strategy plainly in a 1989 interview: the game was part of a broader push to appeal to a wider audience by using established characters from other media, because the company's original characters could be too niche. He placed Willow alongside games built on Area 88 and Destiny of an Emperor. The NES game was directed by Akira Kitamura, who also wrote it, and produced by Tokuro Fujiwara, the same producer behind Sweet Home on this shelf, in the same year.

Composer Harumi Fujita remembered the assignment warmly decades later: "I put a lot of energy into the music for Willow. The producer of Willow was the same producer who made Mega Man. He was an extremely talented individual and I was elated to have the chance to write music for his game, so I put my all into it." And there is a footnote the industry kept: when Shinji Mikami joined Capcom in 1990, every accepted new hire received a free copy of this game.

THE DESIGN

Zelda's shape, an RPG's numbers, no money at all

Willow explores an overhead world one screen at a time, sword and shield in hand, gathering spells and equipment from houses and villagers. Unlike Zelda, the game underneath is a true RPG structure: enemies defeated in real time grant experience, levels rise, and the hero's strength is a number that grows. Two absences define it as much as its systems: there is no money system, every item is found rather than bought, and there is no battery save. Progress is kept by password, and not a gentle one.

The film's plot is a loose frame rather than a script. Willow meets the film's cast briefly and travels on alone, which gives the game a lonelier, stranger tone than its license suggests, closer to a folk tale the film happened to share a name with.

THE EDITIONS

The versions, documented

Japan · 1989

Famicom, July 18, 1989.

America · 1989

NES, December 1989.

Europe · 1993

April 11, 1993, more than three years after Japan, one of the era's latest licensed arrivals.

No re-release

The game has never been re-released on any Virtual Console or collection, which the record attributes, as a likelihood, to licensing issues. The cartridges are the only edition.

THE RECEPTION

Scores, sales, and the dissent

Famitsu · 26 / 40

A middling score from the home panel.

VG and CE · 7 / 10

Video Games and Computer Entertainment's Howard H. Wen praised the graphics, and criticized the music, against Fujita's own fond account, and the complex password system, eighteen characters in upper and lower case.

Hobby Consolas · 75 / 100

Spain's magazine was warmer. Brazil's VideoGame gave it 4 of 5.

Dissent · 1UP, and the long lists

1UP called it a rather poor Zelda inspired game and pointed at Crystalis as the far better one. Yet IGN ranked it 89th among NES games, and Nintendo Power's final issue placed it 254th of 285 in its all time Nintendo list.

Willow's reception is a study in licensed game gravity: critics scored the template, and players kept the game on all time lists anyway, at the low end, for thirty years.

THE LEGACY

What it left behind

Willow is now filed as one of the five years of Zelda followers, alongside Neutopia, Golden Axe Warrior, and Crystalis, and its most durable legacy may be comparative: it is the control group that shows what Crystalis did better. Within Capcom, it stands as a document of the licensed strategy Okamoto described, and of a remarkable 1989 in one producer's office: Fujiwara shipped this and Sweet Home in the same year.