Kid Icarus is a Platform Game developed by Nintendo under the directorial torch of Satoru Okada and the production of Gunpei Yokoi, being the first installment of video game series of the same name. It was originally released on the Famicom Disk System in December 1986 in Japan, and then repurposed for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987 (being released in February to Europe and later in July to North America).
Prior to the events of the game, Angel Land was ruled by the Goddess of Light Palutena and the Goddess of Darkness Medusa. However, whereas Palutena loved and protected humans, Medusa hated them and began to dry their crops and turn them into stone, so Palutena turned her into a monster and banished her into the Underworld. Medusa retaliated by forming an army of monsters to invade Angel Land and deprive Palutena of the three Sacred Treasures, thus allowing the evil matriarch to defeat her in battle and imprison her in the Palace in the Sky. Angel Land is now under a reign of terror. Palutena, knowing that she won't be able to revert the crisis alone, gives a bow and arrows to a young angelic knight called Pit, who's been captured and is now imprisoned in the Underworld, so he can escape and begin his climb back to the heavens to eradicate the evil forces, defeat Medusa, and save Palutena as well as Angel Land.
The game combines the platforming gameplay of Super Mario Bros. with the design philosophy of Metroid, thus featuring both vertical and horizontal levels as well as dungeons that are traversed screen-by-screen like in The Legend of Zelda; this isn't a coincidence, as Metroid'' series producer Yoshio Sakamoto served as one of the lead designers. The Japanese version has a save feature thanks to its availability on the Famicom Disk Systerm, while the international versions rely on a password system instead. Intelligent Systems assisted during the game's development, focusing on the programming.
The game provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Merchants charge exorbitant prices for their wares. You can haggle with them to get a lower price, but if your strength is lower than the level number, he'll raise the price.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: In the Japan-only worst ending of the game, after defeating Medusa, Palutena assigns you a new role depending on your skill and completion (how many upgrades to strength and health you've obtained against how many times you've died). If you do especially badly, she turns you into a specknose.
- Artifact of Hope: The Arrow of Light, the Mirror Shield, and the Wings of Pegasus, known collectively as the Three Sacred Treasures, are a set of weapons and armor under the possession of Palutena before they were stolen by Medusa's army and protected by Twinbellows, Hewdraw, and Pandora. After Pit regains them, he then uses it to fight and defeat Medusa.
- Bandit Mook: The invincible Pluton can steal one of Pit's special weapons and cannot be destroyed. Even worse; there is a flying variation. Sticky talons too, but they are destructible.
- Big Bad: Medusa, who orchestrated the invasion of Skyworld to overthrow Palutena and cause a reign of terror.
- Black Market: The Black Marketeer's goods are both more expensive, and in many ways more useful than the stuff you get from the normal shopkeeper. You can also find a credit card that would allow you to buy an item from him you couldn't afford, but you won't gain any more money until you pay the balance off. Even worse, the second world in the game features thieves that can steal your powerups.
- Boss-Altering Consequence: Freeing the captured warrior angels in the fortress levels will make them appear later to help you fight the fortresses' respective bosses. They're not particularly enduring, however.
- Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: The Angel Feather. If you fall down with at least one in your inventory, Pit will slowly fly back up. You have to land him on a platform before the Feather's effect wears off, or else he'll actually die.
- Cain and Abel: Palutena and Medusa, sister goddesses of light and darkness respectively, have this type of relationship. It's not hard to guess which one is the evil one. It's subverted in that Palutena did not kill her herself, she only turned her into a monster and banished her. The angel Pit finished the job.
- Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": The game uses hearts as currency, and strangely enough there's a credit card as well.
- Cap: The game caps your hearts at 999. This can be a problem, as Pit's power increases when he reaches specific upgrade rooms after having collected enough hearts on that level (among other factors). Hearts that aren't counted because you're already at the cap don't count towards this. In stage 2-2, the upgrade room is very close to the beginning of the level; if you start the level with close to 999 hearts, easily possible with some Money Grinding in stage 1-4, it's impossible to activate it. Fortunately, there are enough other upgrade rooms that you can skip this one.
- Cute Monster Girl:
- Medusa is a cyclops stone head in a wall, but after being damaged enough she turns into a human sized attractive Medusa (her original form according to the story) right before dying.
- The Syren enemy, who has full frontal NES nudity. The manual warns not to be caught unaware by her female form, as she is pure evil.
- Cyclops: Eggplant Wizards are cycloptic purple wizards with the power to turn Pit into an eggplant. They've been in every Kid Icarus game to date, and one was a recurring villain on Captain N: The Game Master.
- Damage-Sponge Boss: The boss battles in the first game are relatively simple, but Twinbellows has 100 HP, Hewdraw and Pandora have 200 HP, and Medusa has 150 HP. The damage dealt by Pit's arrows is determined by his strength; if Pit hasn't received any strength upgrades (whether the player is doing a minimalist run or is simply not skilled enough at this difficult game), then he has to hit Hewdraw and Pandora 200 times to defeat them, making for a long and grueling war of attrition against these bosses. The fortress bosses can be mitigated by Centurions, who can help dish out extra damage, but they're more likely to die instantly and leave Pit to fight the boss on his own.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: On certain platforms (such as ice and clouds), Pit will jump down to a lower level when the player presses Down. However, Down is also used for ducking, which is an effective means of dodging enemies. In the heat of an enemy-infested screen, a player might press Down to avoid an attack... only to drop off the platform instead, likely leading to Pit falling down a Bottomless Pit and dying.
- Damsel in Distress: Palutena in the original game is imprisoned by Medusa and her Underworld army. Apparently, being a goddess does not make one immune to this trope.
- Death Throws: The instant Pit takes his last hit, he jumps off the stage, and the Game Over screen reads: "I'M FINISHED!"
- Denial of Diagonal Attack: Pit can only shoot arrows horizontally. Considering Kid Icarus borrows the engine of the original Metroid, it is not surprising.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: You start out in the series' equivalent of hell and end up killing the goddess of darkness and saving the goddess of light.
- Difficulty by Region: The American version made a few changes to the last level of the original game: the screen scrolls automatically rather than based on the player's movement, you no longer have to hold the Jump button to fly, you can fly through the bricks and pillars, and enemy patterns have been changed. These differences make the American version a little easier.
- Directionally Solid Platforms: Most surfaces are solid, but certain platforms (including those made of ice and clouds) allow Pit to jump through them from below, which are useful for vertical scrolling levels and fortresses. Pressing Down while standing atop these platforms will drop Pit down; this is useful in fortresses, but less so in other levels.
- Early Game Hell: The Underworld, despite being the first couple levels, is very difficult due to the lack of powerups and health, combined with the infamous vertical Ratchet Scrolling and Bottomless Pits. The game becomes more manageable after the first fortress, with the Overworld being a traditional sidescroller, and Pit having plenty of powerups and health by the time Skyworld goes back to the vertical scrolling. Gets a lampshade in Uprising, with Pit and Palutena reminiscing about how deadly the Underworld is.
- Earn Your Bad Ending: In the Famicom version, to get the bad ending where Pit turns into a monster, you'll have to either do a minimalist run or do a lot of dying.
- Enemy Summoner: The Grim Reaper. Don't let him spot you, or he'll summon a wave of enemies upon you.
- Escaped from Hell: This is how the game starts — Pit has fallen into Hades and must fight his way back up. In the second game he's been sent there to prove himself worthy to reuse the three sacred treasures.
- Everybody Hates Hades: Pluton is an invincible and incredibly vicious ogre thief, whose name is the original Greek spelling for Pluto (Ploutōn). The Grim Reaper (shortened to Reaper) and the God of Revenge are also enemies. The first may come from Pluto's other portfolio, being the god of wealth.
- Every 10,000 Points: Your get Life Meter extensions at 20,000, 50,000, 100,000 and 200,000 points.
- Fantasy Pantheon: There's at least one god made up for the game (Palutena). The monster Medusa is a goddess in this game, and references to Zeus were made. This makes it a mix between a Fantasy Pantheon and Greek/Roman gods. Palutena may be based off of Pallas Athena.
- Forced Transformation: If hit by a projectile from an eggplant wizard, Pit will have his heads turned into an eggplant until the curse is lifted in a hospital room.
- Four Is Death: Most enemies appear in groups of four, most significantly the Reapettes for the association with death, but also including Shemum, Commyloose, Monoeye, Minos, Mick, Rokman, Octos, Komayto, Moila, and Daphne.
- Flight Is the Final Power: The protagonist is a flightless angel who needs to find three sacred treasures to rescue a goddess. The final treasure is a pair of magic wings that enable him to fly, which he uses in the last level to travel to the Big Bad's lair.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: The manual describes certain enemies as distinct gods, such as Holer being the God of Plants, Uranos being the God of the Sky, and Erinus being the God of Revenge. However, in the game itself, these "gods" are actually just common mooks without any individuality.
- God of Darkness: While Medusa was a gorgon in the myths, the games portray her as the Goddess of Darkness
- Golden Ending: The best ending of the game, earned by maxing out all of Pit's stats, shows Pit growing in size and getting kissed by Palutena.
- The Goomba: Aside from Shemums, each fortress has a very basic, slow-moving, easily killed enemy commonly found throughout the labyrinth. The Underworld fortress has Kobil, the Overworld fortress has Shulm, and the Skyworld fortress has Uranos.
- The Grim Reaper: Reapers are recurring enemies. If one of them sees you, it'll freak out and summon Reapettes to attack you while a distorted cavalry fanfare theme plays.
- Gorgeous Gorgon: Medusa appears as a cyclops stone head trapped in a wall. Upon her defeat, a Cute Monster Girl version of Medusa
◊ (basically resembling a normal woman with green skin and possibly snakes for hair◊) comes out of the head and dies. This is actually her original form, but she was cursed into a hideous gorgon form by Palutena as a result of her evil deeds (a reference to Athena turning Medusa from a priestess into a monster). The manual incorrectly portrays her as an overweight cyclops woman when she, in fact, has no body in her monster form. - Great Escape: The first world is technically Pit escaping from his imprisonment in the Underworld to go kick Medusa's ass. No wonder it's a hard ordeal.
- Guide Dang It!:
- Nothing in the game tells you that there is a second, hidden score counter that must be raised to certain amounts (by collecting hearts, killing enemies etc.) to get the weapon upgrades. If you don't raise this score high enough, Zeus simply won't appear in the upgrade rooms, and you will have a very tough time completing the game.
- The enchanted weapons you get from the training rooms—the Crystal Rod, Flaming Arrow, and Sacred Bow—are not immediately functional. You must raise Pit's health to maximum first (with at least two health upgrades, which requires 50,000 points), which you probably won't be able to do until you reach the hot springs in the first dungeon. And even then, you still won't be able to use the enchanted weapon right away, because they're disabled while in dungeons.
- It is not obvious what to do in the treasure rooms in the first two worlds (the rooms full of breakable pots.) You have to break all of the pots without collecting any of the items inside. One pot, if broken last, will contain a life potion, barrel, or credit card. Said pot is randomly selected when you enter the room, though it's possible to guarantee a win every time by breaking a few specific pots first.
- Have a Nice Death: Upon being defeated in-game, Pit screams "I'M FINISHED!" before dying, accompanied by a silly "Ha ha, you lost!" music fanfare.
- Hellhound: Twinbellows, a gigantic fiery dog with, like his name implies, two heads.
- Hit Points: The fortress guardians in the first game have counters for how many hits they need to take.
- I Got Bigger: The good ending of the first game has Pit instantly grow from a young boy to a tall handsome man.
- Invincibility Power-Up: There's a lyre that turns all enemies into harmless mallets for a period of time.
- Invincible Minor Minion: Plutons are Bandit Mooks that deal no damage to Pit, but in return are completely unaffected by Pit's arrows.
- Journey to the Sky: The plot of the first game revolves around Pit climbing the Underworld to eventually reach the Overworld, and from there continue his travel to reach Skyworld (where he has to further climb upward) and save Palutena.
- Kill All Humans: Medusa, the Goddess of Darkness, always held a feeling of hatred towards humans, and her dishonest actions towards them never hid that sentiment. After Palutena turns her into a monster and banishes her to the Underworld as punishment, she retaliates by amassing a demonic army to invade Skyworld and kill the human race.
- Kill the God: In addition to Pandora, T(h)anatos, and Medusa, Pit is also capable of killing Holer, Uranos, and Erinus, which are also described as gods in the first game's manual.
- Large and in Charge: Medusa, who is the leader of the evil army that took over Angel Land, is larger than any other enemy in the game.
- Law of Chromatic Superiority: In the first game, if an enemy has a blue version and a red version, the red version is more dangerous while also giving larger hearts and more points. This an inversion of fellow NES game The Legend of Zelda, where blue enemies are tougher.
- Level 1 Music Represents: Underworld is basically the theme of Pit and synonymous with his return in Brawl (with a riff of it becoming his and later Palutena's victory theme), and is referenced a decent amount as a Leitmotif for the side of light in Kid Icarus: Uprising. This may seem ironic for a theme called Underworld in a series starring a heroic angel where Light Is Good, and possibly like a simple decision of recognizability, but the context of its original early-game use in the Underworld area was for Pit's escape and comeback from the prison Medusa sent him to after seizing Skyworld - fittingly, the Overworld now under the villainous gorgon's control has a more treacherous and less upbeat theme. It's clear listening to the original title's soundtrack that Underworld being a significant heroic theme was the intention from the first game, as it shares an intro with the peaceful title screen music (though the two themes differ from there), and Sky Palace, the theme that plays as Pit soars to the final boss with the Three Sacred Treasures in hand, heavily incorporates the same progression recognizable from both themes, with the credits theme harking back to both Underworld and the title theme. Though, it probably doesn't help that very few people actually got past the Underworld stages.
- Level in the Clouds: The third world and the final level take place in this setting. Pit has to climb upward with the help of hovering rocks and uniquely colored cloud platforms (green in 3-1, pink in 3-2, and white in 3-3), all while dealing with numerous enemies. Most of the Game Boy sequel takes place here as well.
- Losing Horns: The Game Over fanfare, fittingly, is a "you lost" arrangement of the Grim Reaper's theme.
- Lost in Translation: An enemy named Phil has a Dub Name Change in the first game, which changes it to EelEye. Consequently, its association with the fellow enemy Collin loses the Shout-Out to Phil Collins.
- Luck-Based Mission: The second room of World 3's dungeon has you climbing down a ladder right into the crosshairs of two Eggplant Wizards. They will either hit you with an unavoidable eggplant curse the instant you enter the room, or they will decide not to. You just have to hope they don't.
- Marathon Level: The final stage in the game runs as long as it takes for you to accumulate enough points in the level to continue on to the battle with Medusa. If you don't have enough points, the stage will loop back from the start. It is a little surprising after the 'get to the end/get to the fortress guardian' goal of ever other level in the game but once you realize progression is based on how many enemies you defeat it shouldn't take more than two trips through the level.
- Medal of Dishonor: If you beat Kid Icarus in a minimalist speed-run instead of making an honest time-consuming grind, Palutena "promotes" you to serve as some kind of Janitor because she believes that you are a lucky fraud for saving Angel Land from Medusa.
- Mooks Ate My Equipment: The game features the greedy Pluton, which will swipe your arrows of strength if they touch you.
- Multiple Endings: Kid Icarus has a total of six potential endings, four of which are shared between the Japanese and English versions, but the Famicom Disk System original has an extra-bad ending, which the Nintendo Entertainment System version replaced with a new Golden Ending. Unlike its sister series Metroid, Kid Icarus grades you on completion rather than speed. Each version uses a slightly different metric; the Japanese version gives you ten points for each level in both your endurance and your strength (i.e. five endurance and five strength together earns you a full hundred points) and then deducts a point for every time you continue after dying, while the English version counts how many values you've maxed out (the number of hearts collected, amount of endurance, amount of strength, how many weapons were collected). The endings in question are the following:
- The worst ending of all, only available if you finish with less than 60 points in the Japanese version, ends with Palutena turning Pit into a specknose.
- The worst of the shared endings (60 to 79 points in Japanese or no categories completed in English) shows Palutena turning Pit into a farmer with a straw hat and sicklenote .
- The second-worst of the shared endings (80 to 84 points or only one complete category) results in Palutena turning Pit into a foot-soldier or a guard with a helmet and club.
- The second-best of the shared endings (85 to 99 points or two complete categories) has Palutena turn Pit into a soldier captain with a galea and spear.
- The best of the shared endings (the original Golden Ending in Japan at 100 points or three complete categories) has Palutena promote Pit into a full-grown hunk of an angel.
- The newer Golden Ending (earned by obtaining 999 hearts, five health, five strength, and all three weapons in the English version) features Palutena promoting Pit to full-grown angel as before and then planting a Smooch of Victory and Big Damn Kiss on him, while the background lights up and angels appear to rain hearts on them.
- National Geographic Nudity: The NES game got away with Syrens having exposed breasts, likely due to being based on Classical Mythology where such depictions would be commonplace.
- New Game Plus: In the NES version only, pressing "Start" at the conclusion of the end credits restarted the game but with Pit as powered up as he had been before (minus the three sacred treasures, of course).
- Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: As long as you carry a feather; if not, it's game over.
- Not Quite Flight: Pit is an angel whose wings are too small to allow him to fly on his own, a major sore point for him; the irony of being a flightless angel named after a hole in the ground is not lost on him. He can get around this temporarily through a couple different means:
- The Angel Feather item allows Pit to fly out of a bottomless pit, but is used up after one time.
- The Wings of Pegasus grow Pit's wings to full size and give him unlimited flight, but are only available to use at the very end of the game.
- Password Save: In the absence of the save feature present in the Famicom Disk System's version, the NES version opts for a password system to record progress. The player has to jot it down to pick up where they left off, or else they'll have to start over again.
- Power Dyes Your Hair: Pit goes through different hair colors at different power levels in the game, with blue being the strongest.
- Power Gives You Wings: Pit starts out with rudimentary wings, by the time he acquires all the MacGuffins, he has fully functional wings.
- Power Up Full Color Change: Pit changes colors as he levels up.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The Overworld theme contains a snippet of "The Girl I Left Behind Me", a marching song that dates back to Elizabethan England but which has a lot of American history, too. This is retained in the Super Smash Bros. Brawl remix, but left out of the Uprising remixes.
- Ratchet Scrolling: One of the main sources of difficulty in the game is the fact that Pit cannot go back once the screen scrolls. In the horizontally-scrolling Overworld, it's no worse than a Super Mario Bros. level; an invisible wall at the left edge of the screen simply stops Pit from backtracking. But in the vertically-scrolling Underworld and Skyworld, the bottom of the screen becomes an instant-death Bottomless Pit, even if there is a platform just off-screen.
- Red Shirt Army: The Centurions. Turned into stone by Medusa, you spend half your time in the dungeons saving them with Hammers, only to have them drop like flies when they attempt to fight the bosses, who aren't that tough anyway.
- Rise to the Challenge: The game has all of the climbing levels (2/3 of the game) do this — falling off the bottom of the screen causes your death. Even if there would be a platform an inch below the screen.
- Sadly Mythcharacterized: The queen of the underworld is Medusa, Pluton is a common enemy that steals your weapons, Pandora is a giant soap bubble and goddess of calamity and deceit, and Tanatos is a snake that lives in Medusa's hair.
- Scenery Porn: The 3D Classics re-release of the first game has some really nice-looking backgrounds.
- Schizophrenic Difficulty: Infamously so. The first levels are teeth-gnashingly difficult, not only because you have no power-ups, but since you're climbing upward, the Bottomless Pit is effectively chasing you. (Uprising has a nod to this, with Pit having very unpleasant memories of dying repeatedly there.) The second world is side-scrolling and quite a bit easier. The third spikes the difficulty with another upward climb, and the final level (where you have One-Hit Polykill laser arrows) is so easy it's practically a Cut Scene. In addition, each fortress is an exercise in eggplant-induced masochism, but the fortress bosses are pushovers.
- Segmented Serpent: Hewdraw and Tanatos in the first game achieve their long serpentine forms with a series of segmented sprites. It's even reflected by Tanatos's manual artwork, where his body is composed of distinct segments.
- Sinister Nudity: Syrens were initially depicted as being topless in manual art and are underworld monsters sent by Medusa to kill Pit when he reaches the final level.
- Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: Spike traps in the fortresses, sometimes going in four directions.
- Smooch of Victory: The American version took out the Japanese version's bad ending where Pit is turned into a specknose and replaced it with a perfect ending where Palutena kisses Pit in addition to turning him into an adult.
- Solid Clouds: Later levels in the game have clouds that are Directionally Solid Platforms.
- Taken for Granite: The Centurions are turned into stone by, unsurprisingly, Medusa.
- This Was Her True Form: Upon the defeat of monster Medusa, Medusa's humanoid form (but still green-skinned) comes out of monster Medusa's eyeball and dies. Then inverted in Uprising, as her one-eyed, cyclops-faced form is revealed to be her true form in the game according to her idol. She has to use magic to cover up her cursed form.
- Transflormation: There are monsters that can turn the player into a mobile eggplant.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: This is a classic NES platform game with some Dungeon Crawling elements thanks to the fortress levels, but then it unexpectedly becomes a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up in the last level.
- Unexpected Shmup Level: The final level, which makes up for the entirety of the fourth world, is a Horizontal Scrolling Shooter.
- Villain-Beating Artifact: The three Sacred Treasures are the only thing that can defeat Medusa, so Pit has to go through all realms of his world (starting with the Underworld and ending with Skyworld) to retrieve them and defeat the Big Bad.
- What Did You Expect When You Named It ____?: Plays straight... in the non-Japanese title of the series and the overseas title alone. Doesn't stop the sequels from having Pit get his wings burnt off, the first time in Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters and again in Kid Icarus: Uprising.
- When All Else Fails, Go Right: It's often When All Else Fails, Go Up. Only the second world's first two levels are traversed from left to right, as is the solo level from the fourth world due to being an auto-scrolling shmup stage.
- Wings Do Nothing:
- Despite Pit having angelic wings, he cannot fly until a power-up is collected.
- The Kobils and Shemums can't fly either.
- Wrap Around: displays this to take advatnage of its reliance on vertical level design. This does not happen in Of Myths and Monsters because, due to the Game Boy's resolution, the screen scrolls horizontally.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: After defeating the Hewdraw, the water appears to turn into a hot spring. Many made the mistake of jumping in and killing themselves.
