Maximo: Ghosts to Glory

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory was created as a spiritual successor to the classic arcade series Ghosts'n Goblins, and Capcom's developers made no secret of wanting to bring the tough difficulty and gothic atmosphere of the old hit into three dimensions for a new console generation. The player takes on the role of the knight Maximo, who, after being betrayed, sets out into the realm of the dead to rescue his fiancée from the dark sorcerer Achrius, passing along the way through graveyards, locked castles, and hellish landscapes full of skeletons, zombies, and other gothic monsters.

Gameplay-wise, it was an action platformer emphasizing precise sword-and-shield combat, collecting keys to unlock new areas, and the genre's typical black comedy, in which Maximo loses pieces of his armor after being hit before finally dying, running around meanwhile only in his underwear. Besides regular lives, the game also works with a limited number of continues that must be bought from Death himself, so every failure carries a tangible price and the player has to weigh whether to risk further progress. The difficulty was intentionally high, harking back to the tradition of arcade cabinets, setting it apart from the then-prevailing trend of more accessible action games.

The visual style combined cartoonish grotesqueness with elaborate environments, and the game earned praise for sensitively building on the legacy of Ghosts'n Goblins while maintaining its own identity; levels are also designed to reward memorizing enemy and trap placement. Maximo became commercially successful enough to earn a sequel, Maximo vs. Army of Zin, and established itself as one of the genre's icons on PlayStation 2. The game was also accompanied by a distinctive narrator commenting on Maximo's failures with dark humor, lending even the more frustrating passages a lighter tone and setting the title apart from more seriously toned competition. Today Maximo is remembered as one of the rare cases where the uncompromising arcade school was successfully translated into three-dimensional space without the game losing the readability and fairness that the old Ghosts'n Goblins was built on.