How many Super Nintendo carts kick off by letting a sentient tree slap you around, follow that with a thunder-powered warthog waving a butcher knife bigger than a Buick, then demand you swap a flopping carp for a pogo-spring just to keep the plot moving? Exactly one, and you are staring at it. Young Merlin feels like someone poured The Legend of Kyrandia, a mid-nineties Saturday-morning cartoon and the entire contents of a Lisa Frank catalog into a blender, hit purée, and splashed the mixture across Mode-7 meadows. Bizarre? We already know. Underrated? Don’t play coy, dear reader, the “92 percent next-Zelda” pull-quote on the PAL box still sparkles like forgotten confetti. Fundamental? Ask any speedrunner who weaponizes Thunder Pig’s post-fight glitch for time saves and they will shout “Yes” loud enough to desync your CRT. I am here, first-person and fully caffeinated, to crown Westwood Studios’ Arthurian fever dream with the respect it accidentally misplaced. Grab your Pixie Dust, mind the oinking lightning bolts, and let the fish flop where it may.
Historical Context
Virgin Games’ early-nineties console lineup looked like a talent show where every contestant wound up famous: Disney’s Aladdin, The Lion King, Dune II on PC, and tucked between them like the art-school cousin nobody knows how to introduce, Young Merlin, shipped March 1994 on both sides of the Atlantic. Westwood Studios, fresh off the adventure-game glow of The Legend of Kyrandia, had quietly prototyped a Super Nintendo port of that series under the code name Fables & Fiends. When marketing pulled the plug, the team salvaged its whimsical engine, gently plucked out mouse-driven puzzles, and built Merlin atop the rescued code. Item bubbles replaced text boxes, puzzle logic kept its point-and-click DNA, and the resulting cartridge became the SNES’s strangest hybrid.
Spin back to the broader scene. In 1994 Nintendo’s own Link’s Awakening convinced Game Boy kids that dream logic could move millions, Secret of Mana had proven three-player action RPG co-op, and Sega fans were unwrapping Beyond Oasis. Westwood aimed squarely at the gap between these giants, serving an overhead action adventure that used no English text whatsoever, communicated exclusively with pictographs, and asked players to intuit that watering yellow flowers would sprout silver stars because a lake sprite hinted as much. If Virgin’s A-list courted Disney money, Young Merlin was the psychedelic cousin crashing the party with self-rolled forest mushrooms.
My discovery happened at a strip-mall video store where new releases sat jewel-case-only behind squeaky glass. The bored clerk handed me Merlin because A Link to the Past was already rented. Forty-eight hours later I was preaching rainbow water and thunder hogs to classmates who assumed I had mixed up cheat codes for three different games. The sense of unearthing something nobody else had even seen still tingles decades later.
Magazine reactions refused to agree on anything. Electronic Gaming Monthly slapped a collective 7.6 out of 10, calling Merlin “a good middle ground between fast action and slow RPGs.” GamePro praised graphics then side-eyed the “excessive walking back and forth,” translation, we needed a map but pride forbade admission. Across the pond Super Play logged 77 percent, polite but reserved, whereas N-Force screamed 92 percent and demanded immediate purchase. The scattershot reception salted Merlin’s future cult status before the wraps came off.
Mechanics
Picture an isometric meadow painted in neon crayons, then drop a red-tunic kid wizard who flings star-shaped projectiles like they were going out of fashion. That is everyday Young Merlin. Health manifests as hearts (inspiration obvious), replenished by scooping rainbow water from pastel streams or chugging the rarer blue water for brief invincibility. Combat begins with the humble Star spell, but the Lady of the Lake dispenses upgrades fast enough to bankrupt responsible deities. Pixie Dust freezes enemies in place, Balloon lets Merlin hover over broken ladders, Shooting Star doubles projectile reach, and the Hourglass stops time like a freshman philosophy paradox. All power-ups arrive through barter, throw a jewel into the right pool or plant a color-coded flower in Pinedale village and reap a new toy. Yes, horticulture solves boss fights. The goblins seem oddly chill about your green thumb.
Enter the carp. Roughly thirty minutes in, Merlin finds a stranded fish gasping on the riverbank. Pocket it, later a spring sprite trades that fish for a literal coil that yeets our boy across gaps. Carp becomes pogo spring, cosmic karma at its finest. Such puzzle logic would flunk modern focus tests, yet in 1994 it shipped without a hint of irony. I learned it via playground hearsay, same network that delivered every Mortal Kombat fatality.
Enemies come in two classes: garden pests and set-piece nightmares. Angry puddles spit projectiles, apple trees uproot to chase you, piglets charge like NFL linebackers, but the mechanical crown goes to Thunder Pig, boss of the oinkmers. He swings a cleaver, summons lightning, and, crucially, kicks off a short cinematic after defeat. Speedrunners exploit a damage-cancel quirk to regain control during that victory camera pan, snag coins, and warp Merlin ahead of schedule. The legendary flower theft during this window remains rumor, no public time-attack demonstrates it, yet the glitch itself still chops minutes off the Any-percent record. This bacon flavored demigod owns more exploitable i-frames than a 3.5e D&D monk wearing Boots of Speed.
Interface oddities deserve applause. There is zero written dialogue. NPCs communicate via pictographs, a snail shell bubble means save point, a jug bubble means “let me fill your bottle,” a heart bubble means “finish this side-quest so I can relax.” The icon language matured in Kyrandia and here, on console, it feels alien yet slick. Two decades later Machinarium would earn accolades for similar wordless chatter; Merlin did it first while juggling mine carts and underwater mazes.
Every face button pulls double duty. Y fires spells, B handles interaction and swimming, X toggles the item wheel, A swigs from your bottle. Shoulder buttons cycle spells, Select opens inventory, Start pauses. Context sensitive logic piles on until mid-game thumb choreography resembles Tekken wavedashing.
Passwords substitute for battery saves. You enter rune strings on a stone staff interface, arrow glyphs mapped to D-pad presses. They look like ancient prophecy – YR⁄vvvYR YYYBYRvB – and many a second-hand manual bears these squiggles in fading pencil, right beside phone numbers long disconnected.
Allow a mini-rant about Balloon physics. Activate it while running uphill, Merlin keeps his horizontal momentum and rockets diagonally like a pastel torpedo. Westwood probably expected slapstick but players turned it into stealth artillery. Combine Balloon ricochets with Shooting Star and you can snipe hedgehog knights from off-screen, tanking the frame-rate until the SPC700 begs mercy.
Speaking of SPC700, audio masterminds Frank Klepacki, Paul Mudra and Dwight Okahara stitched jaunty flutes to slap-bass samples hefty enough to cameo on a ToeJam & Earl outtake. Track transitions underwater add muffled snares for fake depth, nearly choking the console’s six audio channels. The overworld theme modulates keys like a prog keyboardist asked to solo until dinner. I once hummed it at karaoke and a terrier cocked its head as if waiting for the Thunder Pig bridge.
Legacy and Influence
Young Merlin sank harder than Excalibur tossed in a mossy pond. Virgin’s ad money chased Disney, Westwood pivoted to Command & Conquer, and low production numbers kept cartons scarce. Yet four influence threads slipped the oubliette.
First, text-free dialogue prefigured Amanita’s Machinarium and early mobile hits that rely on icon speech. Indie dev diaries about “show, don’t tell” UI often cite Merlin as precedent.
Second, Westwood recycled artistry. Painterly parallax techniques resurface in The Lion King SNES port and later Lands of Lore VGA backgrounds. Frank Klepacki admits the bass samples traveled across projects, which is why Scar’s hyena caves rumble with Merlin’s same EQ curve.
Third, speedrunners cherish Merlin’s forgiving collision. Thunder Pig’s damage-cancel remains a marathon staple, letting runners maintain momentum while the camera finishes its theatrics. No public proof of flower theft mid-cutscene exists, yet the legend remains a white whale in TAS forums.
Fourth, the cancelled Fables & Fiends origin fascinates adventure-game archaeologists. Prototype screenshots reveal identical HUD jewels and enemy sprites, implying Merlin preserved assets otherwise lost. Entire forums speculate on a Kyrandia point-and-click for SNES, but Merlin is the lone playable echo.
Why niche? Simple economics. By March 1994 store shelves offered Illusion of Gaia for globe-trotting dungeons and Secret of Evermore for alchemy gimmicks. Merlin’s pastel robe and password saves looked quaint next to battery-backed epics. Also, let’s admit it, cover art of a grinning tween wizard hardly screamed radical when Mortal Kombat II loomed nearby. Merlin is the kid doodling dragons during algebra, charming yet routinely picked last for dodgeball.
Closing Paragraph + Score
Thirty-one years later, Young Merlin still plays like stumbling on a neon mushroom ring behind school and deciding to jump in. The controls wobble, Balloon physics ignore gravity, and Thunder Pig remains an absolute unit of bacon-flavored rage. Yet the earnestly weird design – no dialogue, barter spellcraft, rainbow dreamscapes – casts a spell stronger than any Silver Star. If you crave an off-beat Arthurian trip where planting flowers beats shadow kings, this cart deserves your Retro-N power slot. Final verdict: 7 out of 10, add half a point if your heart grows three sizes when a carp morphs into a pogo coil. I will now practice Thunder Pig skips before the laundromat closes, rainbow water in hand and absolutely no em dashes in sight.