Haunted Castle (Arcade Review)

Haunted Castle
aka Akumajou Dracula
Platform: Arcade
First Released December 26, 1987
Designed by Masaaki Kukino
Developed by Konami
Sold Separately via Arcade Archives

“I’m almost certain you don’t understand how flashing works.” By the way, his actual boss sprite looks nothing like this.

Sigh. Alright, let’s get this over with. Rip the bandage off. Pop this pimple. Yank out this white hair. You see, I just realized I’m only a few games away from having reviews posted for every 80s and 90s Castlevania game (not counting three LCD games or the cancelled Game.Com game, even though I have the ROM for it). I want to achieve that, but that means I have to actually sit down and review Haunted Castle, and it’s not exactly bad in a way that’s all that interesting. Hell, it doesn’t even have the benefit of being the worst Castlevania game. That honor goes to Castlevania Adventure on the Game Boy (which is technically called THE Castlevania Adventure), and I’d rather be stuck with Haunted Castle than that game. Don’t mistake that as a complement, though I do genuinely have a couple small complements to make in this game that my friend Dave speculates only exists because Konami was pissy of having to cut Nintendo in on a third of Vs. Castlevania’s profits (which I intended to also review but it wasn’t so interesting I could get a whole review out of it).

“Oh, real mature, Cathy!”

First Complement: the soundtrack is really good. Second Complement: some of the settings and enemy sprites aren’t too bad. Really! There’s a convincing fog effect. The game’s version of “The Creature” is probably the closest it ever looked to being like the famous version of the Universal Studios Frankenstein.

Even if it’s a boring boss fight. Then again ALL of Haunted Castle’s bosses are boring.

There’s a genuinely spooky haunted dining room, complete with dinner and kitchen utensils attacking you. A graveyard catches fire and it looks threatening and/or menacing. While MOST of the settings are boring, it’s not all boring. And even when the settings are at their most lifeless, heck, I’ve still seen a lot worse than Haunted Castle’s tour offers. Granted, Simon’s sprite is distracting and his walking animation doesn’t feel confident or heroic. A lot of the sprite work is solid, but others are laughably pathetic. Like, look at this screenshot of blue-haired He-Man battling sawed-off Benjamin Franklin:

It’s supposed to be the fleamen/hunchbacks, but it looks EXACTLY like Ben Franklin. Then again, they did find over 1,200 pieces of human skeletons in Benjamin Franklin’s home. I suppose we can’t completely rule out that he worked for Dracula and was possibly performing a ritual to bring him back in the Americas in the 1700s. If you’re reading this Konami, there’s your plot for the next Castlevania right there!

And now I’m out of nice things to say about Haunted Castle. No shortage of bad things to say, though to be honest, my heart isn’t even into that. It’s just not a very interesting game. The thing that stinks the most is probably the collision detection. Your hit box is just a square that feels much larger than you are, and then enemy attack patterns are tailored to take advantage of the wonky collision box. When it comes to enemies, their collision is much more sprite-accurate, so bats and projectiles require direct hits to kill. They also like to have enemies such as zombies or mummies spawn right next to you, and since ducking or jumping still feature a massive hit box, evasive maneuvers are too hard to pull off and defense is NEVER intuitive.

Platforming is kept to a bare minimum, which didn’t bother me. Most of the arcade barbarian subgenre of the late 80s had roughly the same amount of jumping and moving platforms. If nothing else, Haunted Castle’s maps are boilerplate. That’s all the proof you need that it’s the action that fails this game, not the settings.

So, for example, the mummies begin firing projectiles as soon as they finish spawning. They take multiple hits to kill, AND AGAIN, your box is massive. It’s not a guaranteed life loss, but the resulting gameplay isn’t fun because you’re reacting in anticipation of what this means for your collision box, and not the enemy itself. That’s TERRIBLE for immersion, and action games that aren’t immersive are in bad, bad shape regardless of anything else the game does right. It’s like starting a footrace by immediately stepping on a rusty nail. Even turning around to scratch-out enough distance to avoid their attacks, or to counterattack something else chasing you, usually isn’t effective because of how cramped everything is. Haunted Castle is remarkable because it does NOTHING right as an action game.

These things are an example of the developers crossing the line into full-on trollish design. You kill a skeleton and it turns into these ghosts that are too fast moving and too spongy to slay. Your only option is to start backing away as soon as you strike the killing blow on the skeleton and then duck out of the way of the glorified torpedo it launches at you. This isn’t actually a bad idea in a vacuum. If Haunted Castle had a larger variety of enemies, set-pieces or even styles of layout, this might actually be a great idea for a danger element, especially if you fine tune the layout based around the fact that this will happen. But given the flat, uninteresting layouts and overall lack of satisfying combat, these instead come across as the developer trolling for the sake of it.

It’s an example of counter-optimization, as your attacks are not suitable at all for closed-quarters combat, and almost all the basic enemies are fine-tuned specifically to crowd you and be just above or just below your attack box. The developers did such a good job of crafting and polishing the trollishness that there’s really no excuse for any bad aspect of Haunted Castle. It is polished, but not in a way that’s done for the benefit of entertainment. It’s a quarter-sucker, and nothing more. This was pretty foolish too, because somewhere along the way, they forgot that games that aren’t fun don’t suck as many quarters. Haunted Castle’s fixation on near-miss combat just makes it boring to the point of exhaustion. Even challenging arcade games need to be give-and-take, but this just takes. It skews too heavily in favor of the enemies. Because of that, literally everything else about the game would have to be amazing just to make Haunted Castle rise to the level of overall mediocrity.

It’s worth noting I played two versions of Haunted Castle (out of five total) for this feature, the ones known as VERSION N, which is the initial Japanese release, and VERSION M, which is the second North American ROM and the one notorious for its hard difficulty. Regardless of which version you play, the lack of intuitive collision detection is always the worst problem. I assure you in this shot, my sprite wasn’t anywhere near those fireballs or the bat. You can feel the difference regardless of the difficulty toggles by paying attention to the bats. Version M’s bats attack in a much more cruel, hard to avoid way.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game’s design is just really dull. Now I’m not expecting complicated or even ambitious level design from a coin-op, and I can put up with a game based around mostly flat corridors. Hell, I gave YES! verdicts to Rastan Saga and Cadash in Taito Milestones 3: The Definitive Review. Haunted Castle isn’t that different from those games, with its large sprites and flat, straight-line corridors, minimum jumping, and heavy combat focus. They’re all members of the same graduating class, more or less. But Taito’s beefy action arcaders had a better sense of timing and spacing with their straight line corridors, and even at their most unfair, they never felt as unfair as Haunted Castle. Those games have problems. LOTS of problems. But they also remembered to maintain the sense of entertainment that’s part of that agreement players have with coin-ops. You’re paying to have a good time, after all. Haunted Castle forgot the good time part. I think the design team assumed the settings and connection to the popular Famicom/NES game would be enough by itself to keep players pumping cash, and obviously myself and a lot of critics over the years think they were just plain wrong.

In the opening cutscene, Dracula was white, had jet black hair, and was clean shaven. Now he has green skin, gray hair, and wears a Vincent Price mustache. Simon, you know it gives me no pleasure to say this, but you have to consider the possibility that your new wife did this to him. And he has superpowers! You don’t, so imagine what she’ll do to you! Maybe you should just let her finish him off, because the dude looks downright sickly.

If Simon’s Quest is Exhibit A in the case of Konami not having a clue what they had with Castlevania, then Haunted Castle is clearly Exhibit B. I really think I’m on to something here. It’s not hard to imagine that Konami likely mistook Castlevania’s appeal as being ONLY tied to the superficial elements like the castle or Simon or Dracula and not to the fine-tuned, satisfying combat and heavily optimized level layouts. So perhaps the most positive thing I can say about Haunted Castle is the same thing I said about Simon’s Quest: they needed these failures to point them in the right direction.

This final lead-up to the Dracula fight is so embarrassing. It’s just a typical collapsing bridge sequence, maybe the longest example of this trope ever done in a game like this. You cannot stop to fight all the bats that are spaced out along the way and eventually have to accept a few life slaps. The collapsing bridge trope ALWAYS gets my heart racing, and it’s a damning indictment of how bad Haunted Castle is that it takes one of my favorite gimmicks and runs it into the ground so badly that it becomes boring AND THEN IT STILL KEEPS GOING! By the way, this is the ENTIRE final level of the game. It screams “we have no clue how to feel climatic!”

Haunted House might not be fun, then or now, but in a morbid way, we still owe it a lot. It showed Konami that Castlevania as a theme can’t work as an empty shell. That’s a lesson a lot of franchise owners never got. Sometimes it takes learning what a franchise shouldn’t be to realize what it can be. Or to put it another way, Konami had a red hot property Castlevania, and it’s a good thing they burned themselves on it a couple times very early in its existence, but in ways that didn’t damage the brand overall. I think that’s what allowed Castlevania to become one of the most consistently good franchises in gaming. It’s something like, say, Tomb Raider never got. Then when Tomb Raider suffered its first critical and commercial failures, those failures did real, lasting damage to the Tomb Raider brand. Castlevania’s early failures, on the other hand, were pretty much inconsequential to the brand, yet valuable lessons were still learned from a purely gameplay point of view. That’s why Haunted Castle is kind of a lucky break for gamers, because it allowed the owners of Castlevania to touch the stove while nobody was looking and say “yep, don’t want to do that again!”
Verdict: NO!