Castlevania Legends Platform: Game Boy – Super Game Boy Enhanced Released November 27, 1997 Directed by Kouki Yamashita Developed by Konami Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
There’s a couple spots in the game where you get locked in a room and have to defeat waves of enemies until they stop spawning. Then, late in the game, there’s a spot where you’re frozen in place and have to defend yourself from ghosts. At least they tried to find ways to freshen the experience.
My 2025 Halloween Castlevania marathon has been full of “weird ones.” Simon’s Quest, Vampire Killer, and Haunted Castle? Pretty weird. Legends isn’t really “weird” in the same way previous Game Boy titles Castlevania: The Adventure and Castlevania II: Belmont’s Revenge were, though it maintains a lot of the gameplay. The ropes are back. The big upgrade for the whip being a fireball projectile is back. There’s a lack of skeletons. But, of the three Game Boy titles, this one seems like it’s trying the hardest (and failing, but trying nonetheless) to feel like the console games. They wanted this so much that this was set up to be the ultimate origin story. The game’s heroine, Sonia Belmont, is implied to be the mother of Castlevania III hero Trevor Belmont. If you get the best ending, it’s also kind of implied Alucard is his father, which makes Dracula’s Curse really awkward, doesn’t it? Well, thank GOD that they erased that idea from existence and declared Legends to be non-canon. We wouldn’t want to spoil the integrity of a franchise that features skeletons doing double-dutch jump roping, would we?
“One potato! Two potato! Three potato! Four! Simon’s great-great grandmother was a filthy whore! Five potato! Six potato! Seven potato! Eight! Alucard slept with Sonia after their date! Nine potato! Ten potato! Eleven potato! Twelve! Now Belmont blood is tainted and you’re stuck in helloooo operator! We’re playing Simon’s game! He’s stuck fighting us because of Sonia’s secret shame!”
Actually, maybe the weirdest part of Legends was that it was one of the most negatively-received Castlevanias upon its release. It had FAR worse reviews than Adventure got upon its release, which blows me away. Seriously, if I was put on the spot to name the worst games I’ve ever played in my life, Castlevania Adventure would be one of the first titles to pop into my head. So Legends feels like it got hosed, because honestly it’s not that bad. It’s SLOW in terms of movement, but lots of Game Boy action games feature slow movement, presumably to accommodate the blur factor of the Game Boy screen. But, action isn’t about raw speed. It’s about tempo, and I think Legends maintains a fairly consistent tempo of quality combat and quality platforming, even if it botches most of the Castlevania elements, and it does. But hey, the whip feels pretty good, and they packed a lot of fun layouts, enemies, and boss battles into this thing. Then they sort of screwed it up, but not in a way that completely ruins things.
So long, ropes. We hardly knew thee. Legends added moving ropes, but they’re not as exciting as you would hope because they’re too short to really be anything but transportation.
In a truly bizarre decision, Legends doesn’t have any subweapon pick-ups. Instead, you get subweapons after beating bosses and can select which one you want to use, Mega Man-style. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad, except only one of the standard Castlevania subweapons was used in this game: the stopwatch. And it’s not even presented like a stopwatch. For some reason, it’s a tornado. I’m not sure why a tornado would freeze all non-boss enemies. Either way, you get the stopwatch from the first boss. Then the second boss is a full life refill for only twenty hearts. This in a game where, if you have a full whip upgrade, candles only contain either hearts or, occasionally, health refills. You’re practically picking hearts out from the webbing between your toes in Castlevania Legends. The only way it could be worse is if they made the third item essentially be a cross and work to clear the screen of the bats that become annoying. You see where this is going.
Those had been bats a second earlier.
Now, that bomb is relatively expensive at five hearts and it only does as much damage as the fireball your whip throws, which is half-as-strong as a direct hit with the whip. So it’s not like you can just plow through levels with it because it can’t one-shot anything stronger than a bat. But the bats were one of the main challenge elements, and they’re rendered completely toothless by this upgrade. To really make it obvious how little they thought this whole thing out, the fourth item you get is a weak-ass projectile that seems like it does as much damage as a fully-upgraded whip’s projectile. It’s a little wider than that fireball and only costs one heart to use, but if you’re going to do that, you might as well use the whip and enjoy the satisfaction of one of gaming’s best weapons, right? I never found a good usage for it. So like, why wasn’t THAT the first thing you get? The scaling is all wrong.
This WOULD have been the part where I died if not for the health refill subweapon. Seriously, this was the toughest boss in the game, easily, and it exists in a goddamned bonus stage hidden in the fifth and final level.
And where the hell are the traditional Castlevania subweapons? There’s no axe, knife, boomerang, or holy water. Don’t tell me the Game Boy couldn’t handle them, because they were in the previous Game Boy title (depending on which region you played). Well, their sprites are in this game, but not as items you use. Instead, Legends has hidden them as magical trinkets, one per stage, and if you find all five, you get the fifth subweapon. I should note that the way they’re hidden isn’t very satisfying, as each stage has a few forks in the road, and the hidden item is just in one of the forks. There’s no way to logic out which one. Presumably this whole idea is in there to add replay value, but it’s not creative. I would have rather hidden them in walls along a strictly linear route that was more optimized.
Exploration is great, but there has to be logic behind it, even if I think the level design is good. Legends has probably the strongest level design of the three Game Boy titles, but I’d still call Belmont’s Revenge the best of the trilogy because of the subweapons.
Is finding all five hidden trinkets worth the effort? Well, in addition to getting a better ending that was so nonsensical they struck it and the entire game from the canon, you get a fifth subweapon that might as well give you a free pass to the last boss. Remember how I said the bomb can’t one-shot anything bigger than a bat? The final item is a screen-clearing bomb that takes out everything but Dracula himself for the same cost as the previous bomb: five hearts. Yep, it makes the home stretch before you reach the final boss a cakewalk. So none of the subweapons are particularly satisfying to use. I have no clue what they were thinking with any of this. It’s not imaginative and it’s not fun. The whole system adds nothing to the game at all and feels like it belongs to another property entirely. The funny thing is, the subweapons were always kind of nerfy to Castlevania, and getting rid of them could be a positive thing if what replaces them is more balanced. Replacing boomerangs and axes with any-time-you-need-it full health refills and screen-clearing bombs isn’t exactly balanced, is it?
Honestly, the graphics ain’t half bad, but I still think Belmont’s Revenge looks nicer.
BUT, for what it’s worth, I felt Legends had pretty dang decent level layouts and enjoyable enough boss battles that made Castlevania Legends worth playing at least once. I expected so much worse based on its reputation, and now I’m sitting here puzzled because it’s not a bad game. As of this writing, it’s part of the Switch Online lineup, and if you’ve skipped it because of its critical reception, yeah, take a chance on Legends. It’ll take you a little under an hour to finish, and it’s fine. Just don’t expect one of the stronger Castlevania games, because Legends feels more like a ripoff of Castlevania most of the time.
(shudder) It even gets creepy, something the other two Game Boy Castlevanias didn’t come close to doing.
Really, this feels like its closest kin is Haunted Castle because a lot of the enemy attack patterns are based on crowding you and keeping the combat at closed quarters. Bats and spirits attack in a way where they swoop in from above you. This makes scratching-out distance to get your attack off without taking damage the primary challenge. I hated that for Haunted Castle, but it feels like it works here because there’s a sense of claustrophobia. Otherwise, besides the whip and candles, it never really feels like it belongs in the franchise. But, if you imagine Legends not as an actual Castlevania game but rather as a Castlevania-inspired action tribute that had no clue how to implement subweapons, it’s fine. Really, Castlevania Legends only sucks in comparison to its console big brothers. But so what? What halfway decent Game Boy title that’s part of a legendary action franchise is that not true of? Verdict: YES!
Dracula never got over losing to Wolverine in the first X-Men movie.
Awww, Trevor Belmont was adorable. Who’s the little vampire killer? You are!
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 threeLCDgames 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!
Vampire Killer
aka Akumajou Dracula Platform: MSX2 Released October 30, 1986 Designed by Akihiko Nagata Developed by Konami Never Released in the United States
NO MODERN RELEASE
I played a patched version of the ROM created by developer FRS. The patch improved general performance without altering the core gameplay. It just readjusted the speed, more or less. WARNING: If you use this patch, you will need the ability to map keyboard commands to your controller or just outright use a keyboard (which can be used in addition to a controller) or you will NOT be able to finish Vampire Killer. You see, there’s a door/tunnel maze in one level that normally requires the ability to press both UP and DOWN at the same time, but this patch prevents that. Instead, you have to press “M” to enter the doors.
Get the patch HERE. And I apply patches using THIS TOOL. I should redo the MSX games in the Konami SHMUP feature using FRS’ patches.
If you’ve never heard of the MSX version of the original Castlevania, well, you’re in for a treat.
The original Castlevania wasn’t just released to the Famicom. Four days later, its cousin hit the MSX2 computer, and it’s, ahem, different. And this is why I love experiencing Konami’s output on the MSX, because they didn’t just shrug their shoulders and copy the maps from the more powerful NES. Instead, they took the base gameplay, roster of enemies/bosses, and level themes and settings and then reworked them to accommodate the MSX2’s hardware limitations. MSX in general is notorious for not handling scrolling all that well, and you can either roll with that and make side-scrollers that are played one screen at a time, or you can use it as an excuse to get creative. That’s what Vampire Killer does, turning the game into an exploration-based title where you search for keys to open doors and try to avoid soft-locking the game. Wait, what?
Weirdly, this carry-over from the NES game plays much smoother and more predictably on the MSX than on the NES. It’s MUCH easier to time the presses.
Yeah, soft locking is a legitimate possibility, and it’s not all that hard to do. First, let me explain what exactly is going on with Vampire Killer, because this isn’t Castlevania like anyone from America would be familiar with. Instead of just going from Point-A to Point-B, the MSX Castlevania features six levels, each of which is divided into three blocks. Each block has the standard Castlevania 1 door, just like the NES game, but there’s a twist: it’s locked. Hidden somewhere in the block is a silver key, which is not to be confused with gold keys like the one seen in the above screenshot. Gold keys can only be carried one-at-a-time and are only useful on treasure chests that lay around. The silver key looks like this:
Ignore the “Stage 20” thing because this screenshot is taken from the second loop after I beat Dracula, but this is really the first proper stage of Vampire Killer.
With a couple exceptions, the silver keys are usually hidden behind breakable walls and have to be searched out. It’s an inspired idea and it works fantastic. I mean, for the most part (she said as she eyes the rampaging elephant in the room). The blocks are never too big, either, and there’s one other twist: the maps wrap around. So when you reach the edge of the block you’re on, if it’s not walled off, you will come out the other end. So here’s the first screen in the first proper stage, and it’ll look familiar to NES fans:
Now, I could go to the right, like you would in the NES game. Or, I could go left, which won’t take me back outside the castle, but instead take me to this room on the far right side of the map.
Neat, huh? It’s not pointless, either. This is heavily incorporated into the level design and used for navigation-based puzzle solving, and it works vertically too. Well, sometimes. The vertical version of the map wrapping is a little more problematic because there’s also bottomless pits like any other Castlevania game. There are maps that you can find and pressing F2 calls them up, so you won’t necessarily have to jump blindly. But, I kind of wish they had just eliminated the potential for death by pits altogether and focused on the exploration, because it’s usually really well done otherwise. I enjoyed it so much I attempted to play this blind, with the only guide I used being StrategyWiki’s list of what all the items do.
See the person with a staff sitting on the ledge? They’re basically a shop, though you have to hit them over and over, which will eventually lead to them making a one-time offer to sell you an item. But it’s a LOT more complicated than that, because they change into different colors, and sometimes they’ll just give you hearts and sometimes they’ll take hearts from you. Even the sale mechanic itself has layers to it. Throughout the levels are two types of bibles: white ones and black ones. If you collect a black one, the price of the items in the shops will go up, but white ones make the price go down. It’s crazy how many extra layers of complexity they added to make this version stand out. They really went all out, which is in stark contrast to the elegant simplicity of the Castlevania that Famicom/NES owners got.
I highly recommend anyone who plays this for the first time keep that item page bookmarked, because there’s a TON of items that all work in a variety of ways, both passively and proactively, and almost never intuitively. In Vampire Killer, a whip isn’t even necessarily your primary weapon. The knife, axe, and boomerang REPLACE the whip once they’re picked up. Oh, and the axe doesn’t behave like the axe from the NES game and is instead a short-range boomerang, while the blue cross boomerang (which is fairly rare) goes faster and further. Oh, and if you don’t catch either of them on the return trip, you lose them and go back to your leather whip. Yep. I should also note the boomerangs and knife don’t use up hearts, but the two subweapons do, and they take “overpowered subweapons” to a whole new level.
I think Vampire Killer might earn the title “the weirdest 2D game in the franchise” because of how different it is from the typical Castlevania. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the whip was my least favorite weapon. I never use the throwing knives in most 2D Castlevania games, but I preferred them for this game because knives gave me range and speed without having to worry about losing them every time I used them. Plus, the knife was reliable in terms of collision, whereas whip was inconsistent. I was constantly whipping right through candles to no effect, and in general, the whip has none of the OOMPH you expect from a normal Castlevania game’s whip.
The subweapons are the holy water and the stopwatch. The stopwatch is another item I almost never use in Castlevania games that I got heavy usage out of in Vampire Killer, to the point that I actively sought it out. That’s weird, but not as weird as the method of activating the subweapons. To use the stopwatch, you have to jump in the air and press DOWN. Yes, really, but the holy water is even worse. To use the holy water, you have to jump in the air and tap LEFT or RIGHT. Now, I have twitchy fingers these days, so I was constantly throwing holy water accidentally while jumping at angles. Thankfully, hearts are plentiful and they’re not stripped from you between levels. That’s strange, because everything else is! Yep, ALL ITEMS wear off when you finish a level and you go back to your leather whip. Does it get weirder? Actually, yeah: you can possess the stopwatch AND the holy water at the same time, and they work on basically every boss except Dracula (because they can’t reach him). So five of the six bosses are pieces of cake in this game.
The bosses are CRAZY SPONGY if you try using your other weapons. But they have no invincibility frames at all, making the holy water’s fire extremely effective at quickly draining them. If your timing is true and you activate the stopwatch while throwing the holy water in a way where the fire is damaging them, one-shotting bosses is on the table for pretty much every non-Drac boss. My timing wasn’t, and I still beat Reapy McReapface with two bottles of water.
And it’s at this point I have to inform everyone that my ultimate verdict on Vampire Killer is a bizarre split decision based on how you play it. On the third block of the fourth level, I found myself unable to make progress and decided to use the StrategyWiki walkthrough to figure out what I was doing wrong, and I discovered I’d soft-locked the game. Right before you face the boss of the fourth level, Vampire Killer has the easiest-to-activate soft lock I’ve ever encountered in any game I’ve reviewed at IGC, and it makes this review much more complicated than it should be. I’m going to explain it, and if you know of an easier soft lock to activate in any game, meaning one that’s part of the natural game flow and not one you have to go out of your way to do, I want to hear it because I don’t think there’s ever been one.
SPLIT DECISION: PLAYING WITHOUT SAVE STATES OR REWIND
This is the room in question, and I should note that if you find a candle item (not to be confused with the candles you break with your weapon), it puts a highlight box around breakable walls. Keep in mind that all four blocks are destroyed at once, instead of one segment at a time. You can’t make a stagnated stepladder out of them.
See the key? You can’t jump up and get it, even if you have the item that lets you jump higher (which I don’t even think is located in the fourth level anyway). See the blocks in front of the skeleton dragon? If you break those before you get the key, you’re in BIG trouble, because now you have no way to reach the key. If the dragon is already dead and you break those blocks, you have soft locked yourself. The game is over and you have to reset from the beginning. If the dragon is not dead, you have to damage yourself using the dragon in a way where you pop upward and collect the key using the knock back, but it’s nowhere near as easy to pull off the knock back trick in the MSX game as it is in the NES game.
I’m 75% sure there’s a second potential soft lock in “Stage 17” where a player can render the game impassible if they collect a key before breaking blocks somewhere else on the map to create an escape route. The silver key is located behind the blocks to the right of the base of the stairs, but there’s no way to get out of the area unless you do other things first. I activated this one too, and while I think you can probably die on purpose and restart, I didn’t try it and just restarted the level from my save state.
This is inexcusable design and a critical failure of play-testing, but I think it’s even worse than that. Both potential soft locks feel kind of deliberate, like they were a planned part of the challenge. So either this is a deliberate design concept that nobody in their right mind would come up with or it’s just an example of why play testing is so crucial. Here’s the thing: I believe that a player’s natural instinct, in any game like this, is to smash every single block they see. Does everyone agree? Players shouldn’t expect to be able to end their entire run by breaking one block. Well, I did it, and if I hadn’t been using an emulator where I could rewind this mistake or load a prior save state, I would have been so furious beyond imagination. But it also feels like this is something a player could easily do by accident. First off, collision is NOT PERFECT. Second, if you have a boomerang weapon and try to smash the candle that’s right there in front of the blocks, you’ll break the blocks and that’s it. This is really bad design, and if you don’t have the means to play with an emulator that features rewind or save states, I don’t recommend even trying this game. This is completely unacceptable game design. Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION: USING AN EMULATOR
WITH SAVE/REWIND OPTIONS
Believe it or not, the red skeletons are probably the most threatening enemies in the entire game. They move super fast and they come back to life super fast.
Make sure you throw down plenty or save states or have your rewind set that it can go back several minutes. Did you? Cool. Let’s pretend those two soft lock sections aren’t a big deal, because they really aren’t if you have a nice emulator. I’m not trying to be wishy washy, but we’re not in the dark ages anymore and soft locks can be undone. So, what do I think of Vampire Killer overall?
I stopped and counted to ten and then carried on, and reminded myself that I genuinely enjoyed the maze-like levels.
Keeping it real, a lot of the appeal in Vampire Killer is from a novelty point of view. It’s just so different, for better and for worse. And there’s a lot of “worse” in the conversation. The famously elegant Castlevania combat and enemy design just isn’t here. The actual action of Vampire Killer is pretty sloppy and it lacks the PUNCH that the NES games have that made their combat so satisfying. So most of the appeal, at least for me, is playing a game that’s like an alternative universe version of what is one of the most important games of my life. One thing about the NES Castlevania is it has very conservative level layouts that rely heavily on fine-tuned enemy placement. The MSX game isn’t like that. It has genuinely ambitious level design, which often feels downright puzzle-like. Of course, it can also be so haphazardly done that you can end your game by breaking a single block. Ambition comes at a price.
In my first attempt to beat Dracula, I had the blue boomerang, and I missed catching it during the first phase and had to jump up and whip at the jewel on his forehead with the goddamned leather whip one shot at a time. Eventually I died from the stream of bats. I rewound the game and tried again, missed the boomerang, but I figured out how to block the bats. After a few minutes, I’d barely put any damage at all into Drac himself. Nuts to that. I reloaded the level and found the knife, and then I allowed the continuous stream of bats that he pukes out to knock me back while facing the correct direction (since the ledge doesn’t have enough room to turn around), and that’s how I finished it. It’s worth noting this is easily the hardest of the 8-bit Castlevania games and, if you attempt to play this cleanly, be ready for a game that plays dirty and is still kind of janky. I couldn’t do it. I tried, folks, and Vampire Killer ate my butt.
There’s a voice in my head saying “oh come on, Cathy! If this were any other game, would you be so quick to forgive that god awful soft lock design?” Okay, fair, and the answer is “probably not.” But Vampire Killer isn’t any other game. If the charm of a one-off novelty-like Castlevania experience knocked my socks off, why wouldn’t that apply to other fans? I make no guarantees here, but I think it’s worth checking out at least once if you’re a fan of the series. And I’m not giving it a pity YES!, either. I really did enjoy the level design for 16 out of the 18 blocks. I enjoyed the search for the keys. I enjoyed playing a Castlevania game that’s played one screen at a time and does things other Castlevania games don’t do. There’s a f*cking door maze in this game, for goodness sake!
In fact, the door maze is part of the soft lock room. Now, this will require you to have a keyboard or unlimited button remapping, including the ability to map keyboard controls to game controllers. If you don’t use the ROM patch that I used, this requires players to press UP and DOWN, at the same time. It’s assumed that players are on an MSX with a keyboard right in front of them, and with directional keys, you can easily press UP and DOWN at the same time. Oh, it’s a very inconsiderate and sloppy design, but mind you, for those players using a keyboard, UP is also “JUMP.” Because I’m insane, I tried playing the first level using a keyboard, and I spent the next minute kissing my controller and telling it I will never take it for granted again. I would have taken it even further, but I assume controllers come to life when nobody is looking, Toy Story-style and I don’t want it to judge me.
Hey, I like door mazes! Isn’t it kind of weird Castlevania has never really done a lot with them? They seem like they would lend themselves to the haunted house vibe, and it’s not like I wouldn’t have enjoyed the maze a lot if not for the sour note that ended it. So, I really liked Vampire Killer when it didn’t play as dirty as any game ever has. At the end of the day, after years of being curious about Vampire Killer, I’m actually happy I put in the time to finish it. I can’t say that about Simon’s Quest or Castlevania: The Adventure. Just don’t expect a masterpiece, because Vampire Killer certainly isn’t. Okay, fine, it’s a novelty. But hey, gaming is a big tent, and novelties have their place in it. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest aka Dorakyura II: Noroi no Fūin Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Famicom Disk System Released August 28, 1987 (FDS) November 24, 1988 (NES) Directed by Hitoshi Akamatsu Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection
If you’re saying “hey, wait a second, I don’t remember that map in the game” I would advise you to read past my verdict as I talk about quality of life ROM hacks, including the one I used for this review.
Disclaimer: I used a quality of life ROM hack for this review, but one that I feel didn’t fundamentally change the developer’s intent. There was no rebalancing of the experience system or the rate of hearts being dropped, no enemy rebalancing, no level design changes, and no changes to the items. The big changes were quicker day/night transitions, a better translated script, and more invincibility frames when you get hit. For the full review on the ROM hack I used, “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit, keep reading past my main verdict. NOTHING in the ROM hack I used changes how I feel about this game, so this is my definitive review of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, a game I’ve been putting off reviewing for two years.
Castlevania II has some of the worst Metroidvania-style maps in gaming history. Just totally nonsensical design that neither lends itself particularly well to exploration or action. There’s moments like this, where the path branches out into two paths that will eventually merge anyway, and the commonplace enemies just shamble back and forth instead of having enemies tailored to this area of the game.
Put yourself in the shoes of director Hitoshi Akamatsu and the team behind Simon’s Quest. When the original Castlevania was nearing completion, they must have had some idea that they just created an absolute masterpiece and legitimate contender for the best game on the Famicom/NES up to that point. Not only that, but in Castlevania, they had a game with obvious global appeal and sequel potential up the wazoo. A game that lends itself specifically to sequels from a development point of view, since Castlevania is a LOT simpler than most people realize on face value. It nailed the theme, combat, item design, enemy design, and enemy placement (a seriously underrated factor towards any game’s masterpiece status), but it also features level design that’s actually fairly conservative. Hell, there’s a stage that doesn’t even have a single pit to jump over. The boldest it gets is in the final stage, which is by far the shortest. So they left a LOT of room to grow while staying within a traditional linear format.
Later, you get Dracula’s ring. I wasn’t sure if I was trying to slay him or marry him.
While I admire this sequel’s ambition, it feels like it tries to be too big for its own britches. Simon’s Quest is a very early, very primitive example of a Metroidvania. The irony is, it would be the franchise’s next attempt at this formula that would cement the “Vania” part of the genre’s name with Symphony of the Night. That tells you everything you need to know about how successful Simon’s Quest was despite the fact that it predates Symphony of the Night by just under a full decade. I’m sure they made this game with the best of intentions, but it’s actually remarkable how the direct sequel to Castlevania, a game that got pretty much everything right, manages to get nothing right from a gameplay perspective. It strips out everything that made the first game fun EXCEPT the theme and the most basic combat. It’s fascinating for sure, and it’s also got fans out there which (shrug) I mean, everything has fans. Joe Dirt had enough fans that Crackle did a f*cking sequel to it. What I don’t get is how someone who loved the first game can feel any connection between the two games that isn’t purely superficial.
This is the type of confusing thing that doesn’t bother me. When this came out, especially in the United States, the poor translation made some of the items confusing on how they worked. That sucks and I feel sorry for gamers back then, but it’s not 1988 anymore. There’s strategy guides, like the one I used that’s so useful I got the best ending on my first attempt, though I admit I used rewind to undo false floor GOTCHA traps. But hell, even emulator-based cheating shows that players have plenty of options for solutions if they get stuck or jerked around by the game design. The question I’m asking with this review is “how good is Simon’s Quest when you strip away all the bullsh*t and get down to the nitty gritty gameplay?”
And I’m not even talking about the infamous mistranslated script with its obscure hints, or the agonizingly slow transition from day to night that interrupts gameplay. I just played a version of Simon’s Quest without those things. Once upon a time, they might have been a problem, but after playing through this twice for this feature without those factors, I’ve come to the conclusion they were never *THE* problem. And the Metroidvania formula obviously isn’t a bad idea since the franchise would get its second wind via that genre in the 90s and 2000s. The problem is there’s a total lack of polish to Castlevania II that’s likely the result of a very short development cycle. This was released less than a year after the first game, which is insane given the scope and ambition they had for Simon’s Quest. Instead of just making your way from Point A to Point B, you now have to do things like kneel at a lake while possessing a specific color crystal ball, which will cause the screen to lower and reveal a hidden pathway. Re-read that last sentence. Doesn’t that sound like a game that took at least a year-and-a-half to develop, and not a matter of months?
I won’t claim there’s NO satisfaction in seeing this happen. It’s a cool reveal! I just wish they’d taken their time with the entire quest. You can’t do a 100 meter dash with a game this ambitious!
The rush job explains the total lack of polish and lack of fine-tuned enemy attack patterns and placement. The result is Simon’s Quest is a game with no tempo or flow to it. This can also largely be blamed on the Metroidvania format, which they clearly didn’t know how to build around. For example, the leveling-up system is based not on killing enemies but picking up the hearts they drop. The problem is enemies don’t always drop hearts. While I have no objection to using RNG for currency or item drops, I don’t like the idea of experience points being all-or-nothing RNG random chance. It’s bad game design to leave luck up to heaven. It really doesn’t help that the variety of enemies doesn’t work in a Metroidvania. With one or two small exceptions, none of the enemies feel particularly optimized for the environments they’re placed in. The enemies feel completely arbitrary and often don’t feel like there was much consideration for logic in their design, locations, or attack patterns. Too many just kind of shamble back and forth. The only time I ever felt a sense of danger in the entire game were a few moving block jumps.
Near the end of the game, I was still only up to level three even though I slayed every enemy that I crossed paths with. This meant enemies were especially spongy. As a result, I found myself grinding on these guys, who had high full-heart payouts, to get my level up, and in doing so, I almost cost myself the perfect ending. I beat Dracula as a level 5 (max is 6) on the seventh day/night cycle, which is the very last one that scores you a perfect ending. By the way, that shield I’m holding is actually Dracula’s rib. Of all the bones in the human body, that would not be my first choice for a shield, but I never found Dracula’s hip. Sasha the Kid: “maybe they meant it’s his RIB CAGE and they screwed that up too.” Okay, I can buy that.
What’s strange is that the XP system actually does have a thoughtfulness that’s designed to eliminate the potential for screw grinding. Once you beat enemies in a certain section, they won’t fill up your XP anymore regardless of whether they drop hearts. You have to be near where the next mansion is at, or maybe even inside the next mansion. Also, enemies you’ve already fought become stronger as the game goes along. These are positive ideas, but the cast of enemies just aren’t as fun to battle in these environments. Maybe if they had cut and pasted the entire Castlevania 1 combat system it could have worked, but they didn’t. The whip is back, and although it’s still kind of satisfying, it doesn’t feel quite as impactful as Castlevania 1 or Castlevania III’s whip cracks. Complementary sub-weapons like the axe or boomerang are gone completely, while the holy water loses its combat effectiveness and becomes actively annoying thanks to being so heavily incorporated into the exploration elements. Only the dagger really carried over from the first game, and that’s by far the item I enjoy using the least in Castlevania games. Go figure, right?
One of the new items, the diamond, is just really weak and lacking in the satisfaction of unleashing boomerangs or the axe. It just sort of bounces around. Meanwhile, the sacred fire is overpowered as f*ck. I beat the game with it.
But I think it’s really the level design that drops Simon’s Quest into gaming’s sewer. These are boring maps, and without the pitch perfect enemy placement of Castlevania 1, the sense of claustrophobia the first game had is completely missing. I didn’t really mind the confusing navigation or the backtracking so much. If you use the most optimized game route (I used StrategyWiki to guide my way) there’s really only one MAJOR instance of backtracking and a couple small ones. That’s not too bad for the Metroidvania genre at this stage of its existence. Okay, so I can’t imagine trying to figure any of this stuff out without a guide or a ROM that told me the name of the location I was at, but the days where gamers have to do this stuff blindly are a thing of the past. The problem is there’s only a small handful of sections where I sat up in my chair and said “now this kind of feels like the original game” like seen in the screenshot below.
I won’t say Castlevania II NEVER feels like Castlevania I. Right here, there’s something about the timing of when these fishmen pop out that makes me feel like I’m finally, at long last, playing a sequel and not a spin-off. And yes, since I couldn’t find any other place to talk about it, shout-out to the historically awesome soundtrack. One of the best on the NES. But I don’t play games to listen to music. I play games to play games. Good music can only make a good game better, but it can’t make a bad game better. At least that’s how I feel.
The object of Simon’s Quest is to navigate your way to five mansions to locate body parts of Dracula. Or four body parts and his bling since the last thing you get is the “ring of Dracula” though as Sasha the Kid pointed at, maybe the ring is attached to his severed finger. This actually isn’t a bad idea (I mean the mansions, not Dracula’s finger being stuck in a ring, which is gross, Sasha) but the execution is beyond pathetic. I’m guessing they were aiming for Zelda or Kid Icarus-like dungeon mazes, but they all look basically the same with slightly different colors. There’s also only six total enemies that you’ll ever see in the mansions, not counting the two, yes, TWO bosses total that appear before you fight Dracula. The main two enemies you’ll encounter are skeleton knights and knight-knights, which are functionally the same in that they just sort of patrol back and forth. Two enemies, spiders and slime blobs, appear in the overworld. There’s also hopping devils that shoot projectiles and run of the mill Castlevania bats. That’s the entire roster of mansion enemies. I think that by itself assured the mansions would get old fast and Simon’s Quest would get a NO!
It’s safe to say the primary strategy used by the skeletons and knights in the mansions is to force players to walk into them on the stairs. That’s so unimaginative and boring, which is totally in contrast to, again, everything the first game did. Castlevania I *did* use this concept, but it had more going for it. Castlevania II just keeps leaning heavier and heavier into it. Mind you, Castlevania staples like mummies, ghosts, and the Medusa heads are in this game, but not in the mansions.
Because of the low variety of enemies and the lack of architecture to make one mansion stand apart from the other, they don’t feel like events. Hell, the mansions have absolutely no personality at all. I was F*CKING PUMPED every single time I reached the front gate of a new one. The entrances look like you’re doing something big and important.
No notes. Okay, well, maybe a note. They needed a sign to tell you the name of the place, and maybe they could have done a little more to make the fences look unique.
But the contents inside let me down every single time. They’re complete f*cking slogs to work your way through. Beating a dungeon in Legend of Zelda feels like a big deal. Beating mansions in Simon’s Quest feels like busy work. You’ve got a sacred flame, Simon. Just burn the f*cking building down and grab the bag with the relic in it. It’s not like there’s anything else to do inside of them! Okay, so you have to find and purchase an oak stake to collect the relic, but even that is botched. Even though you can only carry one oak stake at a time, you can prepay for the next mansion’s stake after collecting the relic. The stakes should have been like the big keys in Zelda, IE unique to each mansion. Even if you pretend like that’s the case, the locations of where the stakes are purchased inside the mansions have no sense of discovery about them. They’re usually in arbitrary spots, with only one or two placed in a way that makes it feel like consideration was given towards incentivizing exploration.
This is a great example of Castlevania II’s development team not understanding how to handle progress. The above screenshot shows me getting the flame whip, which is the best weapon in the game and the final upgrade of the whip. This should be a huge, huge moment that’s built towards. There should be a boss fight attached to it, or a quest to retrieve macguffins associated with it, or hell, at this point I would settle for making it the most expensive item in the game since there’s really not a whole ton of sh*t to buy. Something, anything to make the morning star feel like a big deal. There’s none of that! It’s a free upgrade that’s just in the middle of an arbitrary spot. The best thing I can say is the backdrop is unique, but so what? It’s nuts that the people who did such a great job pacing Castlevania 1, to the point that it feels like it was calculated by f*cking NASA, didn’t understand how to present or pace these moments. And don’t tell me it’s because they swapped genres, because big moments in games should have an intuitive lead-up to them. You don’t just spring them on players like this. You build suspense. It’s storytelling 101.
For the most part, mansions are built around sprawling, dull layouts that rely on placing enemies at the top of staircases in a way where you have to wait a long time for them to move out of the way, or false floors. Castlevania II has an obsession with false floors. The only way to really tell if a floor is fake or not is to throw holy water at the ground (you have an unlimited supply of it) and if it goes through the floor, you know to jump over that spot. This is unjustifiable. I swear to you that I hate going back to this point over and over, but the first Castlevania cut a tempo like few games ever did, and here’s the sequel telling players to heel-toe it while gingerly throwing water at the ground like the flower girl dropping pedals at a wedding. It’s unimaginable that they believed this was an effective way to build upon Castlevania’s foundation. And it’s not like the level layouts would be fun without this. In the second mansion, “Rover Mansion”, the level is basically divided into two sides, and the side you start on has NOTHING in it. Okay, so I need to use a map that I’m borrowing from StrategyWiki that was originally created by Procyon. I added the arrow and circle.
Rover Mansion. Not pictured is Fido Mansion and Spot Mansion.
You start Rover Mansion in the bottom left hand corner, where the base of the arrow is. Everything in the circle is a gigantic, winding dead end. The idea is supposed to be that players will eventually discover a false wall. Except, as far as I can tell, there’s no practical clue towards this. I went through every bit of dialog in the game and nothing points towards this. It has to be discovered completely organically by throwing holy water at every solid surface until the player sees one of the jars pass through it. I have NO objection to that, besides the fact that it sounds kind of boring on its face value. What I do object to is the entire circled area in the above map serving ZERO PURPOSE! It’s there only for the sake of a wild goose chase, and that’s just NEVER fun in video games. Granted, they might not have realized that in 1987 and it took games like Simon’s Quest to make that a hard rule, but again, this is the same dev team who, with Castlevania 1, optimized a conservative layout like few games ever have, AND THIS IS WHAT THEY CAME UP WITH? This is some of the least optimized map design in the history of the medium. It’s a bad use of real estate, and inexcusable given what they did with so little in Castlevania 1.
The wall behind me is the false wall in question that’s the key to solving this level. It won’t be the last usage of this gag, but this is by far the least optimized version of it, because it renders half of a level completely pointless.
You can’t even say that sending a player off in a dead end adds to the replay value because it eats up time and could cost players the best ending. Time stops ticking in the mansions. There’s plenty of things that COULD have been done with that area. Why not locate the seller of the oak stake up in there? Why not hide the sacred flame, located in an arbitrary spot on the overworld map, in the furthest dead-end of that area? Why not stick a clue to the false wall being a thing up in there? EVEN IF that would have been bungled in the translation, the dev team isn’t responsible for that. What they are responsible for is a nonsense map, but Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is full of those. What’s becoming apparent is they fundamentally didn’t have a good game plan for creating this interconnected world or building an exploration-based experience. Simon’s Quest isn’t lacking for big events. Things like lowering the lake with the crystal, or summoning a whirlwind to teleport you to a previously inaccessible point of the graveyard absolutely work as big moments. It’s all the sh*t in between that fails as an action game and an adventure game.
Okay, so kneeling for several seconds is not a great means of activation. With events like this, I prefer a single press of the button, which is intuitive, to any form of delayed activation, which isn’t. But the whirlwind does show that they understood, at least on some level, the importance of a big, sprawling adventure having great big “ta-dah!” moments. That’s why I can’t excuse any of the mistakes. They weren’t completely clueless. If they were, this wouldn’t even have been in the game.
And to really hammer home how unprepared and misguided Simon’s Quest is, look no further than the lack of bosses. The first Castlevania was defined by its boss encounters. Even the MSX game was. Simon’s Quest, before Dracula, has two bosses, which appear in the 3rd and 5th mansions. Yep, you have to wait until the game is nearly halfway done before you even encounter your first boss. Presumably they based that on Metroid only having two bosses before Mother Brain. Except, I think the designers of Castlevania 1 should have known better and understood the importance of boss fights and building up to them. TWO bosses? Are you f*cking kidding me? And they’re not even good bosses. One of them is the Grim Reaper, who is the FIRST BOSS IN THE GAME! You don’t even fight him, the actual first boss, until the third goddamned mansion, and he’s a total sponge. The second boss is a spooky mask that’s apparently supposed to be the Castlevania debut of Carmilla. That should be a big deal, except it doesn’t look or feel like Carmilla, or even the skull version of Carmilla that would really debut in Rondo of Blood.
I don’t know if it’s THE worst Grim Reaper fight, but it’s up there for sure.
It floors me that they didn’t recognize the role boss fights played in the original game. And it gets even worse, because they’re not even really framed like bosses. They just appear in the room before the room with the Dracula relic. You can walk right past them since the door isn’t locked. Hell, the music doesn’t even change. There’s no showmanship to them at all. They even respawn after you collect the relic, like basic enemies do! It’s beyond belief that this is what they came up with. In this relatively massive game, THREE bosses, two of which aren’t even given music, and one of which (Reapy McReapface) is basically entirely optional? Because you can beat the game without killing the Grim Reaper. Carmilla has to be beaten because she holds a cross that gates off the entrance to Castlevania itself.
The sad part? This is probably THE highlight of the entire game.
Only the final boss is given the proper weight of a boss fight, but even Dracula himself isn’t very fun to battle. First off, he looks like the Grim Reaper instead of Dracula. Even the kids even said it when I said “hey, who wants to see me fight Dracula?” Second: he’s boring looking in general, but then again, a lot of the enemy sprites are. Third, he’s the easiest Dracula fight in the franchise’s history. I stun-locked him almost immediately with the magic flame sub-weapon and the game ended seconds later. I’ve been saying for a long time that bosses are the metronome of gaming. Simon’s Quest is the proof, because this is a game that feels like it never keeps a beat. In terms of raw gameplay, it’s not close to the worst NES game, but I still would like to nominate it for consideration anyway. They laid the perfect foundation for a sequel and squandered it. Unlike other bad games, they had every reason to do better and no excuses for how bad this is. And it’s HORRIBLE!
“You now possess Dracula’s maidenhead.”
Castlevania II misses the point of the first game so badly that I have to figure this is in the same boat as Super Pac-Man. When you read interviews with Pac-Man creator Tōru Iwatani, it’s plainly obvious he didn’t even understand why Pac-Man was a big hit and chalked it up to “people like to eat” even though there were plenty of other games where you eat stuff. He fixated on “eating is the attraction” for the first two sequels, Super Pac-Man and Pac & Pal and they bombed badly because they featured boring mazes that were unoptimized for chasing and turning the tables (Ms. Pac-Man was made by someone else). It wasn’t until Pac-Mania years later that he seemed to finally realize eating dots was just a means to an end and it’s the chase and the pitch-perfect way of turning-the-tables that made Pac-Man blow up. I assume that’s what happened here as well. I’m guessing Konami and Akamatsu fundamentally didn’t understand what they’d accomplished with the original Castlevania. They probably chalked it up to the whip or the undead setting, but those were a means to an end. Castlevania was a masterpiece because it featured precisely fine-tuned, elegant action that was paced perfectly. All of that is gone here. Castlevania II has no polish and features maps and a game flow that doesn’t seem particularly well thought-out. It could have been salvaged, but they didn’t have time! They wanted to get this out ASAP. My theory is that Simon’s Quest is a victim of gold rush mentality.
You’ll notice a LOT of flat ground in these screenshots. Now, Castlevania 1 is a game that I’ve probably played more than any other NES game and it has a lot more of these straight corridors than people realize, but it can get away with it by utilizing a linear format with PERFECTLY placed enemies, which is to say nothing of the haunted house setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting and the boss fights to serve as checkpoints. You can’t get away with that type of design in a Metroidvania, and especially one that didn’t care one iota about boss fights. The result is a mostly boring landscape to travel.
I get it, by the way and can even see where they’re coming from. You have to consider the circumstances. Konami probably wanted to quickly establish a flagship franchise on the smoking-hot Famicom/NES, which was a new type of cultural touchstone that gamers of 2025 can’t really appreciate. Like, we saw the launch of the Switch 2 this year, right? Now imagine if Switch 2 completely pulled video games from the brink of death to become the single hottest consumer electronics item in the two biggest global markets for consumer electronics and there was a gap of major “brand names” associated with software for the platform. Brand names in this case being franchises. Now finally, I want you to imagine if the Switch 2 launch was as successful as it was (apparently historically successful), only without any established franchises and every hit game being the first game ever in that series. It’s hard to imagine, right? But that’s basically the situation Konami found themselves in with Castlevania.
Simon’s Quest shares blood with The Maze of Galious, a Famicom exclusive they developed which I will review sometime soon at IGC. I have no clue if it’s good or not, but while finishing editing this review, it occurred to me that Konami did do an unsung Metroidvania that I enjoy very much: Goonies II, which ironically I also reviewed (sort of) using a quality of life ROM hack. A full, stand-alone Goonies II review is also coming to IGC because I really want to try to get it re-released. I think it’s fantastic and one of the NES’ most underrated games. It also released half-a-year before Castlevania II did, which shows there’s no excuses for how badly done Simon’s Quest is since Konami knew what a good non-linear platform adventure should look like.
And again, they *had* to know Castlevania was their best piece of software by a country mile up to that point and that it had “marquee franchise” written all over it. So I totally understand the sense of urgency they must have felt to quickly, unequivocally establish the franchise as a brand name that consumers would associate with the world’s hottest brand. Hell, they probably felt being #2 to Super Mario Bros. in terms of direct association with the Famicom/NES was on the table, because it probably was. I don’t think Castlevania was ever that. If you’re an older reader of mine who grew up and went to school in the 1980s and early 90s, I’d LOVE for you to leave a comment and let me know how big Castlevania was among you and your friends in terms of status. Because I think that’s what happened here, and their plan didn’t fail, whether I liked Simon’s Quest or not. It was released just weeks after Super Mario Bros. 2 and sold pretty well, and Castlevania is a famous gaming franchise in the 2020s even with children who haven’t seen brand new Castlevania games in their gaming lives. Simon’s Quest played a part in that. And I’m not naive. I know Dracula’s Curse, my favorite NES game, was as good as it was because they had to make up for Simon’s Quest. We don’t get Castlevania III as good as it is if they don’t completely, utterly, epically, stupendously f*ck up Castlevania II first. So if nothing else, thanks for that, Simon’s Quest! Verdict: NO!
If it was *me* bringing Dracula back to life by assembling his dismembered body, including his heart, I think I would take a sh*t in Dracula’s heart before I started the re-assembly ritual. It’d be messy and gross, especially in the centuries before wet wipes were invented, but it’d be worth it. Then he comes back to life and is like “I, Dracula, prince of darkness, have returned! I vill now conquer zee world using my army of….. vhat are snickering at? Vhat’s so funny, Simon? Vhat, do I have a booger in my nose? And vhy is my chest so lumpy? Vait….. Oh no! Vhat have you done?! YOU SICK SON OF A VITCH!”
BONUS: QUALITY OF LIFE ROM HACK REVIEW
I already knew I hated Simon’s Quest going into this review. I’d tried playing it multiple times for an IGC review, and I just hate the f*cking game. But, it’s one of my most requested reviews, and it is Halloween and it’s tradition for me to do Castlevania games for Halloween. If I MUST do Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, I wanted to be able to examine the game at its peak potential, which meant utilizing a ROM hack. The problem is, there were SO MANY quality of life ROM hacks for Simon’s Quest to choose. It has to be one of the biggest bad games that people have tried to fix, and the volume of ROM hacks is pretty overwhelming to sort through. I wish I had time to review them all because I know how hard the ROM hacking community works, so I’m going to encourage everyone to check out ROMHacking.Net’s Castlevania II page. I went through the list and selected “Castlevania II English Re-translation (+Map)” by bisqwit. I chose it because bisqwit’s translation is cited at places like StrategyWiki and the Castlevania Wiki, and because his version of the game seemed to include the most quality of life upgrades while staying truest to the original intent (IE not improving heart drops, rebalancing enemies).
Bisqwit’s effort not only includes the map above and better translations of the text, but a fully done original prologue. Holy smokes! This goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that I kind of want to give bisqwit a hug, but hopefully being featured in one of my most requested reviews will suffice.
I intended for this to be my definitive Simon’s Quest review and the last time I ever play Simon’s Quest unless Konami puts out an official remake. So please keep in mind that the NO! verdict was not for Bisqwit’s ROM hack. He did a fantastic job improving a game that is, simply put, terrible and I’m bestowing an honorary YES! verdict to his work. If you’re a fan of Simon’s Quest, you’re weird, and also you really should check it out, along with other quality of life efforts for Castlevania II. By the way, I salute the entire ROM hacking community for their hard work. I seriously love and admire all of you and wish that more gaming media covered your work, but as long as I’m around, I intend to use my platform to spotlight your work. So, what made this version of Simon’s Quest different? The biggest change is the transition from day to night is instantaneous. Here’s what it (and the map) look like:
He also added more invincibility frames (what I normally call “blinking”) and the ability to jump off stairs but I didn’t even realize that and never used it until after I’d already beaten the game. Those are the only real efforts towards rebalancing I believe bisqwit did, and he also added a save system to replace the password system. Finally, the dialog is properly translated. Apparently some characters are meant to lie to Simon and provide red herrings that aren’t helpful to players, and I have no problem with bisqwit not changing that. He stayed true to the developer’s intent, whether that intent was stupid or not. The clue books you find in the mansions are much more clear, and you can go back and re-read them in the menu. Even the sign posts are better handled. Here’s some examples of the new dialog, which is based directly on the original Japanese text:
I’m grateful for his effort, because it confirmed to me that my problems with Simon’s Quest are related to nonsensical level design and terrible pacing that goes far beyond a slow transition from day to night. The version I played altered NONE of the level design, enemy difficulty, heart drop rates, experience system, etc. I’m confident that nothing I covered in the main review is going to be different whether you play the normal retail version of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest or the version I played. So what’s here WAS my definitive review, and I’m glad to finally be done with it. This game sucks, but bisqwit’s effort does not. Thank you again bisqwit for your effort! YES! to your patch, even if the game itself is still a NO! And seriously, compilations need to do things like this. There is nothing inherently sacred about old versions of games and including OPTIONAL quality of life fixes is ALWAYS worth the effort, even if the game isn’t that much better for it.
Castlevania: Bloodlines aka Castlevania: The Next Generation (Europe) aka Vampire Killer (Japan) Platform: Sega Genesis Released March 17, 1994 Designed by Teisaku Seki Developed by Konami Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription
To be honest, I’m surprised the enemies don’t mistake you as an ally. John Morris is built like one of those flea men wished upon a star and became a real boy.
This is my fifteenth review related to Castlevania, and hell, that doesn’t even count all the games inspired by it, for better (like Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon) and for worse (like Master of Darkness). Yet, I don’t think I’m close to running out of things to say about one of my all-time favorite action franchises. Good thing, because I’m not really close to running out of Castlevania games to review, either. And it IS an action franchise, or at least that’s why I’m into it. The awesome undead settings and bonkers mythos is just a bonus, because it’s the combat and the pace and the often clever enemy design and placement that keeps me coming back. I love the whip, and the boomerang and holy water and axe and the predictability of it. This is a strange thing to say about a game where you fight skeletons and the Grim Reaper itself, but Castlevania reminds me of slipping on my robe fresh out of the dryer. It’s comfort, in gaming form. I wanted to note that because Bloodlines is probably the most traditional and conservative Castlevania that also counts as “one of the weird ones.”
Boy, did I lose my sh*t on this part, because my up-to-this-point perfect run ended because I went right instead of left before the screen scrolled up enough to show me I was going the wrong way. I’m certain that I’ve played Bloodlines all the way through because I remembered certain aspects of the Grim Reaper and Dracula battles, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember any of the levels, even though there’s a couple spots that seem memorable. I’ll chalk it up to the bug zapper in my head.
Unique to the franchise, at least at the time this came out, is that this Castlevania was set in the 20th century, with the idea being that a witch accidentally re-alived Elizabeth Bartley, who is based on Elizabeth Báthory, who probably did kill a lot of people but the tales are largely exaggerated. No, she didn’t bathe in the blood of people to stay young, which does NOTHING for your looks anyway and makes you stink of iron for about a week though don’t ask how I know that. Those stories were first reported well over a century after the fact. There’s a modern effort to prove she was framed and the victim of a politically motivated smear campaign, but all the evidence says she killed between 30 and 300 girls, for which her reward is being the Lenny Luthor to Dracula’s Lex in the Genesis version of Castlevania. Which proves there’s no divine justice because a crime like that warrants being the second-to-last boss of Castlevania Adventure for the Game Boy.
Only the fourth level feels like it builds upon the war setting, and it does this by leaning into the camouflage colors, putting up some chain link fences and donning the skeletons in army helmets. Meh.
Why all this REALLY matters is because Bloodlines is set during World War I and has far and away the most unhinged story of the franchise. Get this: according to Bloodlines, it was actually Bartley who assassinated Franz Ferdinand using sorcery and started the Great War so she can use all the souls collected from the casualties of the war to bring back Dracula. Talk about devotion. All that effort to bring back one evil guy with an uncanny knack for coming back from the dead only to immediately die again at the hands of a family armed with what is really just enchanted cow hide on a stick when you stop and think about it.
Bartley also doubles as one of the most boring Castlevania bosses ever. You just smack her back and forth before her magic balls ripen.
Like so many other ideas in the franchise, the World War I setting sounds exciting, but doesn’t really amount to all that much. Only the fourth level, which has a couple steel drums laying around, reminded me “oh right, this is a 20th century setting.” Not that you should ever play Castlevania for the story because it’s too silly to take all that seriously. But I guess I was hoping for something like the Grim Reaper driving a tank or Frankenstein (excuse me, “The Creature”) in a biplane. It feels like a missed opportunity, and it’s not like this game was afraid to embrace the comically absurd silliness. One of the bosses is a downright playful set of sentient gears that I’d swear is more like a boss from a Toy Story game.
It’s a hard boss to get a good screenshot of, but this is the Pixar-like boss and you can sort of make out its body in this shot. It’s very animated and has a playful personality too. I actually felt bad killing it, so naturally the game makes you do it a second time during the home stretch. Now whether or not a boss that can be described as “whimsical” belongs in a game where a woman starts a war that killed twenty million people to bring her cousin back from the dead is another matter. Hey Thanos, if Lady Death spurns your wooing, I know someone who would probably be into you!
So ignore the theme, because this is a mostly boilerplate Castlevania with six levels, but a lot more bosses than levels. And I say “mostly boilerplate” because when this Castlevania experiments for one section of the final level, it’s completely out of its mind. I don’t even know how to describe the pictures you’re about to see, except to say I thought my emulator might have been broken at first.
In a nutshell, the screen is divided into three horizontal slices that aren’t in sync with each-other. The best I can describe it is like playing Castlevania in a fun house mirror, and it’s VERY confusing and disorienting, and I sort of like it and I sort of think it’s the worst idea ever. It’s rare that something is both those things, and I think the problem is it’s just not staged right. It doesn’t work as a set-piece because it’s in the room right from the start, so it feels like a glitch, when what they were REALLY aiming for, I think, is for it to sort of feel like a prototype for Eternal Darkness’ insanity effects. This really needed a graphic of Bartley casting a spell after the room starts to show what is happening. The same with the upside-down room that follows. It’s not the same as the famous “slam scrolling” from Dracula’s Curse, because that’s a very intuitive set-piece. This looks like something is wrong with your television in a bad way. It’s a magic act with only “the turn” and no “pledge” or “prestige.” So what should be a dazzling set-piece is reduced to confusion.
What’s especially frustrating about how badly they bungled those “magic trick” rooms is that they’d already shown they knew how to set up a high concept set-piece (well, for Castlevania) in this very game. I really thought this whole sequence was fantastic, and it’s staged correctly. There’s a lead-up with these blocks that’s a typical Castlevania style challenge and kind of mundane, then it starts raining these blocks, and it does it in a way that keeps you on your toes AND you don’t know where they’re going with it. The sequence then stops and returns back to normalcy in the same room. That’s how you do it! You have to lull a player into those types of gags. You can’t just do it willy nilly.
Is Bloodlines a good Castlevania game? Sure. It does Castlevania mostly right with few surprises, but few mistakes as well. Okay, so the Grim Reaper/Bartley fights were disasters. Actually, let’s just call level six a disaster saved by a decent Dracula fight, even if they gave Dracula’s final form the world’s most menacing vagina. SERIOUSLY WHY DID THEY DESIGN HIS CROTCH TO LOOK THAT WAY?! THEY EVEN GAVE IT LIPS, FOR F*CK’S SAKE!!
Probably literally for f*ck’s sake. I’d say “a little penicillin will clear up whatever form of demonic clap that is” but he was raised from the dead about a decade too early.
And there’s a second character, Eric, who uses “Alucard’s Spear” and he’s just not as fun to use. The stick has less OOMPH to it, so the combat’s satisfaction is significantly, dare I say catastrophically, muted. Thankfully he’s completely optional and I think a single run through the game with main character John Morris should be enough for any fan, though Eric’s addition did require one brief branching path that feels like a last-second band-aid more than something that was planned out. John Morris (son of Quincy Morris of the Dracula novel’s fame) can swing with his whip, something I didn’t realize until I reached this section where I reached a gigantic, unjumpable gap and was like “how the hell do you get past this?”
Answer: this way.
Meanwhile, Eric can do the Super Mario 2 charge jump thing, but the charge jump thing doesn’t move Eric horizontally. It’s basically only good for jumping directly above you, though you can jump VERY high with it and even bypass entire sections of the game with it. Of course, since you can’t swing and you can’t move horizontally, Eric can’t get past the room in the above screenshot, so what to do? Well, in the room BEFORE that room, you have to spring-jump up a series of slanted platforms.
Eric often looks more like an exotic dancer than a hero, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hell, I feel like someone should stick a $20 in his underwear. This is seriously the most erotic review I’ve ever had.
I wish they had optimized the game JUST for John Morris, because they clearly didn’t. The whip swinging goes largely underutilized presumably to accommodate Eric. It’s like, if you go to all the trouble of programming a whip swing, you want a lot more than one or two notable usages out of it, right? I got a LOT more usage out of Eric’s exotic super jump. Like, these rooms with gigantic clock gears that are one of my favorite Castlevania tropes? Yeah, they’re a little on the janky side in Bloodlines and I had trouble working them with John Morris. But Eric could just circumvent it by springing up to the target platform and ignoring the gears entirely.
Did I have fun? Sure. Do I get why this is so beloved? Uh…….. Kind of? Hell, my friend Matthew calls it his favorite Castlevania (well, “arguably” his favorite which I think means “I know, I know, but..”) and that made me stop and think how this ended up THAT. I think a lot of it, along with the idea that Bloodlines is one of the “weird ones” is tied to this being the first Castlevania for a non-Nintendo platform (if you don’t count MSX or Haunted Castle in the arcades). By the time I got deeply into gaming in 1998, the idea that Nintendo and Sega were at war seemed downright quaint, but now that I’ve got amazing friends who big parts of Sega during the SNES/Genesis war, I do get it, because I know how proud they were to land Castlevania. How earned it felt for them. Castlevania was a huge prize for Sega to nab, and for a lot of gamers, this was their first Castlevania. I’m sure to Nintendo, it felt like a shot across their bow. None of that matters in 2025 though. Bloodlines is not a great Castlevania game, and it’s not even a weird one. A deeply flawed one? Sure. But it’s also a good one. No arguments there. Verdict: YES!
If you live in Europe, this didn’t happen and so you should be cool and not read the following joke. I won’t be held responsible for warping your brain. If you live in the US, proceed. Ahem. “What the Red Cross does with their blood overstock.” Really, I feel Europeans probably could have read that and lived otherwise normal lives. Censorship is weird.
Castlevania: Rondo of Blood aka Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo Platform: PC Engine Super CD-ROM² Released October 29, 1993 Directed by Toru Hagihara Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Requiem (PS4 Exclusive – $19.99)
I could just skip the review and note that I spent all night getting a 100% completion. I did a complete run with both Richter and Maria, then had to go back and figure out what I was missing, which took a while, but I never got bored the entire time.
It’s been nearly six months since I reviewed Castlevania: Dracula X for the Super Nintendo, which is sometimes called the SNES remake of Rondo of Blood. Friends, I assure you that it’s just not true. In terms of level design, Dracula X is much, much closer to a remake of the original Castlevania than it is to Rondo, no matter what Wikis tell you. Hell, I’d go so far as to say Dracula X is even closer to a remake of the original game than Castlevania Chronicles, a game that’s all but advertised as a remake of Castlevania 1. The “reimagining of Rondo of Blood” is largely based on Dracula X reusing many of the same sprites from that game. Here’s a few comparison shots, and remember that Rondo is always on the left and Dracula X on the right. Here’s the giant bat:
Rondo of Blood
Dracula X
Here’s the headless guy:
Rondo of Blood
Dracula X
In case you didn’t know, the TurboGrafx-16, despite the name, is an 8-bit console running a slightly modified version of the same CPU the NES and even Atari 2600 have. That’s oversimplifying it, of course, as the TG-16 has a few extra things that make it much more advanced than any other 8-bit console and allows a game like Bonk’s Adventure to be more colorful and have bigger sprites than its NES counterpart. Furthermore, the Super CD-ROM² add-on gives the PC Engine/TG16 additional resources to pull from. Specifically, it quadruples the frame buffer from 64kb to 256kb. BUT, this is still an 8-bit console, so I’m not sure if this is more of an impressive win for the 8-bit Rondo of Blood or an embarrassing loss for the genuinely 16-bit Dracula X, which really doesn’t look THAT much better, if it looks better at all. Here’s the werewolf, and honestly, I think the 8-bit platform wins in a landslide in terms of atmosphere. Certainly spookier than the faded/washed-out look of the SNES game.
Rondo of Blood
Dracula X
The SNES has more detailed backgrounds, but the character and enemy sprites themselves are usually identical. Not universally so, as Dracula has an entirely different model, but common enough it’s a little startling. It’s not just looks, either. The attack patterns of bosses and basic enemies are often similar, if not identical. That’s not a bad thing, since the bosses (except Dracula himself) were the one aspect of Dracula X I was able to praise without qualifying it. Bosses in Rondo feel climatic, helped by having a “last hurrah” final attack after being defeated. But, some of them, especially the werewolf and Dracula himself, were big improvements over the SNES game. I’ve often said that certain games, good and bad, should be shown in game design courses. I’m not kidding when I say Rondo of Blood and Dracula X should be an entire course in game design on their own. These two games together prove beyond any doubt that the difference between a historically amazing game and a game so pedestrian that it’s boring can be more subtle than you might realize.
Seriously, this one off set-piece style enemy is a cinch to get past, but it certainly wakes you up.
In fact, all the best aspects of Dracula X are here and, if they’re not identical, they’re BETTER on Rondo. In addition to the bosses and enemies, the item crash debuted here and it’s fun. The key and locked doors are in both games but mechanically, Rondo does it better. So I can get why people would call Dracula X a “reworking” or “reimagining” or even a “remake” of Rondo, even if the 16-bit game is actually a huge downgrade. But, the most important thing is that Rondo is darker and scarier than Dracula X. Some might disagree with me, but I think that Castlevania, for all its silliness, should always be played sincerely and try for spooky, not corny. Here’s one final “same boss, different game” comparison shot. You tell me, which one feels more scary looking?
Rondo of Blood
Dracula X
It’s much more accurate to call Dracula X an “asset flip” and a lazy one at that. Having now closely examined Rondo of Blood, I think I’d be inclined to be even more harsh on Dracula X than I already was. Dracula X now feels like little more than one of those mean-spirited Super Mario ROM hacks that ramp-up the difficulty with no vision beyond being a bastard for the sake of it. It feels obvious now that the team behind Dracula X played Rondo, copied the best parts, but fundamentally didn’t understand why those bits were the good stuff. That’s the classic ROM hack problem in general. The bad ones are ones by developers who aren’t deeply interested in the why of game design.
The opening stage, a tribute to Simon’s Quest, is the best thing to come out of that game. This is a memberberry done right.
If it seems like this review is more of a continuation of my Dracula X review, well, blame Rondo of Blood. It’s hard for me to do my job when a game doesn’t give me many flaws to work with. I really wish I had played Rondo first, because I think I would’ve had a better time laughing at how they completely screwed the pooch on making a worthy “Castlevania X” Nintendo release. It wouldn’t have made the game better, but it sure would have made the experience better. I was so bored playing Dracula X: a slow, uninspired game that’s obsessed with cheap shots, and certainly not worthy of reusing the sprites from Rondo of Blood, a game that lives up to its towering reputation. Hell, the only major knock I have on Rondo is the art direction of the cutscenes. Richter looks fine, but I just can’t take the threat of Dracula seriously when he looks like the world’s most douchey douchebag. Seriously, Count Chocula is more scary than this dweeb.
Look, I’m not trying to be shallow and/or superficial because that’s the type of thing that gets a person cancelled these days, but I have my limits. I can suspend my disbelief and buy that the Grim Reaper works for Dracula when logically it should be the other way around. Whatever, it’s Castlevania so sure, death incarnate lets Dracula call the shots. But what I cannot believe is that the Belmont family wouldn’t take one look at THAT guy and say “you’re adorable, Alucard, but I’m here to kill your pops. Wait, YOU’RE Dracula? No. No, you’re not scary! You look like the villain in a deodorant commercial!” I could believe a guy who looks like that is someone who would deliberately give you the wrong answers on a finals test so that he wins valedictorian. I could believe that’s a guy who would plant a bra in his best friend’s car in an attempt to break up his relationship and steal his girlfriend. I could believe that’s a guy who would start a whisper campaign about you not being a team player at work so he gets the big promotion instead of you. That is the face of someone who is clearly evil, but in a smug, underhanded, douchey kind of way and not in a “I will call on the forces of darkness to raise the dead and take over the world” type of way. Evil, but not EVIL-evil, you know?
Rondo of Blood just works better because it’s not designed around enemies trying to score one-shot kills, which Dracula X was heavily invested in. The level design is instead optimized for a faster-paced Castlevania romp. That’s surprising, because, like Dracula X, Rondo is still a back-to-basics Castlevania game for the most part. To put it in perspective, when you play as Richter, all the basic sub-weapons except the stopwatch and bible only cost one heart. This is a game that was made to be fun and not because the designer has some vendetta against humanity. Like the best Castlevanias, it’s fun to play just for sightseeing, with plenty of memorable settings and basic enemies, none of who are too spongy or too cruelly placed to make progress ever feel slow.
Ever wanted to whip one of the spiky ball chains? Now, you can, and it doesn’t just reverse direction. I was caught off guard when it behaved kind of realistically and was hard to get past. It’s that extra effort towards immersiveness in the level design and enemy design that makes me so frustrated with the cringey cutscenes.
Hell, I think this might even be one of the best games to introduce someone new to the Castlevania franchise. It’s not that hard a game, actually. The enemies are consistently fine-tuned to such a degree that it’s genuinely surprising when you encounter the rare spongy one. Even then, they’re usually staged in a way where they have an almost mini-boss feel. It’s actually remarkable how often Rondo takes what would normally be a flaw in a lesser game and turns it into a positive. If you’ve been intimidated by other classic-style Castlevania games solely because of their reputation for difficulty, give this one a try. In addition to some of the most balanced combat in the entire franchise, Rondo offers plenty of life refills and 1ups. If you die, while you lose your sub-weapon and your hearts are reset to 10, you’re not totally screwed, either. That’s because there’s no whip upgrades, yet every single enemy feels like it’s balanced properly to be slain by the default whip.
The only aspect that I feel isn’t well balanced is the bible sub-weapon. It has so much range and power that it’s essentially a low-cost item crash. If the cutscenes aren’t the worst problem with Rondo, the bible is because it’s too overpowered. Three hearts is just not a steep enough cost for an item this effective, and it even has a low cost (ten hearts) item crash.
While I can’t say with complete confidence that the bosses are also perfectly optimized for the whip, you will always have a chance to get at least one sub-weapon before entering a boss chamber. While you can still cheese the bosses if you have enough hearts to execute an item crash (and some cost quite a bit. One is a whopping FIFTY hearts!), it never feels like you’re cheesing it. What makes it even better is that Rondo’s defensive game is equally satisfying thanks to a variety of dodging moves. Enemies telegraph their attacks in a way where there’s always enough time to activate the backflip move. It takes practice to get the timing down, but it’s so satisfying when you successfully utilize it. I wouldn’t say this is a kinder, gentler Castlevania, but it offers the right amount of grit with almost none of dick moves Dracula X or any other Castlevania game ever has pulled. This might be the most balanced game in the franchise.
In my first playthrough, I lost three total lives from damage, two which were at the hands of the boss rush sequence that makes up the entirety of level six. It’s actually inspired, because the first four bosses are directly lifted from the original Castlevania. They don’t play the same, as Medusa has a body instead of being a gigantic head, there’s only one mummy instead of two, and The Creature doesn’t have Igor with him. I survived all of them, but I lost the final battle against the guy who resurrected Count Draculahaha. A guy named Shaft. I’m resisting the temptation to break out into song.
And this go around, the branching path system works a lot better than the half-assed effort made in Dracula X. Actually, the most damning observation of that game I have now that I’ve played through Rondo a few times is how half-assed the branching paths in the SNES “version” are. They seem to only be in Dracula X because Rondo leaned very heavily into the idea and they needed some token representation to say “see, this is totally an upgraded Rondo! It’s got an X in the title and a couple hidden paths and everything!” But whereas Dracula X’s paths feel arbitrary and out-of-nowhere, Rondo’s mostly have an elegant logic to them. Every start-to-finish game of Rondo (you open up a level-select option in the main menu after beating the first stage) will consist of playing eight levels, but each of the first five levels has secret pathways. The secret pathways aren’t that hard to find and usually contain an alternative boss which then leads to alternative levels, which, once again, have hidden paths, and so forth, and so forth. For example, in the first level, you go here:
And you get a different boss fight than if you just keep following the normal pathway and you’ll get a different second level. So, it’s not like Castlevania III where you choose a different path between levels. Now, to be clear: I prefer the way Castlevania III did it, and I’d really prefer the option of playing all the levels in a single run. If there had been a ROM hack that allowed this like the one I experienced when I reviewed Dracula’s Curse, I would have taken that option after finishing the real game. Of course, it wouldn’t work in this game without somehow rearranging the level layouts. The themes and enemies for roughly half of each of the first five levels and their alternative route counterparts change depending on which path you take. But, when the level design is THIS outstanding, I feel something is lost when you’re forced to replay it instead of them naturally unfolding. But, if a game is going to be designed with the branching paths in the levels themselves, this is probably as perfect as the concept gets.
Sometimes there’s more than two paths to take. There’s a LOT of secrets in this game, including a few one-off hidden rooms. I’m fine with that. Unlike Dracula X, Rondo feels like it’s fully based on exploration and secrets instead of just shoving a couple token ones into the game because the popular game it borrowed assets from had them.
The most noticeable secrets are that four maidens are hidden in the game, the first of which is Maria Renard, who is a playable character. The method of saving the maidens is much easier than in Dracula X, where one key had to be held for multiple doors. In Rondo, there’s three total keys, each of which is used once, in the level you found it in, and not too far from where you found it. With that said, I guess that would be the biggest strike against Rondo: you never know if a pit is actually a pit or the secret path. It happens more than once, too. There’s no way to spin that as a positive if the emulator you’re playing on doesn’t have quick save/quick load or rewinding because you have to just plug your nose and jump blindly while searching. So there, Rondo isn’t perfect. Unless you have a good emulator.
Apparently, not every “hidden path” actually goes somewhere. If there’s a point to this room, I never figured it out. I got a 100% completion so I guess the game just wanted to show where all these flea men riding cannonballs were coming from.
The replay value comes from a very enjoyable alternative character. Maria is unlocked in the second level, though you have to go back to the main menu to switch to her. She’s radically different from Richter, throwing doves at enemies instead of a whip. Richter gets a defensive backflip move, while Maria gets a double jump. She also can do a sliding move, but I never found any situation where it was more effective than jumping. Even a situation that seems tailored specifically for it didn’t work. The mummy in the boss rush stage throws blocks at you and, even though it appears high enough off the ground to slide under, the slide doesn’t work for it. Whatever. Her double jump works fine enough as a defensive move. Maria’s sub-weapons are all animal-based as well, including throwing a goddamned dragon at enemies, which is the most powerful sub-weapon in the game. But even throwing a cat at an enemy is both effective and hilarious, as the cat relentlessly attacks. It’s what my cat would do, even if it wasn’t fighting the forces of evil.
The item crash with the cat is some Power of Grayskull sh*t. Well, HONOR of Grayskull in its case. By the way, Maria apparently has a Street Fighter-like special move, but I was never able to execute it.
I know that a lot of the appeal in my reviews is talking about the flaws in a game, but the truth is Rondo is close to being without flaw. The unskippable cutscenes are easily the most annoying part, regardless of whether or not you know Japanese. In case it wasn’t clear from my tirade above, I really don’t like the art style. I don’t get the direction of it at all, really. It doesn’t match-up with the in-game graphics and really only breaks my immersion. But, fast forwarding through a handful of agonizing cutscenes to play a Castlevania that doesn’t really make any critical gameplay mistakes is a very small price to pay. I guess I was disappointed that the level that’s hidden until after you beat Dracula once doesn’t have a boss fight. Seems kind of lame for a Castlevania game, but even Dracula’s Curse does that too. Sigh. Rondo of Blood really is close to being criticism proof, especially with emulation trickery used to speed-up exploration. I can’t say enough good things about it. This was such a treat to finally sit down with.
OH HEY, there’s part of a bad level! Actually, the river rafting sequence doesn’t even qualify as bad. It’s just very bland, especially when compared to the rest of the game. It needed to be trimmed by at least half.
A lot of the time, famous Japanese exclusives that never got released globally during their original life cycle are really overrated. I’ve played several of them at IGC, from Super Back to the Future Part 2 to Magical Quest 3 to Wai Wai World. Rondo is the rare Japanese holy grail that actually deserves that status and it’s an absolute travesty that it took so long to go worldwide. It got a Wii Virtual console release fifteen years ago and a PSP release a little further back than that. It was also included on the already long out-of-print TurboGrafx-16 Mini, which kind of got hosed by a limited production run and incredibly poor timing as it was delayed due to the pandemic, which is a shame because it was arguably the killer app for it.
“Hey, haven’t you ever heard of guest rights? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT ONLY APPLIES TO THE HOST? No, it doesn’t! Wait. Yea, you’re right. I suppose it is right in the name. It ain’t called Host Rights, after all. I guess you’ve got me there. Well, next time I resurrect, I’m going to YOUR home to kill you. See how you like it when the shoe’s on the other foot, jerk! Oh, you won’t open your door for me? Hmmmph, rude! I always open my drawbridge for you! Where would you be if I didn’t do that? Kissing your family goodbye right before I enslave humanity, that’s where!”
Hell, Rondo would be the killer app for any collection. Konami could just as well slap a $4.99 price tag on it for Xbox and Switch owners and make a killing. So, why in the hell is the only available release a PlayStation exclusive? Now granted, Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood is a contender for best retro two-pack on the market today, but come on, Konami. The cutscenes aren’t THAT embarrassing. Okay, fine, they are, but that doesn’t explain why the hell you gave us Dracula X in Castlevania Advance Collection instead of this masterpiece. I thought THAT was evil, but then you put Haunted Castle in Dominus Collection instead of Rondo, and now I know true evil. Verdict: YES!
“Yes, it vas I who put the sugar in your boyfriend’s gas tank, causing him to be late for school and getting him detention. Now you’re free to go to zee prom with me! Muhahaha! Truly I am the lord of evil! WAHAHAHAHA! Vas zat over the top? So vat do you say? Pick you up at 7:00? Does 7:00 mean 7:00 or are you one of those chicks where you say 7:00 but you’re still doing your hair and we leave at 8:00? I’m only asking because my hair gel starts to flake after a few hours.”
Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō Platform: Famicom Released January 5, 1991 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
It looks like it’s going to be so much fun. Sigh.
Hoo, boy this is awkward. A lot of my friends have very different taste in games than me. While I was suffering through the first Wai Wai World, people I like and trust assured me that the sequel would be a lot of fun and to not worry about it. So, I didn’t. I really did have faith this was going to blow my socks off. Well, my socks are still firmly attached to my feet and I’m so darn butt hurt about it I could spit nails. So, it falls to me to knock YOUR socks off. Let’s see if this statement does it. Ahem. I really hated the first Wai Wai World, but I’d rather play it than this sequel because this is one of the most boring competent games I’ve ever played in my entire life. Wai Wai 2 is mechanically fine and it’s dull.
Instead of the possibility of playing as every character in a single run, you’re limited to only three of five Konami all-stars, which are.. you know what? F*ck it. There’s no point in even saying what characters are included or what games they’re from because they don’t feel anything like the original characters.
This is NOTHING like the first Wai Wai World. That’s all I really knew about Wai Wai 2 going into it. I never looked at a screenshot, and if I played this when I ran through hundreds of NES ROMs a few years back, I don’t remember it. So, when I saw the look of the game, my first visceral reaction was “eww.” It’s not what I was hoping for. Wai Wai 2 reminded me of Kid Dracula, which I liked just fine. It’s an okay game, but that art direction worked for it, and I’m over it. For this franchise, I wanted something that resembled the sprites from the Konami library, not hyper-cute versions of them like Kid Dracula did. It’s what the first Wai Wai World did and what I thought I was signing up for. But, I kept my mind open, at least until the gameplay slammed it shut with one of the most intolerable opening stages ever.
Look! It’s the guy from Contra! I mean, it doesn’t look like him or play like him even a little bit. You can’t even shoot the gun diagonally. None of the iconic power-ups that made Contra an all-time classic are along for the ride, which would be the only reason anyone in their right mind would want to play as the guy from Contra in a non-Contra game. Allegedly the spread gun is here somewhere, but I didn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have helped in THIS game. Even with just the basic gun, he’s so overpowered that he takes what little stakes there are out of the game completely. Calling this the Contra guy is jiggling a key chain at its worst.
Unlike the first game, this is a completely linear ten level genre mash-up that opens with one of the slowest auto-scrolling platform stages I’ve played. An introductory stage that has no excitement at all. I’ve never used the fast forward function on my emulator as early as I did here, and then I kept going back to it because there’s so much dead air where nothing is happening because the screen isn’t so much scrolling forward as it is eroding forward. I’m not a big fan of auto-scrolling platforming in general. I can tolerate it, but not when it’s this slow and nothing happens. The enemies are easily dispatched and the game continues to inch forward. When the stage was still going on minutes later, even though I frequently fast-forwarding, mind you, I really started to become afraid the whole game would be like this. When the second stage allowed me to actually do the scrolling, it was such a relief. “Well, at least the auto-scrolling is finished.” And then, later in the game, this happened:
By the way, that robot is the main character, with all the Konami all-stars being like power-ups you switch to.
That is a screenshot from the slowest and most boring auto-scrolling stage in the entire history of video games. LOOK HOW SLOW IT SCROLLS! Who the hell play tested this? Did they think it was exciting? Did they think this was fun? Now, the stages where you actually do the scrolling aren’t the worst levels in game history, but they are very boring. The designers seem to have overcorrected the difficulty problem of the first Wai Wai World, because this sequel is completely toothless. I never died once during the platforming segments, even though I was braining myself on the spikes in the slow-moving swimming stage above. Besides one boss fight, I don’t think I ever had more than one or two hearts worth of damage. I can’t imagine playing this co-op, because it sure seems like one of the two players is going to have nothing to do for all but one level. There’s not enough meat in these levels for one player, let alone two.
I feel like this is the embodiment of the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme. I too recognize that scene with three coffins from Castlevania III. Jiggle jiggle.
Instead of switching on the fly between the different characters and using them to get past character-specific obstacles, this is just a pure, mindless action platformer where the all-stars are glorified power-ups. You collect an item that turns on a meter that swaps between the three icons of your Konami all-stars loadout. When you press UP and A on the one you want, you switch to that character for the next sixty seconds. Oh, and you’re now invincible. For sixty seconds. Not even fast counting Punch-Out!!-like seconds, either. Granted, if you take damage, it takes a few seconds off the countdown. That doesn’t matter though. This is a seriously cinchy game. I’m not even kidding when I say this is like a baby’s game.
Most (if not all) platforming bosses can easily be beaten by mindlessly slashing at them. I’ve found that a reliable barometer for how mindful a game’s developers are of the type of game they’re making can be found in how much effort a boss takes to dispatch. If you can literally walk up to one the first time you ever play it and, without making any effort to dodge its attacks, defeat it by simply mashing a button with no regard for how much damage you’re taking by doing that, that’s usually reflective of the game being a product of developers who simply didn’t give a sh*t. Don’t mistake what I just said for easy. It’s not the same. An example of an easy boss is the first Bowser in Super Mario Bros. You still have to actually have timing, especially the first time you ever fight it. Some proactive step has to be taken instead of just not caring what happens to you because you’re going to outlast it regardless.
But even if you do take damage while wearing one of the all-stars, there’s so many power-ups that start that meter. Even if you’re already wearing an all-star, you can start the meter going by grabbing an item, wait for the count down to get low, and activate it for the same character again. By the end of Wai Wai 2, the game is giving you the items for that meter seemingly every screen, allowing you, in essence, unlimited invincibility. On top of that, there’s “health boxes” which reset the timer to 60 seconds. Someone got paid for this idea, and someone else got paid to say “good idea!” to that person, and someone else got paid even more to agree with the second person and green light the first person’s idea.
In addition to the platforming segments, there are also a bunch of one-off distractions from the mediocre platforming along the way. Like, the lead-up to the Castlevania stage is basically Frogger. It lasts under a minute, but it’s better than anything in the platforming stages. And for you shmup fans, don’t worry, I’m getting to that. It’s the only good part of the game.
Of course, having so many of these all-star switchers are probably there to accommodate co-op because, as always, co-op ruins everything. Even taking co-op into consideration, the game abandons the idea of the items being special by the end of the game. I couldn’t keep up with all the meter-starters in the last few levels and didn’t bother trying, but they seem to have forgotten about the 60 second timers. I don’t think I took a single hit of damage for the back half the game, at least in the platforming stages. It’s like Wai Wai 2 gets stuck in God Mode, and God Modes get old fast. You just can’t design a game like this and expect it to be enjoyable, you know?
This would have been neat if Kid Dracula didn’t also do a similar Castlevania, only with much more fun play mechanics. Or if I want to play something like Castlevania, I could just, you know, play Castlevania. I thought the point of Wai Wai was to play Castlevania with the Contra guy, and it’s actually THE Contra guy, with the sprites from Contra and the controls from Contra. That’s the game we all want, right? That’s quirky and weird, especially if you play it completely straight.
I feel like they just had the wrong overall concept for the platforming bits, which make up over half the game. It’s such basic, generic level design with no-frills combat. The closest any Konami game comes to this isn’t actually Kid Dracula. It’s the NES Tiny Toons, another overrated Konami game that’s all style and no substance. What was even the point of doing a sequel to Wai Wai World that doesn’t feel even a little like the first? I didn’t like it, but it does have fans and, at the very least, I’m very intrigued by the concept. I feel like this couldn’t possibly appeal to whatever fans the first game made, but at the same time, this feels so disconnected from the other Konami characters being honored that I’m not even sure why they bothered with this game at all. The platforming stuff is all pure digital boredom and I have nothing positive to say about it, but at least there’s a couple very, very good shmup stages.
A comically gigantic version of the iconic Big Core MK I from Gradius is the highlight of the entire game. It’s very cool and actually very challenging. When I wasn’t capturing screenshots, I lost several lives fighting it. You’d swear these segments are a different game entirely. They basically are. Crying shame that they’re stuck in Wai Wai World 2.
Unlike the first Wai Wai game, the shooting stages actually feel like the real games that inspired them. Specifically TwinBee, which is the third stage and Gradius/Salamander, which is the eighth stage. Both of those are “branching paths” but what that means is if you play the game a second time (or reload a save state to return to the level select screen, which is what I did), you can play a different course. This only happens with the shmup stages. I don’t know why they didn’t cut or merge some of the platforming stages and then have every other stage be a shmup, since they’re really fun. I’m not so much into TwinBee, but it’s alright and so are its levels in this. But I’m a huge fan of the whole Gradius format, and both the stages and the encounter with the giant Big Core are every bit as good as the franchise deserves. It’s basically a slightly less silly version of Parodius.
I literally sat up in my chair when the game transitioned to third-person in the TwinBee section, but it was a massive letdown. This is only a bonus stage that feels like After Burner, and all you do is get bells, and here, you can only juggle the bells into one color instead of many. There’s also no enemies. I was really hoping for a boss fight. I’m about to play somewhere around a dozen TwinBee games for a Konami Shmup Definitive Review, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, as long as it does more.
There’s one other branching-path segment that allows you to choose between doing something that kind of resembles a sliding puzzle, only without the normal sliding puzzle rules, or a car driving level. The puzzle was bizarre only because, while you solve it, you occasionally have to switch the position of a character that has a train heading for her. It’s not hard and just adds busy work to the puzzle experience, but it was different. The car level was somewhat close in both look and feel to the Autopia level from Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, which is shockingly one of the most popular reviews I’ve ever written. It controls looser, has projectiles, manual jumps, a boss fight, and it’s much more challenging, but it still feels similar. In fact, when I reached that stage, I wondered if Magic Kingdom was the game that inspired Wai Wai 2. Magic Kingdom had large, hyper-cute characters and basic platforming. The difference between the two games is that one is the platforming is just better done in Magic Kingdom. No boring auto-scrolling helps.
It’s not hard to figure out why Wai Wai World didn’t take as a franchise. It feels like the first game created an amazing set of blueprints to build off of. You never know! Who imagined after playing the first Grand Theft Auto that it would go on to become one of the biggest things in gaming? For all we know, Wai Wai had that breakout potential, and Konami squandered it by seemingly choosing a team that didn’t get the joke of the first game. The idea of a dead-serious cross-over like Wai Wai World is kind of funny by itself. The first game would have been charming if not for the plethora of technical problems. This sequel isn’t charming. It feels like it’s trying too hard to be irreverent and quirky. Going over the top with the wacky sprites and completely changing how the roster of all-stars is implemented so that they no longer feel remotely connected to the games they came from feels like it betrays the entire concept of the first game. And the designers didn’t even stand by their convictions, because they stuck so closely to the TwinBee/Gradius formula for those stages that they feel like they were stolen from other games instead of belonging to this one. I think a ROM hack could save the first Wai Wai World, but this? I don’t think it came from a place of inspiration. It feels cynical, and I can’t forgive it for that. Verdict: NO!
I honestly forgot this was in the game. After the auto-scrolling in level one, you do this shmup section where you can shoot both ways. It’s as forgettable as the platforming segments.
Konami Wai Wai World Platform: Famicom Released January 14, 1988 Designed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Really should be NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED but technically a mobile port was released in 2006.
Wai Wai World has two MAJOR problems that I couldn’t get over. This is the first:
Hug the screen to scroll.
Enemy already in shooting animation, leading to automatic damage.
No, I don’t mean Simon Belmont fighting a dragon from the Goonies. Hypothetically, that’s cool. What’s not so cool is how much you have to hug the screen to get it to scroll. I can’t say for certain it’s solely responsible for Wai Wai World getting a NO! (spoiler alert) because this is a generally problematic and boring game. But it’s impossible to know, because the combat would be transformed by normal scrolling. What do I mean by that? Well, the game that Wai Wai is most often compared to is Castlevania. The Wikipedia page says gameplay is, quote, “very similar to Castlevania.” VERY similar. Folks, it’s just not true. I hate it when Wikis say crap like this. Those completely generalized “the game is a top-down maze, so it’s essentially like Pac-Man or Bomberman” type of comparisons like with the PC Engine version of Batman. Do not go into this thinking you’re playing a Japanese exclusive Castlevania that lets you also play as Goemon and Mikey from The Goonies.
Few non-RPGs have as many ROM hack translations out there as Wai Wai World has, but you really don’t need a ROM hack or know Japanese to play it. The walkthrough at StrategyWiki should be more than enough. You might need the slot machine to bring back dead characters, but I never lost a single person. Well, I did but it was BS so I rewound it. What?
Wai Wai World has the stairs from Castlevania that are essentially identical to the ones from the first Castlevania and that’s where the similarities end. The combat doesn’t feel like Castlevania. The action doesn’t feel like Castlevania. Hell, Wai Wai World doesn’t even feel like Castlevania when you’re in the Castlevania level playing as Simon Belmont and fighting skeletons and Dracula. I’m not kidding. It feels like a bad bootleg of Castlevania, and it’s from the same company! That is one of the most f*cking astonishing failures of game design I’ve seen in my life and worthy of mockery, but I’m going to play along anyway and use Castlevania as an example. So, when you’re scrolling the screen in Castlevania, where are you on screen?
IN THE CENTER OF THE SCREEN! And where are you in Wai Wai World?
You’re closer to the side than you are to the center.
Because of the scrolling, combat is lacking in the elements I think the average player seeks from action games, like excitement, catharsis, or a worthy test of your skills. Most of the time in Wai Wai World, enemies are sprung on you, and if they have the capability of firing a projectile, usually they fire and as soon as they appear. For a lot of them, their attack conveniently is measured perfectly to match the exact length of distance between you and the edge of the screen where you scroll. How lucky for them. So, as you scroll them into existence, they fire and you take a hit that you can not react fast enough to avoid. It’s nothing but a GOTCHA and a life slap.
The design is universally crap. That heart had actually been on the ground and in a treasure chest. By the way, as far as I could tell, the only thing in treasure chests are life refills. But, for whatever reason, only Goemon can open the chests, and when he does, the heart flies up in the air before landing. Throughout the Moai statue level, there’s multiple hearts placed within reaching distance that immediately fly up in the air to an unreachable platform. Even hearts that come from chests disappear relatively quickly, and as far as I could tell, you don’t have enough time to touch the chest with Goemon, scroll through the characters to reach Konami Man or Konami Lady, jump up in the air while holding down the button so you can enter your flying mode, then fly up and grab the heart, which only refills the character who is selected anyway. It’s so trollish. Maybe it’s a co-op thing. I dunno, but this game has a mean-spirited attitude in general so I assume these were meant as jokes.
While life refills are plentiful via random drops, that’s not the point of an action game. There’s no sense of tension because the enemy has already spawned and damaged you before you even know there is an enemy, and so all the action is kind of retroactive, as if combat comes with a life tax. It takes the joy out of making progress, because you’re in a state of hyper-vigilance whenever you’re moving forward, especially as the enemies become more dangerous. If you become low on health, you essentially have to heel-toe forward until you rebuild your health because no amount of skill can protect you from enemies who spawn into existence already in their attack animation right in front of you. At one point, I did find my entire roster critically low on health and resources in the Hell stage, and it sure as heck wasn’t fun. I assume the scrolling was done this way to accommodate co-op, which Wai Wai World offers. It isn’t more fun with two players, especially for the person who goes first and does the scrolling. It just goes to show that arbitrary co-op ruins everything. And I’m not even entirely sure it’s the WORST problem.
Here’s the second major problem with Wai Wai World:
In that picture King Kong (yes, King Kong. This game is weird) is successfully landing a punch. LOOK HOW FAR AWAY I’M STANDING FROM THE THING I’M PUNCHING! And this isn’t one of those games where that works only one way. You can’t use sprites to suss out a safe distance between enemies and the bullets they spray because the collision is universally horrendous. That, combined with the fact that most attacks have no middle frames of animation, make Konami Wai Wai World a game completely lacking in cathartic combat. There’s no OOMPH to the attacks, no sense of violence at all, and thus no immersion. You feel like you’re playing a sloppy-ass game that wants to be quirky without any of the actual charm or effort that made Konami an elite NES developer in the first place.
Even the space shooting level that happens before the final level isn’t good. This feels like a bad knock-off of a Konami space shmup. Even the boss at the end feels like it’s a deleted scene from Life Force that was cut for extreme lameness.
It’s just not a fun game to play, or to explore. Rather than being Castlevania, which I can’t stress enough this is nothing like besides the staircases, this is much more like The Goonies. Not the excellent NES sequel Goonies II, but the first one that never got an American NES release. The combat especially feels just like it: flimsy and lacking in weight. If you’ve not played Goonies 1, instead think of this as a poor man’s Zelda II. Specifically Zelda II’s dungeons, which the levels in Wai Wai World are very similar to in structure and feel. Only, there’s no hub-world and instead you use the starting screen on each stage and hidden warp zones to return to the game’s Mega Man-like level select screen.
I probably shouldn’t have used this picture because hot damn, that looks fun. I just played Wai Wai World two and a half times and know it’s a terrible game, and my brain is still telling me “look at that! Golly, that looks good!”
The basic gameplay idea is you start with the superheroes Konami Man and Konami Lady, and you have to go around looking for keys in stages that allow you to unlock the star of a Konami game that’s trapped within the stage. There’s six in total: Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Mikey from The Goonies, Goemon aka Mystical Ninja, the hero of the Famicom exclusive Getsu Fūma Den (which I’ll try to review in 2025), one of the Moai from Gradius (one of 76 games reviewed in Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review) and King Kong from another Famicom exclusive called King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch (again, I’ll try to get to it in 2025). After you save them, you do a single shmup level with Vic Viper from Gradius or the TwinBee. It’s one of the most random lineups ever, but it’s not like Konami in 1988 had a deep roster to pull from.
Dracula isn’t even a boss in the Castlevania stage, but he’s a major nuisance who absolutely spams the screen with bullets. Do you see the armor next to him? You cannot get it until Konami Man and Lady have the ability to fly. If you play the game by the universally suggested order, Castlevania is the 2nd and 7th of ten steps. Unlike a lot of Wai Wai World’s problems, this is one that I get what they were aiming for, but having the stuff just laying around doesn’t lend it that air of importance. They really needed to implement the items in a way that felt more eventful. There are some big bosses that drop keys and one even directly unlocks a new character, but it’s not enough.
It still sounds like such a neat idea, but after a while most of the characters feel too samey. Goemon stands out because he attacks almost diagonally. Simon stands out because the whip has reach. King Kong stands out because his collision box seems King Kong-sized. But, besides Simon’s whip, none of the basic attacks feel radically different, and thus none of the characters feel radically different. You’ll want to rely heavily on sub-weapons for combat. The sub-weapons use one point of ammo, except Simon’s boomerang which uses five points (that was the smartest design choice they made because three can be thrown at a time and it’s very overpowered) and Fuuma’s ninja stars, which cost three points. Each character has a sub-weapon hidden somewhere in their level, but you probably won’t be able to get a few in a single run through their stage and will have to return later. Wai Wai World has far too much backtracking, some of which is optional, and some of which isn’t.
I had to use my standard safety configuration of sitting far from the screen and drowning out the room with lights while fighting bosses because of epilepsy concerns. I figure I should use this space to remind people that I’m partnered with AbleToPlay to help spread awareness of photosensitivity, which is going to be an issue for older games. Wai Wai World wasn’t always bad with it, but damaging bosses leads to my specific trigger of bright, white flashing. Go support AbleToPlay and sign up to help curate information on risky games, or games that are suitable for people with limited motor functions, or colorblind players, or deaf players. It’s a great idea and I’m so down with it.
For example, the easiest level in the game is Feudal Japan, where Goemon is. Find the key, slay a dragon, get Goemon, who has the highest basic attack of any character. Trust me, that comes in very handy for the rest of the game. However, in order to get Goemon’s lucky cat sub weapon, you need to have the Konami Mantle. That’s a cape that lets Konami Man and Lady Fly, which also makes them lay down and stretch out their arms heroically, which allows them to squeeze through tight spaces. The Mantle is located in Hell, which in order to get into the majority of the stage, you need King Kong, since only King Kong can jump high enough to get past one specific jump that blocks off the majority of the stage. King Kong is located in the big city. In order to enter the majority of the Big City’s stage, you need Mikey from the Goonies because only he can fit through the tiny hole that blocks off the majority of the stage.
This is where it gets kind of silly. Mikey is the only one who can fit through this hole, which appears early in the Big City stage. It’s a tried and true Metroidvania trope of “find the thing that lets you get through the small gap.” It can be done well. I have no objection to the morphing ball in Metroid. I can believe that makes total sense. But, for Wai Wai World’s suspension of disbelief to work, you have to make believe that none of the other characters can crawl. Crawling, otherwise known as that thing that babies do. And that sh*t in the picture isn’t exactly morphing ball-sized. It’s a teenager-sized gap. You mean to tell me that Simon Belmont, slayer of vampires, the man who walked into Castlevania and didn’t immediately run back out when he saw walking skeletons and the literal personification of death, can’t duck his head just a little bit to save the f*cking world? Really?
So, you have to go to the Goon Docks stage and get Mikey in order to get King Kong in order to get the cape in order to go back through a level you already beat once just to pick up a couple things you missed before. Some games can pull off this kind of design mentality, but Wai Wai World can’t, because the gameplay’s lack of excitement renders the backtracking and replays a complete slog. If the combat along the way had been good, I might have been talking about this design being genius, but instead, Wai Wai World is just so boring that it’s insufferable. It’s so frustrating because I really do get the sense that somewhere in this disaster, there’s a great video game.
The game ends on a Metroid-like “everything is blowing up” escape. You’ll want to use Konami Man or Lady and just fly through it, because if you mess up only once, you won’t have enough time to finish.
Switching characters is too clunky, as it’s done spontaneously by holding up while pressing the A button. That was silly, because it forces you to jump as you change, which causes a lot of problems in the heat of battle. You can’t pause and switch characters, which would have helped. Changing from your main weapon to the sub-weapon is done by holding down and pressing A. If only there was one specific button on the Famicom/NES controller you could use to help SELECT which character you wanted. A select button, if you will. Well, this is once again a foible of the co-op. The Famicom’s controllers are hardwired into it, and the second player controller is lacking START and SELECT buttons, and thus the crappy swapping system Wai Wai World has. Say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. Why couldn’t they also have SELECT switch characters for those of us playing single player? Because guess what? They did do that, sort of! You can use select in the shmup stage to switch between the Gradius ship and the TwinBee ship.
Oh, now you’re using a logical control scheme, for one level, at the end of the game? Oh you bastards. You absolute no good rotten bastards. Are we entirely sure this whole game isn’t some kind of practical joke?
Wai Wai’s final nail is that it doesn’t even feel like a Konami NES game. It feels like one of those modern indie games that tries so hard to feel like a popular 80s style generic action game and comes so close that it triggers the uncanny valley. The best example, and this is going to sound like such a nitpicky thing, but just the act of turning around and attacking is totally different here than it is in Castlevania. When I try to turn around and attack a monster that’s right on my ass in Castlevania, I can usually do it. In Wai Wai, I usually didn’t do the “turn around” part and swung my weapon in front of me. The timing of movement and attacking is all wrong, and in a game that’s based entirely around having enemies spawn right on top of you, that’s a mortal wound. You know, I thought I was heading towards a “competent but boring” NO! verdict, but this is actually a very incompetent game. It’s so technically wrong on so many different levels that whatever the hell Konami was aiming for in terms of style and substance doesn’t even matter. You can’t play with good intentions, only the end results.
This part here, where you get Konami Lady’s sub-weapon, is one of the most broken elements I’ve seen in a game. That looks like a normal elevator in the game, but it’s actually a quick-dropping booby trap. So quick that it’s basically an instakill. You have to wait until you get the Mantle to fly down to it. Well, except the gap is so narrow and the collision so spotty that I died anyway several times from the game deciding I had landed and springing the trap when I clearly was not standing on anything. I mostly didn’t cheat playing this, but I did rewind those incidents, because that was straight-up bullsh*t.
It’s really hard to judge creative design like level layout or the potential of enemy attack patterns when the game’s flaws are entirely mechanical in nature. Of all the retro games I’ve reviewed over the last year or two, no game is begging for a quality of life ROM hack as much as Wai Wai World is. I’d LOVE to see a talented, passionate ROM hacker give this game a tune up that fixes the scrolling, collision, and movement physics. Fix two of those those aspects, any two really, and I think Wai Wai World would at least rise to the level of “solid.” Fix all three and, for all I know, this might be a historically fantastic 8-bit game. Wai Wai World is such a mess that I honestly can’t figure out what its ceiling could have been. But, what I do know is myself and everyone else who hears about this game wants it to be better than it actually is. Even as you’re playing it and coming to the slow realization that what you’re playing is actually quite crappy, you still want this premise and these characters to come together and blow you away. I don’t want a re-release of this. I want a remaster, and I want to see what happens. Verdict: NO!
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon Platform: Game Boy Advance Released March 21, 2001 (JP) June 11, 2001 (US) Designed by Koji Horie Developed by Konami Included in Castlevania Advance Collection
Bats are basically just sacks of blood, apparently.
I got Circle of the Moon on the day the Game Boy Advance launched in North America. Oh, I didn’t play it then. Did you ever watch the White Walker battle in the final season of Game of Thrones? Probably not, even if the TV was tuned into it, because you couldn’t see a damned thing. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was kind of like that when it launched. Even after my father installed one of those aftermarket, warranty-voiding light kits to my GBA, visibility wasn’t very good and I still didn’t play it. Actually, because the Game Boy Advance screen was so impossible to see, I didn’t play a lot of GBA at all until the SP and the Game Boy Player (for my younger readers, this was a device that let you play Game Boy Advance titles on the TV via a GameCube) came out in 2003, both of which came with the novelty of being able to see the games you bought. Well, the Game Boy Player did. The original SP was front lit, because Nintendo never admits to mistakes until they’ve exhausted all other possibilities. But, for me at least, the killer app of the Game Boy Player was Circle of the Moon. In fact, I binged the three Castlevania GBA games back-to-back-to-back. And it was a couple of the happiest weeks of what would be a very crappy year for me. So, I cherish the Castlevania GBA trilogy. But, did they age well?
Find the right enemies and grinding can go so quick that it’s kind of shocking. Does it still count as “grinding” if you can get a couple levels in under five minutes?
As the second “Metroidvania” game in the series and the first since the legendary Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon had a LOT to live up to. Circle of the Moon doesn’t attempt to be quite as RPG-like as that game. Actually, it’s more like a noncommittal hybrid of a traditional Castlevania game and a Symphony of the Night-style adventure. While the actual map is massive and sprawling, your only primary weapon is the Vampire Killer whip. Apparently this is not THE whip of the Belmont clan and instead is called the “Hunter Whip” but who gives a f*ck? It’s the Vampire Killer, period, and there’s no permanent upgrades for it and no alternatives. Luckily, the whip is one of the most satisfying of any Castlevania whips, with plenty of OOMPH and a lot of magical spells to buff it and the standard assortment of Castlevania subweapons to complement it. The action is top-notch. Controls really well, too. This is one of those games that plays so well that it completely lives and dies on the merits of the design.
This was my map when I finished the game. Dracula is directly to the right of the first yellow block from the left. With his room filled in, this is a roughly 90% complete map, and I have no idea how many HP/MP/Heart boosts I missed along the way. I didn’t use a guide for them, and actually, I only used a guide for which enemies drop which weapons.
Instead of finding weapons, there’s only armor and accessories which are dropped by enemies. In fact, each individual enemy drops only two potential things, one common, the other rare. I’m not the biggest fan of this design because I hate having this type of thing come down to tracking down lottery tickets. Like, the second best armor in the game is dropped by an enemy that exists only in one specific room. Also, the base drop rate for this armor is 0.5%, and since there’s only one of these enemies in the entire game, if you don’t get it, you have to leave the room and come back and fight it again. Something about that is really inelegant to me, and for this game, I decided not to play along. Instead, I used save states to make some of the drops go quickly. Sometimes it made a big difference, but other times? I’m not at all encouraging you to watch this whole video, but even cheesing the game with save states, it could take quite a while for the item I was seeking to drop.
By the way, the dice seem to be rolled the moment the fatal shot is THROWN, not LANDED, so if you have a boomerang about to kill an enemy on the return trip, reloading the state won’t change whether or not the enemy drops something or not. Speaking of the Boomerangs, they’re pretty rare in this. I’d recommend holding onto them when you first get one because they’re seriously overpowered for all bosses.
Additionally, some enemies drop cards that allow you to cast spells. Unlike armor, card drops happen only once, but if you want to do THAT, logically the first kill against the target enemy should result in a drop. It doesn’t. Lame. There’s two tiers of cards that have to be combined. These mostly enhance your whip. For the most part, I only used two combos, one of which gave me a fire sword and one of which made my whip twice as long. I might switch to one that increased the damage I inflicted by 25% for bosses, but otherwise, I mostly stuck to those once I had them. The problem is the same as the accessories: they’re random drops from enemies. Every treasure that can be found (besides post-boss upgrades) are either upgrades to hit points, magic points, or max hearts you can carry. I didn’t start cheesing the game with emulation trickery until over halfway through the game. If the drop system had been remotely rewarding, I would never have done it. Random drops might be great for the surprise factor, but I can assure you, it gets old. I really think it would have been more satisfying to hide the big armor and accessories as treasures in the castle.
Mercury Card + Golem card ended up being, no joke, my favorite Castlevania whip ever. It reaches nearly half the screen and, although it comes at a cost of speed, it sure made backtracking a lot less painful.
So, this is awkward to say, but I found the RPG elements of Circle of the Moon to be some of the worst in a good game I’ve ever played. Too many enemies that are pushovers pay off too many experience points. Like this room here:
That “frozen shade” paid off so much that I was able to grind up about ten levels in under half-an-hour. It’s not up to players to use the honor system to protect the integrity of the game from lazy design. Designers are supposed to discourage that through challenge, right? Clearly that enemy was not something I was supposed to be fighting then and there. It had easy-to-dodge attacks and, with the fire sword spell and the star bracelets it dropped for me, I was wasting it in four or five hits, before it even fired at me. And since magic refills slowly (another bad choice, in my opinion) I didn’t have to hold back while fighting it. I have no idea how they determined some of these XP totals, but it makes Circle of the Moon one of the most exploitable RPG systems in the entire history of gaming.
One neat thing that it does do is replace weak enemies with strong ones as you make progress, though it waits a little too long to do this, and it doesn’t implement it nearly enough. If you want to put such a heavy emphasis on backtracking, you need more of this. These enemies are at the start of the game, but they don’t show up until you’re nearly finished.
There’s just absolutely no sense of balance, and no balance means no risk/reward to calculate. This is where you have to give turn-based RPGs props. In those, if you encounter an enemy that pays off so huge that you can hypothetically grind out hours worth of leveling-up in under half-an-hour, a punch-for-punch battle would see you go tits-up, lights-out in probably the first attack the enemy got on you. Action games can be that way too, but if you don’t PERFECTLY distribute the enemies or accessories, at some point the opportunity to cheese the game will present itself. Circle of the Moon does that a few times. It’s really badly done in that regard.
Don’t get me wrong: finding the hidden stuff is f’n awesome. I cracked a smile every single time a wall broke.
Now here’s the good news: the level design is mostly pretty good. There’s a ton of annoying backtracking and not nearly enough fast-travel tunnels. According to the game’s clock, it took me six-and-a-half hours to finish the Circle of the Moon, and I’d guess at least a third of that was spent making my way back to areas just to get one previously inaccessibly stat upgrade or find an enemy who dropped a card I missed. If the combat wasn’t so damn satisfying and the level design some of the best in this genre, I wouldn’t have been up for it. Yet, there’s a lot of really weird design choices that made me shake my head. Stuff that shattered my immersion that I was a badass vampire hunter exploring a castle. Like, this for example:
Are you kidding me?
One of the very last items you get from defeating a boss is the ability to shove boxes. Okay, that’s a time-honored staple of the genre. EXCEPT, one of the very first upgrades you get in Circle of the Moon is the ability to shatter stone blocks with a dash move. So, let me get this straight: Nathan Graves (hero of the game) masters the ability to shatter stone with his shoulder before he learns how to push a wooden crate out of the way? I had a spell that turned my whip into a goddamned flaming sword that, by all rights, should have set the box on fire, but I had to wait until the game was almost over to schlep a box? And by the way, they put a lot of those boxes throughout the “levels” of the game, so after getting this upgrade, if you want to boost your stats you have to spend about an hour just making your way to them so you can push them out of the way and pick up the boosts.
When the game is over, you get a series of passwords that allow you to replay the game in a different way, though the hero sprite is still Nathan. Thankfully, you don’t have to beat the game to get these, but honestly, they’re all really boring and feel like the type of challenges that pro gamers come up with to keep themselves amused. The Wizard (pictured here using a spell that turned me into a skeleton) is activated by putting FIREBALL as your name, which is also the name of Angela’s dog. Funny. The wizard is weak in everything except magic, and you start the game with every card so you basically have to magic your way through it. GRADIUS is the fighter, who can’t cast spells but his strength is insane. CROSSBOW is the “shooter” who has weak stats and has to use sub-weapons (including a new version of the dagger) that come at half the cost of hearts to use. This is one of the worst ways to ever play a Castlevania game. Finally, THIEF has weak stats but enemies drop stuff at a significantly higher rate. Sorry, no upside-down castle this time.
In terms of a pure action game, Circle of the Moon is clearly one of the most elite launch games in the history of the medium. It’s actually astonishing to think about: this was a day one Game Boy Advance game. I mean, pity about the vision thing, because the wide variety of enemies, settings, and huge boss fights make this legitimately a pretty good Castlevania adventure. While the RPG aspect is a complete airball in my opinion, the epic scale of the boss fights almost makes up for it by itself. This includes one of the best Grim Reaper fights of the 21st century, a memorable encounter with a gigantic minotaur that’s practically trapped in a pillory, and an even more gigantic two-headed dragon. Sadly, after several top-notch boss fights, the game ends with back-to-back AWFUL fights: the battle against Nathan’s rival, the insufferable Hugh Baldwin (who was originally going to be a playable character) and one of the most sloggish Dracula battles ever. Seriously, the final form of Dracula includes this dashing attack where he’s invulnerable and it’s just the worst. Castlevania: Circle of the Moon sticks the landing about as well as that pole vaulter who landed ass-first on the pole.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Okay, so Circle of the Moon wasn’t as good as I remembered it. Not even close. I can’t stress enough: this WAS the killer app for the Game Boy Player twenty-two years ago. It was the reason I wanted to own one in the first place, and I suspect I wasn’t alone in that. In 2003, at the age of thirteen/fourteen, it felt like it lived-up to my high expectations. But, it certainly didn’t hold-up perfectly two decades later. As great as the map is, it’s not an optimized map. More fast travel points would have been transformative of this game. Hell, just get rid of those and turn the save stations into fast travel points. Why not?
I’m a complete idiot, because it turned out I had the ability to do this much sooner and I just somehow skipped past that card.
Plus, the lack of balance really shows a roughness that I never noticed the first time. Like, the first time I played the game, I beat levels out-of-order because the way you clean the toxic water out of that level is so far away and disconnected from that area that I actually missed it back in 2003. I beat the toxic water level without ever cleaning the water. I just thought it was a really hard stage. That’s on the designers. Actually, knowing where to go next is not intuitive. The first time you play this, expect a LOT of aimless wandering. Thank god for the combat. Circle of the Moon is lucky that Castlevania’s core combat is so bulletproof that you can tack on a terrible RPG system and some haphazard Metroidvania progression and still have a good game. But I’ve been wrong for the last twenty years, because I thought Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was great. It’s pretty good, but nowhere near great. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania Chronicles
aka Akumajō Dracula Platform: PlayStation Released May 24, 2001 Directed by Masayuki Umasaki Developed by Konami NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Castlevania Chronicles appears to be fully delisted from all global PlayStation platforms, but I was unable to confirm this.
Hey, if the Simpsons can get away with Halloween in November, why can’t I?
I nearly did Castlevania Chronicles for Halloween, but I lost interest thinking it was little more than a remake of the first game. Hey, I have much love in my heart for the first Castlevania, but I’ve already reviewed it, so I chose to do Dracula X instead. Besides, I didn’t even have a PlayStation emulator up and running, so all I had was my Vita, wherever the hell it is. I bought Chronicles (or got it with PS+, I don’t remember which) but I don’t remember ever booting it up. Well, Chronicles has a lot in common with Dracula X. They’re both remakes of the original Castlevania. I know that Dracula X is supposed to technically be an alternative take on Rondo of Blood, but I mean.. come on. It’s a back-to-basics Castlevania, only with new level design and “fancy” graphics that are actually pretty damn bland. That sentence is about Dracula X, but it PERFECTLY describes Chronicles, except the bland part. This isn’t just a graphical overhaul along the lines of what Super Mario All-Stars did for the NES Mario games. This has new set pieces, new bosses, removes other bosses (or demotes them to one-off mini-bosses), and features seven entirely (or almost entirely) new levels. And that’s a real pain in my ass because I thought this would be a fun little quickie review to buy me time while I work on the bonus reviews for Tetris Forever: The Definitive Review and it turns out this is a whole new game that I’ve never played before. Well f*ck.
There’s something about fighting a normal Merlin-like wizard that feels completely out of place in a Castlevania game. This is like the type of boss you’d expect in one of the Game Boy Castlevanias, and in fact, this is apparently the same boss from Belmont’s Revenge. Hell, the thing in the center of the screen, which is just an attack by the wizard, should have been the boss.
Actually, it’s worse than that, because this game was first released in July of 1993 for the Sharp X68000 exclusively in Japan as Akumajō Dracula. Castlevania Chronicles is a remake/reimagining of a remake/reimagining of a game that’s then re-remade/re-reimagined a third time. You can play the “original” game from 1993, which I was certain was going to be a beat-for-beat remake of Castlevania 1. It’s not. Then you can play “Arrangement” which I figured would change up the level design. It doesn’t. Both games are, more or less, the same game, though Arrangement’s difficulty is rebalanced. The only other difference is your character’s appearance and the final boss’s appearance. They didn’t even change the backgrounds. Here’s nearly the same screenshot above, only it’s taken in the “normal” mode.
I played this version first, by the way.
Only a few special effects have been added. The giant bat you fight at the end of the first level plays identically, but now it has a spooky motion blur when it moves. I mean, sometimes, but not all the time. Oooooh. The arrange mode is a lot easier, too, though I’d be hard-pressed to explain why. The original game ate me for lunch so badly that I opted to play with save states instead of lives, but I ran through Arrange mode only losing one life the entire time. Maybe I was taking less damage, but if that’s the case, the effect is so subtle I didn’t instinctively notice. Apparently this mode has adjustable difficulty, but I have more Tetris to play and I really thought I was playing a remake of Castlevania 1 that I could knock out in a few hours, so I never experimented with the difficulty settings. Whatever was the default is what I played on. I know that I unlocked concept art when I finished, and there’s also an interview with producer Koji Igarashi, making this one of the first games with DVD-like extras (Digital Eclipse was doing this too with their Arcade’s Greatest Hits line).
If you think this is grainy, try imagining it on the Sega CD.
Only the first level and the final battle with Dracula resembles the original Castlevania, but besides those, only tiny chunks of stages show up. The “Infamous Hallway” leading to the Grim Reaper fight is here, only it takes place in front of a crumbling mural and other spooky paintings. Fun fact: the mural can be any of the four seasons, depending on the X68000’s internal clock. The original PlayStation doesn’t have a clock, but a code can change the date, which changes the mural. The section of the final level where you have to jump over pits while fighting and/or avoiding multiple giant bats that you fought as the first boss? That’s here. And.. actually, that’s about it. In fact, all the other levels feel completely different from the original game, and so do the bosses except Dracula. Medusa is no longer just a giant head. The mummies are gone completely. Frankenstein is a one-off set-piece mini-boss (I wanted to see how many hyphens I could get in a row). The Grim Reaper is a total push-over, and Dracula isn’t far behind him. Hell, the holy water isn’t the be-all, end-all to beat the game anymore. The boomerang is much more effective than it ever has been, as it does more damage than the whip, easily.
Calling “The Creature” a mini-boss is a little unfair. He might not have a life bar or the boss music, but he IS a boss that takes about the same hits (or maybe just a little less) than a normal boss. The timing of when the electrodes wake him up is totally off, though. You don’t see it come to life, but otherwise, this is functionally a mid-level boss battle that’s more exciting and intense than a couple of the real bosses, even including the Grim Reaper. There’s other mini-boss set-pieces. A stained-glass window shatters and comes to life, Young Sherlock-style (it’s so close that it’s a safe bet the producers of Chronicles were big fans of the film), and you fight a giant skeletal spider at one point.
The biggest problem with Chronicles is it has a massive tone problem. Yes, Castlevania is inherently silly, but what I think makes the original games work is they never say “oh, we know it’s ridiculous.” All those early games, including Super Castlevania IV, are totally sincere, so what should be an absurd farce actually does become genuinely scary at times. Castlevania never gets enough credit for that, but all that crap is out the window in Castlevania Chronicles. At one point you enter.. um.. what the hell is this?
Dracula’s day care center? I guess? A gigantic play room that sees you fighting dolls and toy soldiers. Dolls can be creepy, and the dolls in Chronicles are actually some of the tougher normal baddies to deal with in the entire game. But, stylistically, it didn’t work the way they dressed it up. It feels like a satire of Castlevania, but this isn’t the only part like that. In the second-to-last level, my jaw literally dropped when skeleton jump ropes appeared. Not just skeleton jump ropes, but DOUBLE DUTCH-STYLE skeleton jump ropes. Maybe these would have been fun and frisky set pieces for the early parts of the game, but they come in the last third of Chronicles, and they’re just too absurd to hold the mood Castlevania aims for. What was the pitch meeting the monsters made to Dracula for the jump rope? “Okay, we know that the Belmonts have defeated us for, like, century after century, but hear us out! We have a plan that will surely prevent this Simon character from ever making it to you. You know how nobody likes exercise, right? Well, what if..”
This was apparently not a fever dream I had. I double-checked and everything! This is real! That or I just uploaded a picture of a blank screen and my readers are checking with friends to make sure I’m okay.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think this game came out in the 2020s. It’s Castlevania based around subversion of expectations. Like you know the first piece of meat you find in the first Castlevania game? I gave that a whole paragraph in the Castlevania review because it was the perfect example of how to educate a player. They put a bat in front of it in order to assure players whipped the wall, revealing the meat and showing that Castlevania is a game with breakable walls. Well, that wall is back in Chronicles, only when you whip the wall, this happens now:
Since it’s hard to see them, yes, those are the jumping men. An endless stream of them, and that’s not an exaggeration. Tons of them keep spilling out until you leave the room.
That’s just a dick move extraordinaire right there. What’s frustrating about stuff like that is Castlevania Chronicles is, more often than not, pretty dang clever with its level design. This isn’t a half-hearted assortment of platforms and staircases, like Dracula X. Chronicles is solid from start to finish. I just beat it twice, and I could have kept going and challenged the time attack modes (unlocked after beating Arrangement) without being bored. It’s certainly not perfect. The difficulty curve is all over the place and some needless last pixel jumps somewhat spoil the fun. The new bosses are a little on the generic side, with the exception of the best werewolf fight in Castlevania. It takes place in front of a clock, and it actually throws the numbers off the face of the clock at you, then grabs the minute hand and uses it as a melee weapon when it’s down to its final ticks of health.
The remake of the original final battle with Dracula includes no real surprises, which was a bit disappointing. Hell, the final form doesn’t even have a different sprite in Arrangement, like the first does. However, I love how big the boss is, so I’ll let it slide.
I won’t say that Chronicles has a bad reputation, as contemporary reviews I think were more middling thanks to the timing of release. People wanted new in 2001, not old. The PlayStation 2 was already out by the time Chronicles was released, and the GameCube and Xbox were literally just about to come out, but Castlevania wasn’t so old that it qualified as “retro.” Had this come out today, in 2024, I honestly think it’d get 9s and 10s from critics. Instead of a “bad reputation” I’d argue that Chronicles has the WRONG reputation. It’s just not a remake, period, end of story. Try to imagine it as the REAL Castlevania II that happened just before Dracula’s Curse. On those terms, Chronicles is actually kind of the perfect sequel.
It also makes a lot of bone-headed decisions, like having the skeleton spider, a one-off set piece, be obscured by the status bar. We might reach the remake singularity, but screw it: someone really ought to remake this again, because this is easily the most underrated of the linear Castlevanias.
If this had an entirely different first level, they could have done exactly that, retconning Simon’s Quest out of existence and substituting Chronicles as “Castlevania II: Simon’s Chronicles” or something like that. There’s more levels (eight instead of six), better combat (you can whip downward and down-diagonal when you jump) and bigger set-pieces, but there’s still a direct line between the first game and this one. A subtly of evolution that makes it succeed in a way the Dracula X could never have hoped for. I wanted a little review to buy me time while I work on Tetris, and instead, I found one of my favorite Castlevania games. Chronicles isn’t just underrated, but CRIMINALLY underrated, and worth a look, even if it’s too silly for its own good. Verdict: YES!
Castlevania Legends
Haunted Castle
Vampire Killer
Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest
Castlevania: Bloodlines
Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō
Konami Wai Wai World 
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
Castlevania Chronicles
Indie Gamer Chick 
You must be logged in to post a comment.