Master of Darkness (Sega Master System and Game Gear Review)
August 3, 2024 3 Comments
Master of Darkness
aka Vampire: Master of Darkness
Platform: Sega Master System, Game Gear
Released October 23, 1992 (Game Gear), May, 1993 (SMS)
Developed by SIMS
Published by Sega
Published to 3DS Virtual Console
NO MODERN RE-RELEASE
Castlemockia? Crapslevania?
It’s been a long time since I played a game that so flagrantly ripped-off another game’s look, feel, theme, and gameplay so completely that I started laughing, but Master of Darkness did that to me. It’s just so shameless in stealing from Castlevania that I couldn’t help but laugh. Replace gothic horror with Victorian horror and you have Master of Darkness. Well, until the end of the game, when developers said “f*ck it! Dracula is in our game too!” Otherwise, this IS Castlevania. So uncomfortably close that I searched to see if this resulted in a lawsuit. Konami was probably laughing their ass off at this and said “why bother?” Master of Darkness actually makes for a fascinating experiment: how many good parts of Castlevania can you scale-back and still have a good game?
Step one: replace the whip with weapons dropped from the candles, which are replaced with masks. You’ll either have a knife, an axe, a cane, or a rapier. There’s no upgrades to the weapons and no swapping between them manually. You can only change weapons when one is dropped from a mask. Since they’re not created equally, I ended up rewinding several mask-cracks because I didn’t want to change my weapon. The rapier has the most range but does the least damage, while the axe has the shortest range and does the most. The axe also benefits from poor collision, as I swung and missed quite often but still got the kill. Of course, that comes at the cost of immersion. None of the four weapons are very satisfying, and the only one I could stand using was the rapier because at least it made contact with the enemy. Look how far away and off-angle I am from this enemy that I killed:
So, there’s no OOMPH to the combat. Castlevania usually had amazing OOMPH, and removing it entirely by itself radically changes the quality of the game. Step two is to stop attempting to create your own personality. If you’re going to rip-off Castlevania, their attitude seems to have been “in for a penny, in for a pound” because Castlevania set pieces begin showing up. Hey, look at the church in Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse. What a fun, memorable set piece.
Let’s just copy it, only make it uglier and more incomprehensible.
I have no idea what they were thinking. If you’re going to just copy the gameplay of Castlevania, or any game, you want to at least freshen the experience up with different types of settings and enemies, right? So, a Castlevania wannabe should probably feature set pieces, locations, and enemies Castlevania never went to during this era. At least at the start of the game, I figured that’s what I should expect, especially since this is set in London. In level one, you walk along the River Thames and eventually fight Jack the Ripper. Okay, well, at least it’s different from Transylvania. Well, so much for that. Castlevania III had a spooky clock tower with gears in the background and a haunted forest where birds of prey attacked, and hey look, so does Master of Darkness!
What else can I say? Master of Darkness is literally generic Castlevania. The dollar store version of Dracula’s Curse, only with none of the extra characters, clever level design, thrilling combat, memorable bosses, and epic score that made Castlevania III the best 8-bit Vania of them all. Besides the primary weapon, the biggest change is being able to jump off the stairs. Not ON them, like in Super Castlevania IV. Only OFF them, which is still a positive change. Oh, and instead of hearts as ammo, each sub-weapon comes with X amount of shots, which increases if you pick-up another of the same weapon. But, the sub-weapons aren’t very fun to use, either. I won’t actually go so far as to say Master of Darkness is a bad game, because it’s really not. It controls fine and the level design isn’t ever outright bad. The final level is even a Bowser’s castle-like maze where the object is to find the exit. HEY, that’s different from what the NES Castlevanias did. Master of Darkness even tries to do some real-time world building. Cultists show up as baddies, then right before a boss fight, three of them leap to their deaths in a ritualistic suicide.
So I can’t really say no effort was made. That’s why it’s maddening that so many elements were copied wholesale from Castlevania. It’s like they wanted to do something that was different than just “defeat Dracula and save a European country from his reign of terror” before they just gave up. There’s a couple good ideas here, even if there’s absolutely no imagination. With that said, most of my entertainment came from laughing AT it when yet another Castlevania staple shows up. Master of Darkness doesn’t stand on its own at all and feels more like developers covertly passing their résumés to Konami. But, let’s pretend that I’ve never played Castlevania. Even then, I think the combat would have still been a deal breaker. By the end of the game, I was avoiding enemies rather than engaging them because it’s just not fun at all to fight baddies in this Master of Darkness. The greatest irony of this whole thing is this copied so many elements from Castlevania that it feels like digital kleptomania, but the one aspect of Castlevania that would have made the difference between a YES! and a NO!, satisfying combat, is the only aspect they didn’t steal. Master of Darkness was fated to be nothing more than a baffling historic curio either way, but at least decent combat would make it one worth experiencing.
Verdict: NO!
Indie Gamer Chick 
You must be logged in to post a comment.