Vampire Killer (MSX2 Review)

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!