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Liberation maiden
Castlevania: The adventure
Castlevania: The Adventure (-)
Premise
You are Christopher Belmont, a vampire hunter. Your goal is to storm Dracula's castle and kill its master.
Game Structure
There are 4 stages with a generous time limit, each ending with a boss fight. There are checkpoints mid levels and before bosses.
You begin with 3 lives and can gain more by racking up enough points (don't count on it too much) or finding them in the stages. If you loose all your lives you begin at the beginning of the stage you were in and your score resets to 0.
After beating the game, you can go through it again. With each succeeding playthrough the enemies deal more damage and eventually (5th playthrough and higher) all of them kill you in 1 hit. Everything else is the same.
Controls
You use the D-pad to move, A to jump, B to whip and START to pause, there are no subweapons. Christopher moves reaaaaaly slowly and you can only jump up or forward a fixed amount; you can't adjust the heigh or length.
Gameplay
You have to carefully place your jumps and accurately whip your enemies.
Throughout the stages there are candles that drop hearts (restore health), money (gain points), crosses (brief invincibility), 1UPs and crystals.
Each crystal upgrades your whip. The first upgrade greatly increases the length and you do a more damage. The second upgrade only increases the whip's length a tiny amount but you now fire a fireball each time you whip and you also do more damage. You lose one upgrade each time you are damaged. If you die you start from scratch. Keeping the upgrades is vital as your default whip is really short.
You also gain points by killing monsters and collecting money. The left over time is also converted into points.
PROS
+music: My favourite track are
the theme of the 1st level and
the credit's theme.
CONS
-short
-little replay value: The only change, when replaying the stages on higher difficulties, is how much damage enemies do to you.
-Christopher moves like a tank
-no subweapons: Whipping gets kind of old, especially as there aren't too many types of enemies.
-randomness: There's an enemy that can fire a fireball that bounces of the walls either up or down. There's no way to tell how the fireball will be fired and Christopher is so slow that reacting quickly enough is almost impossible, so you will have to rely on luck and hope it doesn't hit you. It doesn't do that much damage on a regular playthrough, but it can be really annoying if you are replaying the stages on harder difficulties. Abusing the game's PAUSE feature is a must on instadeath mode. There are also some bats at the very beginning of stage 2 with an unpredictable flight pattern. Getting past those on instadeath mode is an exercise in frustration.
NEUTRAL
-bosses: Not great but not bad either. They mostly rely on patterns.
-level design: The first stage does a good job at acquainting you with the precise platforming that the game demands without instantly killing you if you fail and the easy enemies provide a valuable training ground. Stage 3 constantly puts you in danger so you have to keep moving and stage 4 has some interesting platforming sections.The problem is that the levels are full of relatively agile enemies, bottomless pits, spikes that kill you in 1 hit and Christopher often feels too slow to deal with all of this.
Hints
-Each stage has a secret room with an 1UP, crystal and heart to restore all your health.
Video
Whole playthrough, the secret rooms aren't shown.
Summary
The game is short and way too frustrating for most people, so I can only recommend this game to die hard Castlevania fans that have to play every entry in the series.
Playtime:
13:47
Completed the game on instadeath mode (5 playthroughs), no save state abuse.