Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
So I played through a good chunk of the Castlevania series recently. I first played the original game years back, but I never really gave the rest of the series a thought until about a month ago, when I started to binge on it - and I figured I'd talk about the series here.
The first game is still probably one of the best in the series. It really is a fantastically-paced game with consistently great level design and enemy placement. It has great bosses (Frankenstein, Death, and Dracula are all extremely fun - and I'd argue Dracula was never as interesting to fight in the later games as he was in this one). The controls are excellent, constantly pushing you to evaluate your situation and plan your moves ahead of time, and the game is balanced well in that most of the subweapons have their uses (the dagger being largely useless and the holy water breaking most of the bosses are certainly weak spots, though). I think what really makes the subweapon system are the double and triple shot upgrades that reward you for sticking with one weapon for a decent amount of time instead of constantly switching around, though - that really forces you to learn each weapon well and work out what will work the best in each area. If you try to go for something like a no-continue run, routing out your weapon pickups becomes a big deal, and I think at that point the game truly shines.
I think it's worth mentioning that the game nails a "sense of place" better than the majority of its successors, which is pretty impressive considering that it's a NES game released in 1986. The way each level logically flows into the next, with the game's entire environment feeling like it makes up a fairly cohesive castle, is really something and adds an extra bit of "oomph" to the game - since the game doesn't feel kind of disjointed like most of the later ones do (and really, like a huge amount of action-platformers do - not that it's really a bad thing though) makes it all the more satisfying to bring the castle down in the end. Of course, the environmental art and music are also fantastic (both of these things are true for pretty much all of the sequels though - especially the music), which does a lot for the game. Castlevania is definitely a top-class platformer and one that is difficult to praise too highly, really.
The second game.... well, I don't have as much praise to lavish on this one, of course. It has some okay ideas; I guess it was interesting to try and make a big adventure game out of Castlevania, and the game does a decent job at creating a spooky atmosphere, but who cares about intent. The important thing is that the game is boring as shit - you spend most of your time walking back and forth across empty fields whacking weak, uninteresting enemies placed with no thought or care whatsoever (a stark contrast to the first game's demanding and focused stage designs). The mansions are mildly more interesting than the fields but ultimately they end up looking pretty pathetic next to the first game's levels, and the fact that the mansions use the exact same enemy types all the way through the game makes them feel incredibly repetitive. And the less said about the boss fights, the better.
I will admit though - although I didn't go out of my way to seek out guides while playing, I already knew what to do with the blue and red crystals before starting the game, so I missed out on the experience of being stumped and having to puzzle out how to use them. That said, I don't think that harmed my experience too much, since it just served to make the game's runtime mercifully shorter. I won't absolutely rip into Castlevania 2 and call it a bad game (it at least controls fairly well, I suppose, and it has solid music and graphics) but it's definitely a mediocre one.
Castlevania 3 is a great return to form. I'm a huge sucker for distinct extra characters in action games, so I really appreciate the partner characters even if they aren't particularly well-balanced with each other - I especially like Grant, whose great mobility totally changes the way you look at every level you bring him into without breaking the game too hard. (Sypha is fun too, but ultimately her contribution is just trivializing some bosses, so I don't like her quite as much.) It's unfortunate that Alucard brings nothing to the table aside from giving you a safety net against pits (and letting you trivialize certain platforming segments in a way even Grant can't) though.
The branching paths are also cool, and add a good deal of replayability since - for the most part - the paths are equally fun (I say for the most part because really, fuck those falling block levels on the bottommost path). That said though, I probably like the first game a little more than the third in the end. The third game is certainly a much bigger game, but it suffers a tiny bit for it - the levels and bosses are somewhat inconsistent in quality (again, compare the tedious falling block level to, say, the penultimate stage - although to be fair, that stage probably is cooler than any single level in the first game), and the levels have a tendency to feel overlong - just look at the strangely stretched-out first stage and contrast it with the simple but appropriately brief first stage of the original. I think the multiple characters and paths do a decent job of covering for that weakness, though. Also, having played the US version of the game, it seems that the difficulty balance in that version is mildly out of whack. It's not imbalanced to the point that it damages the game or makes it into an extreme challenge, but it definitely doesn't feel like the last two levels were built around the player character dying in four hits. Anyway though, 3 is certainly a great game. I don't like it quite as much as 1 but there isn't a sizeable gap in quality between the two.
Super Castlevania IV is pretty good. I really have to give praise to the darker, more ambient music - it creates a mood that is hugely different from any of the other games, and although I can't say I like that quite as much, it's definitely a nice change of pace. That atmosphere is probably the game's most memorable asset, really - who can forget walking into Dracula's room with that creepy music track playing as the torches light one-by-one in front of you, and then having that upbeat stage 1 theme kick in once you've finally managed to whittle his health down most of the way?
But I have to say I think this game is probably the weakest of the linear Castlevanias I've played. Although the game's slow pace (it doesn't really feel like the game starts until you enter Dracula's castle - which is something like six stages into the game) goes a long way towards supporting its gloomy atmosphere, it ultimately just serves to detract from the game as an action game, making it less immediately replayable than most of the other titles. The bosses are pretty much all uninteresting and can be killed just by walking up to them and whipping them to death (the only particularly interesting ones being the very last ones), and yeah, the levels themselves really suffer because of the huge and freely-controllable whip. It's all well and good to give the player more control - but that the game designers decided not to balance the game around it, and built their levels and placed their enemies as though the player could only whip left and right hurts the game a ton. As a result of that the game lacks the tactical encounters of 1 and 3 and doesn't really do anything substantial to make up for it (like several of the later Castlevanias did). I also have to say I don't like the weird dangly whip thing much, since it makes it too easy to swat enemy projectiles out of the air. It's definitely a worthy game, one I'd recommend to action-platformer fans, but it really doesn't compare to a lot of what its series has to offer.
The Castlevania for the X68000 (also included in Castlevania Chronicles for the PS1) might just be my favorite in the series. It's something of a remake of the first game, but it does a lot to expand on it without adding anything overbearing that weighs down on the game. The level design is fantastic and truly feels like a natural extension of the original game's, especially in the last few levels when the game gets pretty demanding, and does a great job mixing platforming with various nasty combat scenarios.
The game adds controllable jumps and, to some degree, multidirectional whipping (you can only whip downwards and diagonally downwards in the air) - but unlike Super Castlevania, it feels like the game designers thought about the player character's capabilities while designing their levels, so the downward whipping just lets you play a little more aggressively without making most battles feel totally trivial. The new herb subweapon, which heals you at a large heart (ammo) cost, is cool too - and it acts as an interesting kind of crutch for less experienced players, since using it cuts your offensive capabilities down severely and ultimately makes boss battles harder despite making stages easier. Speaking of the boss fights, they're fantastic - built to challenge your character's larger moveset while still being very demanding. The only negative thing I can think of to say about the game is that the second and third levels feel pretty basic - once you get to the fourth level (out of eight) the game never stops ramping up, but I do have to say that just because of its slower start, the game isn't paced quite as well as the one it's based on. But despite all that I think this is very likely the best title in the franchise.
Rondo of Blood is also excellent. It's tough to understate how great its visuals and soundtrack are. And the amount of content the game manages to pack in while still being such a solid quality action game is really commendable too - there are tons of cool, unique touches in every level, lots of cool animation details in the sprites, and like in Castlevania 3, the extra paths add a lot of replay value while being really well-balanced (although I do like the default path the most just because it has the coolest bosses). And the bosses are excellent - thanks in no small part to the new backflip maneuver, which acts as a great evasive tool and allows the bosses to pull off some decently nasty attacks that force you to learn when and how to use it. (I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the backflip kind of makes this game, really.) Oh, and I have to say I really love the level late in the game where you face the bosses of the original Castlevania back-to-back - it's really a fantastic boss rush challenge. The standard enemies actually benefit from the backflip too - the traditional axe knights, the large knight enemies, and others (like the weird guys with the wide hats in the swamp level) are really fun to optimize fights against largely because of the backflip; there's a lot of neat footsies going on in this game. Maria is also a fun character to mess around with. She's busted and essentially an easy mode, so she's not as interesting as a proper second character would be - but still, it's really enjoyable to use her insane mobility and offensive capabilities to try and break the game as hard as possible, so I like her.
The game is just a tad too easy for most of its runtime though. Although it's excellent all the way through and doesn't really have any dull levels at all, it takes too long for the game to get particularly threatening, and once it does it never really matches most of the other games in terms of difficulty, which is a shame. I think the game designers intended for the various routes through the game (of which there are a lot) to offset the game's relative lack of difficulty through variety, but I don't think that's interesting in the same way Also, although the enemies are really well-designed in the sense that fighting them in a vacuum is still very fun (which probably isn't true for most enemies in the other games), the game has a tendency to just toss its higher-level enemies in flat rooms without many hazards or lesser enemies to support them, which kind of feels lacking. All in all though, this is still a great game and probably one of my favorites in the series.
Bloodlines is awesome, and surprisingly blisteringly fast for a Castlevania game. It has two characters - John, who plays like the typical Belmont character but with upwards whipping and an i-frame-filled swinging maneuver that can be done off any ceiling (which enables a specific kind of aggressive play that fits very, very well with this game), and Eric, who is slightly weaker, but whose longer weapon can attack in any upwards direction from the ground (making him a bit more of a defensive character). I definitely prefer John, but the inclusion of two characters who are both extremely fun to play with yet whose subtle differences make them pretty hugely different is fantastic. And John's aforementioned aggressive playstyle is a big change for the series since it opens up some really cool speedkills on bosses (if you're precise enough, of course). There's also an interesting powerup system where - usually once per level or so - you can earn a special ability that massively increases the power of your whip and gives you a super-strong, screen-clearing subweapon (that burns through hearts very quickly) - but taking a single hit returns your offensive capabilities to their standard levels. This ends up making a ton of tense, exciting situations, as the game pushes you to get the most out of each super power-up as you can.
The only real downsides - the game is a little on the short side (six levels, and the final one is relatively insubstantial), and I feel like most of the stages have at least one fairly uninteresting segment lodged in there somewhere. It's not bad enough that I would say there are any levels in this game I don't look forward to playing, like in some other games in the series, but it can be a little inconsistent at times.
Symphony of the Night is gorgeous; it can't be denied how beautiful it looks. The soundtrack is probably the best in the series, and the game is absolutely packed full of content and cool little easter eggs, which is pretty commendable - but ultimately the game is fairly mindless, filled to the brim with poorly-designed, boring areas. It's good, but despite its pretty face it's really nothing special; a flat downgrade from the previous games.
So that's been my Castlevania experience. I won't say I'm done with the series, but I do feel like I've played pretty much all of the games in the series that particularly interest me. That's not to say I'm done playing all the games listed above, though.
The first game is still probably one of the best in the series. It really is a fantastically-paced game with consistently great level design and enemy placement. It has great bosses (Frankenstein, Death, and Dracula are all extremely fun - and I'd argue Dracula was never as interesting to fight in the later games as he was in this one). The controls are excellent, constantly pushing you to evaluate your situation and plan your moves ahead of time, and the game is balanced well in that most of the subweapons have their uses (the dagger being largely useless and the holy water breaking most of the bosses are certainly weak spots, though). I think what really makes the subweapon system are the double and triple shot upgrades that reward you for sticking with one weapon for a decent amount of time instead of constantly switching around, though - that really forces you to learn each weapon well and work out what will work the best in each area. If you try to go for something like a no-continue run, routing out your weapon pickups becomes a big deal, and I think at that point the game truly shines.
I think it's worth mentioning that the game nails a "sense of place" better than the majority of its successors, which is pretty impressive considering that it's a NES game released in 1986. The way each level logically flows into the next, with the game's entire environment feeling like it makes up a fairly cohesive castle, is really something and adds an extra bit of "oomph" to the game - since the game doesn't feel kind of disjointed like most of the later ones do (and really, like a huge amount of action-platformers do - not that it's really a bad thing though) makes it all the more satisfying to bring the castle down in the end. Of course, the environmental art and music are also fantastic (both of these things are true for pretty much all of the sequels though - especially the music), which does a lot for the game. Castlevania is definitely a top-class platformer and one that is difficult to praise too highly, really.
The second game.... well, I don't have as much praise to lavish on this one, of course. It has some okay ideas; I guess it was interesting to try and make a big adventure game out of Castlevania, and the game does a decent job at creating a spooky atmosphere, but who cares about intent. The important thing is that the game is boring as shit - you spend most of your time walking back and forth across empty fields whacking weak, uninteresting enemies placed with no thought or care whatsoever (a stark contrast to the first game's demanding and focused stage designs). The mansions are mildly more interesting than the fields but ultimately they end up looking pretty pathetic next to the first game's levels, and the fact that the mansions use the exact same enemy types all the way through the game makes them feel incredibly repetitive. And the less said about the boss fights, the better.
I will admit though - although I didn't go out of my way to seek out guides while playing, I already knew what to do with the blue and red crystals before starting the game, so I missed out on the experience of being stumped and having to puzzle out how to use them. That said, I don't think that harmed my experience too much, since it just served to make the game's runtime mercifully shorter. I won't absolutely rip into Castlevania 2 and call it a bad game (it at least controls fairly well, I suppose, and it has solid music and graphics) but it's definitely a mediocre one.
Castlevania 3 is a great return to form. I'm a huge sucker for distinct extra characters in action games, so I really appreciate the partner characters even if they aren't particularly well-balanced with each other - I especially like Grant, whose great mobility totally changes the way you look at every level you bring him into without breaking the game too hard. (Sypha is fun too, but ultimately her contribution is just trivializing some bosses, so I don't like her quite as much.) It's unfortunate that Alucard brings nothing to the table aside from giving you a safety net against pits (and letting you trivialize certain platforming segments in a way even Grant can't) though.
The branching paths are also cool, and add a good deal of replayability since - for the most part - the paths are equally fun (I say for the most part because really, fuck those falling block levels on the bottommost path). That said though, I probably like the first game a little more than the third in the end. The third game is certainly a much bigger game, but it suffers a tiny bit for it - the levels and bosses are somewhat inconsistent in quality (again, compare the tedious falling block level to, say, the penultimate stage - although to be fair, that stage probably is cooler than any single level in the first game), and the levels have a tendency to feel overlong - just look at the strangely stretched-out first stage and contrast it with the simple but appropriately brief first stage of the original. I think the multiple characters and paths do a decent job of covering for that weakness, though. Also, having played the US version of the game, it seems that the difficulty balance in that version is mildly out of whack. It's not imbalanced to the point that it damages the game or makes it into an extreme challenge, but it definitely doesn't feel like the last two levels were built around the player character dying in four hits. Anyway though, 3 is certainly a great game. I don't like it quite as much as 1 but there isn't a sizeable gap in quality between the two.
Super Castlevania IV is pretty good. I really have to give praise to the darker, more ambient music - it creates a mood that is hugely different from any of the other games, and although I can't say I like that quite as much, it's definitely a nice change of pace. That atmosphere is probably the game's most memorable asset, really - who can forget walking into Dracula's room with that creepy music track playing as the torches light one-by-one in front of you, and then having that upbeat stage 1 theme kick in once you've finally managed to whittle his health down most of the way?
But I have to say I think this game is probably the weakest of the linear Castlevanias I've played. Although the game's slow pace (it doesn't really feel like the game starts until you enter Dracula's castle - which is something like six stages into the game) goes a long way towards supporting its gloomy atmosphere, it ultimately just serves to detract from the game as an action game, making it less immediately replayable than most of the other titles. The bosses are pretty much all uninteresting and can be killed just by walking up to them and whipping them to death (the only particularly interesting ones being the very last ones), and yeah, the levels themselves really suffer because of the huge and freely-controllable whip. It's all well and good to give the player more control - but that the game designers decided not to balance the game around it, and built their levels and placed their enemies as though the player could only whip left and right hurts the game a ton. As a result of that the game lacks the tactical encounters of 1 and 3 and doesn't really do anything substantial to make up for it (like several of the later Castlevanias did). I also have to say I don't like the weird dangly whip thing much, since it makes it too easy to swat enemy projectiles out of the air. It's definitely a worthy game, one I'd recommend to action-platformer fans, but it really doesn't compare to a lot of what its series has to offer.
The Castlevania for the X68000 (also included in Castlevania Chronicles for the PS1) might just be my favorite in the series. It's something of a remake of the first game, but it does a lot to expand on it without adding anything overbearing that weighs down on the game. The level design is fantastic and truly feels like a natural extension of the original game's, especially in the last few levels when the game gets pretty demanding, and does a great job mixing platforming with various nasty combat scenarios.
The game adds controllable jumps and, to some degree, multidirectional whipping (you can only whip downwards and diagonally downwards in the air) - but unlike Super Castlevania, it feels like the game designers thought about the player character's capabilities while designing their levels, so the downward whipping just lets you play a little more aggressively without making most battles feel totally trivial. The new herb subweapon, which heals you at a large heart (ammo) cost, is cool too - and it acts as an interesting kind of crutch for less experienced players, since using it cuts your offensive capabilities down severely and ultimately makes boss battles harder despite making stages easier. Speaking of the boss fights, they're fantastic - built to challenge your character's larger moveset while still being very demanding. The only negative thing I can think of to say about the game is that the second and third levels feel pretty basic - once you get to the fourth level (out of eight) the game never stops ramping up, but I do have to say that just because of its slower start, the game isn't paced quite as well as the one it's based on. But despite all that I think this is very likely the best title in the franchise.
Rondo of Blood is also excellent. It's tough to understate how great its visuals and soundtrack are. And the amount of content the game manages to pack in while still being such a solid quality action game is really commendable too - there are tons of cool, unique touches in every level, lots of cool animation details in the sprites, and like in Castlevania 3, the extra paths add a lot of replay value while being really well-balanced (although I do like the default path the most just because it has the coolest bosses). And the bosses are excellent - thanks in no small part to the new backflip maneuver, which acts as a great evasive tool and allows the bosses to pull off some decently nasty attacks that force you to learn when and how to use it. (I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the backflip kind of makes this game, really.) Oh, and I have to say I really love the level late in the game where you face the bosses of the original Castlevania back-to-back - it's really a fantastic boss rush challenge. The standard enemies actually benefit from the backflip too - the traditional axe knights, the large knight enemies, and others (like the weird guys with the wide hats in the swamp level) are really fun to optimize fights against largely because of the backflip; there's a lot of neat footsies going on in this game. Maria is also a fun character to mess around with. She's busted and essentially an easy mode, so she's not as interesting as a proper second character would be - but still, it's really enjoyable to use her insane mobility and offensive capabilities to try and break the game as hard as possible, so I like her.
The game is just a tad too easy for most of its runtime though. Although it's excellent all the way through and doesn't really have any dull levels at all, it takes too long for the game to get particularly threatening, and once it does it never really matches most of the other games in terms of difficulty, which is a shame. I think the game designers intended for the various routes through the game (of which there are a lot) to offset the game's relative lack of difficulty through variety, but I don't think that's interesting in the same way Also, although the enemies are really well-designed in the sense that fighting them in a vacuum is still very fun (which probably isn't true for most enemies in the other games), the game has a tendency to just toss its higher-level enemies in flat rooms without many hazards or lesser enemies to support them, which kind of feels lacking. All in all though, this is still a great game and probably one of my favorites in the series.
Bloodlines is awesome, and surprisingly blisteringly fast for a Castlevania game. It has two characters - John, who plays like the typical Belmont character but with upwards whipping and an i-frame-filled swinging maneuver that can be done off any ceiling (which enables a specific kind of aggressive play that fits very, very well with this game), and Eric, who is slightly weaker, but whose longer weapon can attack in any upwards direction from the ground (making him a bit more of a defensive character). I definitely prefer John, but the inclusion of two characters who are both extremely fun to play with yet whose subtle differences make them pretty hugely different is fantastic. And John's aforementioned aggressive playstyle is a big change for the series since it opens up some really cool speedkills on bosses (if you're precise enough, of course). There's also an interesting powerup system where - usually once per level or so - you can earn a special ability that massively increases the power of your whip and gives you a super-strong, screen-clearing subweapon (that burns through hearts very quickly) - but taking a single hit returns your offensive capabilities to their standard levels. This ends up making a ton of tense, exciting situations, as the game pushes you to get the most out of each super power-up as you can.
The only real downsides - the game is a little on the short side (six levels, and the final one is relatively insubstantial), and I feel like most of the stages have at least one fairly uninteresting segment lodged in there somewhere. It's not bad enough that I would say there are any levels in this game I don't look forward to playing, like in some other games in the series, but it can be a little inconsistent at times.
Symphony of the Night is gorgeous; it can't be denied how beautiful it looks. The soundtrack is probably the best in the series, and the game is absolutely packed full of content and cool little easter eggs, which is pretty commendable - but ultimately the game is fairly mindless, filled to the brim with poorly-designed, boring areas. It's good, but despite its pretty face it's really nothing special; a flat downgrade from the previous games.
So that's been my Castlevania experience. I won't say I'm done with the series, but I do feel like I've played pretty much all of the games in the series that particularly interest me. That's not to say I'm done playing all the games listed above, though.
