Without further ado...
Castlevania (1986)
What can I say about this masterpiece? It hit the Famicom two months after Ghosts 'n' Goblins and immediately made that game a relic; it sprang forth from Konami's forehead in full glory. The worst that can be said about it is that it's quite short, being such an early release, but everything it does is done brilliantly.
The coolest thing about it, the thing that makes it Castlevania, is Simon Belmont. His fixed jump arc and the delay in his whip animation work in harmony to give the gameplay a rhythmic, forceful, fateful character, a special hybrid of Ninja Gaiden's immediacy and Prince of Persia's detachment (and before both of those games). With every action, there is planning, anticipation, and inevitable finality – each intercepted Medusa head is a prophecy and its fulfillment in one. If that were changed, the result would be a very normal NES action game with little unique beyond its atmosphere and general polish. If everything else were changed while keeping the control mechanics, it would still unmistakably be Castlevania. People who are allergic to using their brains often call the control "dated" because they do not want to think about how and when they move or attack. They do not find joy in this dance, and they do not deserve its beauty.
But the coolest thing about Castlevania is the level design. Constrained by the system's hardware, early NES platform games generally scroll on only one axis and accordingly have level design built along that axis. (Ghosts 'n' Goblins and Super Pitfall are notable exceptions and notably simplistic.) Super Mario Bros. lets you go right. Kid Icarus lets you go up. Metroid lets you go right or up, or left or down, but always through a tight shaft or tunnel. Castlevania, despite having no vertical scrolling (outside one hilarious cutscene), uses its characteristic stairways to connect sections above and below and give the stages a strong vertical character, especially in levels 2 and 3. Traveling through Dracula's castle, the player climbs up through its inner structure and then ascends its outer walls, giving the game a sense of great scale despite its actual brevity. Just as important to that sense of scale is the sheer variety of environments – these heights are followed immediately by the underground river, whose claustrophobic confines are defined by low ceilings and dangerous waters below, in turn followed by a barren field of ruins under a gantlet of marauding birds and hunchbacks. The entrance hall, the dungeon laboratory, the bridge and clock tower and climactic stairway to Dracula's chamber, each set the scene with a distinctive spatial layout as much as with visuals and music. This idea might seem elementary for level design in general, but it's elementary because it was so forcefully and masterfully established by Castlevania, which did it better in 1986 than most games have since.
About those visuals and music: They are the coolest thing about Castlevania, as superficial as that may seem. People love to talk about how great Symphony of the Night looks, and they aren't wrong, but the original Castlevania looks incomparably cooler. I do not care that it's an NES game, nor that it's from when people were still figuring out how to make NES games. There isn't a look more perfectly suited to the system and era than Castlevania's grimy gothic Universal/Hammer/Vampire Hunter D pastiche, and the game nails it from the opening cutscene. Like a nasty old B-movie, if it looked any better, it would look a lot worse. (The Forbidden Forest games on the C64 are another great example of this phenomenon.) As the first level progresses through the crumbling castle façade into a once-opulent hall with tattered curtains and cracked plaster, it's clear that the people who made this get it – but the awesomely nocturnal "Vampire Killer" theme ensures that there isn't an atom of doubt before the player even steps inside. And the atmosphere never lets up. Every place in Dracula's time-ravaged castle is falling apart or grown over with ivy, rendered in the luridly saturated palette of a horror movie poster, and home to some classic monster to spam with holy water. The music, by Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima, follows "Vampire Killer" with one hit after another, themes that the series would perenially return to despite minimal further involvement from the shamefully uncredited composers. (The creditless credits sequence, a farcical reference to the game's cinematic inspirations, is a real dick move even for the time, when Japanese games had already begun including actual credits.) The slinking "Stalker" and "Walking on the Edge", the urgent "Wicked Child" and "Out of Time", the dramatic "Heart of Fire" and baroque boss themes "Poison Mind" and "Nightmare" – Castlevania's music is all here right at the beginning, whether in the recurring songs themselves or in the sounds and moods that later ones would consistently employ.
So that's Castlevania, and that's unfortunately all of Castlevania. A good player can beat it in about 20 minutes even if they take their time and die now and then. There just isn't a lot of game in this game, a situation worsened by the comparatively weak final level. While not bad in their own right, the flat bridge and cramped clock tower are alternately trivial and tiresome by the standards of everything prior; it's fortunate at least that they're the castle's most visually arresting areas and lead directly into the grand showdown with the Count. The stairways, which are only accessible from the ends and prevent Simon from jumping or using his special weapons, also have obvious room for improvement. The levels are designed well enough around them that their associated difficulty is more strategic than cheap, and they serve a clear purpose in setting unambiguous transition points between the "layers" of each level – but with later games for comparison, it would be denial to say that their contrivance here is ideal.
This game is tight and focused, but it leaves me wanting more. Is it skimpy, or is it short and sweet? If it had just one more level somewhere (an armory, perhaps? a courtyard garden?), I would say the latter without hesitation. But I do hesitate.
8/10
