Castlevania series (1986-1995)

[Stalvern]

I've been on a real Classicvania kick this past couple of weeks, thanks to the Dominus Collection review, and I've decided to get my thoughts on one of my favorite series down once and for all. I respect the Metroidvanias for the achievements they are but don't enjoy them nearly as much, so I will not be covering them in this thread, nor will I get into the installments on the original Game Boy or the 3D games.

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

[Stalvern]

Vampire Killer (1986)

Vampire Killer is often treated like an MSX2 release of Castlevania, and it might have started development as such, but it's really just a different game. This is a non-linear action adventure of the sort popular on computers at the time – games like Below the Root and Doriath might be familiar to the C64 Critic, and Dizzy would be a massive British hit on the ZX Spectrum the next year. In this game, each level is transformed into a rather larger multi-directional labyrinth in which Simon Belmont has to find a key before exiting, which necessitates a lot of hunting around for treasure chests and keys to unlock those chests. There are unusual new items like boots that let you move faster and wings that let you jump higher (unlike the Metroidvanias, this game does not require movement upgrades for progress), and you can buy items and weapons from merchants with hearts. Each stage has a map to be found somewhere within it, a welcome surprise for the period.

Normally, this kind of thing is right up my alley, and the games that I mentioned earlier are favorites of mine, but Vampire Killer just feels like busywork. Since the castle is still split into discrete levels, it's missing the sense of space and possibility that games like this thrive on, and doing the same blind scavenger hunt in each level becomes a chore. On top of that, Simon himself has some noticeable changes. There's something off about his jumping, and his formerly hefty whip crack is now a one-frame slash like Ryu Hayabusa's sword in Ninja Gaiden, a necessity in that game that feels cheap and trivial here. Without even the satisfying feel of Castlevania's moment-to-moment gameplay to carry me along, I lost interest in Vampire Killer somewhere in the third level (my favorite level in Castlevania) and did not finish it.

Graphically, it's a mixed bag. Some of the graphics are recolored from Castlevania's, while others are completely new. The overall style is detailed and muted, which suits the more deliberate and cerebral gameplay, but for every highlight like the spiffed-up level 3 and the dungeon lab's shift from blue to brown, there are misfires like the washed-out entrance hall and the dreary new blue-and-gray level 4. (And the staircase leading to Dracula's chamber, an area expanded here into a very drab seventh level, is an absolute joke compared to the one in Castlevania. Does the gigantic new portrait on Drac's wall make up for it?) Still, on balance, Vampire Killer holds its own visually, and, like its non-linear gameplay, its downbeat aesthetics seem to have influenced Simon's Quest. This more serious version of the castle doesn't come close to supplanting Castlevania's pulp phantasmagoria in my mind, but it also cannot be dismissed.

And that's how I feel about the game overall. Despite its failure to appeal to me, I can't just write off Vampire Killer as a bad game. It's an interesting take on Castlevania, one that I assume was born from the difficulty of getting the MSX2 to scroll smoothly – if Vampire Killer has to flip back and forth between static screens, why not make the most of it like other computer games? While I don't think that this style of gameplay works well when grafted onto Castlevania, Vampire Killer has a significant following that disagrees, and the game is different enough from both Castlevania and comparable action adventures that I can see the appeal of its unique approach. If nothing else, Vampire Killer certainly feels like a more substantial undertaking.

6/10

[LoganRuckman]

Very good reviews! Can't wait to see your Castlevania III review.

[GStratos]

Very nice reviews, with a unique perspective to them. In my case, I never liked the Castlevania games, with the exception of Rondo of Blood, but it's always cool to see people describe the games they treasure so much.

[DrLitch]

Good reviews and contribution for a series that basically got me big time hooked into gaming. I have never played Vampire Killer and yours was a welcome contribution into a game on an obscure system that I know little about. Look forward to your thoughts on the RPG lite Castlevania II and the third which is, for some people, the series at it's peak.

[Stalvern]

Look forward to your thoughts on the RPG lite Castlevania II

The forums randomly logged me out before I tried to preview that review and deleted the whole thing. It would have been up this morning. I've been struggling to get a rewrite together that doesn't just feel like a worse version of what I half-remember. Going to take a break before having another crack at it.

Thank you for the appreciation of what I have so far. Yours means a lot to me when it comes to this series.

[DrLitch]

The forums randomly logged me out before I tried to preview that review and deleted the whole thing.

Not a bad skill to have to be able to stream from your consciousness a coherently written piece in the hour or two you are logged onto the forum. The artist deemed the self the brush holds.

Look forward to you following up on your reviews.

[Stalvern]

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (1987)

Despite the title's insistence otherwise, this feels much more like a sequel to Vampire Killer. Freed from a level-based structure, Simon's Quest commits to what Vampire Killer couldn't, with a single continuous world to roam in search of its many secrets. It's a massive technical advancement as well, scrolling its vast environs in all directions for a cohesive sense of space well out of the previous games' reach. In RPG fashion, Simon Belmont and his weaponry grow ever more formidable over the course of his quest to break the curse killing him and the land of Transylvania, even as each passing day is a reminder that his time is running out. With newfound ambition backed up by a prodigious engine and unusual thematic depth, Simon's Quest surpasses Castlevania in every way and stands as a pillar of the NES's legacy.

Well, it would, if it weren't all a put-on. Simon's Quest turns out to have a lot less substance than Vampire Killer. That game has the same song and dance in all seven levels, but this game puts the player through one level over and over, and that level's thinly spread. Each area has a palette swap of the one mansion, a palette swap of the one town, and rolling stretches of palette-swapped land connecting it to adjacent areas. Gray is usually the dominant color. Every mansion is a sprawling jumble of stairways and spikes, the bizarrely tiered towns waste space and the player's time with closed buildings and blathering townsfolk, and the plains and forests have precious little going on besides the occasional novel enemy or spot to use an item. It's all so repetitive and aimless that it might as well be procedurally generated, but it's set in stone, and so is the path through it. This open world is not meant to be explored, as you'll quickly find out if you try going left at the start of the game. Instead, do as the first NPC says and spend the hearts you mercifully start with on the crystal. But don't listen to the next guy's warning about "bum deals", or you'll miss out on the other items you need to buy, eventually get stuck, and have to trudge back to the beginning, like I did the first time I played.

And I mean trudge. Simon takes his time getting around, which is suited to Castlevania's methodical gameplay but makes Simon's Quest's long, trivial stretches between mansions an absolute slog. As it happens, the backtracking I blundered into was the intended path through the game, so after I reached the start and then made it all the way back to where I'd gotten stuck, I quickly came to an actual dead end and had to trek back through two full areas for the third time in a row. This journey would be boring enough, inexcusably so for a Castlevania game, if I had to make it once. Not only did I have two more trips to get through, but I was interrupted all along the way by the infamous day/night cycle, which is every bit the waste of time it's made out to be. I'm not even talking about the stupid transition sequence; the only gameplay purpose this nonsense serves is to slow you down. During the day, you get half as many hearts from killing enemies. At night, you can't spend them on anything and have to wait around for the next day. And if you take much longer than the bare minimum of days to beat the game, you get a bad ending. Are we having fun yet? I'm guessing that this element was included to break up the visual monotony a bit, but when the graphics are all redundant palette swaps, it doesn't help much to add palette swaps of the palette swaps. Sheesh.

The mansions, the most monotonous part, don't even get the day/night cycle. They all have the same tiles, all big stone blocks, arched iron gratings, and ostensible windows with a blank void beyond them. Hanging corpses do their best to provide visual flair, but after their second appearance in the first mansion, there isn't much that they can add to the rest. Even though the mansions are larger and more open than the levels in the first game, they ramble all over the place in much the same way as each other, and their oppressive and unchanging visuals are stifling from the start. With no view outside their dingy stone confines and frequent pools of water at their lower reaches, they all feel like dips into various regions of the biggest sewer level on the NES. Coming after Vampire Killer, it's ridiculous that Simon's Quest has so little to see in its mansions and even less to do. The earlier game's non-linear scavenger hunting has been retained, but it's reduced to the most basic form possible: Wander around until you find the stake vendor (?), then find the Dracula part, then go back through the mansion to get out. If there's a boss, fight him or don't. (The second boss drops a critical item, but the first – who shows up three mansions into the game – drops a weapon that can be safely ignored. These are the only two bosses before Dracula.)

Without Castlevania's focus, Vampire Killer's relative depth, the variety of either, or even the time pressure of the rest of the game, the mansions in Simon's Quest are dull at best and frustrating at worst, and there's no shortage of frustration. The first fake floor is one of the nastiest dick moves I've ever seen in a game, and there are plenty more to keep it company. Fall through the floor, or at all, and the multi-directional scrolling often spares you the death you would have met in Castlevania – only to replace it with a circuitous, slowdown-burdened march back to where you were. (Interestingly, Simon has a very slow fall in this game, almost floating downward, which makes me wonder if the new engine couldn't keep up with his normal falling speed.) False floors and walls can be revealed with holy water, which also breaks destructible tiles. This reveals secrets (more on those in a bit) and opens inaccessible areas, but it's just as likely to lead to dead ends. When in doubt, which is any time a floor or wall is present, throw some holy water and see if anything happens. Of course, 99% of the time, nothing will, so you might as well just use a map and save yourself the trouble. This shouldn't be all that different from Castlevania's encouragement to whip every corner in sight on the chance of finding meat or a tablet, but that's much more reasonable in the context of the first game's tighter level design, which presents fewer and more conspicuous opportunities for the action.

Progress from one area to the next is gated in two ways. First, each area has stronger enemies than the last and a whip upgrade to prepare Simon for the next. Because both scale together, each whip upgrade is functionally a toll paid in hearts, rather than anything relevant to gameplay; enemies always go down in one or two hits, maybe one more at night. (Collecting hearts levels up Simon's health, which likewise keeps pace with enemy damage.) If you don't have enough hearts, hang out at the edge of an area and repeatedly cross over to spawn enemies to kill. Is it fun? No. Does it work? Yes. The game's second barrier to progression is its arbitrary MacGuffin items – crystals and some of Dracula's body parts – with very specific uses, few of which are clear even from the game's copious text. Only about a quarter of what the townspeople tell you is any help, the rest being lost in translation, meaningless filler, or simply false. (Of course, you still need to talk to every Transylvanian you see, just in case they happen to give you a MacGuffin after their dialogue finishes plodding onto the screen.) The only vaguely reliable source of information is the "clue" books, but they're hidden behind breakable tiles, so you have to spam holy water at every wall to find them until you get Dracula's eyeball and can see where they are. The most important clue before that point isn't even behind a wall like the rest; it's buried in a random ground tile in the woods! You'd never find that clue playing normally, even without the spiders immediately pelting you with webs and forcing you to get a move on. (Should you dig it up, you get one chance to read it before it's gone forever – be careful with that B button!) But let's say that you meet the game halfway and only use a map to see where the clues are before uncovering them for yourself. Heck, meet it a quarter of the way and read the clues online while still analyzing them without a walkthrough. None of the books even say what you need to do with Dracula's heart, and the only NPC with relevant dialogue says to use a different item instead, so there's no reason to play along with any of this. The game is functionally an advertisement for Nintendo Power.

Under all the obtuse repetition, though, Simon's Quest is still a Castlevania game. How are the fundamentals? Simon Belmont is as stolidly purposeful to control as ever, and there are moments of interplay with the enemies and environments that match Castlevania's highlights. My favorite is a river or lake in the very first area that Simon must cross while whipping leaping fishmen at the apex of each jump between platforms, which I like even more than the best parts of the first game. But moments like that only punctuate an otherwise shoddy experience. Most of the terrain between the towns and mansions is negligible as level design, and the mansions don't offer much challenge beyond habitually placing platforms at the limits of where Simon can jump. Little things, like enemies that spawn almost on top of Simon when he enters an area or platforms just low enough for him to bonk his head on while jumping, show an uncharacteristic inattention to detail for a Konami game, let alone one of this pedigree. On top of that, the special weapons are a farce. The base versions are unlimited one-time buys, while the upgrades consume hearts better spent on the mandatory purchases to get through the game. It doesn't quite take a genius to know which will be thrown around without a care and which will languish in Simon's inventory until Dracula shows up.

Simon's Quest demands to be played with maps and a walkthrough, negating its already flimsy pretense of non-linear exploration and puzzle solving, and with the structural conceit out of the picture, the basic gameplay doesn't come close to either Castlevania's or Vampire Killer's. Is there anything this game does right that wasn't better before? In fact, yes. I don't have much patience for the MacGuffins, but the way that the laurel figures into the game's progression is much more substantial and rewarding. The holy water could have been the same way if its use had been reined in: Lose the fake floors and give the breakable walls more emphasis in the level design, and you have a reasonable upgrade instead of a tedious chore. One very silly but entertaining detail regarding the holy water is that it's sometimes needed to access townsfolk who have been mysteriously walled away in their cellars, "The Cask of Amontillado"-style, which they don't seem to mind or even be aware of. It doesn't take much thought to figure out what to do, and the situation is so ridiculous that I can't help smiling at it. In contrast to this bathos, Simon's Quest also has a dubiously appropriate flair for the dramatic. I like the cackling ferryman, so ominous for no apparent reason. I like the portentously nonsensical revelation that there are stairs under the water if you can just use the item that scrolls the screen downward. I even like the abandoned ruins of Dracula's castle at the end... in concept. In practice, it needs a final boss whose maximalism equals the preceding minimalism, and we all know what Drac is actually like here. The whole thing just ends up being a lame anticlimax – but the ruins do a good job of setting up something that could have been great. Moreover, inveterate palette swapping aside, I appreciate the somber, grounded atmosphere in general, which transforms Transylvania from an assortment of horror movie sets into a blighted and dying land (regardless of the "film reel" effect on the main menu). And I'd be remiss to ignore the game's most lasting contribution to the series, the "Bloody Tears" theme, a track as iconic as it is short and repetitive. Is this the best that I can say about the game? Can I only damn it with faint praise? I'd better wrap this up.

Despite the favorable revisionism provoked by attention from a certain YouTube star (along with, I suspect, more people watching and making videos about the game than actually playing it), Simon's Quest is plainly undercooked. The obscene repetition and padding, along with the slapdash level design and sketchy structure, betray a development cycle that just wasn't adequate for the ambitions of the project. It's not like it was ahead of its time and people hadn't yet figured out out how to make a game like this – Faxanadu and its computer-based predecessors stomp Simon's Quest into the ground, and even games with such contested legacies as The Adventure of Link and the original Metroid "understand the assignment" in a way that Simon's Quest doesn't seem to. My intuition is that this isn't really the game its makers wanted to make. Unfortunately, its potential wouldn't be realized. Its ideas were swiftly abandoned, and when Castlevania eventually tried something similar again, it was in an unrelated and unrecognizable form. For this easily romanticized tragic element, and for the basic '80s Castlevania foundation, I am sympathetic enough to Simon's Quest to almost enjoy it.

4/10

Sorry that this took so long. Late December was a harried time for obvious reasons, the beginning of this month had some serious stress of its own, and the review itself kept getting longer every time I went back to it. (This is about twice the length of the one that I lost a month ago, and it doesn't even mention everyone's favorite magic tornado.) Future reviews will be posted more promptly and will be more manageably sized.

[Stalvern]

Haunted Castle (1987)

Castlevania fans hate this one, and I'm not about to rock the boat. The best thing about Simon's Quest is that it has the heftily assured Castlevania feel, which is lacking in the otherwise thoroughly superior Vampire Killer. This arcade game is more like Rastan with ankle weights. It even gives Simon Belmont a sword – sacrilege! Was Rastan so popular that even a juggernaut like Konami had to mold a flagship property like Castlevania into an imitation of it? Of course not. The truth is that few things about Haunted Castle have reason to be the way they are, and its misbegotten character is the result of troubled development. The team originally assigned to the project couldn't get it together, and another team already working on a different game (the bonkers OutRun-meets-Speed Hot Chase) was brought in to get the job done at the last minute. Nobody in Konami's arcade division had any connection to the console and computer games, and the circumstances ensured that nobody managed to make the game they – or anyone – actually wanted.

Haunted Castle, for the record, is officially a Castlevania game. There are a few hypotheses about why it lacks the name, but the most convincing one I've read is that Konami didn't want it to compete with the first game's arcade release as VS. Castlevania, which was still popular in the States. Another is that Konami lacked faith in this game to represent the Castlevania brand favorably, which would have been justified. Its hulking version of Simon, who looks like a telephone-game exaggeration of his barbarian depiction in the first game's artwork, totters around in a manner frequently described as "constipated" and has a hit box even more expansive than his oversized sprite. He's an easy target for enemies, so of course there's an American-market variant that makes him die in two hits. (I wonder if the genius behind this was also responsible for the American release of Contra: Hard Corps.) Everything about this take on the character is wrong. His leaden walk is paired with a weirdly floaty jump arc. Upgrading his whip to a flail or sword gives his attack more damage but halves the range, which is inexcusable. Giving him a sword at all is a terrible idea. Giving him a kidnapped bride to rescue like he's Sir Arthur is a terrible idea. Showing him newly married in a white tuxedo before he changes into his Conan getup is one of the most ludicrously stupid ideas in a video game. Nobody with half a clue made this.

I don't just mean that in the context of the Castlevania series to this point. The game is incompetent on its own terms. Simon's jump isn't just floaty; it actually hangs for a few disconcerting frames at its apex. When he descends a staircase, an incomplete walk cycle teleports him choppily from step to step. His pokey normal walk picks up the pace by 25% when there's parallax (exclusive to level 2), because its speed is relative to the background layer, because there's a part where Simon walks from the foreground layer onto the background. This stuff feels "off" until you consciously notice it, and then it's like a splinter under your nail. I take back what I said – nobody with any amount of a clue made this.

The opening graveyard level has about as much platform gameplay as the beginning of Altered Beast, and the constant attacks from the scenery make it a royal pain to get through, but it at least shows off some decent arcade spectacle in its changing weather, raging fire, and climactic Gorgon boss. (She resides in a morgue with, for some reason, a giant spiderweb, which suggests competing ideas for who or what would be waiting there.) The second level really embraces the Rastan inspiration, focusing on chunky platform action and environmental variety. The latter is absurdly exaggerated, with the sky somehow changing from misty moonlit night to a blazing orange sunset in the few minutes that Simon spends underground, but far be it from me to complain about excessive effort, especially with this game. It's here that Haunted Castle starts to feel like it might have something to offer, and the speed boost from the parallax certainly helps. The game doesn't have anything that makes Castlevania good, but as an unrelated arcade machine (maybe a Conan game based on the stories instead of the movies?), it might be worth a couple of quarters. It's janky beyond belief, and the graphics are a grainy, garish mess, and it isn't even all that fun, but these things just add to the underdog character that it takes on if you can pretend that it was made by random nobodies instead of Konami.

And then you get to level 3, and you want to fly to Japan and strangle each of those nobodies personally. A flat hallway where you're mobbed by enemies under dropping chandeliers doesn't sound like a good time in the first place (even less so when keeping in mind that this candleless Castlevania all but restricts special weapons to its boss fights), but it also highlights the single worst idea in Haunted Castle, a distinction of note. Instead of lives, you have quarters, and you have four of them. If Simon dies, you can spend a quarter to continue, or you can spend it while he's alive to restore his health, like in Gauntlet. Unlike in Gauntlet, or in Castlevania, there's no food to restore health without spending real money. Again, the game will only accept four quarters before kicking you back to the title screen. What on Earth is the point of such a crassly quarter-gobbling arcade game when it doesn't even gobble your quarters? You're all but guaranteed to use them up before the end of level 3 unless you hone yourself into a superhuman savant of Haunted Castle, and I can think of a few thousand things I'd rather be an expert in. The only way for a normal player to get through is to abuse state saving, which is just as well, since nobody in the past 35 years has played Haunted Castle on an arcade cabinet anyway.

Three more levels. A lumpy brown underground labyrinth with the best level design and boss but the most amateurish graphics in the game. A pathetic "clock tower" with all the gears stuck behind a window and drawn in flat yellow, half of which is dedicated to a tiresome elevator section. An interminable collapsing bridge that kills you if you waste any frames fighting the bats along the way (which have a habit of getting stuck suspended in the air). Finally, a gorgeous version of Dracula's chamber that just might be my favorite iteration in the series, with a decent Dracula fight to boot... but what's going on here? I just walked through a door from that bridge in the middle of the day, and now it's nighttime outside Dracula's window? My guess is that the bridge was supposed to transition from day to night like the first level, which would also account for why the stage itself is so drawn-out, but the developers ran out of time.

That time constraint doesn't excuse Haunted Castle's big, fundamental problems or its really boneheaded ideas, or even smaller issues like the flat-topped jump arc, but it does explain a lot. Reportedly, the replacement team did most of the work that's in the final game, and they had all of two months to do it. So when the graphics lurch back and forth between grainy scribbles and crisp detail, it's probably because half of them are really unfinished but were deemed "good enough" to move on from. The fake construction-paper clockwork in the clock tower is probably a placeholder for what would have been actual clockwork, whenever people could find the time to program the objects and finish the tile set. There's a ridiculous wall "boss" halfway through the graveyard that flings its stones at Simon until it's gone – for all I know, this could have been desperately thrown in a week before release. Maybe the Gorgon was originally there, and the devs moved her into the morgue when they couldn't get the spider ready to go.

Considering this, it's impressive that a significant portion of the game is done right. There are a couple of iffy bosses (the Gorgon being the most annoying), but the skeletal dragon, Frankenstein monster, and rock giant are very good, especially the rock giant. Dracula's final form as an enormous head is something of a letdown, but his initial appearance has the most panache of any incarnation before Rondo of Blood, and if his fight's on the easy side, it's at least in a game where that's far preferable to the opposite issue. Levels 2 and 4, the ones that feel most like a serious platform game, make the strongest case for Haunted Castle's legitimacy as a project. While they aren't lookers by any stretch and hardly resemble Castlevania, they zigzag around entertainingly, have the most reasonable difficulty, end with the best bosses, and make it easy to imagine the agreeably middling game that could have been built on their strengths instead of this one. The worst levels, 3 and 6, at least have the decency to feature the best graphics – and, in level 3's case, a beefy rendition of "Bloody Tears" (along with a painting that cries, well, bloody tears). The music is excellent overall and is the best thing about Haunted Castle by a country mile, as might be expected from the part of the game least affected by its fraught gestation. My favorite piece is the clock tower theme, but they're all great, with an aggressive, synthesized sound that sets the game apart from the rest of the series in a positive way.

Of course, none of this has saved Haunted Castle from a deservedly negative reputation. And as understanding as I can be toward it when I really put in the effort, its impressive knack for unforced error invites mockery at every turn. Like so many others, I'm happy to oblige.

3/10

[Stalvern]

Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (1989)

Between the unfulfilled promise of Simon's Quest and the junk called Haunted Castle, it would have been a sensible move for the next Castlevania to refine Simon's Quest into something more substantial. An open-world Castlevania III could have surpassed Blaster Master as the subgenre's peak on the NES and likely would have resulted in a game like Symphony of the Night happening much earlier. And yet Konami decided to play it safe, returned to the original Castlevania, and set it in stone as the model for the series. I say that Konami "decided to play it safe" because it's inarguable that the Castlevania III we got was less ambitious in scope than the alternative. But its goal was loftier in its own way: bringing out the untapped potential of a game whose greatness was already indisputable. It's very easy to improve on Simon's Quest, but how do you improve on Castlevania? The worst you can say about that game is that it came out in 1986, so it's on the short side and has a bit of graphical repetition.

The response of Dracula's Curse is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. This is one of the NES's biggest, baddest games, my favorite on the system and probably my favorite game of the '80s (although the international release was in 1990). It has almost triple the levels of the original, each about twice as long as before. The upgraded graphics only use their increased detail and variety to look even rougher and nastier. Defeated bosses become playable characters, and branching paths through its network of levels pile on the replay value. The Japanese version has a special sound chip blasting out unbelievable music, and the international release, which couldn't support such a feature, still uses the stock NES hardware to the fullest. Other issues with the international version include the moronic nerfing of Grant and a pointlessly simplified damage system, but its downgrades can't put more than a scratch on this untouchable classic. What a game.

Its greatness comes at a price, however. Am I happy that the clock tower from the first game is revisited twice here? Of course. The new clock towers, now with spinning gears and swinging pendulums, are the perfect environment and metaphor for the player's movement; the arc of each deftly timed jump between the cogs is like clockwork itself. The impossibly vast first tower is my single favorite level in the series and one of my favorites in any game. This needed to be done, and Haunted Castle's pitiful crack at it hardly counts. But in specifically revisiting the first game, and in doing such a brilliant job of it, Dracula's Curse declared that the series going forward would be nothing more than iterations on that game. Dracula's castle would rise again and again, and various Belmonts would traipse through its decrepit entrance hall and whip jumping fishmen and throw holy water on Frankenstein's monster until the end of time, or at least until Konami got sick of making the same game over and over and decided to make a different game over and over. New locales or monsters would be permitted only if they didn't overshadow what was already established.

Going into the '90s, Konami had a policy of only releasing system exclusives. Various teams developed five Castlevanias for four systems, and they are all Castlevania as hell. If you like smacking hearts out of candles, you sure will like these games – and I sure do like them. I will never get tired of smacking hearts out of candles. If I get tired of a specific game's take on smacking hearts out of candles, I can simply play any of the other Classicvanias and settle back into its variations on the theme. But it's hard to ignore what might have been if the series had been given more freedom to develop in new ways during such a fruitful time.

I'm reminded of the band Bad Religion. They were one of the greatest hardcore punk bands of the '80s. They made their name with a self-titled EP and an album called How Could Hell Be Any Worse? For their second album, they put out a wonky little space-prog thing called Into the Unknown, and their fans all hated it. It's not a very good album, an ambitious but hazardously undercooked failure in the same way that, say, Simon's Quest is. After it flopped, the band released an EP called Back to the Known and then cranked out three hardcore albums in a row that blew away their early material and made them even more legendary. And then they kept doing it. They kept making the same popped-up hardcore album with the same complicated college professor lyrics over and over and over for the next 40 years and counting. It's a pretty good album, and it's a really good album if you're a Bad Religion fan. But if they hadn't decided to so consciously get "back to the known", or even if they hadn't released Into the Unknown at all and just let its spirit bleed into their other music instead of reining it in, it's hard to argue that they wouldn't have had a more interesting career – and it's very hard to argue that they wouldn't have had more interesting albums after 1990.

At the same time, I have to remember another band, Motörhead. Motörhead never had that little detour, never had anything to break a four-decade streak of recording one album again and again. Their albums are all Motörhead as hell. If you like Lemmy Kilmister hollering his head off over fast guitar riffs, you sure will like these albums – and I sure do like them. I will never get tired of Lemmy hollering his head off over fast guitar riffs. If I get tired of a specific album's take on Lemmy hollering his head off over fast guitar riffs, I can simply play any of the other Motörhead albums and settle back into its variations on the theme. It would be really stupid to speculate about what might have been had the band developed in different ways, given that this is Motörhead I'm talking about.

The question follows: If neither of these bands stepped outside a formula once established, why care that one of them might have done so and didn't? Alternatively, if I imagine a dead-end Motörhead prog album, would such a thing make me appreciate one of my favorite bands any less? Wait, Lemmy was actually in a prog band before Motörhead. Why did he never return to the groovy psychedelic space exploration of Hawkwind? This question of artistic redundancy has become even thornier.

In the end, I really don't know how I should feel. I don't know if making the same Castlevania over and over again was slavish repetition or staying true to a vision. All I know is that I really like cracking that damn whip.

Some more thoughts about Dracula's Curse, since I've gotten so far off track:

Perfect opening level. Remember how cool it was going into the basement at the start of Castlevania? What if transitions like that just didn't stop? No need to imagine. Besides that, the challenge is manageable for a first-time player.

I said that the first game was too short and praised this game for being long, but there is a concisely poetic elegance to the original that's lost in this sprawling epic. Not to say that it isn't replaced with something special in its own way, but it is gone.

I like that the Medusa heads are a bit slower this time around. They're a little fast in the first game, but they feel just right to whip here.

With Grant being so useless in the international release but the clock tower being so awesome, it's nice that you can immediately replace him with Sypha. I would never do that in the Japanese version, though.

Love the owls in the woods and the toads in the swamp.

More games need a big decrepit ship.

The Simon's Quest review mentioned my appreciation for the senseless drama of the stairs under the lake. The forced-scrolling remake of the first game's red tower turns this kind of beautiful goofiness into an entire level. It's just as awesome when it happens again toward the end of the game.

It was awfully nice of this game to "canonize" the collapsing bridge in Haunted Castle as a trope of the series. Very generous to a terrible game's legacy.

It was awfully nice of this game to establish Atlantis levels as a trope of the series. Very generous to me.

The level with the falling blocks is a real chore, but I don't mind. It's a neat idea on paper, and I can just skip it with Alucard anyway. Plus, it has that funny little guy hopping around angrily while he waits for acid to dissolve the blocks imprisoning him.

Is this the only Classicvania where water does anything besides hurt or kill you?

Awesome Dracula fight.

Awesome endings.

Perfect game.

10/10 (Japanese)

9/10 (international)