MY BAD GAME JOURNEY WITH FRIENDS IN VOICE CHAT
MARATHON PART 1: DRACULA X

this game isn't nessesarily bad despite the title, but as a CASTLEVANIA game its a huge letdown, this isn't even like a watered down port of Rondo, its pretty much in terms of its level design is completely different, in a very bad way, the bosses were OKAY until dracula. the dracula fight is slow and every time i think about it i can only think about the sonic jam ost on the game.com specifically because my friend put that on the bot on loop.

its such a dissapointment that it caused my autistic brain to come up with a new vocal stim, every time i took an unfair hit all i could think or speak was "awesome sauce" so imagine being with me in the voice chat where every time i got hit from some bullshit or had to deal with any bullshit in the game (which happened quite often) you'd have to hear me exclaim "thats so awesome sauce".

and its not like this game is like the worst either its just that if you've al;ready played rondo then you wont have a fun time with this game.

It's a classic Castlevania game, yet a very forgettable one. While it's gameplay is what I prefer for Castlevania, and I did enjoy what I played, nothing particularly stuck with me after beating it. Mind you, I played the Super Nintendo version, and I'm told the PC Engine version is far superior.

That being said, Dracula X for the SNES is a very standard game. Richter is cool; he can do a backflip! It's versatility can't be understated, and I enjoyed skipping platforming and getting to higher areas with its use, but you can stop using it after a while. The entire game doesn't need to be designed around the backflip, but a handful of extra use-cases for it would've gone a long way. Ultimately, the best part of this game is its music, but even that's 1upped by the PC Engine counterpart.

At the end of the day, I'd rather play the NES original, but maybe I'm in the minority on that one.

This SNES version of Rondo of Blood isn't a completely bad Castlevania game, but it comes off limited in comparison. Controls wise it's a step back from Super Castlevania IV—you only have the horizontal whip attack, though you can backflip which is very fun to pull off in spotty situations. There's no whip swinging, no diagonal or vertical whip attacks, no alternate paths, and the levels are basic and not as well-designed as usual. It feels like there's an overuse of the Spear Guard—maybe I just don't know how to fight them, but Richter's reach is too short and his animation is too slow to get a hit in and get out without getting hit. Often when climbing stairs an enemy will stand at the end, and without a diagonal whip attack there's nothing to do but walk up the stairs to take damage; it especially sticks out compared to the earlier games because while they can be difficult and unfair, they usually aren't this cheap. This is all compounded by the fact that some enemies take a lot more damage than usual to kill them—in the best scenario, it feels like you're having a duel with a Sword Lord or Axe Knight, but it can also feel tedious and unfair when you're dealing with platforming or Bats/Medusa Head at the same time. Still, I'm a sucker for the basic Castlevania experience so I mostly had a good with the levels.

The bosses at the end of the levels are mostly pretty good versions of them. The exception is the Count himself, who is here in his most annoying version. It's the typical dodge projectile + attack head thing, but rather than a regular arena, the level is a set of pillars floating at various heights, and Dracula teleports to a random one before each attack. This makes jumping just right to dodge and hit his head very difficult—the timing is a lot more precise than usual. You can't simply jump over the projectile then attack because Richter doesn't have that much height and speed to jump from a lower place when Dracula attacks. You can't attack the projectile then jump and attack because you typically would need to jump to hit the projectile; once Richter lands, you don't have enough time to jump again and hit Dracula's head before the window closes. Dracula will also throw an energy ball, which can only be dodged by jumping or backflipping over it, depending on the height of the attack, or by getting to the lowest pillar and crouching so it glides right over you. On top of all this Richter has a momentum and weight to his jumps, and you cannot guide Richter after you've already hit the jump button, so it is extremely easy to fall to your death, or land your jump on the pillar only to slide to your death. It's very frustrating, but with rewind + save states it just becomes very tedious. The second phase where Dracula goes demon mode is a lot easier. His projectiles have an easier timing and placement so you can often take out the projectiles and get damage in at the same time, and you can jump through or crouch to dodge his wind hoop attack.

The best part of the game, besides timing a backflip perfectly, is the way it looks. It's more artistic/anime looking than the blocky classic style of Rondo of Blood, and actually looks a little slicker to me than Symphony of the Night; it's much closer to the GBA games that Dracula X is now packaged with. The music is good too, though nothing stuck out for me.

Altogether this is an unfortunately middling game that makes me appreciate Super Castlevania IV and Castlevania: Bloodlines even more. Until Konami releases a Rondo collection on something besides PlayStation, this will have to do.

If all you had was a Super Nintendo back in the day, this game would be alright. Now? Especially when playing it right after Rondo? Good lord. Slowdown when walking, anyone?

In all fairness, it's not like this game is a "lesser Rondo of Blood". There's tons of different things going on here, especially the levels. It's all new from what I could tell, but I didn't take all routes in the game so maybe there's some copy pasting, who knows.

Now, all Castlevanias have issues with enemy placement, it's nothing new. But MAN did Drac X give me a hard time with it; spears coming out the edge of the screen, bats cropping up ONE MILLIMETER before entering a door, the list goes on. Don't even get me started on those jumps where you have to be basically off the edge to land.

And how about that Death fight with the one move you're basically forced to Item Crash to avoid? Fun times. You know what's even more fun? A VERY slow, very tedious Dracula fight where you have like... A SECOND to hit his face before he disappears. Oh yeah, and make sure to wait until his "poofing in" animation is fully over, otherwise you'll be hitting jack and shit.

Unless you're going for a full series retrospective, don't bother. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I won't lie, it got me a bit tilted.

OH YEAH, no playable Maria. Immediate 0/5

It is wrong to say it's a lesser version of Rondo of Blood, while they are meant to be the same events, they are clearly very different games. What's not wrong is to say this game sucks.
The levels are frustating, with a lot of them being to corridors with enemies on the top who CAN attack you while you cannot. The screens barely flow into one another making it feel like you just teleported places. On the topic of screens, a few of them are lifted from older Castlevania titles and end up being ust worst version of those screens.
Richter controls terrible, he feels slow and heavy, and has really short invincibility frames, making it that you could get stun locked by some enemies.
On the topic of enemies, it has the worst Dracula fight of the Castlevanias i've played, just a bore.
With all that you could wonder why i didn't score the game lower? At the end of the day is still a Castlevania game, and has its good parts, when not being an extremely frustating game i had fun with it, as some parts of it display effort and competence, it's just a shame those parts are not that many.

Of all the Classic Castlevania games that follow the traditional formula of the series, Dracula X is likely the most divisive, disliked of them all, with the fact of it feeling like an inferior version of the highly acclaimed Rondo of Blood, but for the SNES, immediately souring the opinions on the game for many people, especially in retrospect. Further adding to the displeasure that many people felt for the game was how it felt like a step back in a lot of respects, with reduced whip functionality, bringing back the whip controls from the NES titles, but also making the mobility be far more limited than Super Castlevania IV, along with the design of the game in terms of its approach to difficulty also feeling extremely out of whack. Nonetheless, despite me thinking that this game has a fair few shortcomings and that the Genesis got the superior game in the form of Bloodlines, there’s definitely some positives along with the negatives.

The game’s presentation here is far more vibrant than the often washed out look of Super Castlevania IV, with a much brighter colour palette, along with more detailed models across the board, many of them going on to be the signature look of them for games to come. This ultimately makes it that even during the most frustrating moments in the game, there’ll almost always at least be some eye candy on screen to keep you interested, especially with the developers seemingly wanting to push the hardware to the absolute limit with some of the effects in the game, notably the gigantic fire in the background throughout the opening level. The unfortunate downside to this is that I feel that the game ended up making the same mistake as Super Castlevania IV, overextending to the point where there are some significant performance drops in certain areas, most notably during a boss fight that continuously summons enemies as time goes on, creating an insane amount of particle effects to the point where it almost feels as if the boss is using the extreme lag as a weapon of its own. One other issue with the presentation of this game is the fact that by this point the series begins to feel formulaic, perpetuating many of the conventions within this series, but without really adding anything meaningful or interesting to them, with a lot of it, such as the obligatory clock tower stage, simply feeling like retreading old ground, making the excitement of discovery and progression from the games feel lessened here due to its predictability.

Outside of the presentation, the game’s design as a whole also feels considerably weaker than a fair few of the past titles as well, bringing back a lot of the more unfair aspects of the past games such as excessive bottomless pits and enemies placed in extremely awkward, near undodgeable locations that often force the player to either perform an extremely reckless action, or spend a great deal of time tediously inching their way through what the game throws at you. Often it just feels like the original intention of the slow movement of having to constantly think about your each and every move was lost to an extent here, with it often feeling like an unnecessary hindrance rather than anything else.

The worst offender of a lot of these issues is the final stage however, which feels straight up a mess in multiple ways that ultimately makes the game unsatisfying. For one, a lot of the stage feels conventional and unadventurous to the point where I genuinely didn’t realise it was the final stage until I got up to the Dracula fight, since very little outside of the initial stair climb really resembles anything too climactic, the obstacles either being incredibly easy or downright obnoxious to deal with, but nothing really having the spectacle you’d expect from the grand finale of the game. However, while the game being quite anticlimactic is definitely disappointing, where this game truly fails is by having undoubtedly the worst boss in the series, and it’s not even close. A large part of the problem comes down to the fact that the arena is set up on thing pillars of varying heights over a death pit, effectively making most hits taken from the fight an immediate death. While this alone is absolutely awful, the nail in the coffin is really how aggravatingly tedious the fight is, with certain locations making it impossible to get hit by all but one attack, but RNG potentially making the battle last from anywhere between a minute to 5, especially depending on whether or not the player makes effective use of the axe subweapon or not. What this does is make the already underwhelming final stretch of the game end up leaving a bad taste in your mouth after either struggling for an incredibly long period of time against the final encounter, or just giving up on account of it not feeling worth the effort in the slightest, making an already flawed game even less fun by the end.

Honestly, this game just feels really formulaic and mediocre in a lot of ways, despite some good aspects definitely making it feel at least somewhat worth a try. It feels like there was a serious issue with creativity in this game on the whole unfortunately, just going through the motions again but with a really nice looking coat of paint, with some aspects, such as the boss fights feeling greatly improved for the most part, while others just felt like creative bankruptcy. This is highlighted to me in the OST for this game, with all of the tracks being really great, with a more upbeat feel than any previous game, but with 3 of the stages out of 7 being reprises of the main themes from the original trilogy of games, and the final stage feeling like a mishmash of them that didn’t end up sounding quite right. Ultimately, while this game does succeed in some ways, as a whole it often feels more like a botched love letter to the games of the past, but rather than building upon the ideas of these games, it just feels like taking them without much additional thought put into it, which makes the game really feel like a step back form the progression the series was seeing from game to game.

I'm a huge fan of Rando of Blood, and had always heard horror stories about this version of it.
Overall, I don't think it's bad and I actually had more fun than I anticipated I would. But some it's level design is so rough.
A lot of vertical rooms with very uncertain enemy patterns. They love doing this thing where if you miss a jump, you have to go outside your current room and back around to get back to it, respawning all of the enemies and making the punishment much more annoying as a result.
I kept saying "wow this game is mean." Rather than feeling it was a more deliberate challenge they wanted me to figure out.
It's been a minute since I've played the original Rando, but I can't recall having that many moments like that.
I ended up using a few save states towards the end, just to save me the pain and time of retreading an entire stage to learn one obnoxious vertical section of the level design.
But the worst offender of this is the final boss. A shit show of a boss fight. Small hurtbox windows, a lot of RNG and littered with pits to, invetibility, get tossed into by some attack from offscreen you couldn't react to.
And that's just the first phase. The second phase is an onslaught of barley reactable projectiles. With such small platforms to keep yourself on, it makes almost impossible to get right your first time; meaning you're playing through that tedious first phase with each attempt to learn.
It's obnoxious and shudder to imagine that 10 year old kid in 1995 slaving over this for hours on a school night.
Even a perfect run of this fight on youtube takes 5 full minutes.
I absolutely did not have the patience for this,
Ended up amusing save states heavily, and felt extremely underwhelmed as a result.
Just a real wet fart to end the game on.
And the lack of Maria kinda stings. She is huge part of why I love that original game so much.
I guess that's why this game has this reputation, it doesn't do its own thing at all, so it just ends up being in the shadow of its older, cooler, brother.

(This is the 110th game in my challenge to go through many known games in chronological order starting in 1990. The spreadsheet/blog is in my bio.)

The Castlevania series is among the few series I'm looking forward to the most as part of this challenge, which is something I wasn't expecting to say after I had a bit of a falling out with Castlevania 3 you could say. But after Super Castlevania IV and Castlevania Bloodlines, you can definitely call me a Castlevania fan. I haven't played any other Castlevania games before in my life, so all of these releases are new to me. Does Castlevania: Dracula X deserve to be praised as highly as the previous two games I've mentioned?

Released in 1995 exclusively for the SNES, Dracula X is supposedly a remake for Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which I didn't play yet (but should according to Castlevania fans everywhere) but based on what I've seen from Rondo of Blood, Dracula X looks like a lite version of it for some reason. The wikipedia entry for Dracula X does say that there were limits of the SNES cartridge format to think in mind as part of this port, so I'm assuming stuff was cut out here. With that in mind, remake seems like an odd term for this game. It seems like a port with updated visuals.

STORYTELLING/CHARACTERS | 2/10

The Belmont family v Dracula Round #854. This time it's Richter Belmont, who fights Dracula Reborn hundreds of years after Simon Belmont defeated him initially. Dracula lures Richter in by kidnapping his girlfriend and sister, who you can save in Dracula's castle, if you can find them. In Rondo of Blood, the sister I believe becomes a playable character when you find her, while here, only Richter Belmont is playable. That's pretty much it to the story, it's the same as with all Castlevania games up to this point pretty much. You just got Richter, who is added to the Belmont Clan of vampire/Dracula slayers.

GAMEPLAY | 14/20

Castlevania: Dracula X goes back to the two-directions only approach with Richter Belmont. There also is no other playable character, so you only have access to a character who feels lacking in ability compared to his relatives as a result. Richter brings something new to the table however, which is called "Item Crash", which is basically a super attack. Instead of using one heart to use your normal sub-weapon attack, you can use up many of them at the same time (I believe 10 are used for the axe Item Crash) for one attack that deals more damage. These attacks kind of felt weaker than I would have thought however.

As far as the weapons and sub-weapons go, Richter is equipped with the whip and the sub-weapons he can collect are the same that the other games have also had pretty much. Incidentally, enemies, both normal and bosses, are also re-used from other Castlevania games. Basically it's more 90s Castlevania, which fans will like and people who dislike Castlevania already won't.

There are a total of seven stages (perhaps more if you can find the kidnapped girls, I didn't find them), and each ends with a boss. Boss fights are pretty cool as per usual with the Castlevania series, at least in terms of design and variety in how you have to tackle them, but some of them are pretty unfair. The Dracula boss fight would have been impossible for me to beat if it wasn't for save states on my emulator. You have less than 10 platforms that you can stand on and pretty much every time you get hit, you will drop down into the pit and die. Considering that the final Dracula fight is hard enough usually, you definitely do not need this extra challenge. There also is just not enough space to reliably dodge the attacks and worst of all, Dracula has a targeted fireball attack that you can't reliably time against at all, so I pretty much had to be lucky whenever I whipped to hit the fireballs and make them disappear. Dracula's design was definitely hilarious (absolutely shredded and only wearing a thong) but in a positive way I'd say.

Among the normal enemies, I want to say fuck you to the spear-flipping soldiers who have stupid range and can seemingly block all sub-weapons.

Overall however, as someone who enjoys the Castlevania gameplay loop, this game has one of the more fun gameplay experiences you can have on the SNES (JRPGs excluded) and proves that the Castlevania formula alone can make your game at least somewhat enjoyable. There is the typical SNES / Castlevania / 90s gaming BS moments in this game here, but that's what you have to expect with all Castlevania games that released, at least up until 1995. I'll return to Castlevania with Symphony of the Night, which I've heard lots of positive things about, so maybe the BS meter is lower there.

MUSIC/SOUND/VOICE | 9/10

The Castlevania series seems to be one where songs are reused regularly and simply remixed in each iteration. As someone who loves Castlevania soundtracks, I'm actually fond of listening to the classics again after a while. Dracula X does have some new songs, at least I didn't recognize every single one, and the ones that were reused are great, so I'm not gonna complain. Whether this is your first or 5th Castlevania game, I'm sure you'll have a great time listening to the soundtrack here. Shoutout to Divine Bloodlines, the first stage song. Just fantastic.

GRAPHICS/ART DESIGN | 8/10

I really like the visuals in Dracula X. Backgrounds are detailed and set the atmosphere, there are some nice visual effects, enemy design is repeated from many other Castlevania games but looks good, environments are varied, and level of detail is pretty good overall. It's a step back from Super Castlevania IV, which is understandable for a glorified port like this, but it's still one of the more graphically appealing games for its time, both in quality and art design.

ATMOSPHERE/IMMERSION | 8/10

Atmospherically the game places itself right in the middle of all prior Castlevania entries. The gothic-medieval art style that Castlevania is famous for sets the scene in Dracula X just as it always has, and the soundtrack for Castlevania games are probably the best examples the 90s have for music that tells the player to go be a hero. Castlevania has the gameplay to pull the epic music off and not have it awkwardly run counter to the gameplay itself, even if Dracula X is not the prime example for this, but it still works well here.

CONTENT | 5/10

Dracula X's content is, based on my understanding, the same as in Rondo of Blood, just worse and with plenty of content cut. That's certainly a disappointment. The content in this game is certainly enjoyable enough, and the short length does not necessarily work in its detriment, the fact that the original was longer probably does. Because the way the game is set up, you constantly see unique areas and fight bosses pretty quickly after one another, so it flows pretty nicely, although bosses can ruin the fun for sure.

LEVEL/MISSION DESIGN | 6/10

Levels don't feel repetitive as far as the game itself goes, though obviously you've seen these designs in other Castlevania games already. The difference to a game like Super Castlevania IV is that the game lacks some of the more clever levels like those that made use of SNES' Mode 7. Other than that, you have the typical dangers and challenges to overcome, which is certainly still fun, and as mentioned, they always feel fresh because the number of stages and areas is not on the high side.

That said, some levels have entirely too many enemies that keep spawning and annoying you to no end and too many bosses are not well designed in terms of their fairness.

You can, however, find different routes that lead you to find two of the kidnapped individuals, and with that, find optional bosses, which is pretty nice.

CONCEPT/INNOVATION | 4/10

A game full of FMV scenes that is not a Night Trap-like game but rather a horror adventure game was conceptually unexplored at the time, and looking at how the game turned out, I don't think D managed to get it quite right. That said, I can tell that with the start of the 5th generation of consoles, experimentation is a big theme, so I can appreciate that about D, as well as the fact that it atmospherically did plenty right.

REPLAYABILITY | 3/5

There isn't as much replayability here as in previous Castlevania games. Only one playable character, no real multiple paths to use and not all that many sub-weapons to try. What you do have are 3 different endings depending on how many of the girls you find and a few optional bosses to fight, which adds some replayability.

PLAYABILITY | 5/5

Works well at all times.

OVERALL | 64/100

Castlevania: Dracula X is another enjoyable Castlevania game but two factors that work against it is that it is a remake/port of a superior game and that some of the bosses, especially the final one, are ridiculously hard. Overall though, if you don't go into this thinking it should be Rondo of Blood, the soundtrack and the typical Castlevania gameplay loop is still challenging and fun for at least a few hours.

Eu acho que a coisa que mais me deixa triste desse jogo é ele ser "baseado" no Rondo of Blood, um jogo que foi feito com muito carinho e é disparado um dos melhores de toda a franquia.
Porem esse... é repetitivo, chato, injusto e mercenário.
Um jogo curto e sem conteúdo que se estende o máximo que pode atrás de desafios que só são chatos e cansativos e inimigos que estão espalhados por toda parte pra te matar de qualquer lado que você vá.
É plataforma e escadas com maxado voando pra tudo quanto é lado, morcego e medusa spawnando numa velocidade ridícula e Spear Man que não te deixa subir, só pra te dar um combo desgraçado, dar game over e você voltar pro inicio da fase... isso a quase todo momento.
Combina isso com o Dracula mais cansativo junto o de Circle of the Moon e torna esse um dos Castlevanias que eu menos tenho vontade de rejogar e que eu só queria fingir que não existe.