Castlevania has been kind of nothing but hits for me so far. I’ve found a lot to like in the popular series punching bags like Simon’s Quest, which has become probably a top ten video game for me, and The Adventure, which has become a game I will halfheartedly defend as actually fine when it comes up in casual conversation. Even popular games that I don’t get along with like Super IV and Symphony of the Night are obviously incredibly well done experiences, just ones that don’t rub me the right way. On average though I think Castlevania might have the highest hit rate of any series I’ve played this many entiries in bar like, Final Fantasy where (has not played 16 voice) I think literally every one is very good to great. So I came into Legends with a very open mind. Castlevania has basically never steered me wrong yet, I find myself more positive than average it seems, you get to play as a cool anime girl, and I’ve quite enjoyed the weird formal experiements that the limitations of the Gameboy hardware make necessary in these early portable entries. How could it POSSIBLY go wrong.

I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.

It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.

The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.

And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?

They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.

The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.

There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.

To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.

Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?

Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.

It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64

LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

Not as bad as everyone makes it out to be, but hold on! It's not even that good.

Castlevania Legends has a cool protagonist design and a nice soundtrack.

... that's it. Everything else feels uninspired, unbalanced (since the first power-up you get is literally the best one) and mostly out of touch with what made the other GB Castlevania games good. There's no enemy variety and even if there was, they all walk and fly towards the player as their mastermind plan. There are forks in the levels, but you can be locked out of the good ending if you choose the wrong path even once! I love being locked out as soon as I start the game!

Adding that the gameplay itself is ok at best, sluggish and tedious at worst, it can be seen why Legends isn't beloved by many. I tried making it work, but it felt more like a roadtrip distraction, as it maybe it was meant to be, compared to an actual videogame.

The Game Boy Castlevania titles are a fascinating glimpse into the history of the franchise. The first of the trio, The Adventure, is heavily criticised, but it’s worth remembering that it was released even before Castlevania 3. The inspiration it could draw from was the discordant grouping of the first game, the confusing adventure that was Simon’s Quest, the odd semi-port that was Vampire Killer for the MSX, and the poorly received Haunted Castle arcade game. While it was wrangling with that diverse mix of influences, it also had to deal with the troubles of new hardware. The Adventure wouldn’t just be the first in the series to be on a handheld, it was the first game Konami ever developed on a mobile platform. It would release just six months after the Game Boy itself did, and all those factors lead me to believe that The Adventure had a difficult development. At least, that’s how it seems from the clunky controls, lack of features, and even its story. It claimed Christopher Belmont was the first of the family to fight Dracula, when the Castlevania 3 team would release their game about Trevor Belmont being the first only two months later. If there’s a game that completely embodies the growing pains of the franchise, it might just be this one.

Meanwhile, Belmont’s Revenge turned out much better. It was released a comfortable two years after Castlevania 3, and it’s apparent the developers had more time, more experience, or both. The controls feel much better, there are more features and levels, it’s a competently-made entry all around, even if it still feels limited by its hardware. It’s representative of the time that Castlevania games got into their flow, with the following mainline titles being Castlevania 4, Rondo of Blood, and Bloodlines, which each refined the formula to its peak in their own unique ways.

That brings us to Legends. If you played all these games in a row, or just mentally grouped them as “the Game Boy games”, its release date may seem a bit shocking. Adventure came out in ‘89, Revenge came in in ‘91, but Legends released all the way in 1997. It would release eight months after Symphony of the Night, and as such, would be the first time a classic-style Castlevania would try to mix in the exploration and story of the new format. However, what that ended up being within the limitations of the Game Boy hardware was a few times you could decide to either go left or right, with one of the two giving you an optional item that contributes to the true ending, and the other railroading you to the end of the level. You also get two cutscenes in the entire game, one with the new sexy Alucard, and one with the contemptuously beautiful Dracula. Powers similar to Alucard’s magic have been introduced, replacing the standard subweapons with innate magic like healing, stopping time, and damaging all enemies on screen. You can also go into a burst mode once per level, which boosts your damage and makes you invulnerable temporarily. The intention may have been to give players more tools to work with for more complex action, but that didn’t exactly pan out. Stopping time costs five hearts, but a full heal costs twenty, so there’s no point in using the time stop unless it allows you to clear a gap, or if using it four times would save you more than an entire health bar’s worth of damage. The burst power is so strong that you naturally save it for bosses, and it lets you defeat them by standing in place and mindlessly whipping. Overall, it’s probably the easiest classic-vania, with the bats that attack directly from above being more of a threat than all the bosses combined. While that’s emblematic of the game’s lack of balance, it also makes the game hard to hate. There aren't any frustrating levels, it has the smoothest control of all the portable games, it has a stylistic polish the others don’t, and it actually communicates a nice little story, even if it’s the third (or possibly fourth) time a Belmont was considered the first to fight Dracula.

This little Game Boy Castlevania journey I accidentally went down in the last couple weeks isn’t one I would necessarily recommend to everyone, but I definitely had a lot of fun looking at how they embody the series as a whole. The dark times, the good times, the shift in styles, the confused canon, the way you can tell the developers realized they made a horrible mistake by saying Dracula only came back once every hundred years, it’s all here. If you’re still hanging on as a fan of this abandoned series, I would say beating all three is a fun and enlightening little quest, but otherwise, it’s better to experience what they represent directly, by playing the big highlights like Castlevania 1, 4, Bloodlines, Rondo of Blood, and Symphony of the Night.

take out a dictionary and flip to the page that says "mid", odds are the first definition says "Castlevania Legends"

this is truly the Castlevania of all time. honestly I have no opinion of this game whatsoever. it's not good, yet it's not bad, it just exists. the music's cool I guess and the level design is pretty boring outside of Stage 3 that actually attempted to do something, bosses are pathetic and the game is embarrassing easy if you abuse the power-ups (I tried not to outside of the healing one and screen clear when the enemy placement got annoying). story is just another "Belmont defeat Dracula haha" featuring Alucard during a time when he was down bad. there's really not much else to talk about, the game's a whole bunch of nothing. I guess it's the most beginner friendly Castlevania but you're probably better off playing a more interesting game than this one.

the baby is no longer canon

Now THIS is an improvement! Adventure was hot garbage, Belmont's Revenge was smoldering garbage, but Legends manages to close the Gameboy trilogy with moderate success.

The ropes are still around, walking is still slow, and it doesn't look particularly great thanks to the hardware. But this time around, I actually had fun!
The jump got upgraded to Castlevania IV levels of control, meaning you don't need to propose to your jump arc anymore; after a jump, you can move back and forth as necessary. Instead of subweapons, you have spells that you obtain after each boss à la Megaman and they're all useful, just poorly ordered. (Why is the 1-Heart dagger-esque spell the fourth one you acquire instead of being the first? Hmm.)

Alternate paths are now a thing but not in the Castlevania III sense. There's still only one correct path to the Stage boss, but in order to obtain the best ending, you need to collect 5 relics located in these alternate paths. Exploring was nice, but if you ended up taking the correct path and crossed a door, you wouldn't be able to backtrack to get the relic. That's pretty dumb, but I can appreciate the attempt.

The music is MUCH better compared to its Gameboy siblings. Battle with Alucard, Clock Tower and this very snazzy Vampire Killer arrange are my favorite examples. It's a shame the Gameboy soundfont really doesn't do it justice.
... Thankfully, there's a VRC6 version of the OST available! Man, do some of these compositions really shine here.

Honestly, if Simon's Quest was structured like this back in the NES, I think its reputation wouldn't be nearly as bad as it is, as Legends' real problems (at least to me) come from the hardware it was released on. The slow movement, the sound quality, the simple visuals... If this was a late NES game instead, we would've had a pretty sick game.

As it is, Castlevania Legends is a good game, sadly hindered by the Gameboy's lack of power.

An inconsequential footnote

Sometimes that's worse than being terrible.

Say what you want about Adventure, that one is in the anniversary collection.

Kid Dracula is also in there

Not this one through.

Despite being a big Castlevania fan, I'd never really spent much time with Castlevania Legends previously. I did play it in my emulating days of youth, but for some reason I don't think I actually ever beat it, even though I've always remembered it as a fairly good game. "Thanks" to Nintendo Switch Online, though, I can now say that either my memory is terrible, or I had no taste as a kid, because this is truly one of the worst games in the franchise. Not quite as bad as genuinely awful The Adventure or as boring as Castlevania II (Simon's Quest; not Belmont's Revenge), but still just a bad experience almost all the way through, and with a story so bad that Koji Igarashi would erase it from canon just a few years later with Lament of Innocence.

But why is Legends so bad? I mean, it's still the classic Castlevania gameplay we all know and love, but done in maybe the most uninspired way possible, and the new ideas it brings to the table are all their just to make the game worse. First stage mostly sort of lulls you into believing this won't be the case. It is boring and overly long, to be fair, but not to an egregious degree. You fight bats, jump over pits, move at a relatively fast pace so it seems like the game could be decent if a tad bit uninspired. Then you hit a random candelabra, thinking it would just give energy or something, but instead you're transported to another screen where you have to fight an unreasonable amount of zombies. "Cool secret, wonder what the game will reward me with after this ordeal", you might think, but then the fight is over, and you're transported back to the previous screen with nothing gained and health lost. You might think there's a reward in the candelabra that transported you, but no, you idiot, you absolute fool, because it just transports you back to the zombie fight.

This is a warning from the developers. "Do not play this game...", they say with this, "...because we're just going to waste your time and annoy you as much as we can from now on." And they really, really do just that. Stage 1 is harmless outside of that awful candelabra, but going forward, this will be a game that, despite being only about 90 minutes long, feels like an eternity to complete. Stages are filled with branching paths, but there's always just one correct path while the other just leads to either a dead end or another one of those horde fights that you have to complete to be able to even get back to where the path first branched off. There also seems to have been made an attempt to make fighting enemies as annoying as possible no matter which path you choose.

See, Castlevania Legends is a game that loves verticality in its stages, so much so that the vast majority of enemies you fight will be either ghosts or bats that fly down on you, which is not great in a game where the protagonist can basically just attack straight forward. "Just use the axe", you might say, but there is none in Castlevania Legends! In fact, sub-weapons don't act as sub-weapons at all, but as secret items to collect in order to get the secret ending (that basically adds nothing of importance), and while you do have some magic powers that can be equipped at will, they cost so much energy that they're not feasible to use that often (and shouldn't really ever be used outside of the one that heals you, since they sort of suck.)

It's also a lot harder to just jump up and hit them than in most other CV games since enemies move at you very fast, move diagonally downwards in a very awkward way, which is complimented by stage design that often puts you in very tight spaces without much maneuverability. Even the usually so trivial bats are super annoying, having the most erratic movement pattern I've seen in a video game in a very long time. To make matters even worse, the respawning of enemies in Legends is somehow even more aggressive than any Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man on the NES, so if you happen to get hit and knocked down to a slightly lower platform, expect to face that exact enemy once again, and sometimes even if you progress past that point, the enemy may somehow respawn and come at you from below whenever the game feels like messing with you just a bit more.

Even without these issues with constantly respawning enemies that are often basically impossible to avoid or hit, stages tricking you into just wasting time, or sub-weapons being replaced by boring magic, the entire game is just so... Unremarkable. Whenever you're not being constantly annoyed by vertical sections, the game really has nothing interesting going on. The bosses are extremely easy (something's very wrong when I can even beat Dracula first try without any issues), the non-airborne enemies barely pose a threat but often still have an annoying amount health anyway, and every single stage is just way too long with a whole lot of nothing. So long, in fact, that this is probably the only Castlevania where you might be in actual danger of ever dying from running out of time, especially when taking any wrong path. Castlevania Legends might just be about 90 minutes long (when going for the secret ending. It's probably just about an hour otherwise), but it feels longer than any other Classicvania simply because it has nothing going for it.

Legends not unplayable like The Adventure, actually feeling fairly competent in its controls, having really fair checkpoints (the game even seems to spawn you at the latest checkpoint after a game over, sort of begging the question why the game even has extra lives at all, but it's appreciated nonetheless), and no real difficulty spikes to keep the player stuck at any point, but it feels like Konami fed every Castlevania game into a very primitive AI and let it produce a game, which is cruel to the actual developers that made this game, and probably not under optimal circumstances, but it really is how the game feels, with it generating a game that knows about both Symphony of the Night and classic games, and then combining them into one thing that does neither well, and equating Castlevania's difficulty as just "cruel shit." Even Alucard is thrown into the game for a very small role, and acting nothing like the coolest protagonist of 1996 that we all know and love.

Honestly, what saves Legends from getting that coveted 1 or 1.5 rating is that as much as I dislike it, it is mercifully short and as annoying as those vertical sections are, or as boring as the more horizontal, the game is easy enough that no section at least overstays its welcome. The levels as a whole certainly do, but I never got stuck, and as annoying as those flying enemies are, they don't really do enough damage as to have killed me all that often.

Thinking about it now, maybe a lower rating is justified when a game's sole positive is that it's not very long, but it could have been so much worse if the difficulty was more like previous games in the series, and I'd just wander around these boring as sin stages for at least twice as long as I did. Honestly, despite being bored by a lot of the game, I didn't really hate most of my time with it. I would never want to play it again, but there are worse games out there, and especially on the Game Boy. Sure, for a game made on the handheld as late as 1997, Legends should be a lot better than this, especially considering how much better Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge was, but at worst I'll just forget about the whole game in a few months and never think about it again, rather than remembering the terrible times I had with it. "Castlevania Legends? No, I can't really tell you anything about that game", I'll say in complete earnest, and just move on with my life.

The Gameboy Castlevania's are easily forgotten titles in the Castlevania franchise and in all honesty, they should be. They simply aren't very good, or even memorable except for maybe their great cover art. That said in Castlevania Legends defense it's easily the best of the three Gameboy games and by a decent margin. The first two games are just a legacy in excruciating design and frustration, especially the first game Castlevania Adventure.

Unfortunately my issues with Classicvania games are still present here regardless. The enemy placements and AI for how they attack you for constant cheap hits at angles you can't defend against continue to be irritating. The bats and shades that fly at you the instant you enter a room or when you climb one of the games many, many ropes got on my nerves start to finish. This is exasperated by them reappearing if you step half a centimetre off the edge of the screen which you often have to so you can find an angle to attack them from.

The level design is kinda boring. As mentioned above you get some ropes and blocks with the odd visual flourish like a gate or gears instead of blocks but it's all rather trite. The bosses and enemy variety are fairly decent though strangely extremely easy for a Castlevania game. My biggest issue though is an old hold over from the original games of the levels having a timer. Why? Literally what does this accomplish? The levels aren't 100% linear with dead end sections going off for a few screens that can take time to go through with the enemy placements then back again. I got to one boss who after some dialogue took one step as I reached it with a zero timer and my character just fell over and died like she had a heart attack.

So pointless. Kind of funny, but utterly pointless.

Overall it's an ok game that as mentioned above is easily forgotten. I give it some credit for having a female lead (which is still all too rare in gaming, never mind it's own series). Otherwise it's worth playing for a novelty if nothing else.

Before being retconned out of the series chronology, Castlevania: Legends used to be the very first game in the series' timeline. It features the first incarnation of Count Dracula as well as the first Belmont, Sonia Belmont, to rise against him. For what would be a pivotal game in the series chronology, it's... definitely one of the Castlevania games ever made.

The Game Boy and Game Boy Color were filled with boneless, unambitious platformers, be them licensed games or attempts to bring home console franchises to the portable, and Castlevania: Legends is one more game in that latter pile, featuring uninspired level and enemy design, a janky, barebones implementation of traditional series mechanics and encounters that are an exercise in frustration. It has a very short runtime, but even so, it's better off being skipped.

It's a shame, too, because it features a female protagonist, whose appearance on the cover of the game was what drove me to try it in the first place. Sonia is pretty cool, it's just that her game is... not. I do enjoy the implication in the best ending that she had a son, Victor Belmont, with Alucard, thus forever tying the Belmont bloodline to Dracula. My gal literally doomed her entire bloodline to get a piece of that gorgeous dhampir, which... based and goals? Mad respect for her.

Besides, just think about it: had Legends stayed canon (which in my heart, it did), it would recontextualize every one of Alucard's appearances as him looking out for his great great great great grandchildren. "Richter, get down from that throne, you're going to hurt yourself". "Trevor, take an adult with you to fight grandpa's dad, okay?". I can only assume Iga struck the game out of the continuity because he was too afraid of how powerful such a narrative would be.

Sonia Belmont, girlfriend to Alucard and sadly stricken from the timeline. Anime legend. She has the ability to go super saiyan and become invincible for a few seconds. What more could one ask for?

Okay probably like, a better game. We could ask for that. This is in many ways somehow the worst of the Gameboy 'Vanias but about halfway through it's incredibly bizarre idiosyncrasies kind of won me over. It was one of the times I went down an entire, multi-room path full of enemies only to discover it was a dead end containing one (1) chicken drumstick at the end which gave me back maybe half of what I lost.

There's a sort of accidental survival horror element here. Enemies are frequently nigh-impossible to properly dodge both due to their placement and movements and also the extremely "hmm" hitboxes, but they very rarely do significant damage. The levels are very, very long slogs. Your 'burning mode' can be activated at-will once per life per level to give you invincibility, extra strength and speed, but there are segments that seem intended to force you into using it. This is also the literal only classicvania where the first whip powerup doesn't come free from the first candle you hit every time.

All that said, checkpoints are very frequent and running out of lives doesn't send you any further back than that. The difficulty is entirely a facade, propped up by a number of hidden items you need to find to get a slightly expanded ending. Instead of subweapons, each level earns you a new magic power which you can select freely, including a heal for a whopping 20 hearts. It's actually kind of cozy in a way, despite the rampant frustration of bats that start at the top of the screen and can only fly directly downwards onto your head god DAMMIT

Some good things: Alucard is in this and looking like his SOTN self because this game came out in nineteen ninety fucking seven. There are some very neat enemy sprites, including one of my favorite Dracula forms. Having a super invincible mode you can do is objectively very cool. It reminded me of shitty old games I made as a kid again, something that just seems to be endemic to monochrome handhelds

That was it? That's Castlevania Legends? That was just boring design and rubbish hitboxes!

Honestly, I expected much worse, I expected a game that would shit on my bed and kick me in the dick. Instead it's just a deeply mediocre platformer that is definitely not good, but not offensively terrible in the same way that Castlevania: The Adventure was. I'd be more forgiving...if it wasn't such a downgrade in every way from the OTHER Castlevania game on Game Boy, Belmont's Revenge.

Platforming is standard Castlevania affair - you move pretty slow, you have to time your whip swings and jumps carefully, and you get knocked back upon taking a hit. However, things have been simplified. Stairs are basically non-existent, instead there being platforms you can jump through more akin to most other platformers. Knockback is minimal and I was only ever sent into a pit from it once. It's honestly fine, but my praise stops there.

Level design is abysmal. Usually just stretches of corridors with the most deeply unimaginative, and dare I say borderline docile enemies. There's this one enemy who hides in the floor and then pokes out a big claw to inflict damage...but chooses to do this not when under you, but just in front of you. Embarrassing.

One big selling point is the non-linearity of the levels. While it's true you can take multiple paths, most of them are literally just dead ends with a healing item to say "sorry mate, here's some of the health back you lost while getting here." A few of these alternate routes house the collectables you need to unlock the true ending(meaningless as it is since the entire game was retconned) but you still have to make it all the way back yourself, with no map in sight in case you do get lost. My issue here doesn't just lie with the unnecessary non-linear design, but the fact that, horror of horrors; the time limit is back. Why?! Rondo of Blood did away with it and was all the better for it, and that game was almost entirely linear! Legends asks you to explore, then literally murders you for doing so.

One thing that makes the entire first half of the game embarrassingly easy is the ability you get to shoot fireballs when your whip is fully upgraded. It makes every boss in the game way easier, and unlike Adventure you can't lose the whip levels from getting hit. I almost choose to believe it's this easy to imply that, with this being intended as the first game in the timeline, Dracula still didn't have this whole Castlevania thing figured out, and hired some lousy henchmen to guard everything.

By the way, remember how Adventure had no subweapons, and Belmont's Revenge at least thought to give you a couple of options? Well, Legends thought screw that, because they're gone again! In its place are Soul Weapons, essentially magic that you get from killing bosses that replaces subweapons. They can stop time, do a full screen attack, shoot projectiles (which you should already be doing by default) and...fully heal you at any time for 20 hearts. Really weird choices of abilities, and you only get a new one every stage. The subweapons can be picked up in the game, but they can't be used - their only purpose is for the true ending. Was it meant to be some kind of clever reference to the other games? How about referencing the parts where I get to actually use them instead?

How about that story eh? It's the one thing from the game that is probably shit on the most, and not even because they put women in Castlevania - people actually seem to like Sonia Belmont a fair bit. What they don't like is the bit where she and Alucard have a thing for one another. Sure, there's an age gap - hard to avoid when you're Alucard - but Sonia was a minor in this game. Makes her feats impressive...but this writing decision nasty. Other than that it's Castlevania business as usual. It's meant to be an origin story, with Sonia being the first of the Belmonts to bear the curse of having to fight Dracula, but Iga decided he didn't like it and made his own origin story later on, retconning Legends as non-canon. The cutscenes are a bit distracting and take forever to scroll through, but mercifully, they are skippable.

Musically, this game has nothing worth mentioning. None of the boring tracks from the game stuck with me at all other than the...interesting remixes of Bloody Tears and Vampire Killer. Graphically, I can't be too harsh given that this is for Game Boy, but the monster designs are generic even by Classicvania standards.

All in all, it is at least a playable platformer, it doesn't screw up too much in what it presents other than the really bad hitboxes on projectiles, which are either too big or too small in either extreme. But the things it does set out to do are all mundane and unexciting, and without a killer soundtrack to trick you into thinking you're doing something badass when you aren't, it falls flat. I think this game is perhaps a little overhated and Adventure is still the worse game...but I'm not about to take a bullet for this one. Especially not following Belmont's Revenge...

Castlevania Legends is not a good game but for me to call it bad would be too harsh for me personally. While it has it's flaws and is ultimately unpolished for the standard of the series. There is still a decent game in here for me.

I think what hurts this game the most is just how easy it is, besides some of the awful enemy placement especially with bats, it's so easy to beat the game. If you can keep the projectile whip ability then you're golden for most of the game. I'm also surprised just how good the time stop is in this game.

There's also this burning mode where you move faster and are invincible. I'll be honest I only used it for bosses as it makes a lot of them a joke. You can get through most of the game fine without it. You also get additional abilities by beating bosses and that's a neat way of doing it. It's better than having nothing for the first GB game.

The game's level design a lot of the time feels like hallways and ropes. You guys like ropes? I like ropes, actually no I don't I lied sorry. But yeah it's nothing special and they oddly feel long. There's only 6 stages in the game if you count the hidden stage. There's also 5 items you need to find for the good ending but it's not much.

The game looks eh, nothing really impresses me too much. It does have SGB support at least but the border is really lame. The music is good though some of it is just tunes from previous games. Oddly the final boss theme is Vampire Killer of all things.

Castlevania Legends is the game seen as the embarrassment of the bunch which personally I wouldn't agree with it but along with that and some plot that kind of doesn't fit with the timeline, the game no longer is canon. It's a shame the game is the way it is, I could see it being good. It's still better than the first GB game though can't say for the 2nd because I haven't tried it. I can't really say I'd recommend this but hey I got some fun so I'm satisfied.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Great protagonist, lame everything else. Legends fails to learn from past GB titles, repeating the same mistakes. Level design is marked by the same sloppiness, while the mechanics remain constrained compared to console counterparts. The distinctive open level selection of Belmont's Revenge fails to re-emerge, marking a regression to the basic progression of The Adventure, with a slight deviation toward the end.

The only distinctive mechanical feature is the new take on sub-weapons, which are now spells Sonia can cycle between, with some classic sub-weapons being hidden in levels. While I wouldn't want this as a standard, it works to set Legends apart. It feels appropriate considering the fresh protagonist. Her interactions with Alucard and Dracula are better written than I expected, though not exceptional.

Legends is pretty damn bad on the whole. Definitely better than The Adventure, but not quite as salvageable as Belmont's Revenge. It's a shame, as I really do dig the protagonist for whatever reason. If we'd got a 'Legends ReBirth', I'd definitely be down. As it is, I cannot recommend Legends, or the GB trilogy in general, to anyone but the most diehard Castlevania fans.

Yet another Konami Game Boy game that makes me question if it was even tested. There are so many moments where the level design and enemy placement are so constricted, moments where enemies spawn right on top of you, and moments where enemies will instantly aggro as soon as you enter a screen that I swear you have no choice but to take damage. This is also the first Castlevania game I've ever played where the timer killed me. How the hell are you going to make levels with an emphasis on openness and exploration and not give me enough time to even finish them? Better question: how the hell are going to make such levels and have so many of the alternate paths lead absolutely nowhere? And why in FUCK would you hide a level needed for the true ending behind something so utterly illogical?

The subweapons are pretty much worthless except the one that maxes out your HP, but that combined with the Burning Mode (which I often activated by accident because the controls are so dick) makes it possible to tank every boss after it's accessible. The bosses themselves are already pretty embarrassing, especially the Death fight, but when you add these elements to the mix, they're completely trivial. It all comes together for one of the easiest frustrating experiences I've ever had, if that makes any sense.

This is surely better than The Adventure, but it's far from exceptional. I really don't know why it exists, but Konami's decision to pretend it doesn't may be the best one they've ever made. I'm going to follow their lead.