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.

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

No soc gran fan dels Castlevania de la Game Boy, però crec que este és encara pitjor que els altres.

El tema d'agafar objectes col·leccionables per al final vertader no està mal de per sí, que per a fer-ho toque menejar-se per escenaris lineals amb rutes alternatives fàcil de confondre amb les normals, és una idea HORRIBLE.

El major interès d'haver-lo acabat era fer "check", la veritat.

I knew from the moment I saw Alucard show up in this nothing game, starting to spout words to a character he never mentions ever again in the series, this game was definitely someone's fan-fiction. Like there's no other way to explain it, no offense to the character herself, I think its great that we have a female protagonist after all these sweaty buff guys, but she really fucked herself over by having a Gameboy game of all things, as we know already those games aren't the greatest, and neither is this one.

I actually hadn’t even planned on playing this any time soon, but, going through my Switch and doing my usual checking of the new games on the Switch Online retro services, I found that I’d completely forgotten that this got added to the GameBoy service! One of the few classic Castlevania titles not on that collection that Konami released a few years back, this was a great excuse to finally play through this and see what the last GB Castlevania game is all about~. It took me about an hour and a half to play through the Japanese version of the game with my Switch Pro Controller without using save states or rewinds at all.

Legends follows the story of Sonia Belmont, the original first of the Belmont clan, as she goes through Dracula’s castle to put him down for the (at the time) canonically first time. You bump into Alucard along the way, but it’s a pretty straightforward and simple story that you’d expect from an action game on the original GameBoy. Konami eventually struck this from the canon, and I imagine it was a combination of them wanting to make a larger, grander “The Saga Begins!”-type game later via Lament of Innocence alongside how the little writing this game does have is a bit embarrassing in retrospect (like how in their one conversation together that we see, Sonia is not only Alucard’s protégé but also implied to be a romantic interest for him ^^;). As is, it’s an inoffensive and funny story that does more than enough to set up the action at hand, much like its many classic Castlevania brethren.

But stories, silly or no, really aren’t why we go to Classic-vanias after all. We’re here for gameplay! And this game, while certainly not the strongest of the Classic-vanias, is a pretty darn good one! Across the game’s five (or more, if you find the secret stuff, which I did not bother to do <w>), you’ll trek through Dracula’s castle fighting monsters and bosses along the way. Nothing surprising there. Reusing the same formula (and likely the same engine) as Casltevania Adventure, you’ve got your whip that has two upgrades with the second one being a fireball, but this game mercifully decides not to downgrade your weapon upon getting hit like Adventure does. The weirdest part of this game is how it handles sub-weapons. Instead of finding them throughout stages, you get a new one every time you beat a boss, and you can select one from the pause menu whenever you like. You also have a “Burning Mode”, which gives you temporary invincibility alongside a doubling of whip strength once per life, and it’s a HUGE help for the harder fights and sections (especially Dracula).

Beyond just the very forgiving addition of the burning mode, boss and level design is overall pretty solid while still trending towards the easier side. There are a few traps or mean-ish placements of enemies here and there, but playing carefully should see you past most obstacles on your first or second try regardless. Even with that, the game’s approach to dying is very kind too. Losing all of your lives and continuing puts you back at the last door checkpoint you went through exactly like just losing a life normally does, making this a very nicely forgiving Classic-vania, and a better game for it, in my opinion. It’s certainly not going to set your world on fire, and it might be a bit too easy if you’re a super fan of much harder, meaner games like Castlevania 1, but if you want something a bit more along the difficulty of a classic Mega Man game like I tend to prefer, then this is a great time to play through.

Aesthetically the game is very nice for a late-life original GameBoy game, though it’s hardly the nicest thing in the world to look at. You have lots of big, nice sprites and I never found it difficult to tell what I was looking at, but it’s not a particularly pretty game one way or the other, even if it’s not exactly ugly either. There is some slowdown as a result of all of the detail on the sprites and backgrounds, though it mercifully never really affected gameplay negatively. I usually appreciated the bullet time it provided, more than anything XD. While the graphics may be a bit middling, the music is however excellent. It’s largely a collection of classic Castlevania tunes, and these are some absolutely delightful 8-bit GameBoy renditions of them. Granted, you could quite fairly fault the game for lacking much originality in its soundtrack, I still think that the quality of the reused older songs more than makes up for it, especially in such a bite-sized Castlevania package~.

Verdict: Recommended. While it’s not a particularly stunning game one way or the other, I found this to be a really fun one! The wrinkles in its design don’t put it quite as high as the second GB Castlevania game for me, but if you’re a fan of 8-bit action games and/or Castlevania, then this is a game you’ll likely quite enjoy spending an afternoon with as I did~.

I gotta say, coming from Symphony of the Night, this feels...

Disappointing. As simple as that.

Sofia is not a bad character, though. That I can give her.

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.