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.

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.

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

For context, I haven't played the other GB Castlevanias, but as a fan of the series in general, decided to give this a try. I'd heard it was bad, and I wish I could disagree.

Sonia has two modes: agonizingly slow... and twice as fast + invincible. You can only use the invincible "burning mode" once per life, and it doesn't last for long, but it should be enough to get you past the more frustrating spots and help you mindlessly blast through bosses. But as cheap as it may feel, you wouldn't want it otherwise; one of the shorter Castlevanias, yet also one of the cheapest, this game basically begs you to use its built-in mechanics to brute force your way through. I didn't feel like I had cheated myself by making liberal use of Burning Mode, as the game just isn't really fun to play except in that brief span of feeling overpowered. In addition, the adventure overall has an option called "light mode" where you can choose to give your file a constantly fully-powered whip. I didn't play with this, but wish I had, since there didn't end up being much of a challenge regardless, and by the time I was halfway done I just wanted to make it to the end.

I know people have praised that Sonia can change direction while jumping, and also walk/whip while ducking, which is apparently a step up from the previous GB titles… but the default feel is still clumsy, especially with the change in the subweapon system removing a lot of the player's toolkit and creativity. Something I normally adore about Castlevania games is hunting down the best strategic subweapon for your preference and needs, but here you get power-ups one by one after beating various levels, making the game feel very limited until later on.

This game has some annoying enemy placement (and they'll respawn if you scroll the screen, too), and is filled with bats that will knock you around before you can maneuver your horizontal whip to kill them. The devs also loved tall vertical rooms which the hardware cannot handle, leading to slowdown every time.

The final boss is a test of learning patterns and figuring out where to stand, which is... ok if you like that sort of thing, I guess. It actually made me feel engaged for once.

The idea of the first vampire-hunting Belmont being a young woman is cool, and I was happy to see my boy Alucard show up... until the implication that the two of them were an item, which was weird. It also makes the implications for the future of the Belmont clan weird. They really drive home the strong independent girl thing, and yet have to make sure to tie her into having a romantic involvement with beloved Alucard from that better game. In the end, I don't mind that this is no longer canon.

When I was in high school I had a MegaMan game on my calculator. That’s what this game reminds me of. This is the beautiful and elegant idea of Castlevania stripped down to its barest essentials, so that you might play it portably. Isn’t that cool?? At the time, getting the Castlevania experience on a road trip must have been entertaining enough to get some to cut this game some slack. In the modern era, only the most hardcore and curious of fans need bother.

As the last Game Boy game, Castlevania Legends is a huge letdown. It isn't as bad as say Castlevania: The Adventure, but it’s more of a forgettable entry in the series.

The game stars Sonia Belmont, a female Belmont who storms Dracula's Castle to defeat the Count himself. This game acted as an origin story, beginning the Belmont clan as a whole, and is famous for being retconned by Koji Igarashi from the official timeline. As the story involves Sonia and Alucard making out together, it's probably for the best, all because it doesn't make sense story-wise.

The gameplay is more of the same as the Game Boy games, but new to Legends is Burning Mode. When activated, she becomes invulnerable to enemy attacks and her attack strength has been doubled for a brief period of time. I used this for all of the bosses, and they are pathetically easy to bring down with the mode activated. For the levels themselves, they are boring and a slog to get through. There are six levels and they go on for notoriously long than they should be. There are five items to collect based on the original sub-weapons, and these are required in order to get the good ending. There really isn't much to say honestly, so I'll wrap this review up.

Castlevania Legends isn't a bad game, it just isn't a memorable one, and as the last original Classicvania game, this is disappointing. The origin story is a mess, with boring level design, and mediocre music makes this game a forgettable experience.