how do you remake a game that's beyond saving? you don't, you make a new game.

adventure rebirth fucking rocks, it makes sense no one knows about it cuz it's just a little wiiware game (i didn't know either), but this is a much better "casual friendly" entry into castlevania than IV, and unfortunately the last classic style game since.

good level design with alt paths (although some of them are really long), new enemies with interesting design, the sub weapons are well balanced (maybe except the stopwatch), good mid stage bosses, middling to good stage bosses and a fantastic final boss.
could've been even better, but it definitely stands out among the other games.

interesting thing to note, this is the only castlevania game where you might want to haul ass, as the timer is a lot more strict.

the game contains a selectable difficulty level, which im not very fond of, and a classic mode without air control and limited subweapons (only allows for cross and holy water). i did a normal run and a classic hard run, the latter was a pain in the ass but makes me wish the game was more designed around classic, as i think the essence of castlevania is about making calculated moves you have to REALLY commit to, while also allowing for some precise coordination between your movement and attacks.
mechanically, rondo of blood still wins, but its nice that the game allows for backwards whipping in classic.

i wish the OST was more original, but they picked some nice obscure tracks to remix, and they did a really great job.
they even remixed christopher's theme but decided to leave it out of the game, despite being the best track in the OST.
https://youtu.be/WkxpLVYoz1Q

the only things this remake keeps from the original are the projectile whip, which you will lose after some time or by taking damage (though you won't lose your whip upgrade like the original), and some enemies which were vastly improved. it also includes some enemies from the 2nd gameboy game.
level design is completely different and for good reason, as the adventure has level design closer to mega man than anything castlevania.

While I have the Wii U (and therefore the contents of my old Wii that was transferred into it) hooked up, I figured I would play through some of the other games I've had sitting on there for ages that I'd never gotten to playing through before. First up on the list was the Castlevania entry in Konami's ReBirth series they did for WiiWare. I picked it up back before the Wii store shut down, but I never got around to playing it until now. It took me around two hours to play through the whole thing.

I haven't played Gradius: ReBirth, but I have played Contra: ReBirth, and unlike that game, Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth is a remake of an old game rather than an entirely new one. That said, only in the scantest sense is this actually the old GameBoy game Castlevania: The Adventure. Other than some recurring enemies (like the big rolling eyeballs), your whip shooting a fireball at max power, and the protagonist still being Christopher Belmont, this is an entirely separate game (and thank goodness). There are 6 stages instead of only 4 (granted stage 6 is just Dracula, really), all of the stages have been completely reworked, and THANK GOODNESS your whip doesn't power down when you get hit.

While I haven't played every one of the non-Metroid-y Castlevania games, I've played enough of them to say pretty confidently that this is both a faithful entry to those games as well as the easiest of those games by a significant margin. Part of this is due to how the game plays. You can unlock a "classic" playstyle by starting the game once (you can immediately quit and you've unlocked it) where your controls are like the NES games (namely your fixed jump), but the standard play mode is with far more play control. You can still only whip left and right, but being able to modify your jump midair, even a little,
makes it SO much easier to get through. This on top of being able to choose your starting number of lives (1-9) and difficulty mode make this game a far more easily completed beast than its ancestors.

It's got great music with some great remixes of old tracks, and a really pretty art style that's far more fluid and HD than the DS games of the time. It has some great new bosses, and a really excellent final Dracula fight as well. Plenty of checkpoints and a good difficulty curve to boot make this a great entry to this style of Castlevania game.

Verdict: Highly Recommended. Igarashi shows he can not only do Metroid-y Casltevanias but classic-syle ones as well. This is a fantastic entry into the action/platformer lineage of Castlevania, and it's well worth checking out if you're itching for that kind of action but don't want something quite as unforgiving as the older games.

It's all here: asset re-use, kickin remixes, a soaring difficulty curve, and infinite continues. All the things we want to see in a Classicvania.
The branching paths are really neat, even if they don't branch very far. Second mention to the kickass remixes, they are so good. Gets really hard at the end, but nothing I'd consider to be unfair (but stage 4's boss is shamefully tedious).

If you could backflip, this would be my favorite Classicvania.

This was the first game I played through after HDMI modding my Wii, and, um, how come this game has a bilinear filter over all of the game? But the pause menu and title screen is crispy clear? Can I turn off the bilinear filter please? What about 240p maybe? No?

Also: this game has a penchant for using really inappropriate sound effects. Dracula rereads some lines from the end of SOTN, skeletons make Ape Escape noises when they throw bones, it's pretty cute.

Got the urge to play this guy again for various reasons, and so I did. What a nice little thing this was, especially now that we look back and know classic Castlevania was dead as shit then and remains to this very day.

Also I've actually played the Gameboy game now so I can see what was considered essential to the experience (rolling eyeballs) and what was not (climbing ropes). Seriously even Dracula shoots rolling eyeballs at you.

This is honestly good! It's not the biggest game in the series, and you need to unlock a difficulty with any bite compared to the others, but it would be nice if you wanted a simple CV game. I beat it in a little over an hour, continuing just twice. The music is fantastic, some of the bosses look super cool. Just a little snack of a game. A little morsel. It was a downloadable budget title after all. There's a bunch of paths and secrets to find but no wild unlockables or anything like that. A tasty treat of a game. Shame you can probably only emulate it now because of the digital hellscape we live in. Oh well.

Oh Dracula makes like, cat noises in this one for some reason. That's interesting.

Holy hell, this was SO good! STUPID good!
I can't believe a remake of my least favorite Classicvania ended up in my Top 3. If it had 8-way whipping, it could honestly topple CV4 for me.

Though, ReBirth's simplicity is what makes it special. Only two buttons; it's you and your whip, no gimmicks, no nonsense. And despite that, I had 0 issues using items on stairs, or any other jank from all other games that came before it. Christopher here controls like a dream. (I LOVE that the whip has a hitbox on the back. Finally some jank in OUR favor!)

Also, can I get an amen for the absence of ropes? They're gone! Losing your fireball powerup is also not a thing, the game uses a timer to dictate how long it'll last instead. While I prefer permanent powerups, this actually encouraged me to try and speedrun through the stages; I don't wanna waste them fireballs!

Visuals here are great, like a PS1 Classicvania we never got or something. I did notice some sprites from Aria of Sorrow cropping up, got a chuckle out of me more than anything.

And how about that KONAMI ORCHESTRA HIT on the soundtrack? I was tapping my feet the whole time, they absolutely nailed the music selection here. Reincarnated Soul, Aquarius, New Messiah, and even the Load BGM got upgraded to stage BGM!

And that Death fight! The red lines before the scythe cut! The big ass scythe covering the whole stage then grinding back on the ground! EASILY my favorite Death fight in any Classicvania, if not the whole series. (Stage 4 mini boss also gets a mention for being a baddie 🙏)

This is pure Classicvania gold. This is sidescrolling gold. If you want to get into the older games, you play Rondo, Castlevania 4, and this. The absolute triad.

O maior erro desse jogo foi ter 5 fases, com a sexta ser apenas a escadaria para o dracula.

Os controles são bons, a trilha sonora só pedrada, e a dificuldade subindo gradualmente.

A questão dele mesmo é não inovar muito, é um clássico castlevania sem mais e menos.

E a pixel art do jogo é feia-

While being very short and not as strong as Rondo of Blood. Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth still manages to be a very strong classic-vania entry in the series with its stunning visuals, strong level design, tough but fair boss fights, and another banger soundtrack that is just expected from a series like Castlevania consistently. Impressive work from a studio like M2 this is their first developed Castlevania game

Unfortunately, though this game is stuck digitally in the WiiWare, and since that got shut down. There are no legal ways to get it as of now which is a huge same. Play this gem however you can!

Out of the classic Castlevania games I've beaten (1, Densetsu, Super, Bloodlines, Rondo, and Rebirth) or at least made significant progress in (Dracula's Curse, Belmont's Revenge), Adventure Rebirth is hands-down my least favorite. While on the surface being a fun recreation of what made these games fun, Rebirth has some issues that really hamper the experience

1. Stage length. The stages in this game are LONG. Way too fucking long. While 5 stages might not seem like a lot, Rebirth is actually about as long as Bloodlines (6 stages) and Dracula's Curse (10 stages), and unlike Bloodlines where stages tend to have a pretty consistent length outside of the climactic finale, stages in Rebirth's get longer as the game goes on. Stage 5 has a time limit of TWELEVE MINUTES; despite only having two boss fights and only four checkpoints it is very possible to get close to running out of time unless you can rush through the stage. For comparison, Bloodlines's final level is about the same length, but it has like three very long boss fights (if you want to count individual phases, there are nine bosses), twice as many checkpoints, and no time limit. Bloodlines in general has about twice as many checkpoints as Rebirth, while most other games in the series, while not having as many, have significantly shorter times between checkpoints. It should also be made clear that despite not being a retro game, Rebirth's raw difficulty is pretty high. It approaches the levels of Castlevania 3, and is made worse by enemies dealing more damage as the game progresses (4 damage in Stage 5).

2. Visuals and theming. While the appearance of the game is fine, the levels really lack much in the way of meaningful themeing and setpieces/gimmicks, leading to levels being pretty forgettable. This problem isn't exclusive to Rebirth (even Rondo suffers from this at times), but Rebirth is compounded by levels being a drag, meaning you will be playing the same boring levels for extended periods of time, and the visuals not being fully readable. Because you'll be playing this game at a high resolution and there's a ton of background and foreground elements, it can become difficult to tell where enemy attacks are and especially where enemies are coming from; there's no bigger example of this than the final checkpoint of Stage 5 where the scythe and bone projectiles can't be effectively seen due to the gears in the foreground blocking your view. It just serves to make the game even more frustrating than it already is

3. Sound design, it just sucks. About half of the sound effects are ripped straight from Bloodlines, and the other half are clearly stock that really take you out of the experience. That cartoon splat sound effect (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkOib-MmTds) is one of the last things I'd want to hear in a Vania game. I should mention the music in this game are some very good FM arrangements of Castlevania tracks, some deep cuts, some classics, and some "classic deep cuts" (i.e. New Messiah), but I still wish we got new music in these Rebirth games. The arrangements were neat, but are pretty basic and not enticing enough to prevent me from muting the game audio and listening to some podcasts when the gameplay became too much of a slog. It screams like a missed opportunity since the arranagements are handled by Manabu Namiki, one of the greatest VGM composers of all time who around this time was cooking up the excellent music in Dodonpachi Daifukkatsu.

4. Lack of checkpoints and saving. As I keep saying, stages are very long, and checkpoints are nowhere near as frequent as most Castlevania games, meaning you will be replaying the same sections over and over again until you manage to clear the stage. Getting a Game Over on Stages 3-5 and needing to replay stages that stretch upwards of 10 minutes quickly becomes a hassle, and it's an inevitability with how difficult this game gets at times. This is further hampered by the fact that this game which came out in 2009 DOES NOT HAVE A PROPER SAVE SYSTEM. The only Classicvania game that people actually care about to lack a save feature is the cartridge version of Castlevania 1 (the original on FDS actually had a save feature!), and that game is less than half the length of Rebirth and only has one particularly difficult section (Stage 15), so if you turn off the game it's feasible to blast your way back to where you got stuck thanks to Castlevania 1's pacing. If you dare turn off Rebirth because you're sick of Stage 5, you are playing the whole game again, including dragging your feet through Stages 3 and 4.

Recommended to Classicvania fans who want that gameplay fix because it very much still exists if you can get past the issues outlined above (which is why it just barely gets the 6/10 from me despite really teetering on a 5/10). Any newcomer to Classicvania should start with Super, Rondo, or Bloodstained Curse of the Moon.

i didnt even know this shit existed until last week when i looked at the wikipedia list of castlevania games and im so glad i did because otherwise i would have missed out on this. im glad that they were able to take a game as shitty as the adventure and really polish it and add so much to it to make it a new amazing entry. its pretty fair most of the time, its a lot of fun to play through, you can beat it pretty fast, theres some replay value with the routes you can take on levels with the keys, this game just fucks. all i could think about while playing this is what if we got more castlevanias of this quality to this day with such great spritework and animation

This game made me think about Hard Corps: Uprising (2011). Which made me Imagine a timeline where we got an ArcSys developed CastleVania.

With a Daisuke designed Belmont. And Daisuke renditions of all the classic CastleVania songs.

And now I'm sad. Fuck this game it made me sad.