Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse expands on the linear action game roots of the original with some welcome and exciting additions, but it suffers from some notably unfair design choices and poor balancing of certain challenges.

After the significant departure of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, the series would return to linear action platforming for a series of new releases over the next generation of gaming. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse once again sees the player controlling a Belmont (this time Trevor) as he makes his way to Dracula’s Castle. Trevor explores the world around Dracula’s castle in a branching level format, where key junctures will take you to different locales and stages. Essentially, the game streamlines the exploration elements of its direct predecessor to give the player the same sense of forward momentum as the first game. Continues are handled the same way as the first, where a minimum of three are granted, with failures resulting in stage resets and game overs resulting in larger level resets. Subweapon upgrades are once again temporary and are lost upon death.

The biggest change introduced to Castlevania III is the addition of three additional player characters, called spirits, who will join Trevor on his quest once they are met: the witch Sypha Belnades, the acrobat Grant Danasty, and the son of Dracula himself, Alucard. The player will always be able to control Trevor Belmont but can switch to one of the other spirits once acquired by pressing Select. Spirits introduce new attack patterns as well as unique platforming abilities, as well as offering separate endings depending on which is with Trevor upon completion of the game. Spirits’ paths are generally designed with their abilities in mind before the game bottlenecks at Stage 8 at the entrance to Dracula’s Castle. I played the Alucard path myself, and it’s all that I can comfortably comment on, though I plan to play through with the other spirits and with none of them at some point in the future, at which time I might edit this review.

Giving the player new platforming abilities in particular seems to have been a big inspiration for changing up the challenges of the game. Light puzzle platformer segments (really mostly pattern recognition of falling blocks) and auto-scrollers have been added to this game. The results are a bit mixed, I must admit.

Early on, these new mechanics feel fun and fresh, but by Level 7 in particular (along the Alucard route, at least) they become downright sadistic. For one thing, you have to clear seven consecutive stages ending in a three-boss gauntlet. The first several of these stages are light platformers puzzles, and the final few are massive combat gauntlets. They help to demonstrate some of the big problems of the game. Puzzle platforming is unpredictable and frustrating until the pattern is identified, at which point it becomes quite tedious. One section in particular takes a total of two minutes to finish up, and you’re just jumping between two squares to avoid successive blocks. Using these kinds of challenges doesn’t really play to the series’ strengths, as jumping has always felt a bit cumbersome in these games. Auto-scrolling is even worse, as the game is fond of hurrying you along with gradually breaking blocks to force you into a bottomless pit. That’s not really a big deal, and I actually like auto-scrollers in general in moderation. But here, the top of the screen, when it isn’t killing you with a screen wrap, is perpetually popping in a bit slowly. The amount of times I would make it to higher ground only for an enemy to suddenly spawn on top of me and knock me off a platform was too high.

Combat in general has completely abandoned the tough but fair model of the first game, as Castlevania III reversed course to include quite possibly the worst feature of the NES era: infinitely respawning enemies. You absolutely must be moving forward at all times, as strong enemies will respawn frequently. It’s never as bad as Ninja Gaiden, where there are looping spawns above pitfalls that will force you to die and reset a stage, but there is certainly an inordinate amount of unavoidable damage. The complaints about stairs in the first game typically fell on deaf ears for me, as careful planning was usually enough to avoid damage. Not here. Without the right subweapon, you’ll definitely be smacked for a quarter of your life bar consistently as you near the game’s conclusion.

All that said, when the challenge is fair, the game is tons of fun. Being this much more difficult than the already tricky first game instills a real sense of accomplishment. The situations involving enemies are much more varied and interesting, and the locales are cool. Boss difficulty has been curved a bit better, with earlier bosses not being quite the pushovers that the Phantom Bat and Queen Medusa are in the first game but mid-game bosses not being completely impossible like Igor & Frankenstein. The Grim Reaper appears once again and is as horrifying as ever, and Dracula’s three-form final boss fight is a real thrill. A special boss closing out your final approach to Dracula’s Inner Sanctum is a particularly exciting and challenging encounter that shows off some of the best elements of the series at once.

While the levels are clearly a bit unbalanced due to experimentation with different character abilities, it’s undeniable that these shaky first steps set the foundations of a formula that would eventually make the series a staple archetype that has been done to (un)death in the contemporary indie scene but was honed into deeply loved masterpieces in the coming decades.

Castlevania’s closing chapter on the NES really insists on doing more in every way possible, and while it gets muddled by its indulgence of all the worst tropes of NES game design, its ambition is admirable.

I've only played through the FDS version, however it is a very tight experience for the Castlevania series. Innovating a lot for the normal formula with the inclusion of semi-nonlinear pathways and multiple playable characters. However it suffers from localization changes to enemy damage property changes to layout changes and even certain subweapons being just outclassed by Holy Water. Oh and it has a lot more stupid traps than Castlevania (NES). Regardless of these bullshit moments, it still has a lovable soundtrack and a lot of various ways to play it. Even brought us Alucard; a very popular series veteran. If you want something even more stupidly hard of the CV games, this is your game. Especially if you play the US version where they add enemies in a late game stage that didn't exist in FDS.

Never let anyone tell you that 8-bit Castlevania is "hard but fair". I used an infinite lives code, and a patch that improves the control and allows you to jump off the stairs (no jumping on them, sadly), and it was still pretty hard, but noticeably less bullshit. I've avoided plenty of cheap hits thanks to these improvements, and there was still some cheapness to be found (enemies sometimes spawn right on top of you for some reason. It was possibly an emulation quirk though)

With these improvements/cheats, it was a healthy challenge. Without them, it's too bullshit to say it's fun. Frustrantingly, it gets so close, but the balance is ruined by 80s videogames design.

After the ambitious, yet ultimately large misstep of Simon’s Quest, Castlevania III sees the series go back to its linear action-platforming roots, building upon the already established formula, rather than trying anything new and outrageous. What this led to is core gameplay that overall remains the same, but generally feels more refined, and with greater variation to the environmental obstacles thrown in the player’s way spicing things up nicely. That said, along with greater variation, I’ll quickly touch upon the fact that this game’s difficulty is also significantly higher than past games, like, seriously, this game is insanely tough.

One of the more noteworthy points of interest in this game is the fact that your can switch between characters, each of which providing different mobility and/or combat benefits to provide additional potential solutions to certain parts of the game, 2 of them tied to specific routes that the player takes at specified parts of the game. Not only does this make each area of the game more interesting to take on, but it also gives the game some great replay value, since it’s impossible that the player will play every level in a single run, given how many branching paths there are. This of course wouldn’t matter if not for the fact that just like the original Castlevania, this is a game that makes simply being able to see a new level a reward in itself, with absolutely incredible atmosphere combined with often creative level design that manages to make each part of the game charming and distinct. This once again goes all the way down to each enemy requiring slightly different approaches to kill them, making each encounter something that requires a lot of split-second planning and strategizing, especially with the classic, stiff Castlevania mobility making each input potentially lead to your death. One of my personal favourite instances of this is in a section where the player is forced to walk across a series of platforms that will flip and cause the player to fall to their deaths if they jump, requiring them to carefully navigate around the constant onslaught of flying medusa heads, requiring prediction on the general pattern of each of these enemies along with apt reaction time to be able to quickly move back and forth.

With that said, despite the fact that the game is in a lot of ways a more interesting one, it also has the same glaring issue as the first Castlevania, but to even greater lengths, that being that this game tanks DRAMATICALLY past a certain point, where the late game feels more focused on beating down the player rather than providing a fun, fair experience. There’s one big difference between the approach to difficulty in this compared to Castlevania 1 however, as while Castlevania 1 began to throw short bursts of stupidity and near unavoidable bullshit, Castlevania III demonstrates more of a gruelling endurance match, where the player will have to go through a great deal of obstacles before they progress to the next area. While I initially considered this a good thing, as the level design became far less overtly unfair in this, it also required too much of the player and became a tedious slog to go through so much just to get another shot at trying the latest thing you’re stuck on, which you’ll almost undoubtedly die on a few times until you learn what you’re meant to do.

The biggest example of this was the entirety of the 7th area, the sunken ship, which had multiple parts dedicated to waiting for falling blocks to land in order to be able to slowly inch your way up to your destination, with one section taking about 2 or 3 minutes of waiting that’s mindless enough to be painfully dull, but just difficult enough to make it that they can’t zone out, lest they likely get hit by one of these blocks and are sent of a cliff to their death. While this on its own is bad, the issue is exacerbated by the fact that there are still multiple parts past this point that will ensure that if the player dies, they’ll be right back at the bottom of this section. The most obnoxious part about all of this is that after another couple of autoscroll sections with every possibility to kill you, the player is then put up again an onslaught of 3 boss fights, each one almost certainly requiring a few shots at before the pattern can be learned, especially with each of them only needing 4 hits to kill you.

Another particularly egregious example is the fact that the 3 phase final fight against Dracula doesn’t heal you in between each phase, and doesn’t even have the courtesy of giving the player a checkpoint anywhere even close to the fight, causing the player to have to go through a run back that will once again take a couple of minutes, but this one could also kill you at the drop of a hat, as you’re forced to jump between swinging pendulums over more bottomless pits while bats fly at you from all directions, a single hit surely sending you falling to your doom and potentially making the player go through even more tedious bullshit if they run out of lives. To make matter worse, the fight against Dracula is once again one that feels quite cheap, with many situations causing you to almost certainly take damage unless you’ve ascended and become a god, all made especially worse when the final phase introduces more pits that you can fall down and die. This last set of levels ended up making the game a borderline miserable experience to play through, new areas no longer felt fun, everything just seemed to test my patience more than any sort of actual skill, almost everything felt as if it had to initially be trial and errored through, which would’ve been cool if not for how damn long it took to get back, everything about these final levels genuinely felt as if the designers wanted the player to hate this game, and to an extent, I feel like it worked, because it made me have no desire to play through a lot of this second half again.

Overall, it’s hard to deny that in quite a few ways, this game nicely improved upon the first game, with the greater variation that almost always felt meaningful providing the player with even more potential challenges as they explored the atmospheric world of Castlevania. That said, while the first half to two thirds of this game was 2D platforming in top form, that last portion of the game hurt this to such a horrible degree that I ended up liking this somewhat less than the first Castlevania. Despite how much potential even this part of the game had, it just seriously had some terrible decisions compounded with asking far too much from the player to feasibly do without cheating in some way, at least not without utterly demoralising them by the end (as a note, I beat this game completely legitimately, not even using save states). I definitely like a lot about this game, but overall find it to be quite flawed and frustrating, ultimately making my experience far less enjoyable than it potentially could have been.

Scattershot statements:

The music isn’t quite as good as the previous 2 entries for me, but this is still top notch stuff once again

Playing through the game with Alucard as your partner has the benefit of turning into a bat, but it also means taking on that stupid ship level

The bosses in the game tended to be more interesting than in Castlevania 1, with some genuine pattern recognition and skill being required to get past them, with them almost all feeling as if they were designed with the sluggish mobility in mind

Subweapons remaining entirely unchanged for most of the cast felt like a missed opportunity

The fact that the Doppelganger fight seems to be built around the concept of exploiting its AI is something that I absolutely love, as it makes it a really unique, challenging fight, even if it’s placed at the end of a garbage-fire area.

The game seemed to have even more focus put into the art than in the first game, like, this game is downright gorgeous in places despite fact that it’s 8 bit.

This game does not hold up like I remember.

Idk, maybe I'm just too good at the genre? But this is just a weak as hell selection of levels and I made sure to choose the "Hard" path this time. Character swapping doesn't really give meat to the amount of fat the game has, with bosses that are borderline pushovers. I didn't lose a single life for the first five levels and even though the challenge ramps up as it goes, it's definitely one of the more dull castlevanias I've played despite the fantastic music. Maybe Bloodlines is to blame for partially spoiling me.

What hurts is that I loved this game so much on my first playthrough, some 7-8ish years back. It was probably really challenging for me back then, but now I'm breaking the game's metaphorical spine. It's not bad still, I guess I should say, but it's really really difficult for me to think of what else is POSITIVE in the couple hours it took to lay waste to CV3.

Potentially worth a look still, definitely recommend as a first-time platformer, not a game I enjoy anymore.