Nearly 35 years after its release, few action games have managed to match Castlevania. This game has it all: satisfying combat, a good difficulty curve, engaging bosses, and—most notably for its time—very fair enemy placements.

In Castlevania, you play as Simon Belmont, wielding his notorious whip to take on various challenges on the floors of Dracula’s Castle as you ascend to fight the Dark Lord himself. Each level is made up of three stages, with a boss at the end of the third. If you die once, you reset to the beginning of the level. Get a game over, and you’re returned to the beginning of the three-stage level.

The basics of the game feel great. The whip flies out with a satisfying snap, and it’s a joy to learn the spacing necessary to take on tougher foes. The whip can be upgraded to extend its range and improve its attack power. These upgrades are generously placed so that if you die, you’re likely to have your whip back up to its third upgrade in decent time. The various sub-weapons you can get (and upgrade with their own “shot multipliers”) are all enjoyable to use and experiment with. The awkwardness of the jump (you need to simultaneously press a directional button and the jump button to jump diagonally, and you can’t affect your trajectory while in the air) is the only thing that gives away the game’s age, but there are luckily not many technical platforming sections.

Enemies have some patterns that are challenging but not bullshit to learn. The most notorious are surely the flying Medusa heads and the erratic, jumpy hunchbacks. In my experience, though there were some classic “get pushed into the water and die” moments, none of them were completely unpredictable like some NES games can be. The game is also coded better than the later Ninja Gaiden, where certain enemies can respawn at the edge of the screen and essentially halt all progress. Some people complain about unavoidable damage on stairs, and I don’t deny that it would be nice to be able to jump off of them or at least move a bit faster, but I don’t think there’s technically unavoidable damage on them at any time unless you’re rushing.

The real meat of the experience comes in the form of six boss battles that gradually ramp up in difficulty. The Phantom Bat is a simple enough boss to justify inclusion as a standard mob later in the game, and Queen Medusa isn’t too challenging for the most part. Mummy Man can be rough, as it’s the first two-enemy boss fight, but positioning can help to make it a laughable fight. Frankenstein & Igor are where shit gets real. These are the Ornstein & Smough of Castlevania NES. Frankenstein just kind of lumbers around and doesn’t do much but soak up damage from you, but Igor is a complete punk. He jumps around like a regular hunchback with much higher jumping arcs, throws fireballs, and can drain your health completely if he hits you into Frankenstein and decides to come and land on you during your recovery. It’s a ton of fun to get down the patterns and start properly managing two enemies at once, and it’ll prepare you for still more trying fights like the Grim Reaper and The Count himself.

Fortunately, this classic action game is well-balanced and well-designed enough to hold up. Rather than being a grueling slog to return to as many of the 8-bit era’s greats can be, Castlevania would fit right in with a decent number of contemporary indie games if it weren’t so much better than them.

So, this game was absolutely tough as nails in a lot of respects, but it honestly feels like it’s stood the test of time better than a lot of other NES games, with a wide range of enemies that each actually feel like different enemies in ways beyond simply aesthetic, each type requiring a slightly different approach to take down, keeping the game quite fresh and interesting throughout. The extremely rigid, honestly a bit clunky control of Simon Belmont is an aspect of the game that ends up being nowhere near as much of an issue as one would first think, with the majority of the levels and obstacles clearly being designed around this much slower, calculated sort of movement, with excellent positioning and timing required to tackle most of these, yet almost never requiring too much from the player in order to overcome these challenges.

This approach to difficulty of course, applies to the first 4 of the 6 areas, as after that, balance often feels like it’s thrown out the window in favour of just throwing as much garbage at the player as possible, exemplified best in the clock tower stage right before the fight with Dracula. The issue with this part is that there is enemy spam, but not just enough to be problematic and clear artificial difficulty, but enough to straight up floor you with how stupid it is, spamming small, bouncing enemies everywhere while also making the player jump across slim platforms with death pits surrounding you at all times. To make this even worse, because of the way wall collision works in this game, things become straight up absurd when you’re then subjected to these jumping bastards begin to clip through the floor below you, surrounding you from all sides, including the walls, leaving the only course of action to be simply praying that the RNG and AI will be nice enough to you to not just decide that you’ll die now.

One other issue with the game that I really have is the fact that the bosses feel absolutely cheap or unreasonable, and just not designed for the more slow-paced nature of the game. This is even something that I find noticeable in the first boss of the game, the giant bat, which while relatively easy, all things considered, flies in an erratic enough pattern that it can feel incredibly unreasonable to tackle it due to the disconnect in speed between the player and the enemy. Other instances in which I found there to be issues with the boss balance included the 4th area’s fight against Frankenstein’s monster, in which the small, fire spitting minion accompanying him can often make for situations that are impossible to avoid damage in, which makes frustrating quite a tame word that can be used to describe this section.

Honestly though, despite the fact that this game is flawed and brutal in a lot of respects, it still remains an extremely fun one as well in a lot of respects, making you feel like a real badass as you’re making your way through this gigantic castle full of horrific creatures. The game clearly had quite a bit of forethought put into at least the earlier areas in order to provide a punishing, yet reasonable level of challenge, with the game only really faltering in a major way during the last couple of areas. I can definitely see how this game is considered to be an NES classic, despite the fact that yeah, it’s extremely far from perfect.

Scattershot statements:

The music is absolutely excellent, one of the best soundtracks for the NES

Subweapons don’t play a big part for the most part, but are a cool system that can sometimes feel absolutely essential, which is cool for player agency, but also can make the game feel unfair if you don’t have the right one with you.

Whip upgrading is somewhat obnoxious, as it can leave the player in much more difficult circumstances upon respawning for a bit and doesn't really add much to the game.

I can’t think of a recent encounter in a game that’s frustrated me as much as Dracula, telefragging is really infuriating to say the least.

The strategizing of when the perfect moment to jump or attack is makes for a game that makes more or less every encounter a really engaging one up to a point, since it keeps you on your toes.

This remains a masterpiece even after all these years. A very compact, briskly paced, challenge-heavy game that submerges you in a rhythm of walking, jumping and whipping that feels effortless once you gather enough patience to master. Despite its very abrupt spike in difficulty after the third stage, the game feels like it nails how long it needs to last before it becomes stale, and as such, no level feels redundant or wasted. Adding to that the lavish pixel art and the very carefully selected colors and we have a classic that deserves to be played again and again.