Understanding context is a virtue when it comes to learning why any form of media is the way it is. It can help someone enjoy something even more, but it could also wrap around and bring even more questions to how people could bear with it.

In the second stage, you are immediately met with bats who linger on the ceiling waiting for you to trigger their response of leisurely meandering somewhere towards your vicinity. Their pathing still baffles me after about five playthroughs, and I have yet to get past this part without taking damage, but sometimes these bats like to shatter reality and start hanging from within the blocks that make up the real estate of the stage. On the original tiny Game Boy screen that is of watermelon coloration due to it's dot matrix lcd screen, when the bats decide to do this little parlor trick they may as well become completely invisible to the player. It's a nice convenience for new players of the modern era who don't need to deal with this visual impairment, unless they decide to seek out playing on the original hardware.

...I don't recommend it.

This game is slow, we know this. The horse named "slow" has been beaten to such a near-death state that it resuscitated the horse, only for it to be beaten once again within an inch of it's life once more, in some kind of fucked up cycle. Castlevania never usually came installed with blast processing, and it surely doesn't exist here, but I'm going to be real. I just got used to it. Believe me, I feel bad for Christopher Bee's crippling boneitis, but it was something I just started looking past, because the rest of the game is very much built around this even steadier pace, as enemies aren't exactly breaking the sound barrier either in their method of attack. The punishment of your whip getting demoted after any hit is excruciating, especially for new players, and the lack of sub-weapons to properly strategize for areas aren't exactly helping as the "strategy" is quite simply "don't get hit" or "get good".

These are all things I can get past by simply "getting good", and I could even potentially say I enjoy these aspects the more I master the game, much like any other Castlevania experience, especially with such a simpler approach. As you could imagine, there is exactly one thing that is crippling in this game's ability to have a lasting heartfelt impact upon me, and it's something that would hinder any game, whether it was Aria of Sorrow or Elmo's Letter Adventure. That is of course, the copious amounts of button inputs getting dropped by the slowdown that can be triggered by things as minor as two enemies appearing on screen. It becomes a fun gamble wondering if Christopher Bee will jump straight up instead of where he's supposed to go in a hair-raising climb in everyone's favorite autoscrolling section with instant death spikes. This isn't something done by a bad emulator or a bad controller, this is an experience I've had playing this in the AV Collection on both my Switch and PC, as well as Lame Boy on my DS years ago. I would get this same problem playing with my Hayabusa fight stick with six frames of runahead on a MiSTer. That's just how badly unoptimized and poorly programmed the game is, if it wasn't already obvious by the random code you'll sometimes see on the screen just from casual play.

The Adventure was an obvious rushjob from both the aspect of it's gamefeel, as well as in many sections of the game that felt like they were barely playtested. The bridge in stage 2 will sometimes spawn the giant eyeballs that roll across the screen in such a way that you will have no choice but to take a hit, because hitting two of them rolling from the right will create a pit that's too wide to jump across, thus oops. The infamous autoscrolling third stage has a vertical climb that will train you to constantly be on the move and stay at the top of the screen, but there is a part where you must jump across platforms that will fall as you land on them. Attempting to jump across these platforms too early will make you faceplant into an invisible wall, as the autoscrolling screen had not yet made your destination accessible yet, oops. In the final stage, there are two very suspect rope climb screen transitions. One will lead you to a guaranteed hit from a bouncing ball projectile fired by one of the phallic looking monsters that are attached to the floor if it decides to fire upwards, thus necessitating a climb back down and then back up in order to reset the screen, and hoping our buddy fires downwards instead so we actually have a chance to avoid the incoming projectile. There is another rope climb later that demands crackshot reaction to quickly go up and get into position in order to avoid a scythe thrown by a hooded miscreant.

It's all very shoddy and obviously made on a tight schedule, and these are all things I wouldn't point out if I hadn't decided to try and beat this on the third loop, where Christopher Bee takes triple damage. I probably would've eventually beaten the final stage, if a new Picross game hadn't have come out for me to suddenly snap my focus away from this odd "kuso-great" entry. Yes, I'm going to admit. I enjoyed myself trying to learn and adapt to this mysterious game. It's not an entry I would ever say is "good", but I do believe it's punched down on a little too hard these days. As of this post, The Adventure holds an average user rating of "1.64" here at Boys Love, putting it below the likes of nefarious entities such as Diablo Immortal, Farmville, and Spyro: Enter The Dragonfly. Damn.

It's a shame that Konami didn't let The Adventure stay in the oven a bit longer, because with fixes to the terrible slowdown, ironing out some poorly balanced sections, and perhaps not having you be able to be demoted all the way to the weakest whip would probably allow it to maintain a healthier long term relationship with the modern audience. Instead of becoming a cherished "cute" game with a small amount of stages like Super Mario Land, it's harshly spat on and considered one of the worst games in the entire franchise.

For myself, the most disappointing aspect about The Adventure is actually the final boss music that plays when you fight Dracula's infamous "flying meatball" form. It begins intimidating enough with a bellowing intro growl, descends into a furious barrage as if a struggle against ultimate evil has begun, then it goes into a heroic melody as if the final blow is about to be struck....but this heroic melody suddenly loops and the track restarts back to the struggle. It perfectly captures The Adventure itself, something that could've potentially had been viewed as an underrated classic and be viewed favorably for years to come, only to have it's legs suddenly chopped from underneath it as the composer was on a tight schedule and had a dentist appointment to get to, apparently just like everyone else on staff at the time.

My advice is play it and give it a respectable amount of time, maybe you'll still hate it, or maybe you'll see the intent it had and give it a bit more slack. Regardless, your opinion is yours to keep, much like my own and you're free to throw bricks at me.

I could also just be masochistic too, who's to say? That fifth loop with one-hit deaths sounds pretty appealing to me, ngl.