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.
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.