Castlevania intentionally inverts the Belmont's rigid and challenging action design for a graceful, shameless power fantasy. Alucard's boundless strength is portrayed both in his progressive control tweaks and the overindulgent arsenal of trinkets and touchpoints he gorges upon. 80% of his toolkit is all but useless or overly-situational; a god beyond peer, he doesn't even need to use his trump cards.

Never felt bothered by how easy the game tends to get: Threats have huge variability on a peak around 'moderately easy', keeping the adventure tense and foreboding while rarely punishing your actual progress. It's all to maintain a gorgeous tour through the unalive corridors of Dracula's castle, adorned with breathtaking architecture and a troupe of delightfully-devilish monsters. Konami weaponizes the PS1's 3D tools to garnish already-pristine sprite art with lucid psychedelia; a peerless case study for pixels as strokes of paint to a breathing canvas.

But uh, fuck the reverse castle and fuck konami for chickening out of the 'richter loses his shit' plot. Insane backpedaling to play it safe. Stretches out an otherwise perfectly-scaled game to 4-6 extra hours of meandering and it can't even end on good bossfights. Genuinely would say it's better to go in and just play the main castle & bad/default ending, unless you really want to play Richter/Maria.