ORIGINAL REVIEW FROM 07-03-2021
I'll spoil it right out the gate: I dropped this game at Stage 5 out of 6. After getting the Anniversary Collection for pennies on Switch, and being an enormous fan of the Bloodstained Curse of the Moon duology, I figured I should try giving the original game that started it all a spin. And for being a game from 1986, the first four levels of this game hold up remarkably well! Enemy layouts remain very smart throughout, and stages are short enough to where restarting them when you're out of lives doesn't become a hassle, and can even be beneficial to do in order to get access to better Sub-weapons. Despite being such a simple game there's tons of mileage mined out of Simon's weaknesses as a character: Both the whip, jump and crouch have very clear drawbacks, and enemies feel designed like a rock-paper-scissors game around them. Fights with multiple kinds of enemies are sublime. An example of this is at the end of Stage 5. The player is presented with multiple Axe-throwing soldiers that walk backwards as you approach them, demanding steady forward movement alongside crouching and jumping to dodge the axes, althewhile interfering Medusa heads demand you to adapt those dodges to not line up with their patterns of movement. Every way Simon can move - forward, back, up and crouch, are tested in an organic way purely out of how two enemies work together, its fantastic.
Althesame, the subweapons feel comically unbalanced: The stopwatch feels as if it doesn't work on some enemies, the dagger is borderline useless, and the upward arc of throwing Holy Water sort of diminishes the value in of Axes somewhat. Despite that though, I found just the act of rotating between these tools dynamically throughout early stages provided enough variety to feel satisfying. The early stages of the game are so much fun because you're given juuust enough wiggleroom to experiment, to decipher out attack patterns and testing all the different ways to circumvent them with different weapons.
But when Stage 4 arives, it begins to show two of the game's big problems into the spotlight: Inconsistency, and lack of healing.
At the end of Stage 4, after a very well designed aerial assault segment, your fun is halted by four skeleton serpents. They have no rhyme or reason to their movements, shoot fireballs at an inconsistent rate that can come in angles near impossible to whip, and take an eternity to kill. The sick trick being that once they die, they either drop a surplus of sub-weapon ammo for the boss just ahead (very useful), or a surplus of money (very useless). What this effectively means is that, while Stage 4 is exceptionally well designed for the first 3/4ths of its runtime, its conclusion feels as if its entirely decided by luck. And, yknow, bullshit moments like this are usually fine in comparative games like Mega Man, because they tend to have an amount of mercy on the wounded player. Enemies will drop health pickups every now and then, and health pickups and 1UPs are strewn about levels, allowing even struggling players to feel as if there's hope in continuing to push through. Part of Castlevania's horror atmosphere comes from its refusal to do just this.
In Castlevania you get, at most, one (1) health pickup per level, which doesn't even bring you up to full health: Hell, it doesn't even restore half, its closer to 40%. If you get hit so much as TWICE total in the whole level, you will not beat the level with full health, and will enter the boss arena on uneven footing. And I'd be fine with a system like that in a game that didn't have the bullshit inconsistency problems from before.: This is, in a lot of ways, what the Curse of the Moon games do so well when playing Zangetsu-only. It takes supreme confidence in your game's design to pull off a system like it, but due to a few flubs, this game simply doesn't stick that landing. You effectively NEED save states to beat it.
Which brings us to what caused me to drop the game: Stage 5, home of Death. Death's boss fight is another of inconsistency: Projectiles that home in on you at angles you can't possibly hit them unless you have dead-eye aim with the Cross or Axe, but using those weapons means giving up on dealing damage to the boss itself, who's most aptly dealt with using Holy Water. The stage itself simply lacks wriggleroom: In the Curse of the Moon games, all different subweapons could be found regularly in stages, which encouraged mixing and matching different characters' kits to get through in a way that suits you! The challenge presented may have been difficult, yet still felt as if it in the player's hands. By comparison, the only possible Holy Water drop in the entirety of Stage 5 is within the first 5 seconds of the stage.
Which sometimes just gives you a dagger instead.
Its a damn shame the game turned out like this: And believe me, half my playtime with this game is Stage 5, I truly wanted to overcome this legendary game. In the end, I cannot bring myself to genuinely recommend it in its totality. Its brilliantly executed in core mechanics but gets carried away later on: Castlevania takes your trust, and fucks off. I could beat the game with save states, sure, but if the only way to get around the game is to flat out rig it in your favor, then I simply believe the game is not worth it.
Playtime: 4 hours
Keyword: Unreliable
I'll spoil it right out the gate: I dropped this game at Stage 5 out of 6. After getting the Anniversary Collection for pennies on Switch, and being an enormous fan of the Bloodstained Curse of the Moon duology, I figured I should try giving the original game that started it all a spin. And for being a game from 1986, the first four levels of this game hold up remarkably well! Enemy layouts remain very smart throughout, and stages are short enough to where restarting them when you're out of lives doesn't become a hassle, and can even be beneficial to do in order to get access to better Sub-weapons. Despite being such a simple game there's tons of mileage mined out of Simon's weaknesses as a character: Both the whip, jump and crouch have very clear drawbacks, and enemies feel designed like a rock-paper-scissors game around them. Fights with multiple kinds of enemies are sublime. An example of this is at the end of Stage 5. The player is presented with multiple Axe-throwing soldiers that walk backwards as you approach them, demanding steady forward movement alongside crouching and jumping to dodge the axes, althewhile interfering Medusa heads demand you to adapt those dodges to not line up with their patterns of movement. Every way Simon can move - forward, back, up and crouch, are tested in an organic way purely out of how two enemies work together, its fantastic.
Althesame, the subweapons feel comically unbalanced: The stopwatch feels as if it doesn't work on some enemies, the dagger is borderline useless, and the upward arc of throwing Holy Water sort of diminishes the value in of Axes somewhat. Despite that though, I found just the act of rotating between these tools dynamically throughout early stages provided enough variety to feel satisfying. The early stages of the game are so much fun because you're given juuust enough wiggleroom to experiment, to decipher out attack patterns and testing all the different ways to circumvent them with different weapons.
But when Stage 4 arives, it begins to show two of the game's big problems into the spotlight: Inconsistency, and lack of healing.
At the end of Stage 4, after a very well designed aerial assault segment, your fun is halted by four skeleton serpents. They have no rhyme or reason to their movements, shoot fireballs at an inconsistent rate that can come in angles near impossible to whip, and take an eternity to kill. The sick trick being that once they die, they either drop a surplus of sub-weapon ammo for the boss just ahead (very useful), or a surplus of money (very useless). What this effectively means is that, while Stage 4 is exceptionally well designed for the first 3/4ths of its runtime, its conclusion feels as if its entirely decided by luck. And, yknow, bullshit moments like this are usually fine in comparative games like Mega Man, because they tend to have an amount of mercy on the wounded player. Enemies will drop health pickups every now and then, and health pickups and 1UPs are strewn about levels, allowing even struggling players to feel as if there's hope in continuing to push through. Part of Castlevania's horror atmosphere comes from its refusal to do just this.
In Castlevania you get, at most, one (1) health pickup per level, which doesn't even bring you up to full health: Hell, it doesn't even restore half, its closer to 40%. If you get hit so much as TWICE total in the whole level, you will not beat the level with full health, and will enter the boss arena on uneven footing. And I'd be fine with a system like that in a game that didn't have the bullshit inconsistency problems from before.: This is, in a lot of ways, what the Curse of the Moon games do so well when playing Zangetsu-only. It takes supreme confidence in your game's design to pull off a system like it, but due to a few flubs, this game simply doesn't stick that landing. You effectively NEED save states to beat it.
Which brings us to what caused me to drop the game: Stage 5, home of Death. Death's boss fight is another of inconsistency: Projectiles that home in on you at angles you can't possibly hit them unless you have dead-eye aim with the Cross or Axe, but using those weapons means giving up on dealing damage to the boss itself, who's most aptly dealt with using Holy Water. The stage itself simply lacks wriggleroom: In the Curse of the Moon games, all different subweapons could be found regularly in stages, which encouraged mixing and matching different characters' kits to get through in a way that suits you! The challenge presented may have been difficult, yet still felt as if it in the player's hands. By comparison, the only possible Holy Water drop in the entirety of Stage 5 is within the first 5 seconds of the stage.
Which sometimes just gives you a dagger instead.
Its a damn shame the game turned out like this: And believe me, half my playtime with this game is Stage 5, I truly wanted to overcome this legendary game. In the end, I cannot bring myself to genuinely recommend it in its totality. Its brilliantly executed in core mechanics but gets carried away later on: Castlevania takes your trust, and fucks off. I could beat the game with save states, sure, but if the only way to get around the game is to flat out rig it in your favor, then I simply believe the game is not worth it.
Playtime: 4 hours
Keyword: Unreliable