While I have the Wii U (and therefore the contents of my old Wii that was transferred into it) hooked up, I figured I would play through some of the other games I've had sitting on there for ages that I'd never gotten to playing through before. First up on the list was the Castlevania entry in Konami's ReBirth series they did for WiiWare. I picked it up back before the Wii store shut down, but I never got around to playing it until now. It took me around two hours to play through the whole thing.
I haven't played Gradius: ReBirth, but I have played Contra: ReBirth, and unlike that game, Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth is a remake of an old game rather than an entirely new one. That said, only in the scantest sense is this actually the old GameBoy game Castlevania: The Adventure. Other than some recurring enemies (like the big rolling eyeballs), your whip shooting a fireball at max power, and the protagonist still being Christopher Belmont, this is an entirely separate game (and thank goodness). There are 6 stages instead of only 4 (granted stage 6 is just Dracula, really), all of the stages have been completely reworked, and THANK GOODNESS your whip doesn't power down when you get hit.
While I haven't played every one of the non-Metroid-y Castlevania games, I've played enough of them to say pretty confidently that this is both a faithful entry to those games as well as the easiest of those games by a significant margin. Part of this is due to how the game plays. You can unlock a "classic" playstyle by starting the game once (you can immediately quit and you've unlocked it) where your controls are like the NES games (namely your fixed jump), but the standard play mode is with far more play control. You can still only whip left and right, but being able to modify your jump midair, even a little,
makes it SO much easier to get through. This on top of being able to choose your starting number of lives (1-9) and difficulty mode make this game a far more easily completed beast than its ancestors.
It's got great music with some great remixes of old tracks, and a really pretty art style that's far more fluid and HD than the DS games of the time. It has some great new bosses, and a really excellent final Dracula fight as well. Plenty of checkpoints and a good difficulty curve to boot make this a great entry to this style of Castlevania game.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Igarashi shows he can not only do Metroid-y Casltevanias but classic-syle ones as well. This is a fantastic entry into the action/platformer lineage of Castlevania, and it's well worth checking out if you're itching for that kind of action but don't want something quite as unforgiving as the older games.
I haven't played Gradius: ReBirth, but I have played Contra: ReBirth, and unlike that game, Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth is a remake of an old game rather than an entirely new one. That said, only in the scantest sense is this actually the old GameBoy game Castlevania: The Adventure. Other than some recurring enemies (like the big rolling eyeballs), your whip shooting a fireball at max power, and the protagonist still being Christopher Belmont, this is an entirely separate game (and thank goodness). There are 6 stages instead of only 4 (granted stage 6 is just Dracula, really), all of the stages have been completely reworked, and THANK GOODNESS your whip doesn't power down when you get hit.
While I haven't played every one of the non-Metroid-y Castlevania games, I've played enough of them to say pretty confidently that this is both a faithful entry to those games as well as the easiest of those games by a significant margin. Part of this is due to how the game plays. You can unlock a "classic" playstyle by starting the game once (you can immediately quit and you've unlocked it) where your controls are like the NES games (namely your fixed jump), but the standard play mode is with far more play control. You can still only whip left and right, but being able to modify your jump midair, even a little,
makes it SO much easier to get through. This on top of being able to choose your starting number of lives (1-9) and difficulty mode make this game a far more easily completed beast than its ancestors.
It's got great music with some great remixes of old tracks, and a really pretty art style that's far more fluid and HD than the DS games of the time. It has some great new bosses, and a really excellent final Dracula fight as well. Plenty of checkpoints and a good difficulty curve to boot make this a great entry to this style of Castlevania game.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Igarashi shows he can not only do Metroid-y Casltevanias but classic-syle ones as well. This is a fantastic entry into the action/platformer lineage of Castlevania, and it's well worth checking out if you're itching for that kind of action but don't want something quite as unforgiving as the older games.