Despite being a big Castlevania fan, I'd never really spent much time with Castlevania Legends previously. I did play it in my emulating days of youth, but for some reason I don't think I actually ever beat it, even though I've always remembered it as a fairly good game. "Thanks" to Nintendo Switch Online, though, I can now say that either my memory is terrible, or I had no taste as a kid, because this is truly one of the worst games in the franchise. Not quite as bad as genuinely awful The Adventure or as boring as Castlevania II (Simon's Quest; not Belmont's Revenge), but still just a bad experience almost all the way through, and with a story so bad that Koji Igarashi would erase it from canon just a few years later with Lament of Innocence.
But why is Legends so bad? I mean, it's still the classic Castlevania gameplay we all know and love, but done in maybe the most uninspired way possible, and the new ideas it brings to the table are all their just to make the game worse. First stage mostly sort of lulls you into believing this won't be the case. It is boring and overly long, to be fair, but not to an egregious degree. You fight bats, jump over pits, move at a relatively fast pace so it seems like the game could be decent if a tad bit uninspired. Then you hit a random candelabra, thinking it would just give energy or something, but instead you're transported to another screen where you have to fight an unreasonable amount of zombies. "Cool secret, wonder what the game will reward me with after this ordeal", you might think, but then the fight is over, and you're transported back to the previous screen with nothing gained and health lost. You might think there's a reward in the candelabra that transported you, but no, you idiot, you absolute fool, because it just transports you back to the zombie fight.
This is a warning from the developers. "Do not play this game...", they say with this, "...because we're just going to waste your time and annoy you as much as we can from now on." And they really, really do just that. Stage 1 is harmless outside of that awful candelabra, but going forward, this will be a game that, despite being only about 90 minutes long, feels like an eternity to complete. Stages are filled with branching paths, but there's always just one correct path while the other just leads to either a dead end or another one of those horde fights that you have to complete to be able to even get back to where the path first branched off. There also seems to have been made an attempt to make fighting enemies as annoying as possible no matter which path you choose.
See, Castlevania Legends is a game that loves verticality in its stages, so much so that the vast majority of enemies you fight will be either ghosts or bats that fly down on you, which is not great in a game where the protagonist can basically just attack straight forward. "Just use the axe", you might say, but there is none in Castlevania Legends! In fact, sub-weapons don't act as sub-weapons at all, but as secret items to collect in order to get the secret ending (that basically adds nothing of importance), and while you do have some magic powers that can be equipped at will, they cost so much energy that they're not feasible to use that often (and shouldn't really ever be used outside of the one that heals you, since they sort of suck.)
It's also a lot harder to just jump up and hit them than in most other CV games since enemies move at you very fast, move diagonally downwards in a very awkward way, which is complimented by stage design that often puts you in very tight spaces without much maneuverability. Even the usually so trivial bats are super annoying, having the most erratic movement pattern I've seen in a video game in a very long time. To make matters even worse, the respawning of enemies in Legends is somehow even more aggressive than any Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man on the NES, so if you happen to get hit and knocked down to a slightly lower platform, expect to face that exact enemy once again, and sometimes even if you progress past that point, the enemy may somehow respawn and come at you from below whenever the game feels like messing with you just a bit more.
Even without these issues with constantly respawning enemies that are often basically impossible to avoid or hit, stages tricking you into just wasting time, or sub-weapons being replaced by boring magic, the entire game is just so... Unremarkable. Whenever you're not being constantly annoyed by vertical sections, the game really has nothing interesting going on. The bosses are extremely easy (something's very wrong when I can even beat Dracula first try without any issues), the non-airborne enemies barely pose a threat but often still have an annoying amount health anyway, and every single stage is just way too long with a whole lot of nothing. So long, in fact, that this is probably the only Castlevania where you might be in actual danger of ever dying from running out of time, especially when taking any wrong path. Castlevania Legends might just be about 90 minutes long (when going for the secret ending. It's probably just about an hour otherwise), but it feels longer than any other Classicvania simply because it has nothing going for it.
Legends not unplayable like The Adventure, actually feeling fairly competent in its controls, having really fair checkpoints (the game even seems to spawn you at the latest checkpoint after a game over, sort of begging the question why the game even has extra lives at all, but it's appreciated nonetheless), and no real difficulty spikes to keep the player stuck at any point, but it feels like Konami fed every Castlevania game into a very primitive AI and let it produce a game, which is cruel to the actual developers that made this game, and probably not under optimal circumstances, but it really is how the game feels, with it generating a game that knows about both Symphony of the Night and classic games, and then combining them into one thing that does neither well, and equating Castlevania's difficulty as just "cruel shit." Even Alucard is thrown into the game for a very small role, and acting nothing like the coolest protagonist of 1996 that we all know and love.
Honestly, what saves Legends from getting that coveted 1 or 1.5 rating is that as much as I dislike it, it is mercifully short and as annoying as those vertical sections are, or as boring as the more horizontal, the game is easy enough that no section at least overstays its welcome. The levels as a whole certainly do, but I never got stuck, and as annoying as those flying enemies are, they don't really do enough damage as to have killed me all that often.
Thinking about it now, maybe a lower rating is justified when a game's sole positive is that it's not very long, but it could have been so much worse if the difficulty was more like previous games in the series, and I'd just wander around these boring as sin stages for at least twice as long as I did. Honestly, despite being bored by a lot of the game, I didn't really hate most of my time with it. I would never want to play it again, but there are worse games out there, and especially on the Game Boy. Sure, for a game made on the handheld as late as 1997, Legends should be a lot better than this, especially considering how much better Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge was, but at worst I'll just forget about the whole game in a few months and never think about it again, rather than remembering the terrible times I had with it. "Castlevania Legends? No, I can't really tell you anything about that game", I'll say in complete earnest, and just move on with my life.
But why is Legends so bad? I mean, it's still the classic Castlevania gameplay we all know and love, but done in maybe the most uninspired way possible, and the new ideas it brings to the table are all their just to make the game worse. First stage mostly sort of lulls you into believing this won't be the case. It is boring and overly long, to be fair, but not to an egregious degree. You fight bats, jump over pits, move at a relatively fast pace so it seems like the game could be decent if a tad bit uninspired. Then you hit a random candelabra, thinking it would just give energy or something, but instead you're transported to another screen where you have to fight an unreasonable amount of zombies. "Cool secret, wonder what the game will reward me with after this ordeal", you might think, but then the fight is over, and you're transported back to the previous screen with nothing gained and health lost. You might think there's a reward in the candelabra that transported you, but no, you idiot, you absolute fool, because it just transports you back to the zombie fight.
This is a warning from the developers. "Do not play this game...", they say with this, "...because we're just going to waste your time and annoy you as much as we can from now on." And they really, really do just that. Stage 1 is harmless outside of that awful candelabra, but going forward, this will be a game that, despite being only about 90 minutes long, feels like an eternity to complete. Stages are filled with branching paths, but there's always just one correct path while the other just leads to either a dead end or another one of those horde fights that you have to complete to be able to even get back to where the path first branched off. There also seems to have been made an attempt to make fighting enemies as annoying as possible no matter which path you choose.
See, Castlevania Legends is a game that loves verticality in its stages, so much so that the vast majority of enemies you fight will be either ghosts or bats that fly down on you, which is not great in a game where the protagonist can basically just attack straight forward. "Just use the axe", you might say, but there is none in Castlevania Legends! In fact, sub-weapons don't act as sub-weapons at all, but as secret items to collect in order to get the secret ending (that basically adds nothing of importance), and while you do have some magic powers that can be equipped at will, they cost so much energy that they're not feasible to use that often (and shouldn't really ever be used outside of the one that heals you, since they sort of suck.)
It's also a lot harder to just jump up and hit them than in most other CV games since enemies move at you very fast, move diagonally downwards in a very awkward way, which is complimented by stage design that often puts you in very tight spaces without much maneuverability. Even the usually so trivial bats are super annoying, having the most erratic movement pattern I've seen in a video game in a very long time. To make matters even worse, the respawning of enemies in Legends is somehow even more aggressive than any Ninja Gaiden or Mega Man on the NES, so if you happen to get hit and knocked down to a slightly lower platform, expect to face that exact enemy once again, and sometimes even if you progress past that point, the enemy may somehow respawn and come at you from below whenever the game feels like messing with you just a bit more.
Even without these issues with constantly respawning enemies that are often basically impossible to avoid or hit, stages tricking you into just wasting time, or sub-weapons being replaced by boring magic, the entire game is just so... Unremarkable. Whenever you're not being constantly annoyed by vertical sections, the game really has nothing interesting going on. The bosses are extremely easy (something's very wrong when I can even beat Dracula first try without any issues), the non-airborne enemies barely pose a threat but often still have an annoying amount health anyway, and every single stage is just way too long with a whole lot of nothing. So long, in fact, that this is probably the only Castlevania where you might be in actual danger of ever dying from running out of time, especially when taking any wrong path. Castlevania Legends might just be about 90 minutes long (when going for the secret ending. It's probably just about an hour otherwise), but it feels longer than any other Classicvania simply because it has nothing going for it.
Legends not unplayable like The Adventure, actually feeling fairly competent in its controls, having really fair checkpoints (the game even seems to spawn you at the latest checkpoint after a game over, sort of begging the question why the game even has extra lives at all, but it's appreciated nonetheless), and no real difficulty spikes to keep the player stuck at any point, but it feels like Konami fed every Castlevania game into a very primitive AI and let it produce a game, which is cruel to the actual developers that made this game, and probably not under optimal circumstances, but it really is how the game feels, with it generating a game that knows about both Symphony of the Night and classic games, and then combining them into one thing that does neither well, and equating Castlevania's difficulty as just "cruel shit." Even Alucard is thrown into the game for a very small role, and acting nothing like the coolest protagonist of 1996 that we all know and love.
Honestly, what saves Legends from getting that coveted 1 or 1.5 rating is that as much as I dislike it, it is mercifully short and as annoying as those vertical sections are, or as boring as the more horizontal, the game is easy enough that no section at least overstays its welcome. The levels as a whole certainly do, but I never got stuck, and as annoying as those flying enemies are, they don't really do enough damage as to have killed me all that often.
Thinking about it now, maybe a lower rating is justified when a game's sole positive is that it's not very long, but it could have been so much worse if the difficulty was more like previous games in the series, and I'd just wander around these boring as sin stages for at least twice as long as I did. Honestly, despite being bored by a lot of the game, I didn't really hate most of my time with it. I would never want to play it again, but there are worse games out there, and especially on the Game Boy. Sure, for a game made on the handheld as late as 1997, Legends should be a lot better than this, especially considering how much better Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge was, but at worst I'll just forget about the whole game in a few months and never think about it again, rather than remembering the terrible times I had with it. "Castlevania Legends? No, I can't really tell you anything about that game", I'll say in complete earnest, and just move on with my life.