SoHai
2 reviews liked by SoHai
Belmont’s Revenge at first glance makes my spirited defense of The Adventure look uhh kinda stupid, with its extremely successful transliteration of the feel and stylistic trappings of NES Castlevania. But I do think it’s worth keeping in mind that this game was made two years into the Gameboy’s life cycle rather than six months, when we were seeing a lot of second-try sequels or games that had longer development times to begin with making stronger use of the hardware. I would also point out that this game was made by a team of experienced Gameboy developers who were hot off of GB adaptations of two other popular Konami franchises, Skate or Die and Contra, and that this team included future Castlevania superstar Toru Hagihara, who is less famous than Kogi Igarashi but is the actual credited director on Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Belmont’s Revenge has a lot going for it, and frankly, I think it delivers.
Fifteen years after The Adventure, Christopher Belmont’s son Soleil (I don’t know how he knew his son would grow up to be gay either) is having a cool coming of age ceremony where apparently vampire killers are granted magical powers (???) and during this ritual DRACULA STRIKES and possesses Soleil and summons not one but FIVE evil castles that Christopher must now tromp through to go save his son before Dracula can use his evil powers to resurrect. Some sort of Castlevania The Adventure 2. Perhaps Christopher will take some sort of revenge upon Dracula idk I’m just spitballing here.
The game feels good. They solved the hitbox problem from The Adventure and the movement is pretty much pitch perfect to the NES games now, which I didn’t miss but I’m surely happy to have – these games just feel good to move about in. Subweapons are back in the form of the holy water and the axe which gives you a good amount of coverage, but importantly they didn’t just throw away everything from the weird unpopular first game that made that one unique. The fireball whip upgrade returns and doesn’t leave you if you take a single hit, so it brings with it a lot more active utility rather than feeling like a rewarding bonus for hyper-skilled play. Most importantly, the rope-climbing mechanic from that game returns and sees a much more active incorporation into the level design.
Each of the four castles, which you can choose from the game’s hub menu like Mega Man levels (both of these games’ screen-based level designs feel a lot like Mega Man, as much as Castlevania actually), have strong themes and gimmicks, from Cloud Castle’s intense vertical pulley systems to Crystal Castle’s swift waterways to The Underground One That I Forgot The Name Of’s clever use of Castlevania’s iconic candles, the source of all upgrades and ammunition. That’s still true in that level but because you’re in an underground cave, destroying the candles visible on a given screen makes the screen go entirely black except for your sprite and those of the insectoid enemies you’ve activated who would otherwise be inert and acting as platforms in the light.
It’s another sleight of entirely original bosses in this game, free from the already entrenched traditions of its console cousins, and only two of the six of them are bullshit, I think? One of these is a standard level boss and unfortunately the other one is Dracula himself but this is the first time I’ve ever felt like the final boss was blatantly unfair across five famously difficult 8-bit games so I’ll count my blessings. But they’re all cool designs. The obvious standout is the possessed Soleil, fought directly before Dracula, because he marks what feels like a momentous occasion for the series. Not only is it the first time there’s actual dialogue within one of the games vs just featuring opening and ending text, but he’s also the first time in the series you duel a guy with a roughly similar moveset to your own. This game isn’t particularly well equipped to make this duel exciting, and his AI is not terribly clever or well-suited to the room you fight him in, but he’s threatening in the huge damage he deals per hit, and his own secondary weapon gives him big coverage that forces you to get within range of his whip if you want to avoid its damage. You need to make smart use of your own secondary weapon to be able to beat him and that’s clever fight design that makes up for any other shortcomings the character himself might have.
This has been the biggest surprise of Ina’s Big Weekend Of Castlevania so far. Like I said in my writeup for The Adventure, I didn’t even know these Gameboy games existed until very recently and this one has really impressed me with its creative level design, and not just because it’s unique within the series. I think there’s a real creative spark here, and it’s easy to see why one of the programmers on this one would have a brief but incredibly acclaimed and influential run in the near future of the series.
PREVIOUSLY: DRACULA'S CURSE
NEXT TIME: SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV
Fifteen years after The Adventure, Christopher Belmont’s son Soleil (I don’t know how he knew his son would grow up to be gay either) is having a cool coming of age ceremony where apparently vampire killers are granted magical powers (???) and during this ritual DRACULA STRIKES and possesses Soleil and summons not one but FIVE evil castles that Christopher must now tromp through to go save his son before Dracula can use his evil powers to resurrect. Some sort of Castlevania The Adventure 2. Perhaps Christopher will take some sort of revenge upon Dracula idk I’m just spitballing here.
The game feels good. They solved the hitbox problem from The Adventure and the movement is pretty much pitch perfect to the NES games now, which I didn’t miss but I’m surely happy to have – these games just feel good to move about in. Subweapons are back in the form of the holy water and the axe which gives you a good amount of coverage, but importantly they didn’t just throw away everything from the weird unpopular first game that made that one unique. The fireball whip upgrade returns and doesn’t leave you if you take a single hit, so it brings with it a lot more active utility rather than feeling like a rewarding bonus for hyper-skilled play. Most importantly, the rope-climbing mechanic from that game returns and sees a much more active incorporation into the level design.
Each of the four castles, which you can choose from the game’s hub menu like Mega Man levels (both of these games’ screen-based level designs feel a lot like Mega Man, as much as Castlevania actually), have strong themes and gimmicks, from Cloud Castle’s intense vertical pulley systems to Crystal Castle’s swift waterways to The Underground One That I Forgot The Name Of’s clever use of Castlevania’s iconic candles, the source of all upgrades and ammunition. That’s still true in that level but because you’re in an underground cave, destroying the candles visible on a given screen makes the screen go entirely black except for your sprite and those of the insectoid enemies you’ve activated who would otherwise be inert and acting as platforms in the light.
It’s another sleight of entirely original bosses in this game, free from the already entrenched traditions of its console cousins, and only two of the six of them are bullshit, I think? One of these is a standard level boss and unfortunately the other one is Dracula himself but this is the first time I’ve ever felt like the final boss was blatantly unfair across five famously difficult 8-bit games so I’ll count my blessings. But they’re all cool designs. The obvious standout is the possessed Soleil, fought directly before Dracula, because he marks what feels like a momentous occasion for the series. Not only is it the first time there’s actual dialogue within one of the games vs just featuring opening and ending text, but he’s also the first time in the series you duel a guy with a roughly similar moveset to your own. This game isn’t particularly well equipped to make this duel exciting, and his AI is not terribly clever or well-suited to the room you fight him in, but he’s threatening in the huge damage he deals per hit, and his own secondary weapon gives him big coverage that forces you to get within range of his whip if you want to avoid its damage. You need to make smart use of your own secondary weapon to be able to beat him and that’s clever fight design that makes up for any other shortcomings the character himself might have.
This has been the biggest surprise of Ina’s Big Weekend Of Castlevania so far. Like I said in my writeup for The Adventure, I didn’t even know these Gameboy games existed until very recently and this one has really impressed me with its creative level design, and not just because it’s unique within the series. I think there’s a real creative spark here, and it’s easy to see why one of the programmers on this one would have a brief but incredibly acclaimed and influential run in the near future of the series.
PREVIOUSLY: DRACULA'S CURSE
NEXT TIME: SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV
I’ll say this for Simon’s dad, Christopher Belmont and our star in The Adventure: he has a significantly less fucked time of it than his dad had or especially his son will have. I’ve played a handful of castlevanias from across the series timeline and it’s kind of a general blindspot for me – I just don’t care to read about stuff I don’t care about, and for most of my life I didn’t care about Castlevania. I didn’t KNOW that this game EXISTED until like a month ago and I didn’t realize it was REVILED until like last week when I saw a friend comment on Detchibe’s review which as a contrarian-by-circumstance I’m very excited to finally read. Having played it now it seems absurd to me that this thing is sitting at a 1.6 average rating? Damn guys.
I think this is a pretty smart adaptation of Castlevania to the constraints of first year gameboy development. Sure you move slow as molasses but it’s only a little different from how every other castlevania moves, only a little bit more extreme, and your enemies certainly slow down to accommodate you. There aren’t any subweapons but the bad guys you fight don’t necessitate them, and if you keep your whip powered up you get a sick fireball attack that shoots from it. You lose this if you get hit even once, and that just goes back to the central focus of the game. The thing it asks of you, again and again, is to master its movement. Get good at jumping, especially, and I think it’s a fair ask. The game is tuned around your stripped back abilities, an adaptation rather than an attempt to condense the full NES experience to the Gameboy. If there’s one black mark here that I never quite acclimated to it’s that Christopher’s hitbox is enormous, a giant invisible rectangle that occupies a lot of negative space around especially his head and shoulders, and this fucked me up primarily when I was trying to duck under projectiles. As if in answer to this, though, the game’s candles drop a pretty generous number of healing items, something unique to this entry in the 8-bit life of the series so far.
There’s a variety to the game that surprised me, too. Level 2’s cave maze admittedly sucks lol but level 3 being a really evil take on the ever-present gear theme in this series to first create a ceiling of crushing spikes that can only be stopped if you destroy the pillar gear that is bringing it down on you in time, followed by a really challenging (but imo not unfair) vertical platforming section as the instakill spikes rise from the bottom of the screen to greet you. Level 4 is similar but with horizontal scrolling and more gothic set dressing and I WILL say that the enemy difficulty is a little wild here but just like every other Castlevania game you get infinite continues, so to some degree it is a nonissue I think. Bosses are a similarly mixed bag; 1 and 3 are standard gameboy type guys who just sort of run or fly at you and do their attack while 2 and Dracula have patterns and interesting gimmicks to them.
ALSO the music is STILL GOOD and this is the sickest Castlevania design so far, a bulbous mass of lumps and protrusions, very cool looking, even if you only see it in silhouette.
So I dunno man, is this the least of the three NES games plus this one? Absolutely, for sure, no question. But I find a lot to like in it. I think in it being the least it’s easy to throw the kid dracula out with the evil bathwater but to do so overlooks that this game did try to creatively tackle the problems inherent to making one of these games as they existed then on this system and I think that for the MOST part they pulled it off well if you’re willing to practice it some. I think Christopher did a great job, but considering he’s got a sequel in two years, he is about on par with his son as a vampire hunter, because presumably Dracula is going to also not be really dead for him. Who said these guys are the best vampire hunters? They’re two for two family members who can’t seal the deal.
PREVIOUSLY: SIMON'S QUEST
NEXT TIME: DRACULA'S CURSE
I think this is a pretty smart adaptation of Castlevania to the constraints of first year gameboy development. Sure you move slow as molasses but it’s only a little different from how every other castlevania moves, only a little bit more extreme, and your enemies certainly slow down to accommodate you. There aren’t any subweapons but the bad guys you fight don’t necessitate them, and if you keep your whip powered up you get a sick fireball attack that shoots from it. You lose this if you get hit even once, and that just goes back to the central focus of the game. The thing it asks of you, again and again, is to master its movement. Get good at jumping, especially, and I think it’s a fair ask. The game is tuned around your stripped back abilities, an adaptation rather than an attempt to condense the full NES experience to the Gameboy. If there’s one black mark here that I never quite acclimated to it’s that Christopher’s hitbox is enormous, a giant invisible rectangle that occupies a lot of negative space around especially his head and shoulders, and this fucked me up primarily when I was trying to duck under projectiles. As if in answer to this, though, the game’s candles drop a pretty generous number of healing items, something unique to this entry in the 8-bit life of the series so far.
There’s a variety to the game that surprised me, too. Level 2’s cave maze admittedly sucks lol but level 3 being a really evil take on the ever-present gear theme in this series to first create a ceiling of crushing spikes that can only be stopped if you destroy the pillar gear that is bringing it down on you in time, followed by a really challenging (but imo not unfair) vertical platforming section as the instakill spikes rise from the bottom of the screen to greet you. Level 4 is similar but with horizontal scrolling and more gothic set dressing and I WILL say that the enemy difficulty is a little wild here but just like every other Castlevania game you get infinite continues, so to some degree it is a nonissue I think. Bosses are a similarly mixed bag; 1 and 3 are standard gameboy type guys who just sort of run or fly at you and do their attack while 2 and Dracula have patterns and interesting gimmicks to them.
ALSO the music is STILL GOOD and this is the sickest Castlevania design so far, a bulbous mass of lumps and protrusions, very cool looking, even if you only see it in silhouette.
So I dunno man, is this the least of the three NES games plus this one? Absolutely, for sure, no question. But I find a lot to like in it. I think in it being the least it’s easy to throw the kid dracula out with the evil bathwater but to do so overlooks that this game did try to creatively tackle the problems inherent to making one of these games as they existed then on this system and I think that for the MOST part they pulled it off well if you’re willing to practice it some. I think Christopher did a great job, but considering he’s got a sequel in two years, he is about on par with his son as a vampire hunter, because presumably Dracula is going to also not be really dead for him. Who said these guys are the best vampire hunters? They’re two for two family members who can’t seal the deal.
PREVIOUSLY: SIMON'S QUEST
NEXT TIME: DRACULA'S CURSE