Somehow didn't really mind this, in fact I actually kinda like it. I get why it's so hated though, with the main American version of the game being ridiculously difficult. If you played this in an arcade you probably had every reason to hate it, and even now with emulators, I'll bet most people still ended up playing the broken American version (version M) because MAME makes it so complicated to find alternate versions of the same game if you set it up with a merged romset. I played it on version K, which was much more tolerable, but I think the original Japanese version is meant to be even easier (I couldn't get that version to even show up in MAME after hours of trying so I guess I'll never know). If you need to make it easier you can change the difficulty through the DIP switches in MAME as well. It makes sense that this was meant to be pretty forgiving considering it sticks to Castlevania's original 3 continue setup despite being an arcade game. You can feed it more quarters but it just adds to your health bar in your current life. Die three times and you go straight back to the start. If I tried to play this on version M I probably would have given up before the first boss, and just glancing at other reviews on here I'm sure that's exactly what a lot of people did. It's a shame because this game really isn't that bad. Get one of the decent versions running and it's a very charming reimagining of the original game with really pretty visuals. Like Vampire Killer, most of the stages here have a direct analog in the original game, but the higher visual fidelity here leads to some great elaboration on the original levels. The approach to the Castle is more drawn out, the underground caverns are more expansive and foreboding, and the bridge before the final boss now crumbles behind you as you walk along it. At one point in the third stage you get sucked through a portal to this faded ruin of a castle to be attacked by harpies, only to be sent back as soon as you beat them. It's more like something out of Dark Souls II than Castlevania, but it's those moments where the game hits you with something completely out of left field that make it so effective. I dont think Haunted Castle even comes close to Castlevania I or II, and even on easier versions it still has its flaws. The lack of unlimited continues really hurts with the amount of traps and surprise enemies, a lot of the levels are a bit monotonous design-wise, and the boss on stage four is incredibly annoying. All things considered though, this game's reception seems really undeserved. It's a shame it's still so complicated to get arcade games working through emulators with all the different versions and settings they could have, if version K was the way the majority of people played this game I can't imagine it would be so widely hated.

Most of the time when I take the contrarian stance on something like this I can kinda understand why most people hate/love it while I feel the complete opposite but with Dark Souls 2 I just genuinely cannot comprehend why people feel the way they do about it. Whenever I play this game and remember the way people talk about it online it makes me feel like I'm going insane. This game does maybe one single bad thing (soul memory) and most of the rest of it is leagues above the other souls games barring maybe Demon's Souls (I go back and forth on the two constantly but rn I think I like DS2 more). Without engaging too much with the endless shit-flinging internet debates surrounding this game I will say none of the complaints I've heard raised against it are even remotely compelling and frankly a lot of them sound completely deranged. Oh, going up an elevator from a mountain to the caldera of a volcano is so immersion-breaking that it ruined your entire experience with the game? As if Tomb of the Giants showing you Lost Izalith and Ash Lake in a way that clearly depicts all three areas being on the same level of depth doesn't break the illusion of the first game's world just as blatantly?

Regardless it's pretty pointless to compare this to DS1, I can completely understand liking that game more than this one for a variety of reasons and I do love 1 as well. I just prefer the approach 2 takes to the world a lot more in just about every way. It feels like a genuine attempt to develop the concepts of Dark Souls into a serious and compelling narrative that DS1 only vaguely approached. It's when people say they prefer Dark Souls 3 to this one that I really start to question my sanity. I struggle to think of a reason why anyone could play both games and come away genuinely preferring Dark Souls 3, a blatant nostalgia-baiting cashgrab of Souls imagery lazily tacked onto the framework of Bloodborne, but to each their own, I suppose. I think the way that game kind of ruins everything this game attempts to do with the ideas of hollowing and the eternal recurrence of lighting the fire/the effect that has on history (I never see anyone talking about it but the Ancient Dragon Memory in this is seriously one of the coolest moments in the entire series mostly because the game hasn't spent half it's runtime on dumb callbacks and recreated areas up to that point. Nothing in 3 even comes close.) is reason enough to hate it but it also just sucks on its own and is probably the best indictment of Fromsoft's general downward trajectory in recent years. Admittedly I did really like Elden Ring when it came out but I've gotta go back to that one and see if it was just the hype of playing it alongside everyone else in the first month or so or if it was really that good.

One of my only real complaints with 2 is that there is a bit of an overreliance on underground areas, but it's more than made up for since so much of this game looks amazing. Ds1 has like two good-looking areas across its entire duration (Darkroot Garden and Anor Londo) and 2 surpasses that within the first few hours with Majula, Heide's Tower, and the Lost Bastille alone. The caves and tombs can be a bit of a slog but push through it and you get even more gorgeous areas at the end like the Dragon Aerie, Shrine of Amana, basically every location in the DLC, etc. This is pretty much the pinnacle of From's visual design in my mind, outside of some of the awesome pulp sci-fi/horror inspired stuff in Elden Ring (and to be fair to Ds2, a good chunk of that is stuff they were already doing here... the underground cities feel very reminiscent of Heide's Tower and the Old Chaos.) I mentioned the recent decline in the quality of Fromsoft games earlier so I think I have to address the music, probably the most obvious way their games have gradually gotten worse and worse. Even in Dark Souls 1 the score was already a lot worse than in Demon's Souls and by the time you get to Elden Ring there's only one or two even remotely memorable tracks in the entire game.

However, here in Ds2 I think the music might actually be better than the first game, although you can still see the gradual homogenization of the music into generic "cinematic" orchestral slop, and a lot of it feels weirdly misplaced. Like Old Dragonslayer rocks and I love how Skeleton Lord evokes the harsher brass and strings of the Demon's Souls score... but what did those two completely unremarkable fights do to warrant some of the best tracks on the score when far more important bosses get far more generic music? And there's no excuse for some of the best songs on the soundtrack, Queen of Drangleic and Sin and Crowns, not even appearing in the game. Still, it's mostly pretty good. I'm definitely not a huge fan of the Ds3 soundtrack, but Yuka Kitamura who composed most of that soundtrack does some of the best tracks in Ds2, like Sir Alonne, Worshipers of the Dead, the aforementioned Old Dragonslayer, and so on. She uses a lot of the same elements here that you can find all over Ds3 so I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with her compositions, and If anything I like her work in this game a bit better than Motoi Sakuraba's. it's more likely that From or Bandai Namco gradually pushed for a more generic orchestral sound that would be immediately recognizable as "dark souls music" without ever taking the risk of trying anything new or actually memorable.

I've probably been talking about the soundtrack for too long. What I'm getting at here is that this game is really good. I think it's probably the best in the series, and I don't think I'll ever really understand why more people don't agree with me. Play it if you haven't, play it again if you have. Go in with an open mind and you might just find you like it a lot more than people online made you think you would!

So ahead of it's time its kind of unreal. Every bad thing anyone has ever said about this was wrong. Less challenging and less "perfect", so to speak, than the original Castlevania but the gameplay, setting, tone, and story (even with the butchered translation) are much more interesting. So many great little moments, the way each subsequent town is a little more sparse and a little less welcoming, the way the day-night cycle reinforces both Simon's impending death and the impact his curse has on the world around him, the halls of Dracula's castle lying abandoned and in ruins as you push forward to the center... it's easy to see why people say this game is blatantly unfinished or whatever but the occasional emptiness of the world makes complete sense within the story and never really detracted from the gameplay for me. It leads to a dismal atmosphere and a bleaker, more introspective pace to the entire game compared to Castlevania 1, which I really appreciated. Probably one of my new favorite Famicom games. Man, there were so many groundbreaking unique games on this system that just get completely disregarded these days in favor of their flashier, more accessible sequels.





I was going to make a joke about how this is probably as close as you could get to making Pathologic on the Famicom but then I remembered Takeshi no Chōsenjō exists

The community surrounding Xonotic is a cockroach that's almost as resilient as the Id Tech predecessors proper.
So the original IP holders sell it off to a German studio for a console-only CryEngine reboot, published by THQ? No sweat, here comes Xonotic, a kneejerk fork of Nexuiz Classic, likely created in the same year of the selloff. A new website and Quakenet IRC channel are created.
Nexuiz 2012 releases and bombs. Also THQ goes bankrupt. Xonotic still lives.
Shootmania comes and goes, Ubisoft is underwhelmed by the lack of engagement and shuts it down. Xonotic still lives.
Toxikk is gonna bring back the REAL and HARDCORE ARENA SHOOTER Action (NO REGENERATING HEALTH HERE!! 1999 IS BACK BABY!!!!!!) aaand the game underperforms and the developers quietly shutters it. Xonotic still lives.
Oh my goodness, Epic Games is bringing back Unreal Tournament 4! UT4 is here and real! It's coming to a paid open alpha and uh... whoops haha uhh Epic's got their obscure indie hit Fortnite to maintain so they'll just pretend UT4 doesn't exist. Xonotic still lives.
Okay okay, we know Epic will never touch that property until the Fortnite train dies. But look, Cliff Bazinga's got an arena shooter coming out! It's like the best of Overwatch and Quake combined, look at the hot new eSports tournament they're producing!!
Lawbreakers bombs, Xonotic still lives. (shoutout to Radical Heights LOL)

It's been over a decade and a scrappy arena shooter based off an incredibly hacked apart Quake 1 source port is still able to have pulses of life. I have seen an honest to god Xonotic tournaments livestreamed in this decade, with live commentary. One even topped 69 viewers, outdoing Cruelty Squad in that game's well-earned buzz cycle for that year. And there's a reason for that.

Even the act of getting pubstomped by semi-competitive players is a joy, just from the movement alone. The autohopping can quickly send you flying across the rooms of a map, air control letting the player cruise through like a plane. The weapons may not have a clean eSports™ balance but only a weird analytics nerd would dislike the selection. This is not an 'edgy' pastiche, but a game whose predecessor was released in 2005, one year before Quake 4. Pure iteration.

And it's free, both in payment and in source code. With the exception of Warsow, Cube 2 Sauerbraten, and arguably Quake and Doom, no other "revival" of this genre has dared to take this step for fear of market competition.