masterful step up from the very first game in the series giving the gameplay a lot of nuance and interesting directions

while I do think this game still suffers from it being a classicvania and therefore hard as shit and therefore its pretty useless to play this game without savestates I do believe this is such a fun fucking experience even compared to the standard of the franchise as a whole

the skeleton of the game is heavily reliant on the already awesome debut the winning formula is there trevor feels like a fucking rock to move the whip is whipping the sub weapons are sub weaponing the enemies are eneming and everything feels as classic as possible

I'm not as much as a classicvania connoisseur to tell you whats actually different in the gameflow and how the entire game feels BUT I can say that the new additions of stuff like side characters with different play styles to use and branching paths add a lot to the whole experience and throughout this is definitely a tighter experience than the somehow rudimentary ancestor

this is also the game which the netflix series adapts and while I didnt watch the series yet I can say that the grand introduction of castlevanias best character to ever exist count draculas ikemen blondie tall twunk dhampir son alucard could be regarded as the second coming of christ if you ask me without this game symphony of the night would never exist so show some respect ungrateful ass

so all in all while it still doesn't have the refinement of later classicvanias in the series it's probably the greatest installment in the original NES trilogy and its pretty insane how much of an improvement this is over its predecessor and while at this point the series is moving forward im glad the original design of "let's put flying heads and fireballs over a crumbling bridge and at the end let's put a skeleton with a whip" type of levels is still there because while I don't really condone them literally bloating a 30 mins experience to like 2 hours because I have to use savestates every second thats kind of the charm of these games they're clunky in a good natured way if you want

castlevania is a weird series to get into and as a diehard fans for all these years it's still a pretty strange trip to get back to the classicvania hellfire and skill issue of yours truly but they're always gonna be bomb nonetheless

alucard I'm free on saturday and I bought kinky leather harnesses on vinted

also the soundtrack is cum inducing