Pretty good remix of a lot of ideas from earlier Castlevanias: the character switching, the branching paths, the NES style of the original. OK levels, but some of the characters trivialize certain segments: The Alucard rip off’s special ability lets you fly over any obstacles, the wizard lets you make yourself invincible to enemies etc. There’s some weirdness to the difficulty. It never feels quite right, always either trivial or annoyingly hard. The normal difficulty settings give you 3 continues and enable knockback when you get hit; the casual difficulty gives infinite continues, while disabling knockback. I would have liked more specific settings, or a third option of infinite continues and knockback.

I don’t love the bosses. They aren’t all very fun to learn, and their design really sticks out. They have a more detailed, anime quality to them which I don’t mind on it’s own, but they’re jarring against the more NES looking characters, enemies, and backgrounds.

It gave me with enough good feelings to check out the sequel; hopefully there are a few improvements. There’s some fun to be had here, but you’d have more fun playing Castlevania: Bloodlines.