The final Castlevania game for the NES introduces player choice, a major feature that would come to define the later Castlevania games. There are multiple paths you can take and multiple characters you can find and play as. For this first play-through, I went to the clock tower to pick up Grant, then I swapped him out with Alucard. I really liked playing as Grant—he's refreshingly agile, able to climb walls and ceilings and crawl through gaps Trevor can't fit through. Alucard I never got the hang of; it felt like his attack range is too short. Still, I mostly played as Trevor throughout. I just like hopping and whipping dudes.

This game has some unfair levels and bosses that I never quite felt like I found the solutions to, like the double mummy and the cyclops. A lot of bosses do a thing where they push you into a corner, and Trevor is not agile enough to get around them without taking damage. The Dracula fight isn't the worst one (it doesn't hold a floating candle to the one in Dracula X), but it will sometimes screw you over during his boss fight by giving you no room to move and dodge his third fire wall—I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do in that situation except take damage, and it seems to happen pretty randomly. Some of the levels will also do the thing I hate where you're stuck on stairs taking damage because an enemy won't move from the top of the stairs while they chuck bones at you. I also hated having to climb the falling debris, which just felt super tedious.

At its best, its still a lot of fun to hop and whip through these levels, and the NES look is really charming. I still plan on checking out the Japanese version, and trying the route I didn't take this time; hopefully that version fixes some of these difficulty issues.