As I type this I'm looking at every game I've rated one star, and trying to decide if it's on the better end of them. It's not. It's somewhere in the middle of the pack, an absolute also-ran of garbage games, and I have to wonder why I even considered the question.

It's hard to mess up linear Castlevania games. Make whip feel good (or have a suitable alternative weapon like a sick-ass spear/trident), make game harsh but fair, banger music to carry you through. Castlevania: The Adventure fails at all of these, spectacularly so, and yet... it feels like it's grasping for them. It knows what's good. The development team just couldn't pull it off.

Across the game's four levels you have blobs, birds, worms and so on either wobbling about minding their own business or attacking you in clear and predictable patterns. So far, so good. But... wait, who the heck am I playing as in this one? Christopher Belmont. Okay. But Christopher controls like shit. His walk, slow. His jump? Awkward. His whip? A drag to use on ground and in the air. He sucks. They messed up at a key feature: your little guy! Without that, anything in the game, be it battling foes, precision jumping, or literally walking across a screen becomes a chore and a nightmare, and makes what should be a nice quick jaunt through a petite companion to a console classic into an endless parade of lost lives and reset progress as Christopher once again betrays the player in a key moment.

Weirdly this doesn't impact the bosses too badly, as they're mostly minute single screen enounters where small twitches benefit more than larger actions as you dodge attacks and sneak hits in with your whip. Well, your upgraded whip, if you have it. You lose an upgrade each time you take a hit, and a completely unupgraded whip is so short as to make bosses a nightmare, as their attack range seems to be based on the longer, upgraded whip, or in the case of one of them, the fully-powered up whip that launches fireballs at your opponents. It's by no means over if you reach a boss without a big whip, but it is telling that all boss encounters have a candle with an upgrade in it in the room. The designers knew that basic whip was dogshit.

The music was okay. Unremarkable.

I'm amazed I've had even this much to say about C:TA. It's just a bad game. Any ambition is wasted, the end product isn't worth anyone's time, but it's still kind of interesting. A Castlevania with no sub-weapons is interesting. A Castlevania on Game Boy is an interesting exercise in working within limitations. It's just that this game doesn't manage to do anything with either of those things.