Okay so maybe we all got a little scared by what we had going on in Castlevania II, this is fair. That is an adventurous game, even a Simon’s Quest sicko like me will admit it’s not for everybody. It’s certainly not a bad idea to go back and iterate upon Castlevania 1, and that’s what this is, for the first time in the series: an iteration. I don’t think there’s really very much to actually say here.

The colors pop in wild and spectacular ways; it’s not at all uncommon to see reds and blues and greens and yellows and purples all coexisting on the screen, bright popping ones that feel like that should clash but really only add to the feverish sense of phantasmagoria that permeates this game. If Castlevania 1 is iconic by necessity and ingenuity, Dracula’s Curse feels iconic by statement, aesthetically maximalist in every way. Colors pop, enemy designs leak and groan and emote, the music is more tailor made to locations but when it rips it rips harder than anything in the series so far. This does feel like a culmination, and although this game was considered a sales disappointment that began the long death knell of Hitoshi Akamatsu’s career, there’s a palpable sense of excitement, of a team at the top of their game at the height of control over what their console could do.

While the many many levels and their branching paths and three main routes through the game are very cool and have a lot of good setpieces (in the famicom version at least, the American version sucks shit lol I will never play it ever again and happily never look back), the real stars of the show are the three new playable characters, a real bunch of fuckin freaks if I’ve ever met any. There’s Sypha the wickedly OP vampire killing church Sorceress who according to the ending scroll is in the midst of some sort of gender crisis and frankly I support you sister me too. There’s GRANT DA NASTY the biggest homie of all time who has fuckin sicko wall climbing abilities and animations along with a throwing dagger attack that makes him also absurdly useful (IF YOU PLAY THE FAMICOM VERSION WHERE HIS ATTACK WASN’T TAKEN AWAY FROM HIM FOR NO REASON HEY IDIOTS ENJOY THOSE TRUNCATED SALES IN AMERICA BECAUSE EVERYONE THINKS THE GAME IS TOO HARD), forgotten by history, turned into a Voldo in Castlevania Judgement, omitted from the cartoon based on this game, funniest name of all time, love this guy. The best one though is Alucard, you can’t dethrone him he’s such a fuckin doofus in this game, not yet a sexy Ayami Kojima painting, here he is a full on Hammer Horror ass Christopher Lee ass fake Dracula ass widow’s peak ass loser with awful attacks and a mostly useless power compared to his peers, mostly just kind of a bad version of stuff the other each do better, but he can do both at once. His ending is two bros dudes rocking on the corpse of his dad but he’s a little sad about it because you did kill his dad after all, he’s great. I love each and every one of them and most of all I love the very cute little handshake animation that plays when you accept them into your party.

Dracula’s Curse doesn’t do much that is genuinely fantastically new but it doesn’t really need to; what it offers instead is a hyper stylish, more polished, version of a game I already liked with more stages to choose from and the best Dracula sprite they’re probably ever going to have, calling it now (it’s his second phase where he is a clump of blood-vomiting heads that rot into dead skulls as you whittle his health down, sick as fuck bro). It’s a game that could be skating by on aesthetic charm, it has plenty, and maybe it's not as cohesive a package as either of its console predecessors, but it nails the fundamentals too and SOMETIMES that’s all I need y’know.

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NEXT TIME: BELMONT'S REVENGE