Vee commented on my review for Belmont’s Revenge expressing interest on whether I’d be a Super Castlevania IV liker or hater which did surprise me a bit because, in my complete ignorance of this franchise, I was under the impression that this is a really well-liked game! I’m glad to hear it’s a little more divisive because I was beginning to worry I was just going to be an eternal, obstinate contrarian with this series. It’s nice to know that I have a camp of people with me in thinking this one is a bit of a disappointment.
Super Castlevania IV takes the tack of a lot of early or series-first-outing SNES games (in this case it’s both, squeaking in just under a year after the console’s debut in Japan) in acting as a sort of ground up reimagining of its NES forebear rather than a true sequel. The goal here is to take the basic framework of the original Castlevania and balloon it to much more expansive proportions while simultaneously introducing new mechanics in both play and presentation that would have been impossible on less powerful hardware. SC4 goes in whole hog on this, expanding itself to probably four or five times the size and width of Castlevania and shoving 16-bit graphical luxuries at you so frequently and with such enthusiasm that it sometimes feels like a tech demo as much as it does a lavishly produced Castlevania sequel.
These aren’t bad things, necessarily. It IS cool that they can have Simon travel from the foregound to the background element now; even if this mechanic doesn’t really amount to anything play-wise, there’s an obvious giddyness to its implementation, or that of the truly migraine-inducing rotating cylindrical skeleton hallway halfway through the game. None of this stuff HAS to be here, and indeed Mode 7 sees much more practical use in the room immediately preceding that hallway where you turn the entire geometry around your character, or the boss fight that is actually a Mode 7 background element cleverly disguised as a character sprite to allow it to grow and shrink in size. It’s here because it’s COOL. A LOT of stuff is here because it’s cool and I fully support that.
In fact the single best thing about the game is its visual presentation. When they found themselves with suddenly a LOT more graphical fidelity than they’d ever had before, the new Castlevania team headed this time by a relatively young Masahiro Ueno needed to decide whether these games were gonna go all in on actual gore and horror or like, goofy cartoon B-movie shit and they went ALL in on Spirit Halloween vibes, it’s nonSTOP in this game. There are skulls just like, everywhere, on the ground, hanging from the ceiling, embedded in the walls, following you with their eyes; paintings reach out to grab you and books rattle supernaturally in their shelves. All of the familiar Castlevania mainstay enemies are here but there are some really great additions to the repetoire, my favorites being the ghostly ballroom dancers that haunt the middle range of the castle, floating around to music only they can hear and seeming to harm Simon by accident as they shoulder check him during a dance they don’t realize he’s not a part of. There are cobwebs and goop everywhere, and a lot of the returning bosses from the original game have new twists (special shoutout to the giant bat, who has been placed significantly later in the game and is now made of a mass of evil sapient gold coins that take the SHAPE of a bat, very sick). It’s just wall to wall a visual treat. I wish I could say that about literally any other part of the game.
It’s not that I DISLIKE any particular aspect of Super Castlevania IV, it’s more that none of it really moves the needle for me either way? The music is a prime example of this – after the first level opens with an absolute banger track, one that’s both foreboding of the adventure to come and full of this jazzy soul, confident that Simon will claim victory, almost all of the music in the game is just like, incredibly mild, borderline ambient. None of it is bad but it’s not the vibe I’ve come to expect from Castlevania, and it doesn’t even instill dread like calmer tracks in Castlevanias past. It’s a strange choice to make the music so sedate when the visuals of the game are SO maximalist at all times. The gameplay at large is in a similar spot. There are key changes at play that drastically alter the feel of the series in the form of 8-directional-whipping and being able to adjust your jumps in midair, but there are smaller things too. Subweapons are significantly less powerful by and large, or at least they feel it, while your whip is MUCH longer than in any other game, and you now have the ability to also like, freehand shake it around once it’s out, at which point it will still do damage when it connects, a fact you can use to absolutely obliterate literally anything in the game that gets close to you. What you’re left with is a game that massively empowers you but despite being expanded hugely from the game it’s based on, doesn’t seem to really account for your new tools in its level or enemy design. I definitely don’t mind a game being easy, and I don’t even care about the sanctity of difficulty in Castlevania in particular either. What I think sucks about this in particular is that the game is just kind of unengaging. It’s a long game by Castlevania standards, easily the longest one so far, but there isn’t a lot of variety to the actual stuff you do in each level despite fantastic visual theming across the board. It’s a long game that feels very samey across the board. This all culminates in a really bland, simple Dracula fight that hands you a win nearly as easily as the one in Simon’s Quest but without any of the thematic weight that one has. In a microcosm of the game’s play problems, he doesn’t even have a second form but he DOES have three equally simple attack patterns. It’s a long, boring fight that doesn’t ask very much of you at the end of a game that’s long and boring and doesn’t ask much of you.
I wish I wasn’t writing this because I wish I wasn’t feeling this way because there is SO much to love here. It’s just ultimately swallowed up by the fact that these ARE games that are so far mostly driven by the part where you walk to the right and whip a skeleton in the face until he explodes (the explosion effect is incredible in this game they really just burst like a clattering water balloon full of pretzel sticks) and that part is juuuuuust tedious here for me. More like Middling Castlevania IV. More like, Super Mediocre Castlevania IV. More like, more like, more like Subpar Castlevania IV. That’s pretty good let’s go with that one.
EDIT NOW THAT I HAVE SAT ON THIS FOR A FEW DAYS I TAKE IT BACK THIS GAME IS FINE IT IS NOT SUBPAR CASTLEVANIA IV IT IS SOUP-N-SALAD CASTLEVANIA IV, LIKE IT’S NOT WHAT I’M HERE TO EAT BUT I’M NOT GONNA NOT GET DA SOUP OKAY
PREVIOUSLY: BELMONT'S REVENGE
NEXT TIME: RONDO OF BLOOD
Super Castlevania IV takes the tack of a lot of early or series-first-outing SNES games (in this case it’s both, squeaking in just under a year after the console’s debut in Japan) in acting as a sort of ground up reimagining of its NES forebear rather than a true sequel. The goal here is to take the basic framework of the original Castlevania and balloon it to much more expansive proportions while simultaneously introducing new mechanics in both play and presentation that would have been impossible on less powerful hardware. SC4 goes in whole hog on this, expanding itself to probably four or five times the size and width of Castlevania and shoving 16-bit graphical luxuries at you so frequently and with such enthusiasm that it sometimes feels like a tech demo as much as it does a lavishly produced Castlevania sequel.
These aren’t bad things, necessarily. It IS cool that they can have Simon travel from the foregound to the background element now; even if this mechanic doesn’t really amount to anything play-wise, there’s an obvious giddyness to its implementation, or that of the truly migraine-inducing rotating cylindrical skeleton hallway halfway through the game. None of this stuff HAS to be here, and indeed Mode 7 sees much more practical use in the room immediately preceding that hallway where you turn the entire geometry around your character, or the boss fight that is actually a Mode 7 background element cleverly disguised as a character sprite to allow it to grow and shrink in size. It’s here because it’s COOL. A LOT of stuff is here because it’s cool and I fully support that.
In fact the single best thing about the game is its visual presentation. When they found themselves with suddenly a LOT more graphical fidelity than they’d ever had before, the new Castlevania team headed this time by a relatively young Masahiro Ueno needed to decide whether these games were gonna go all in on actual gore and horror or like, goofy cartoon B-movie shit and they went ALL in on Spirit Halloween vibes, it’s nonSTOP in this game. There are skulls just like, everywhere, on the ground, hanging from the ceiling, embedded in the walls, following you with their eyes; paintings reach out to grab you and books rattle supernaturally in their shelves. All of the familiar Castlevania mainstay enemies are here but there are some really great additions to the repetoire, my favorites being the ghostly ballroom dancers that haunt the middle range of the castle, floating around to music only they can hear and seeming to harm Simon by accident as they shoulder check him during a dance they don’t realize he’s not a part of. There are cobwebs and goop everywhere, and a lot of the returning bosses from the original game have new twists (special shoutout to the giant bat, who has been placed significantly later in the game and is now made of a mass of evil sapient gold coins that take the SHAPE of a bat, very sick). It’s just wall to wall a visual treat. I wish I could say that about literally any other part of the game.
It’s not that I DISLIKE any particular aspect of Super Castlevania IV, it’s more that none of it really moves the needle for me either way? The music is a prime example of this – after the first level opens with an absolute banger track, one that’s both foreboding of the adventure to come and full of this jazzy soul, confident that Simon will claim victory, almost all of the music in the game is just like, incredibly mild, borderline ambient. None of it is bad but it’s not the vibe I’ve come to expect from Castlevania, and it doesn’t even instill dread like calmer tracks in Castlevanias past. It’s a strange choice to make the music so sedate when the visuals of the game are SO maximalist at all times. The gameplay at large is in a similar spot. There are key changes at play that drastically alter the feel of the series in the form of 8-directional-whipping and being able to adjust your jumps in midair, but there are smaller things too. Subweapons are significantly less powerful by and large, or at least they feel it, while your whip is MUCH longer than in any other game, and you now have the ability to also like, freehand shake it around once it’s out, at which point it will still do damage when it connects, a fact you can use to absolutely obliterate literally anything in the game that gets close to you. What you’re left with is a game that massively empowers you but despite being expanded hugely from the game it’s based on, doesn’t seem to really account for your new tools in its level or enemy design. I definitely don’t mind a game being easy, and I don’t even care about the sanctity of difficulty in Castlevania in particular either. What I think sucks about this in particular is that the game is just kind of unengaging. It’s a long game by Castlevania standards, easily the longest one so far, but there isn’t a lot of variety to the actual stuff you do in each level despite fantastic visual theming across the board. It’s a long game that feels very samey across the board. This all culminates in a really bland, simple Dracula fight that hands you a win nearly as easily as the one in Simon’s Quest but without any of the thematic weight that one has. In a microcosm of the game’s play problems, he doesn’t even have a second form but he DOES have three equally simple attack patterns. It’s a long, boring fight that doesn’t ask very much of you at the end of a game that’s long and boring and doesn’t ask much of you.
I wish I wasn’t writing this because I wish I wasn’t feeling this way because there is SO much to love here. It’s just ultimately swallowed up by the fact that these ARE games that are so far mostly driven by the part where you walk to the right and whip a skeleton in the face until he explodes (the explosion effect is incredible in this game they really just burst like a clattering water balloon full of pretzel sticks) and that part is juuuuuust tedious here for me. More like Middling Castlevania IV. More like, Super Mediocre Castlevania IV. More like, more like, more like Subpar Castlevania IV. That’s pretty good let’s go with that one.
EDIT NOW THAT I HAVE SAT ON THIS FOR A FEW DAYS I TAKE IT BACK THIS GAME IS FINE IT IS NOT SUBPAR CASTLEVANIA IV IT IS SOUP-N-SALAD CASTLEVANIA IV, LIKE IT’S NOT WHAT I’M HERE TO EAT BUT I’M NOT GONNA NOT GET DA SOUP OKAY
PREVIOUSLY: BELMONT'S REVENGE
NEXT TIME: RONDO OF BLOOD
12 Comments
I am more in the lover squad but really just because I can't possibly hate something so dedicated to a comedic aesthetic as this it's just so fuckin funny. The dancing ghosts are named Paula AbGHOUL and Fred OSCARE. That one doesn't work as well when I capitalize the word for the pun but it's not crypt keeper enough if I don't.
glad everyone agrees iv is mid now
can't wait to see your take on bloodlines!
can't wait to see your take on bloodlines!
No lie, I love the music in this game, but I get people who don't gel with it very well. I always found this one oddly comfy due to the lowered difficulty, but I think that's just classicvania in a nutshell for me.
I definitely think the review comes off more overtly negative than I intended because I wouldn’t cal myself a full hater as much as I felt like apathetic towards a lot of the decisions y’know? Now that we’re firmly in a period of the series between the original creative lead being kicked out and Igarashi becoming the dominant overal production voice, that constant shuffling of new people trying new thing coupled with the fact that we’re seeing games on the gameboy, the SNES, and soon the Genesis and PC Engine mean there’s a lot more room for the series to branch out from its roots, and it turns out for me that this particular creative branch just doesn’t resonate very much personally.
I do dig the Hyper Halloween stuff though obviously and Paula Abghoul and Fred OScare are my faves forever.
And Vee I def feel your perspective on the music and the difficulty, this game has premium rainy day vibes for sure
I do dig the Hyper Halloween stuff though obviously and Paula Abghoul and Fred OScare are my faves forever.
And Vee I def feel your perspective on the music and the difficulty, this game has premium rainy day vibes for sure
Just want to log another 'yea' vote for Super IV here, I think it's probably the most vibes-based entry in the series. Definitely has some of the best art and music of the whole deal for me. It's a great companion piece with the vastly different but just as awesome Bloodlines.
Dies this is my favorite classic one so far
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Great review. Though I mildly disagree with your conclusion that this is middling, I can respect where you're coming from. Castlevania 4 is one of those Castlevania games that demands the ultraspecific way to play via patiently & perfectly timing attacks and platforming if you are to be successful, which those kind of games haven't really aged well the more time goes on (unless you grew up with it or like a speedrunner or something). The newer 2D Castlevania's really alleviates a lot of this game's problem of being too sluggish and feeling somewhat powerless to the relentless onslaught of enemies by having the playable character be faster and have weapon variety instead of just a nice framerate whip you can flail around that maybe sometimes cheese a few deaths from enemies just out of reach.
The enemy placement in this one is particularly awful and you have to be near clairvoyant to not be chipped of health every 10 seconds and ---
You know what? I just realized I agree with you -- this game is super mid.
Fuck.
The enemy placement in this one is particularly awful and you have to be near clairvoyant to not be chipped of health every 10 seconds and ---
You know what? I just realized I agree with you -- this game is super mid.
Fuck.
This comment was deleted
I REALLY want to emphasize that I don’t think this game is mid I just don’t think it clicked with me. As an avowed liker of every castlevania game so far including the famously hated simon’s quest and the first gameboy one I definitely don’t have a problem with slow movement and indeed I think SCIV actually gives you the most versatile options for that up to its point in the series. You’re more flexible with jumps, they’re a lot more generous with letting you catch the edge on platforms, you can land on stairs. I didn’t feel powerless at all; the whip is now like 50% longer than it used to be, it can hit every direction, it can block projectiles, it’s more powerful, and you take less damage from the enemies that you deal more damage to. I think this is by a pretty wide margin the easiest Castlevania game yet, which does have the side effect of making the few cheap enemy placements or death traps that seem like background elements stand out more, and really made me feel the final stage difficulty spike. The only real disempowerment I felt was in subweapons but I’m bot ENTIRELY sure that’s not just because SO much of their function is obviated but the whip now.
I have played a couple of new castlevanias and I like their style a lot too but I definitely discourage the line of thought that things age badly just because they’re old or they ask specificity in play from us. I’ve been playing a lot of old games this year and I think it is more a comfort thing for us than it is a problem with the games most of the time.
SCIV might not have vibed with me and I certainly don’t think it’s tuned very well to the core changes they made to the player’s toolset but the more distance I get from it the more I regret the overall tone of my review, specifically the bit right at the end because I think it emphasizes meanness in a way I don’t really feel about it.
I have played a couple of new castlevanias and I like their style a lot too but I definitely discourage the line of thought that things age badly just because they’re old or they ask specificity in play from us. I’ve been playing a lot of old games this year and I think it is more a comfort thing for us than it is a problem with the games most of the time.
SCIV might not have vibed with me and I certainly don’t think it’s tuned very well to the core changes they made to the player’s toolset but the more distance I get from it the more I regret the overall tone of my review, specifically the bit right at the end because I think it emphasizes meanness in a way I don’t really feel about it.
It wasn't that mean imo, I had a laugh with it. We all friends here, and I love soup.
perhaps all I wanted to talk about soup, I got a new cookbook last night with some dope soups in it and I’m very jazzed at the prospect of making some soups, stews. Etc
soup-er castlevania iv
Archagent
1 year ago