It's that good, but maybe not that good.
Rondo of Blood has managed to develop a legendary status among a lot of people who know about Castlevania. Not "legendary" in the way that Muhammad Ali or Jimi Hendrix were legendary, but "legendary" in the way that the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are legendary. There were decades after this game came out where nobody in the west played it. Barely anyone outside of Japan even owned a Turbografx-16 (which I'll maintain is because the name PC Engine is better), and even fewer owned the $399.99 USD CD-ROM attachment that came without any bundled games. Fewer still would have been able to import the game from Japan, and fewer than that would have actually known enough Japanese to figure out what the fuck Richter Belmont's deal was.
But the allure of Japan-only releases has been around since long before the Lost Decade hit, and it was bound to breach containment eventually. Dracula X wasn't going to satisfy the masses for long, and if they weren't going to get an official release, then that wasn't going to stop them from playing it. Getting Rondo of Blood set up is trivial today, with a deluge of modern emulation options and Konami-approved channels you can buy it from. For a while, though, Rondo of Blood was locked exclusively to western fans who had copies of Mednafen and whatever .bin and .cue files they could scrape from the internet. While The Dracula X Chronicles did release in 2007, the original Rondo of Blood was an unlock that you got for beating the remake, and it suffered from awful audio sync issues. Konami still wasn't selling an acceptable version of the game anywhere outside of Japan after fifteen years of waiting.
All of this has led to Rondo of Blood building a serious reputation for itself, marked by decades of westerners struggling to get their hands on a working copy of the game. And, remarkably, it kind of lives up to the hype. It's a really, really solid game. I'd say without a doubt that it's my favorite of what's retroactively been dubbed the "Classic-vania" games. Granted, I still prefer Symphony of the Night overall, but which one you think is the better game is probably just going to come down to whether you like the pure platforming or the Metroidvania loops more. Playing Rondo of Blood did make me yearn for Alucard's backdash, but the little flip that Richter can do is an acceptable substitute.
The game is designed to be tight. It really isn't that cruel or unfair, but enemies are balanced with a laser focus around Richter's specific set of abilities. I didn't wind up playing as Maria for long, because her increased range trivialized a lot of the encounters; most foes have an active danger zone of just a few pixels shorter than the tip of Richter's whip, and fights with them turn into a little dance of getting your hits in, backing off, going back in, and repeating until one of you dies. The hyper-committal jumps and massive endlag on your whip strikes forces precise play — as was established about a decade prior in the original Castlevania — but it never feels like it's demanding too much of the player. Many drops into pits that would have killed you in earlier titles instead often plop you down on a lower screen of the level, with secrets or progression hidden within. Rondo of Blood is strict, but it's fair. Shaft is harder to kill than Dracula.
The then-novel CD sound quality is incredible, the graphics are still crisp and pretty, and the gameplay is balanced on a knife's edge. There's not much here that I think anyone could feasibly dislike, aside from the fact that Richter can't act out of invincibility like his other family members. Getting hit once means you're probably going to get hit again, and it's a little too easy to spiral into an endless loop of getting juggled until you die. This is a minor gripe for a game that really isn't all that hard even with this inclusion, but I can see why some people would still prefer to have an extra tool like Super Castlevania IV's (massively overpowered) eight-way whip.
All told, it feels like Rondo of Blood could have been the direction that Castlevania could have kept going in if it had found greater success outside of Japan. Castlevania 64, despite its initially warm reception, has faced significantly greater scrutiny with every passing year. Symphony of the Night was a much more obvious runaway success, and remained the model for just about every subsequent Castlevania game until the Lords of Shadow titles came out. I've barely even scraped the surface of Rondo of Blood — I only played as Maria for a short while, I only found one of the hidden levels, and I never item crashed a single time because I didn't think that pressing the select button would do anything — so I feel confident in saying that I might come to enjoy this more the next time I come back to it.
Richter is incredibly cool. Simon who?
Rondo of Blood has managed to develop a legendary status among a lot of people who know about Castlevania. Not "legendary" in the way that Muhammad Ali or Jimi Hendrix were legendary, but "legendary" in the way that the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are legendary. There were decades after this game came out where nobody in the west played it. Barely anyone outside of Japan even owned a Turbografx-16 (which I'll maintain is because the name PC Engine is better), and even fewer owned the $399.99 USD CD-ROM attachment that came without any bundled games. Fewer still would have been able to import the game from Japan, and fewer than that would have actually known enough Japanese to figure out what the fuck Richter Belmont's deal was.
But the allure of Japan-only releases has been around since long before the Lost Decade hit, and it was bound to breach containment eventually. Dracula X wasn't going to satisfy the masses for long, and if they weren't going to get an official release, then that wasn't going to stop them from playing it. Getting Rondo of Blood set up is trivial today, with a deluge of modern emulation options and Konami-approved channels you can buy it from. For a while, though, Rondo of Blood was locked exclusively to western fans who had copies of Mednafen and whatever .bin and .cue files they could scrape from the internet. While The Dracula X Chronicles did release in 2007, the original Rondo of Blood was an unlock that you got for beating the remake, and it suffered from awful audio sync issues. Konami still wasn't selling an acceptable version of the game anywhere outside of Japan after fifteen years of waiting.
All of this has led to Rondo of Blood building a serious reputation for itself, marked by decades of westerners struggling to get their hands on a working copy of the game. And, remarkably, it kind of lives up to the hype. It's a really, really solid game. I'd say without a doubt that it's my favorite of what's retroactively been dubbed the "Classic-vania" games. Granted, I still prefer Symphony of the Night overall, but which one you think is the better game is probably just going to come down to whether you like the pure platforming or the Metroidvania loops more. Playing Rondo of Blood did make me yearn for Alucard's backdash, but the little flip that Richter can do is an acceptable substitute.
The game is designed to be tight. It really isn't that cruel or unfair, but enemies are balanced with a laser focus around Richter's specific set of abilities. I didn't wind up playing as Maria for long, because her increased range trivialized a lot of the encounters; most foes have an active danger zone of just a few pixels shorter than the tip of Richter's whip, and fights with them turn into a little dance of getting your hits in, backing off, going back in, and repeating until one of you dies. The hyper-committal jumps and massive endlag on your whip strikes forces precise play — as was established about a decade prior in the original Castlevania — but it never feels like it's demanding too much of the player. Many drops into pits that would have killed you in earlier titles instead often plop you down on a lower screen of the level, with secrets or progression hidden within. Rondo of Blood is strict, but it's fair. Shaft is harder to kill than Dracula.
The then-novel CD sound quality is incredible, the graphics are still crisp and pretty, and the gameplay is balanced on a knife's edge. There's not much here that I think anyone could feasibly dislike, aside from the fact that Richter can't act out of invincibility like his other family members. Getting hit once means you're probably going to get hit again, and it's a little too easy to spiral into an endless loop of getting juggled until you die. This is a minor gripe for a game that really isn't all that hard even with this inclusion, but I can see why some people would still prefer to have an extra tool like Super Castlevania IV's (massively overpowered) eight-way whip.
All told, it feels like Rondo of Blood could have been the direction that Castlevania could have kept going in if it had found greater success outside of Japan. Castlevania 64, despite its initially warm reception, has faced significantly greater scrutiny with every passing year. Symphony of the Night was a much more obvious runaway success, and remained the model for just about every subsequent Castlevania game until the Lords of Shadow titles came out. I've barely even scraped the surface of Rondo of Blood — I only played as Maria for a short while, I only found one of the hidden levels, and I never item crashed a single time because I didn't think that pressing the select button would do anything — so I feel confident in saying that I might come to enjoy this more the next time I come back to it.
Richter is incredibly cool. Simon who?