Okay so here we are, the era of sixteen bit Castlevania experimentation is complete, three games on three consoles, each with a markedly different philosophy on what they’re trying to accomplish. If Super IV is a reimagining of the original Castlevania that recreates the vision of that game with new ideas and new possibilities, and Rondo of Blood is a successor to the original style of Castlevania that only utilizes the new hardware for style while essentially keeping the spirit of the originals intact, then Bloodlines seems to really embrace the fact that it’s entirely unburdened by legacy and just get a little wild with it. We’re left with something that’s still very obviously Castlevania, just looking and sounding and feeling a little different than usual in a way that’s been reserved for handhelds and remakes and spinoffs so far and honestly? Tbh?? It rules dude this game absolutely owns.

We’ve advanced far enough along the timeline now that we are just fully in the twentieth century, and which means that this game has to reckon with both the fact that the novel Bram Stoker’s Dracula has happened and that the first World War is ongoing. Wait did I say “has to” because actually they didn’t have to do either of those things at all but DO they? Yes. So, gone are the Belmonts, who do have some sort of descendant here but he’s a gigantic buff American with the biggest shoulders and funniest walk cycle I’ve ever seen named John Morris who is presumably not directly of Richter’s line (Richter stays losing, poor guy). Also present is John’s best friend Eric Lecarde who fights with a spear (my personal favorite Video Game Weapon Archetype) and is a trans icon, definitely taking her estrogen, excited to find out what name she chooses. This pair of fucking knucklehead losers evidently...saw? The climax of Dracula? The Book? Maybe the Coppola movie? That was out a couple years before this. I would use it as the basis for my hardcore edgy vampire game too, that movie is unbelievably cool. I dunno so they saw Dracula get dusted in 1897 and now it’s 1917 and his NIECE who is also an evil vampire and a sorceress is trying to revive him early by CAUSING WORLD WAR ONE and generating enough Bad Vibes all over the continent to rehydrate Dracula early. So our heroes trek across a nightmarish hell version of Europe to go kill her. Does this, like? Are you reading this shit. It’s so cool. It’s also incredibly funny to me that this woman, she’s called Elizabeth Bartlet but she’s very clearly based on Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian noblewoman from like the 1500s or something who MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN but probably actually wasn’t a prolific serial killer, who, after her death, became an international subject of myths and folk tales about how she would kill girls and drink their blood and shit. It’s funny to me that the devs of this game were like “are there any other historical figures associated with vampire stuff who we could turn into real cartoon vampires in our video games? Oh yeah just one? Fuck yeah dude hell yeah let’s go” like yeah guys go for it this rules she killed millions of people and turned the leaning tower of Pisa into fuckin nightmare tower sure.

It’s just such a different tone, even as it hits all the formal beats and nothing in the game is SO far removed from anything we’ve seen previously. All the small stuff adds up. We’re on the Sega Genesis and there’s such a fuckin Genesis-y vibe to the whole thing, particularly the way there is suddenly a TON of gore. We’re not censoring shit over here like over on your fuckin Nintendo Baby Box Goo Goo no sir, we’ve got as much goofy cartoon blood as you could possibly ask for. It’s still schlocky and haunted housey, it’s just the kind you see on midnight block horror movies or the kinds of haunted houses you don’t take eight year olds to now. It’s great! Less great are some of the visual tricks used, with the mind-bending screen cutouts in the evil late game hallway certainly less offensive than the genuinely cool mode 7 stuff that Super IV was doing or the simple but effective parallax and color usage of the Rondo on the PC Engine. Still though, the game looks good when it’s sticking to fundamentals, and the setting of a continental trek leads to a lot of jaw dropping vistas you just can’t find in other Castlevanias so far; the highlights for me being the aforementioned Evil Tower of Pisa and the long trek across a jewel-toned lake at sunset, scrabbling over ruins as the cool, supernaturally flat water bobbed up and down beneath my feet.

The other way it FEELS like we’re on the Genesis is just like, how it plays. We look more like the kind of arcadey brawlers that were at home on this console and we play more like them too. John and Eric move a little faster than their ancestors did, and they’re more maneuverable in general. Platforming isn’t nearly as forgiving as it is in Super IV but there’s way less emphasis on it than there’s ever been before in the series. Instead you’re bombarded with enemies almost nonstop; this is a game of combat attrition and reflexes, and fittingly both characters are kitted in interesting ways to make that focus both fresh and challenging. John doesn’t have the full Super IV moveset but he can attack diagonally, while Eric has more reach and a jump attack but can’t aim in diagonal directions or make quick back attacks. OBVIOUSLY I played as Eric partly because I immediately found a true kindred spirit (spear, extremely gay, obviously trans) and partly because I just took some variety from Whip Guy when it was offered to me! But the game is easily completable with both of them and their stylistic differences do make that second run interesting as you adapt to the feel of the second character, which is truly and meaningfully different beyond just having a different special attack.

So I dunno man! I dunno how much more there is to say, I feel like this game has really frazzled me, this game is ridiculous. It feels ridiculous to play, slaughtering your way through a munitions factory full of German zombies and then stomping through a fountain that’s creating skeletons out of blood outside the palace of Versailles! On your way to go stab Dracula’s serial killer niece through the chest! Death makes you do a tarot themed boss rush! It just rules. Nothing else to it really. All of these three experiments in what Castlevania IS and what is CAN be have been really successful I think, even the one I didn’t like personally very much. Even if I were to stop playing through these right here I think this would be a really rewarding journey, a really interesting look into the way these kinds of things can evolve. So many what ifs happening in this period and like I know Symphony is next, I know everything is about to change and, to some degree, homogenize. I’m just glad we got something like Bloodlines before it did.

PREVIOUSLY: RONDO OF BLOOD

NEXT TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

the discomfort zone got too comfortable so we made the comfort zone discomfortable. samus: meet samus

where super dove uncritically into the power fantasy that metroid II (the game with a literal Genocide Counter in the UI) unmasked and deflated, this feels like it's turning it inward against you personally. Your body, Your likeness, and Your autonomy hijacked; Your celebratory past tense role as (repeated) casual annihilationist to reckon with and cower from

it operates as something of a Super Negative Image Metroid: an inversion right down to the uncomfortable, choking grip of the direction. all that clammy ADAMsplaining, those sequestered zones, the redline urgency; everything's dialed perfectly into the exact same channel with uniform intent. even the woozy alien psychedelia's been spirited away in favour of clinical, detached interiors and astroturfed xerox biomes with some of the most appropriately sterile Oops No Backlight lighting on the GBA

and no, it obviously doesn't accomplish the same things as its predecessors, but it's not attempting to. this is a game about lack of control, and altering the format would be akin to breaking the spinal column that holds it upright. fusion's big successes (the pacing, brevity, tonal and thematic consonance, and delicate curation of tension and challenge) are the result of its structural changes. being shunted around a tiny sarcophagus isn't a flaw, it's the entire premise. duh

even without all that though it's impossible for me not to love a game with nightmare, the Profaned Baja Blast Suit, AQA's sunken banger, shots like this, and those absolutely psychotic ridley screams

quite possibly the best SA-X heavy fusion since the sultry sounds of steely dan

"sonic had a rough transition into 3d"

cool, weird-ass game that proudly wears its status as sega flexing its shit on the previous gen right upon its sleeve. the monolithic status this game has in the fandom and the historical context of sonic as an entity is pretty interesting to me considering there really isn't that much to it - ten solid sonic levels and then little fragments that more or less exist to flaunt the possibilities of the dreamcast and what all sega was capable of at that point. i'm really endeared by games of this era that were chock full of weird side content and minigames just to show what the fresh hardware was capable of (final fantasy x also comes to mind), and sonic adventure is maybe nothing BUT that. combine that with its weird atmosphere and bizarre, campy writing and it fits right up there with the pantheon of Weird PSX JRPGs of '99.

speaking of writing - i was surprised on a playthrough how this game basically doesn't have a story so much as it has a bunch of isolated events that happen in proximity to one another in an arbitrary and sort of staggered fashion. sonic's story may be the main draw here in terms of gameplay (and clearly the star of the show in general; he's the only one of the stories you can't knock out in an hour tops) but it's also the story where pretty much nothing of note happens. honestly as cute as tails and amy's little mini-character-arcs are the only story worth writing home about here is gamma's, which i still find really poignant and thought-provoking even as an adult... something fatalistic and genuinely dark about this power-hour of pathos, even in comparison to the really dire places that sonic adventure 2's writings and greater themes go. honestly gamma's just the best part of the game in general, between his story, his variant of hot shelter easily being the best level in the game, and the boss fight against beta being one of the game's very best. kinda wish i cared for drakengard 3 at all because i would KILL for a version of his general plot pitch that's not written for children

can't help but feel like some of these little stories deserved a bit more time in the oven; gamma's shooting gameplay and knuckles' hunting were both eventually expanded upon in SA2 but i really like the "puzzle platformer where the female protagonist has to avoid a creepy stalker" idea with amy's gameplay and how tails' levels take sonic's ethos of playing as little of the level as possible to their natural extreme... such a shame their stories take about 11 minutes apiece to complete.

definitely not as polished, focused, effortless or full of finesse as sonic adventure 2, but honestly i don't think being less Good in one linear direction makes it Bad in the opposite linear direction either. sonic adventure is a strange, curious, funky little game, and it's lovely for it.

the discrepancy between top banana's advertised aesthetic, signified by its cover art, and the manifestly psychedelic artwork reflected within is ferociously disorienting. ive never felt such abrasive whiplash, anticipating a rote and teed-up but hamfistedly executed platformer and getting instead what can only be described as environmental rave horror.

im pretty happy to walk into games knowing next to nothing these days, people love inadvertently ruining the joy of discovery online nowadays. i sat there for half an hour, adjusting the settings of my amiga emulator, trying to get this damn thing to work with no knowledge of the games mechanics or stylings. for a time i was accompanied only by the lovingly recreated whirring and chugging of the amiga emulator reading my floppy disk files, presumably orchestrated so as to reflect the sounds an actual amiga might make. we're segued into the game with a loop of a music video entitled 'Global Chaos' featuring protagonist KT, and then momentarily halted by copy-protection as the game asks us to use a specific word from the game's manual as passcode. following this, the player is unceremoniously thrust into the game proper and finds they must contend with an arcane control scheme. z moves left, x moves right, the enter key fires hearts, the quote key jumps, and the / key will stop jump momentum at any interval, bringing you down to a platform.

according to the manual, top banana's world is facing calamity: "not from slimy aliens or evil wizards but from direct consequences of our own greed and stupidity." in plainer terms, corresponding to the systems of the game itself, the manual lets us know the goal is simple: reach the top of the stage, prove your skill and courage in the material world, and become the top banana after seeking ultimate wisdom in the Mind-Scape. along the way you navigate perilous floods and you vanquish foes, among them bulldozers and emaciated individuals, with the power of love, akin to an off-kilter love-de-lic experience. it would be a straightforward endeavour were it not for some frankly eerie sound design, evocative of silent hill and siren, setting the tone for the experience. note that i wouldnt make that comparison lightly. this is compounded further by some genuinely eye-straining and cluttered visuals.

and this is where my interests in top banana as an ineffectual and rudimentary, but otherwise somewhat functional platformer end and my interest in top banana as an aesthetic experience begin, something of a vulgar, perverse mother 3. because it's clearly not up to snuff as an arcade platformer - controls are slippery, the ruleset is abundantly unclear, visuals are sometimes indecipherable, the effects of powerups are very rarely beneficial - despite being obsequious to the general rule of thumbs for a variety of very difficult arcade platformers, ie directing the player to adhere to a strict choreography in order to progress effectively. but it is, in many ways, something of a forward-thinking experience that could only have been constructed by a multimedia collective, not fully dedicated to games but instead interested in their form, structure, and conveyance. a lot of the spritework and textures in top banana wouldn't feel too out of place in something from jack king-spooner's body of work (like a boss that's a cross between a police helmet and a spider), with the claustrophobia of its platforming feeling not dissimilar from itch.io works, or something like problem attic. and obviously the sound design is very much worth mentioning too, with its rainforest stages all sounding like a turbulent mix of either raging fires in the distance or generic jungle ambience; the mind can't quite decide initially. all told, the game's environmentalist journey has you traverse hollowed-out industrial cities, crumbling religious temples, and a "psychedelic hip-house", the haze and splendor of a mind flayed, as you fight against your "fears, dreams, and illusions". kind of earnestly bleak stuff, kicking you back to the starting point ghosts n goblins style, without any felt impact on the world or its inhabitants but instead jeering and laughing from the game itself. love, self-actualization and self-prioritization, and spiritual enlightenment aren't enough in the face of the world's evils, it seems.

i also think it's noteworthy that it takes its environmentalist bent to the furthest extent it can, releasing with environmentally friendly packaging and even allowing for a supposed large breadth of freedom with regards to editing sprites and sound, kind of riffing on that sustainability. put your money where your mouth is and all that, serves as a nice implicit acknowledgment this medium is a nightmare wrt exploitation of environment

it's really quite fascinating playing something that feels modern in sensibilities and tone with relation to the medium, despite releasing into a media zeitgeist already dominated by themes of environmental preservation as it relates to encroaching technological advancement (with even dinosaurs ending with its cast confronting corporate-engineered apocalypse). no doubt in my mind rainbow islands is the better game but there's something about this games tailored spitefulness im enamored with. it's cynical and cruel, i kind of love it. KICK IT TO EM.

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