It makes me so mad that they kept the mechanic from the NES games where you can’t drop back down in a level. Once you climb up somewhere, if something knocks you off a ledge— which happens OFTEN— you are dead, even if you KNOW there is ground RIGHT THERE, because you were literally just on it. It’s just slightly offscreen! ahhhhh. Enraging.

In general, the platforming in Super Castlevania IV is brittle and terrible-feeling—spikes with giant hitboxes will one-hit-kill you, you have to make these awkward jumps onto the itty bitty corners of ledges all the time, your jumps are often interrupted by some obstacle above you and you die, etc etc. All of that might be acceptable in an NES game, but in the 16-bit generation, it feels like a pretty massive failure to evolve.

However—whippin stuff is fun. The free-swingin chain is especially neat. Though, it sometimes feels as though the game was designed NOT with an all-directional whip in mind, and like that was only implemented late in development… because there are so many enemies you can just whip to death from below super easily, and it feels a bit odd/broken.

Not that the game isn’t difficult. It is. It made me very mad, a lot. Luckily it’s nice enough to give checkpoints and infinite continues and passwords, so I did end up making it to the end— though, I didn’t beat Dracula.

My big problem with Super Castlevania IV, other than the oft-critiqued platforming, is that, for my money, the Castlevania series is all about bops, tunes, jams—and this doesn’t have any. The music is shockingly ineffectual, considering how outright delightful and immediately grabbing the NES soundtracks were.

Overall, I guess it was fun enough… but it just didn’t quite learn the right lessons from the older games. It feels stuck right alongside them, to me, instead of being the entry that pushed the series into the future, as it perhaps wanted to be, and should’ve been.

Reviewed on Jan 09, 2022


2 Comments


2 years ago

Love the hell out of this game unconditionally and yet I was with you on all these fair points,,,,, right up until the part about the music

2 years ago

Haha I’ll concede it got better as the game went on and I was ALMOST jamming to the song as you climb the tower to the final bosses.