This is a game I got ages ago for free via Twitch Prime, and it's just been languishing in my Twitch game library ever since (like so many other games :b). But this month's TR being point and click stuff gave me the perfect excuse to try it out (after Ack gave me the go-ahead that it counted as a horror game enough for the TR, at least X3). I've never played many point and clicks, let alone LucasArts ones, but I've watched a few be played. I got sorta stuck a few times, but only had to look up one thing (and I felt a bit silly once I had, since I really should've realized what I had to do there XP), and it took me around six and a half hours to beat the game.
Day of the Tentacle is a sequel to Maniac Mansion, with Bernard from that game getting a letter in the mail from Green Tentacle that Purple Tentacle has mutated and is trying to take over the world. Bernard and is friends Hoagie and Laverne journey from their college dorm back to Dr. Fred's mansion to try and help Green Tentacle, but all they do is let Purple Tentacle loose. Dr. Fred tries to use his time machine to go back in time to the previous day to keep Purple Tentacle from turning evil, but the cheap diamond in his time machine breaks, throwing Hoagie 200 years into the past, Laverne 200 years into the future, and Bernard is stuck in the present with Dr. Fred. Even for a LucasArts game, this is a pretty darn strange game, but it's also quite a funny one. There were plenty of times I got a really good laugh out of just how funny the dialogue is. There's some humor that's aged fairly poorly (an instance of homophobia here and there and a fair amount of ableist jokes as well), but it's a far more tolerable amount than in something like Sam & Max: Hit the Road, for example. As far as comedy games from the 90's go, I think Day of the Tentacle is probably about as well-aged as you're gonna possibly get XD The mechanics of the game are a point and click adventure game, and there's really nothing too special about it in that regard. The main gimmick of the game is the three characters being stuck in the three time periods, and you can send small (or rather, whatever the game decides is "small" enough) inanimate objects between the time machines between each person to help someone out in a different time period. It's a bit of a pain to go back to the time machine constantly if you're stuck and just throwing items back and forth, but it isn't the worst thing in the world. The game also has a lot of cases where you'll use an item for the last time, but that item doesn't get consumed, so you just have a seemingly still useful item in your inventory (and there are a few items that are entirely useless red herrings, so far as I could tell). All that said, out of all the 90's point'n'clicks I've played or watched, this easily has the least moon logic out of all of them. This is a game that is very completable without using a guide, and that's honestly one of the best things about it aside from the good writing. The remaster has the original graphics/UI and the new remastered graphics/UI that you can switch between at any time via the settings menu. In the remastered UI, you don't have all the commands on the lower screen, but instead if you right click on an object, the possible interactions you can do with it appear on a scroll wheel that you can choose from. The item list will also automatically hide below the screen and it'll pop up by mousing over the lower left corner. It's a really nice way to improve the UI and make the whole game just that much more convenient to play. The music and VA is also all great and sounds nice in the remastered stuff. The music is very fun, and has a happy vibe to it that really reminds me of something like Banjo Kazooie. What is NOT nice about the remaster is that it runs like absolute trash (and while my PC isn't a behemoth, it ain't no slouch in terms of power). It almost feels like they old engine is simply making the new parts work on my Windows 10 PC, because there was a ton of mouse lag and even lagging audio clips. It seemed to get better if I shut down the game and booted it back up again, but it still felt baffling that a remaster of a game this old still runs this badly. Edit: A lot of the gameplay lagging (although I'm not so sure about the audio lagging, as I think that's just the emulation) was due to faulty drivers on my end. Definitely sucks to find that out so much later, but good to know it wasn't the game's fault~ Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I haven't played that many old point and clicks, I think this one has aged fantastically. From the humor that is still for the most part palatable to modern sensibilities to the almost complete lack of moon logic, this is an excellent game to pick up if you want a taste of that old 90's point'n'click fun without all the bull crap frustration that goes along with them (at least if you can get past how it runs).
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This is a game I read about in Nintendo Power yeaaars ago that at the time was only available in Japanese and the author writing about it hoped would eventually get an English release in some form. Well, it never did, and now that the Wii Shop Channel is gone forever, you technically can't even buy this game anymore (although from what I understand, emulated solutions are possible through some means). A Super Mario Bros. parody made by Sega, it was something really weird and neat-looking to me, and I finally jumped on it when I bought a ton of stuff on the Wii Shop Channel before it went away a couple years ago. I can certainly see why it never got an English release, but I still had fun in the hour it took me to beat it on stream earlier today.
Pole's Big Adventure is the story about the titular character going through six worlds to save his lady love Sharon from the evil bull-like antagonist who has kidnapped her. In five of the six worlds, Sharon is just some poorly disguised enemy character instead of the real thing, and you must go to yet another location to save her. It's all very tongue-in-cheek parody of Mario Brothers mechanically, but stylistically it's also a very loving parody of Famicom games in general. Mechanically, it's a very standard 2D platformer somewhat reminiscent of Super Mario Bros., but not by much. You can jump, sure, but you don't get any kind of health powerups, and you don't jump on enemies, you shoot them with your shotgun XD. The main gimmick of the game is that it's presented somewhat like a Japanese variety show. Lots of silly, parodical things will happen to Pole and he'll loudly complain about them in a heavy Osaka accent, and the words he's saying appear on the screen in big blocky letters (just like on a variety show). It adds a fun layer on top of the parody already there, and a lot of those jokes (or "neta") are hidden quite well. The game even has a gallery where you can view neta you've found, and it even has a counter in the lower right to count the total you've found in the game. The game even has a world select feature, so going through the game to try and catch all the neta is absolutely the intended gameplay loop if you're gonna spend more time with this game than the hour or so it takes to beat it the first time (as it's not a terribly hard game). Presentation-wise, it's quite a nice-looking game. The graphics are bright, colorful, and Famicom-y. The animations are a little too smooth to be the real thing, but out of all of the retro-style platformers in last decade and a bit, this one is definitely more on the end of looking like an actual Famicom game. The music is also really nice too. There aren't many tracks, but what's here is pretty boppin'. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Given that to play it now you'd NEED to get it for free, the original 1000-ish yen price tag doesn't really factor in here. The bigger hesitation I have is that you don't NEED to know Japanese to play through the game, but Pole's quips are really one of the main reasons you're showing up. If you can't understand those, you can still appreciate the visual jokes (some of which are even graphical glitches like an old Famicom game would have), but the rest of the humor will remain quite inaccessible. If you're fine with missing that or you can understand the Japanese, then this is a game that may be short, but it's definitely sweet as well. I adore both Nier and its sequel Nier: Automata. When I first completed Nier years ago, I attempted to play through its director Yoko Taro's first big game Drakengard and was pretty firmly not impressed. After finishing and adoring Nier: Automata earlier this year, I decided to give Drakengard (or as it's known in Japanese "Drag-On Dragoon) another try to see what people see about this game. Like Nier, Drakengard has multiple endings and they're certainly all intended to be played through, and up until even after completing the first ending of Drakengard I was really unimpressed and frustrated with my time with it. However, as I went on to see the other endings and content (as the completion percentage in the lower right is keen to inform you, more than half of the game is still waiting for you after you see ending A), I began to respect Drakengard more and more as a game and as a work of fiction. It took me just about 24 hours to get all five endings in the Japanese version of the game. Before the review beings properly, I want to clarify that while I won't get into any discussions that require content warnings in this review (and hoo boy does Drakengard need them), I will be getting into some fairly heavy spoilers for the game in my discussion of the themes it presents.
Drakengard is the story of Caim, a soldier and prince of the allied army, and the red dragon he has formed a pact with. Despite Caim's hatred of dragons (an imperial dragon killed his parents) and the dragon's general detest for humans, they form a pact between their souls to save their own lives when they're both on the brink of death. Caim and his dragon go on to fight the imperial army headed by an evil empress bent on destroying the world by killing Caim's big sister who is also a goddess that acts as a seal against the aforementioned world destruction. The story itself is somewhat complicated on paper as far as characters, motivations, and places go, but the particulars aren't really important. Most characters in Drakengard don't really change over the course of the story, and this is a game whose message is much more about its themes than the story itself, but we'll get back to that later. First we need to mention the actual gameplay of Drakengard. Drakengard as a project started out as something to capitalize on the success of the Dynasty Warriors (aka "Musou") series, which is why Drakengard has big fields of enemies for you to tear down hundreds of. However, midway through its development, it was also decided that it would also be prudent to make Drakengard a vehicle to ALSO jump onto the popularity of the Ace Combat series, which is why Drakengard also has the aerial combat sections on the dragon. Neither of these sections are particularly impressive in and of themselves, and honestly both somewhat work against each other on a more fundamental mechanical level. The most solid parts overall are the air missions where you have your dragon and can fly around the skies defeating targets. It can be a bit overly difficult to maneuver at times and when characters talk mid-mission they cover up your enemy radar (very annoyingly), but overall these are far more like the simplicity of Star Fox's flying missions than something more technical than Ace Combat. You have a normal breath attack, a homing attack, and a super magic attack as well as the ability to zoom to the right or left to avoid incoming fire. They're quick, breezy, and a little annoying with how you can sometimes get overwhelmed, but they overall work fine. The on-ground sections are very Musou-like, with you going around and slicing up tons of enemies trying to kill targets to win that particular mission. You have a normal attack, a magic attack you can do if you have enough mana from killing enemies, and a combo super you can do by pressing the button for your magic attack mid-combo (which yes, results in a lot of whiffed magic uses when you meant to do your combo super). You also, quite usefully, have a ground dodge just like the dragon has side-dashes in the air. There are also new weapons scattered throughout the game that you can get to allow you access to new combos as well as new magic spells to fling around. The ground combat is where most of the outright faults with the game mechanically derive from, however. Very annoyingly, your camera is also the same as in the sky. Turning the right stick just makes you look in that direction temporarily. It doesn't actually properly turn the camera. It turns it like you're looking left and right in a cockpit like in Ace Combat. This is all well and fine for the flying sections, but it is not welcome at ALL in the ground sections, and the only way to refocus the camera is by holding the block button. This was likely a compromise made due to how you can also summon your dragon to fly on during the on-ground missions, but it's still one I could've easily done without. The new weapons are also not very fun either, ultimately. Despite there being 65 of them, most of them require some real sleuthing or dumb luck to find without a guide, with many being locked behind killing specific enemies, taking specific paths, beating certain enemies or levels within time limits, or even just waiting around as long as 25 whole minutes for the chest to just spawn on its own. Just to top that whole mess off, none of these secrets are communicated to the player in any way shape or form. You aren't even told which verses (segments of chapters) have weapons remaining in them to find. To make matters even worse, you can't even really properly use a weapon when you first find it. Caim and the dragon both level up, but Caim's levels only affect his and the dragon's shared max HP, and the dragon's levels only affect the dragon's attack power. Weapon attack is entirely down to the level of the weapon, and weapons don't really have much of a power creep, and you can't really know how powerful a weapon will be until you level it up. This means every time you want to try out a new weapon to really get use out of in the story, you'll need to grind for like half an hour in earlier stages to get it to max level so THEN you can start really getting a feel for it. HOWEVER, as bad as ALL that sounds (and is), I would argue that a significant portion of it is actually in the positive service of the game as a whole. Drakengard's endings progressively make the narrative get to worse and worse places. Arguably, the first ending you get is the "good" ending for the story, as it's certainly the happiest outcome for everyone involved. Caim's priest ally even posits whether the "gods" have decided to spare [humanity]. As you go towards further and further endings, playing more and more of the game, you see more and more just how monstrous all the characters, Caim included, are. The further endings all progressively doom the world to differing but all worse fates, with the final ending opening up a portal to modern day Tokyo (and, given that that is the inciting plot incident for Nier's canon, you could argue it ends up destroying all of the real world's humanity). Drakengard is ultimately a game that is trying to comment on how players interact with games and particularly the narratives within them in relation to the gameplay. When you enter the portal in ending E to the real world's Tokyo, the dragon remarks that you've entered the world of the "gods". When the priest asks in ending A if the gods have decided to spare them, he isn't referring to unknowable gods of his world. He's referring to you, the player, and all of us in our own world. Much like Undertale would get so much praise for more than a decade later, we, the player, will decide if we spare them and their world by stopping at our first ending and not continuing as we are prompted to. Getting ending E requires going through the monotonous task of collecting all 65 weapons in the game. It is an extremely deliberate act that takes no small amount of time (I'd say it's easily more than a third of the game's completion time), and the final rhythm game-like boss battle of that ending is also very difficult. The player is REALLY committing to this destruction all in the sake of completing a game, and Drakengard wants us to ponder the morality of that in the context of its narrative. I think something like Undertale achieves this a bit more successfully, but I can't say that I didn't leave Drakengard impressed with the message it tries to tell with what could otherwise come off as just a quite dark (for a video game, certainly) medieval fantasy story. Presentation-wise, Drakengard is a bit of an odd mixed bag. Visually, it's quite a nice-looking game for 2003, with the CGI cutscenes (particularly of the later endings) looking very nice even today. The ground enemy designs are a bit uninteresting, but the flying enemy designs are generally really cool (they feel far more Nier-like), and once you get to the giant babies borne from space at the end of the game, it just gets to plain nightmare fuel territory. The music is really weird, being remixes of pieces of classical music. From what I've read about it, they were apparently deliberately put together to evoke the game's theme of "madness", and given how several of my friends who watched me play it over Discord described the music as "brain melting", I think they achieved their goals XD. As a final note, while I remember the English VA being fairly dire, I thought the Japanese VA was really good, although I don't believe any version of the game has any kind of language select option, unfortunately. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. I really liked this game, but it will definitely not be for everyone. Drakengard is a game much more than the sum of its parts mechanically, and that will turn off a lot of people pretty quickly, and I also don't blame them for that. I think Drakengard is a fascinating and fairly bold attempt at creating a narrative in a video game for its budget in 2003, and I really respect it for that, but I also have the good sense to realize that that is SO not what many (or even most) people go to video games seeking. If what this review has described has piqued your interest, then I'd say it's probably worth hunting the game down and giving it a try. Drakengard is a game that most people will quickly dislike and for good reasons, but I think it will always be a game I have a certain fondness for. Growing up, I loved Sonic Adventure 2 on the Gamecube, and I played it all the time. However, the Gamecube DX port of the original Sonic Adventure was a game I rented several times back then, but never ended up finishing. With all the fun I had going back through Sonic Adventure 2 a month or two ago, I had been keeping my eyes out for a copy of the original game on Dreamcast, and I finally happened across one. It was then once I'd already spent my 300 yen on it that a friend asked me if I'd gotten the "fixed version" to which I responded "Fixed version? ^^;" XD. Turns out, Sonic Adventure had not one but two releases in Japan. One in 1998 at the launch of the Dreamcast, and another "International" version nine months later when the game launched in the rest of the world. From what I understand, this "unfixed" version isn't as buggy as the laser Gamecube port, but it does have some wonky cutscenes and, most importantly, an absolutely dire camera. All that said, I did this time what I couldn't do as a kid: I beat all six stories and even the secret one at the end, and it took me around 10 hours to do it.
Sonic Adventure is Sonic's first proper foray into 3D after the absence of any such game in the Saturn generation outside of the hub world of the Sonic Jam collection. Angel Island falls out of the sky one day after an attack by Eggman, and Station Square City is under attack by a mysterious watery entity known only as Chaos that appears to grow and evolve as it absorbs more chaos emeralds. You play through not just Sonic's path through these events, but also Tails', Knuckles', Amy's, as well as two new characters: Big the Cat's and Gamma the Robot's. They experience strange flashbacks to events far in the past that slowly elucidate Chaos' origins as well as those of an echidna civilization far gone. The story is a kind of weird space between serious and silly in a way the later games don't reach in quite the same way. Sonic's story is fairly standard "gonna save the world", but then you have Tails where he's learning that he doesn't need Sonic to be brave or be a hero and Gamma's story of destruction towards his fellow Eggman-built robots. You also have Amy's story which sort of results in "she helps emotionless characters feel emotions because girl = emotions and also she helps animals" and then there's Big's which is comically entirely about single-mindedly trying to save his friend Froggy, but warts and all there's a corny sincerity to it, and it makes for an experience I found quite memorable and charming. The game has a very interesting approach to how it constructs its six story campaigns. Sonic's levels are usually all about going from point A to point B through a stage, and he has ten stages in total. His campaign is by far the longest, and it took me about 3 hours in total to do (on a stream, for the record). Most of the other characters, however, have nearly no unique stages, and their stages are constructed in whole or in part out of bits from Sonic's stages. Each of their campaigns ends up coming in at about an hour (with the one exception being Big's stages, which I'll get to later). This would seem like a really awful over reuse of assets (and to a certain point it does feel that way sometimes), but they vary this up by giving each of the six characters different gameplay styles and control methods. They each have different jumps and movements speeds/momentums, but it's more than just that. Tails' missions are largely Sonic's missions (sometimes literally the same for the shooting side missions), but are otherwise made up of races against Sonic through more streamlined bits of his stages. Sonic's stages certainly weren't built for Tails and his flying (no mech suit in this game), but they're still modified a bit to accommodate him and they work out alright. Knuckles' levels are his famous "hunt the master emerald shards down" levels in more open areas of Sonic's levels, and the main difference they have to later games is that all emeralds are tracked at once, so you won't end up walking past one you simply weren't looking for yet. Gamma's stages are action-based and he plays a lot like Eggaman's and Tails' would in the sequel, where he has a targeting lock-on that he uses to kill enemies. The only catch here is that you have a countdown timer to finish the level, so you need those chain kills to get more time. Amy's are her running from an otherwise invincible robot chasing her, but they're nothing special than how awkwardly she controls compared to the rest. Big's stages, finally, are oddly enough a total shift in genre as you need to play fishing mini-games to catch his best friend Froggy after he runs away from Big's home once he accidentally eats a part of Chaos. One of this game's biggest black marks is not so much the gameplay conceits themselves but the level design as a whole. I've always maintained that the overworld the game gives you to go between levels is largely confusing more than it is good, but this level design problem extends far outside of that. It doesn't just feel like Sonic's levels weren't designed for Tails. They don't feel like they were really designed for Sonic either, quite frequently. Sonic moves very fast, of course, and the tons of tiny railways they have you walk across and otherwise common precision platforming are far more frustrating than fun. All the characters have this looseness to how they move that makes it feel like you're fighting against the game to walk precisely any time you want to do it (especially to pick up an object, as you often have to do), and that is all irrespective of the camera that plagues this version of the game (it constantly gets stuck on things and in walls and is generally a bad time). Then you have some campaigns that feel like total afterthoughts like Amy's who only has three levels to speak of and barely a story at all. The only character other than Knuckles whose stages feel all that special are Big's, and those are for the wrong reasons. Big's fishing mechanics, especially for Froggy, are utterly broken and arbitrary. Froggy will bite your line whenever he feels like it, and that is nearly never. The first level took me over an hour, with the second one taking me an hour and a half, with the third and fourth very mercifully taking eight and fifteen minutes respectively. His levels and just how awful they are are what kept me from completing the game as a kid, and if I didn't have my friends to suffer through this with me on Discord while I played it, they might've kept me from completing it this time too XD One thing this game does not skimp on, however, is the presentation. It's a very pretty game for the time, and even though some facial animations are hilariously broken-looking, they just add to the comedy and silliness of the whole thing. The Japanese voice acting is really nice, and all the characters manage to come across in ways that are appealing (as a side note, I really like this VA for Eggman's Japanese voice, especially over the guy they got to replace him in the games after this one). The music especially is fantastic. Although I'd say Sonic Adventure 2 has stronger vocal tracks, this game definitely has stronger instrumental tracks (with my personal favorite being the pinball stage). As a final note, while this game DOES have a Chao garden like the sequel has, I never really interacted with it much because the presentation of it is so unclear. You can collect rare Chao in the hub world and bring them back there, and you can also collect animals in levels to feed to them, but it is never super clear to what end you're doing that other than just to play with the Chao. It's a fine diversion for its time, but it's definitely not as user-friendly or as fleshed out as the sequel would make it. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. While I would maintain that Sonic Adventure 2 is still a fine game that has stood the test of time in many ways, I cannot say the same about its predecessor. Even outside of just how heckin' dire Big's levels are, the overall poor level design and looseness of the controls really makes this a difficult game to go back to these days. Sonic has had far better 3D outings than this since 1998, but if you really want a 3D Sonic game, you can certainly do a lot better than this, and you'll likely enjoy a decent enough amount of your time to feel justified with it if you can find it for cheap. The 8th game on the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, and also one which had its debut in the West via that collection, Kid Dracula is a bit of an odd title. Very much in the vein of games like Famicom Splatterhouse game or Konami's Parodius titles (in which Kid Dracula himself would later appear), Kid Dracula is a silly take on an existing property in a familiar but different genre. Getting away from the melee-action platforming the series is so familiar with and going for a Mega Man-style shooting platformer, Kid Dracula is a very oddball but still fun entry in the wider Castlevania series.
Kid Dracula is chilling in his castle one day when it's suddenly attacked by monsters under the control of the galactic conqueror Galamoth. Not one to take such things lying down, Dracula sets off to kick some invader butt. The only catch is that Dracula isn't the big, adult Dracula we're familiar with. He's just a little kid! Obviously a non-canon game in the series, the game nonetheless has an epilogue that says that Dracula's defeat of Galamoth gained him such popularity that more and more monsters flocked to his banner until he was the new lord of darkness, which makes this something of a parody origin story for Dracula XD. The presentation all around is very colorful and silly like this, having bright, pastel color and a super deformed style for the monsters present, it is a very cute game (particularly for the Castlevania series). The only really exceptional thing is that the music is really nothing to write home about. It isn't bad, just not what you'd hope for with a Castlevania game. The mechanics are very much like Mega Man more than they are Castlevania. Kid Dracula has a series of blaster-type powers he can use to fight enemies, and can even charge them for special effects (I think in-game they're spells he's casting). Upon beating a boss of a stage, you unlock a new power you can use, very much like Mega Man, however those powers very rarely (if ever) have any relation to the stage you just went through or the boss you just fought. You only get the special power of that weapon if you do a charge attack, so most of your time is spent with your weapon charged. The weapons also aren't dished out terribly balanced, with the homing shot you get for beating level 1 being one of the best weapons in the game. Several weapons aren't even weapons but platforming aids, letting you transform into a bat to fly or sticking to the ceiling. These are neat, but the execution isn't terribly inspired. The level design is fine, but the later levels get pretty brutal with checkpoints, as the final stage doesn't have them at all. The bosses range from a little frustrating to super easy, and the final boss is a good challenge too. The only real dangers in the last few levels of the game is the aforementioned lack of checkpoints and a particularly nasty vertical climbing section, but even then the levels aren't that long. I didn't even end up using save states for this one. It's not a terribly long game, only coming in at around 2 to 3 hours over eight stages, but it's a fine time and a fine challenge for what it is, even if it isn't terribly Castlevania-y. Verdict: Recommended. Kid Dracula isn't particularly amazing, but it's a very competent game and it's worth playing on the collection. The difficulty and overall design remind me a lot of Taito's Panic Restaurant or Konami's Biomiracle Bokutte Upa, where it's a silly, pastel-colored platformer, and the theme of this particular game just happens to be Castlevania's Dracula as a kid. It may not be the superior GameBoy sequel (whose absence on the Collection is quite odd, really), but it's still a fine game that will deliver a burst of retro platforming goodness, even if it's not ultimately that memorable. Over the past few days, I played through the other 7 games on the Castlevania Anniversary Collection as well as another Castlevania game I got on the Wii U Virtual Console. Rather than review them separately, one at a time in the order that I beat them, like I usually do, I thought it would be more fun and interesting to try something different. I'm going to write this singular massive post reviewing each in the order that they came out and in the context that they came out. I already was comparing the games to one another as I played them, so comparing them actively via writing to the past Castlevanias at the time sounded like an even more fun idea~. As a quick note before I properly begin, I will clarify that because Belmont's Revenge and Rondo of Blood already have proper reviews on the site, I'm not going to totally re-review them here. Additionally, Kid Dracula is a bit too different to really be worth comparing to other Castlevania games, so that'll get its own review at a later date. Lastly, all of these games are the Japanese versions unless specified otherwise.
Castlevania (Famicom) The game that started it all: Simon Belmont's quest to go to Castlevania and destroy Dracula. This is where so many foundational aspects of the classic games get their start, but it also definitely shows its age and has many marks of being a first attempt. This is a game I attempted to beat quite a lot as a kid, but I never could. Even this time I used save states quite a fair bit (more than almost any other of the games I'll write about here). I generally tried to use them only either before a very hard boss, or once I'd completed a section without getting hit (that was proof enough to me that it wasn't worth my time replaying it over and over). Simon Belmont has six stages of Castlevania to get through before Dracula, each of them with an increasingly difficult boss awaiting him at the end. He has his trusty whip which he can collect upgrades for (that reset when you lose a life) that make it longer and more damaging, and he can also pick up one subweapon at a time that can be used by holding up and pressing the attack button. It's a relatively simple formula, but it works pretty damn well. Other staples of the classic games get their start here too, such as your infamously very rigid jumps (no play control here) and the big knockback when you get hit. Simon has a very deliberate way to how he controls. From the jumping to the walking to the whipping, everything has a reliable animation that you need to really get used to if you're going to survive with it. Mistakes are not very often tolerated, and this is a game that really rewards knowing exactly what you're getting into so you can approach it in a way that you'll actually have a chance of surviving. On that note, I would say that the first Castlevania's biggest problem is that it falls into a design trap of "too hard to be fun" very often for me. The knockback is very unforgiving and frequently lands you down pits, constantly spawning medusa heads and bats are a constant danger to falling into pits as well, bosses are often very mobile and powerful while you are absolutely not, difficult gauntlets proceed nearly every boss, and so on. What I think makes this somewhat worse is how GOOD the holy water is. Most if not all of the bosses and enemies in the game can be absolutely destroyed if you manage to get holy water and a subweapon multiplier (to let you throw more than one at once) before you get to them, because holy water stun-locks not just normal enemies but bosses too as long as the fire burns them. This means that most bosses are either super difficult and punishing, or you know how to beat them and they're pushovers. I didn't realize it until I'd already beaten it, but the Japanese version of the game actually has an easy mode that makes you deal more damage, take no knockback, take less damage, and generally make the game far more forgiving, and that's something I wish I'd realized before I'd started the whole adventure XP One excellent trend that this game starts that continues through the whole series is nailing the presentation. It's a fairly early NES/FDS game (1986, but the Famicom version on the Anniversary Collection is the cart version of the FDS game released in 1993), but the music is excellent and the game looks really pretty. There's still sprite flicker and slowdown from time to time, but it's often not frequent enough to really impact gameplay all that much. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is definitely one of the games in the series that I say most benefits from save states. The difficulty on particularly the Death and Dracula fights is just so brutal that even aside from how difficult their stages can be to get through, those save states will really come in as life savers for your patience. It may be an excellent action game for '86, but I don't think it's all that fun to play vanilla these days if completing the game is your end goal. ----- Castlevania (MSX) Released very shortly after the original Famicom Disk System release of the original Castlevania, "Vampire Killer", as it's also known, is an adaptation of the Famicom game made for the MSX home computer system. It's never been released outside of Japan, and this game also is the only one in this post not on the Anniversary Collection. This is one that I bought on the Japanese Wii U Virtual Console to play on Twitch, and I ended up beating it in a little over 2 hours in one sitting. While this will be uncannily familiar in many respects to anyone who has played the NES game, the MSX version of Castlevania is a completely different game in just about every respect. Some of that is down to the differences in the programming realities of building a game for the Famicom vs building one or the MSX, but there is a broader design philosophy that makes the bridge between the two far far wider. While still a stage-based linear game, MSX Castlevania is much more of an adventure game than its predecessor. In many ways, it's a kind of missing link between the first two Famicom game, and playing this explains a lot of why Castlevania II was just apparently an adventure game for no reason when the first entry was a straight-up action platformer. Some elements of this game are just like its Famicom counterpart. Your whip upgrades when you collect power ups and that power resets on death, there are six stages with generally the same bosses at the end of each, and you collect hearts as you go through the castle. However, there is a LOT here that is utterly alien to the original Castlevania experience. You have hearts to collect, sure, but they don't power your subweapons (not like the other games, at least). In fact, this game doesn't even have subweapons at all. You use these hearts at merchants in the castle to buy things like health refills, new weapons, maps of the areas you're in, or even a shield to block incoming projectiles. There are more weapons, yes, but they replace your old one. If you get the knives (which are REALLY good), they replace your whip, but you can throw those things infinitely and they take no ammo to fire. The only subweapons that are here are the holy water and stop watch, which are both very very finicky to use, and seemed to require jumping in the air and then holding up and then pressing B to actually use. I could never get them to work reliably. Additionally, each of the six stages are separated into three areas, and in each area you need to find a silver key to open up the gate at the end to access the next area. There are also normal keys to collect to open chests that hide everything from passive items to maps to just bundles of hearts you can use to buy stuff. The keys you need to progress are often hidden very well, and some are eventually even outright fakes or red herrings that are only there to try and get you to kill yourself trying to get them. That brings me to my ultimate gripe with this game. While the first Castlevania is difficult to the point of not being very fun, I wouldn't call it outright unfair more often than not. Its level design is unforgiving, absolutely, but it's never meanspirited. MSX Castlevania, on the other hand, is a VERY vindictive and unfair game. It is riddled with traps to kill you like the aforementioned false door keys, and that's not to mention the slimes that are hidden in ever so many candle sticks, the enemies that are so close to the edge of the screen that you cannot enter that screen without getting hit, or how if you miss the return on boomerang weapons like the axe or cross that weapon is just GONE and you have nothing but your weak default whip again. Even your map has limited uses for some inexplicable reason. And this is all on top of how this game has no continues, no passwords, and no extra lives. You have THREE whole lives to get through the entirety of a very labyrinthine Castlevania and kill Dracula with, and should you lose those lives, it's back to the start of the entire game for you. Thankfully, Simon is pretty beefy and he can take a lot of punishment, but even with save states it was pretty difficult at times to not die before getting to the bosses. The bosses, paradoxically enough, are super duper easy, but this mostly revolves around how this is an MSX game and not a Famicom game. Like most MSX games, the screen doesn't scroll with you as you move. Like in Zelda 1, when Simon gets to the edge of the screen, the next screen forms ahead of him as he transitions to it. It doesn't move along with you as you move like the Famicom version of Castlevania does. Another interesting thing is that, while Simon himself has a knockback SO huge that it actually knocks you farther than you can physically jump forwards, enemies themselves don't freeze upon being hit and have no invincibility frames at all. Simon can also whip his whip REALLY fast, so if you just get close to a boss, you can let it hit you, tank the hit and just lay into them while your invincibility frames keep you protected. While this is otherwise a very difficult game, the bosses are easily one of the least difficult aspects of it. This also has one of the easiest Dracula fights by far (at least if you buy the very cheap knife weapon being sold right near his boss door), although it does drag on and gets a little boring after a while. All that said, the most unfortunate thing about this being an MSX game is that the slowdown affects the gameplay far more than in the NES games, meaning there were a lot of times where the game simply didn't recognize an input because it was stuttering so badly and I ended up getting hit or dying as a result. As far as the presentation is concerned, it's still pretty decent. The music hardware of the MSX isn't exactly up to the standard the Famicom could produce, but they're still quite good renditions of the tracks from the Famicom game. The graphics are also good recreations of that, although I wouldn't say it's quite as pretty as the Famicom game. There are some quite odd aspects to the presentation though. Particularly, that not only is the epilogue to this Japan-exclusive game all in English, is also doesn't even call you Simon Belmont O_o Verdict: Not Recommended. I can say very safely that this is the worst Castlevania game I've ever played and almost certainly the worst in the series. It honestly wouldn't be quite so bad if it weren't for the lack of continues or extra lives, but even then it'd just be a below average adventure game. Even with save states, this game is really only ever worth playing if you're just THAT curious about how it fits into the overall evolution of the series, and even then, I'd advise just watching a playthrough on YouTube before spending any money on it (let alone 800 yen like I did XP). ----- Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES) While the Castlevania Anniversary Collection DID add all the Japanese versions of the games on it in a post-launch patch (the Japanese versions for the English release, and vice versa), the one exception to that is Castlevania II. I even bought the Japanese version of the game on the Japanese Switch eShop, and even THAT version just has the American NES game instead of the Famicom Disk System version of Castlevania II. Given that this is even more of an adventure game than the MSX game is, and therefore has a lot of text, it's easily the worst game you could possibly do that with if the intention is for Japanese players to be able to understand what they're playing XP. The only explanation I can think of to why they did this is that Konami just didn't want to bother getting Famicom Disk System games to work on their Famicom emulator, so they just slapped the NES version on there since, unlike Castlevania 1, no cart version of Castlevania II exists in Japanese. Weird version nonsense aside, despite this game's dire reputation, I was actually very pleasantly surprised by what it had to offer. In a weird turn (particularly for Westerners without access to the MSX game), Castlevania II is much more a successor to the MSX game than the Famicom game. Releasing the year after the first two games, Castlevania II is an action-adventure game through and through. Just like the MSX game, you have hearts not really to use subweapons, but to buy things from merchants. In an even more odd twist, those hearts also function as experience points that you will level up with to gain a larger max health bar. Unlike the MSX game, however, there's not a set of levels to go through, but a side-scrolling overworld connecting a series of towns and mansions to explore. This is the first time we start getting much any story in a Castlevania game as well. After Simon killed Dracula in the first game, he unwittingly was cursed by the vampire despite his victory. He now must go through five mansions around Transylvania to collect the remnants of Dracula and then bring those remains to Castle Dracula to destroy them to free himself from the curse once and for all. It's not much, but it's something, especially for a series that would eventually become much more narrative focused. Simon goes from town to town hunting for items, and these items take all variety of forms. Like the MSX game, you can buy subweapons, and some of those subweapons consume hearts but some do not. There are also items you'll need to progress through dangerous areas, as well as passive items to unlock secrets. Even Dracula's remains function as passives when selected, like Dracula's Rib being the return of the invaluable projectile-blocking shield from the MSX game. Most interestingly to me is how your whip can be upgraded to simply do more damage forever. The temporary upgrades of the past are gone, and now you can even get a really awesome flame whip if you REALLY wanna heck fools up. You're gonna need those better whips too, because this game works on a day/night cycle, and enemies get twice as tough at night time. This game has three endings, and you need to beat it within a certain amount of time (which is a pretty damn tight time frame, all things considered) if you want Simon to live through his quest. And that time limit comes down to the ultimate flaw with this game: signposting. Like so many other adventure games of the 8-bit era (even the Zeldas of the time aren't free from this design hurdle), the massive amount of time spent with the game will be wandering around utterly lost as you try and stumble into the next totally unexplained thing you need to do to progress. The combat and platforming in Simon's Quest aren't particularly hard, but what IS tough is just knowing where to go or how to progress in the first place. The times I did use save states were largely just to save time should I make a wrong turn or take a bad jump, and not usually for larger difficulty reasons. Simon's Quest in particular suffers from a pretty rough English translation that makes the information you ARE given that much more difficult to use in the first place. A guide is absolutely essential if you're going to make it through this game in any reasonable amount of time, let alone get anything other than the worst ending. Personally, I didn't use a guide for my first attempt, ended up totally hecked after accidentally skipping the first three mansions, and then started using a guide. I took a wrong turn near the end of the game and the time it took to recover from that still put me over the 8 day limit you need to beat in order to get the best ending, so all I got was the 2nd best ending XP The presentation and base mechanics of the game are both good improvements to the first game. You'll sometimes get framerate slowdown, but it's not too brutal or game affecting thankfully. This game polishes up Simon's movement a fair bit too. He moves just a bit faster, jumps a bit quicker, and whips a bit faster. It makes the whole thing feel a bit better to play than the first game, although the kind of action and platforming you're doing isn't exactly the same most of the time. This game also has some of the best music in the classic series, with the main theme, Bloody Tears, being one of the most iconic songs of the entire franchise. Verdict: Recommended. My recommendation here is largely on the condition that you'll use a guide. If you don't use a guide, then it's honestly largely on you for how frustrated you get being lost, because this game is a doozy of a game for how lost it makes you XP. As a relatively early Famicom adventure game, however, this is a really solid one. The difficulty almost never feels unreasonable, and it's a pretty good time to spend an evening trekking through if you know what you're doing. I was very pleasantly surprised by my time with Simon's Quest, and I'm looking forward to someday playing through the Japanese version so I can compare just how misleading the hints and information are in the original Japanese compared to the cryptic English text. ----- Castlevania: The Adventure (GB) 1989 brought us Castlevania's first foray into the portable space with Castlevania: The Adventure. Developed by a different team than the NES games, this is the story of Christopher Belmont's first quest to take down big ol' Dracula. This game has something of a bad reputation among those who have played it, and in my time with it I grew to find that its reputation is absolutely deserved. The Japanese version is almost identical to the International releases, so there really isn't anything to comment there (Switch port or no Switch port), so this game's faults are entirely its own, no matter the region you're playing them in. The story as its presented is pretty basic Castlevania fare of "Oh look there's Dracula, let's go kick his face in." Not a whole lot here other than an excuse to go out vampire-huntin', and who really needs more of an excuse than "he's here to destroy the world yet again"? The presentation as a whole is pretty sub-par, though. The music is fine and the graphics are alright, but the game runs VERY slowly when there's more than a few enemies on screen, and that's something that affects your ability to play the game significantly at times. Much like the MSX game, there were many times where Christopher just wouldn't do a quick turn or a whip I needed him to do simply because the game was slowing down so badly. That slowdown just compounds onto the game's already fairly mediocre design. This is a Castlevania game that is once again an action game (no adventure game aspects to find here), but it's a far more simple action game than even the first Famicom game. You have your upgradable whip, but other than that, you don't got nothin'. This game has no subweapons of any kind, and not even a fireball to whip out when you have your whip at max power. Then add in that your whip gets downgraded EVERY time you get hit, and you have the realization that you're gonna need to memorize these levels quite well if you want to have anything other than your base whip. The level design isn't MSX Castlevania-levels of vindictive, but a lot of it is just really uninspired. Like Belmont's Revenge (the second GameBoy game) would later do as well, this game eschews stairs for ropes to climb, but that's really the only "special" thing about it, if you can even call it that. The downgraded whip and a fair amount of really precise jumping sections really make this entry an unforgiving time in a way that has a lot of trouble finding a fun-factor, even with save states (and I only used save states in this one right before Dracula since stage 4 was so difficult I didn't wanna have to go through the whole thing again XP). The way the game slows down and speeds up can those jumping puzzles and dealing with enemies, particularly tougher ones, feel far more frustrating than it should be, and it makes the whole game feel like a slog. It's far from the toughest Castlevania game, with even the bosses not being terribly difficult (save for Dracula who's pretty tough but very learnable after a few tries), but that just never gets around the fact that this game just isn't terribly fun to play. Verdict: Not Recommended. If you ABSOLUTELY MUST have more Castlevania in your life, I can certainly recommend this game more than I can the MSX game, but I still think your time is better spent playing or replaying one of the other classic Castlevanias instead. It's more frustrating than fun, and on the whole pretty unmemorable outside of those most frustrating sections. I didn't despise the few hours I spent with this, but I certainly feel no need to ever repeat them again, and "I didn't totally hate it" is a pretty difficult watermark to recommend a game at in any regard XP ----- Castlevania III (Famicom) In a fairly hard pivot for the main Castlevania team back from Castlevania II, Castlevania III not only changes the era and the protagonist but also the genre back to being an action platformer. Being an action platformer is also where the series would stay for quite some time, as the same goes for the rest of the games in this post as well. Castlevania III also is a quite famously different game between its NES and Famicom versions, so for this game, probably more than any other on this list, it's important to keep in mind that I'm talking about the easier Famicom game rather than the much harder NES game. It took me about 3 or 4 hours to get through the game with marginal save state usage (mostly just before very hard bosses, especially before the second to last level's boss). This game follows Simon Belmont's ancestor Trevor (or as he's known in the Japanese version, Ralph) Belmont in his quest to travel through Transylvania to Dracula's castle to defeat him. Similar to Castlevania II, this is another game where the adventure doesn't start at Dracula's doorstep, but instead follows our hero from the Transylvanian hinterlands all the way to and through Dracula's domain. Trevor himself plays a lot like Simon does in Castlevania II. He has no inventory like that game (back to good old temporary whip upgrades and classic heart-ammo subweapons), but he still moves and whips a bit faster than Castlevania 1 Simon did. While this game may not be an adventure game like its predecessor, what it does have is a series of branching paths. The most important feature of these branching paths is not just to give you more ways than one to play the game, but also to lead you down optional roads to this game's other most important innovation on the previous games: extra playable characters. Along his journey through Transylvania, Trevor can meet three people turned into monsters by Dracula as stage bosses. Upon beating them, they will offer to join Trevor, but he can only have one companion at a time. These companions can be switched to at any time with the select button, and they each have their own unique attacks as well as often having their own unique subweapon set as well. First you have Grant the acrobat, then there's Sypha the witch, and finally you have Dracula's own son Alucard who is half-vampire and half-human. Alucard has a projectile attack and can turn into a bat, but he's generally considered the worst of the companions since his transformation is limited by your number of hearts, and flying isn't actually that useful. Sypha's normal attack isn't that great, but she has a slew of subweapons that turn most bosses to tissue paper if used properly. Finally you have Grant, who can not only jump higher and even change direction mid-jump (something no other character in the game can do and is a rare ability in the series as a whole), but he can also throw infinite knives. A very big change from the Japanese to the English releases of the games is that Grant was given a very short-range, weak melee knife in the English versions. This is in contrast to his normal weapon in the Japanese version which is an infinite supply of the knife subweapon which he can even throw if he's climbing walls or ceilings. This makes him an even more useful ally than he is in the English version, as he's not just nimble but dangerous too, and that's just one aspect of how the Japanese version is easier. Damage calculation itself differs between the two games, but on the whole you take less damage in this game. Many bosses and even normal enemies have significantly less health and more simple/abusable attack patterns. Heck, Grant is so good and Dracula is so much easier, I got to him with Grant without even full health and I managed to (albeit narrowly) beat him on my first try (which I was very proud of regardless :b). That's still not to say this game is easy, not by a long shot, but having played a fair bit of the American version as a kid, I can say that this version's lowered difficulty allows it to be a lot more fun than its English counterpart for me. The presentation is once again absolutely excellent. The Famicom and NES's technical differences allowed Konami to use their own hardware in the cartridge for this game, meaning that the Japanese version of the game not just has gameplay differences but it also has several extra audio channels, meaning the music is on the whole often better (although some of the English tracks can certainly be argued to be superior). The environments are very pretty, the animations are nice for enemies and player characters alike, and the game on the whole really flexes what devs were able to do with the Famicom by 1989. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While not my favorite game of the classic action platforming Castlevanias, this is still easily my favorite of the 8-bit games (followed by Belmont's Revenge on the GB). It's got stellar music and a fairer difficulty curve that makes it a compelling challenge even without save states, and the oodles of content provided by the branching paths and extra characters give it plenty of replay value as well. If you're a fan of action games and don't mind a bit of a challenge, this is definitely one you can't afford to pass up. ----- Super Castlevania IV (SFC) Despite the title, this is actually more of a remake of the original Castlevania than anything (which is why the title is the same as the original in Japanese). Coming out in the first year of the Super Famicom and SNES, it still manages to be a really impressive entry for both the series and the console. This is the only entry on this list that I've beaten before, so while it has been years since I did so, this was ultimately a re-experience of this game rather than my first completion, so it didn't take me that long or that many save states to do it (save states were once again more of an infrequently used convenience thing rather than used out of necessity). While in spirit this is certainly a remake of the original Famicom game, the content of it is anything but. Along with the addition of a "trek through Transylvania" lead up to Dracula's castle, even Dracula's castle is completely different from the NES original. The only real relation to the original is that it's once again Simon Belmont's quest to kill Dracula, and from there on out proceeds to be an entirely different Castlevania game. That said, it's still a very good and very impressive Castlevania game. Once again we have linear stages, temporary whip upgrades, subweapons (you know the drill by now), but there are a few very interesting mechanical changes to how you play this Castlevania. Most important to mention is how your whip works: You can whip in EIGHT whole directions! You can even hold the whip button down to let it go limp and then you can flick it in any direction with the D-pad for a weak bit of damage. Additionally, the subweapon button has been bound to the R button instead of up + attack, so you can finally stop worrying about accidentally trying to use your subweapon while trying to climb some stairs and attacking XD. Even Simon himself has a real fluidity to it, and a level of maneuverability and play control rarely seen among the classic Castlevania games. You can even jump onto staircases! It provides a sense of control that I find really engaging, and that's a bit part of why this is my favorite game on the Anniversary Collection. Level design is varied and interesting, and there are even new platforming mechanics to take advantage of your new whip abilities by means of grapple points Simon can swing from. The game as a whole has a very fair level of challenge to it. I would say it's probably one of the most fair-feeling out of any of the games on the Anniversary Collection. Part of this is definitely down to just how versatile Simon's move set is, but part of it is also definitely down to how tight the level design is and how well balanced the bosses feel. This game has a bunch of bosses that all feel good to fight, and the difficulty curve of the game is also well done so you don't really have huge walls of difficulty in the middle of the game. The presentation is once again excellent, with a rocking soundtrack of remixes of old tunes along with new tracks, and the graphics are excellent as well. I can't help but feel that, had this come out a year or two later and Konami had had more experience with the SFC sound chip, the music would be even better, but what's here is still really impressive for such a relatively early SFC game. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is right up there with Rondo of Blood for me as an impeccable classic Castlevania game. I know there are many who prefer the Mega Drive game, and I know that there are many who also find this game a bit too different to feel comfortable with it compared to the other Castlevanias, but those elements of difference are part of what makes this such a brilliant entry in the series. Despite the fact that I'd easily call Rondo of Blood the better overall game, this game is just so good for pick up and play action that I'd frankly recommend this first over that one. ----- Castlevania: Bloodlines (MD) Coming out at the tail end of '93, we have our last classic Castlevania game on the Anniversary Collection as well as really the last proper classic-style Castlevania game made before Symphony of the Night revamped what the whole series was about (at least if you consider Dracula X on the SNES as a port of Rondo and not its own game, which is debatable). I don't like it quite as much as Castlevania IV or Rondo of Blood, but it's still an excellent entry in the series. This was one that took me only a few hours to get through the six stages of, with serious save state use only used in the last stage. This is a bit of an odd Castlevania in how the story is both simple but also quite different from the simplicity of its predecessors. Sure, it's still basically "Oh look, let's go beat up Dracula again, he's a baddie", but this time you aren't even a Belmont (not by name, anyhow). This game takes place in 1917, and the vampire killer whip has passed to a distant relative of the Belmont clan known as John Morris (hilariously called "Johnny Morris" in Japanese). You can play as either him or as Eric Lecarde (who looks quite feminine in the Japanese version) who is out to avenge his vampirized girlfriend, as they trek across Europe to several famous spots to hunt down Dracula's allies before he can be taken on himself. While the story itself isn't really that interesting other than it calling into question how you can go from Romania to Germany to Britain during the height of World War 1, or the really funny way that one level is a German munitions factory (which also has a castle because of course it does) that is populated by skeletons wearing military helmets, it DOES give you the ability to play as one of the two characters. While Morris has his whip, Lecarde has a spear. The two characters aren't nearly as different as Richter and Maria are in Rondo of Blood, but they play meaningfully different enough that a playthrough with each is definitely still worthwhile. I played through as Johnny, and he can whip in front of himself, but also diagonally upwards to swing on ceilings and even down (although your jump is so low that the downwards whip isn't all that useful). Lecarde's spear, on the other hand, can stab directly upwards and has a slightly longer range than Morris does, and he can also do a high jump. Morris' grapple whip and Lecarde's high jump give them access to slightly different paths through the levels, making even the levels themselves slightly different depending on whom you're playing as. Instead of going through Transylvania, you're treking all around Europe to all sorts of different locales. Even Dracula himself isn't even in continental Europe at all, but in a castle in England. The different countries make for some very interesting level designs (like the swaying in the Tower of Pisa), and despite this game having fewer levels than the other 16-bit Castlevanias, they're quite long compared to those levels and each level feels very different to the others. My main complaint about the game is how stingy it can be with whip/spear upgrades. There are many bosses, particularly in Dracula's castle, for whom range is paramount to how easy a time you'll have with them. If you die once, you won't be given two whip upgrades to fight the boss again, you'll only be given one, and that aspect to the boss design really left a sour taste in my mouth. It's certainly far from how tilted the difficulty can feel in Castlevania 1 depending on the loadout you brought, but it's analogous enough to that frustration that it keeps me from holding this game in quite a high a regard as the other 16-bit Castlevania games. The presentation is also no exception to the series general rule of excellence. The music and graphics that really show the kind of speed and color you could get from the Mega Drive come 1993, and it's probably one of the prettiest looking of the older Castlevanias in general as a result. Most of the differences between the Japanese and Western releases are cosmetic (such as making Lecarde look more masculine, Morris' first name), but one important difference is that the Japanese normal mode is the English easy mode, so even though I played through the game on "normal", what I played through compared to the rest of the world was easy mode. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Though this may be my least favorite of the 16-bit Castlevanias, it is by no means not a great game. It still sets a high water mark just as most of the other games do, and is very well worth playing. ----- Upon buying the Anniversary Collection, I really didn't imagine myself playing through anything more than just Belmont's Revenge and maybe toying with the other games only a little. I'm really glad that I caught the Castlevania bug and ended up giving the others a chance, because it was a weekend I really enjoyed my time with. Especially if you can get it on a 40% off sale like I did, I highly recommend the Anniversary Collection to any fan of retro action games. The save state function lets you make all the games as hard or as easy as you'd like them to be, and that's honestly the best way to play old action games like this: at whatever difficulty and pace is right for you ^w^ And because it would be criminal to write such a long (and ostensibly comparative) piece about so many similar games and NOT rank how I feel about the games, here is my ranking of the classic (pre-SotN) Castlevania games that I've played: Rondo of Blood > Castlevania IV > Castlevania III (JPN) > Belmont's Revenge > Bloodlines > Castlevania II > Castlevania I > Adventure > MSX This was part of the most recent addition of games to the Switch Online SNES game service, and I was pretty excited to see it. While it was quite weird that the Western SNES service got it and the Japanese SFC service did not, I love me some Picross, and I've had a lot of fun with Mario's Picross on the GameBoy, so this has been something I've wanted to try for a long time. 300 puzzles over the course of a few weeks later, I finished this one XD. It's difficult to really give much of an estimate for this one, but I'd guess this took me at least 25+ hours to 100% complete if not more.
Super Mario's Picross is, for the most part, just what it appears to be. It's a Picross game that has Super Mario-themed presentation, but not really puzzles for the most part. There's a few more Mario-themed puzzles in the few dozen puzzles you unlock after you beat the first 260 or so (the ones you need to beat to see the credits), but other than that, it's mostly just mundane objects, places, things, etc. That's not really a strike against the game, but it was just something in the presentation I was surprised by. The game has two kinds of puzzles to complete: Mario puzzles and Wario puzzles. You unlock the Wario puzzles as soon as you complete the first dozen (or rather, the first "level") of the Mario puzzles. Mario's puzzles have a 30 minute time limit and you get time taken away from your remaining total every time you make a mistake. Wario's puzzles have no time limit, but also have no hint feature. While Wario's have no hint feature, they DO have a kind of trial-and-error mode you can toggle on, which lets you experiment with a new type of marker and you can choose to either erase or commit those choices when you're finished with that guessing mode. It's a neat feature, but I mostly just used save-states and rewinds to do the same thing XP The biggest issues with the game largely come down to its age and the lack of quality of life features it has. Moving up from being a GameBoy game, this game has more detailed graphics, of course, but that isn't always in the game's favor. I frequently found myself simply not seeing what was or wasn't an X'd spot because they can blend in with one another when you're on the bigger Picross boards. Beyond that, this game also doesn't mark off the numbers on the edge of the board for you. You need to do that yourself. That lacking QoL feature is probably the #1 reason I'd have trouble recommending this game, because it's a big adjustment from more modern Picross experiences (of which there is no shortage of free editions of), as marking them off yourself is time consuming and keeping track of them in your head is annoying. The game's presentation is fine, but a little underwhelming. Mario and Wario will talk to you after you beat a world, and Wario's dialogue especially can be quite funny, but there isn't that much unique dialogue. It's mostly just "you beat a world, now try the next one" unless it's the last puzzles in the game. There're only about a dozen music tracks in the game, and they're usually fine but nothing special. Wario's 3rd song is also very weirdly sleepy, and given that it takes place during levels 8-10 (out of 11 base ones), you're gonna be hearing it a lot (unless you change to one of the previous tracks or just turn the music off and put something on yourself). I took to calling it the "Picross Lullaby" XD. It's also worth mentioning, in closing, that this is a pretty lousy first Picross game if you don't speak Japanese, as since there ARE tutorials, they're all in Japanese XP. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This is a fine Picross game, but I don't think there's anything that massively special about it other than it being free on the Switch Online service. The Mario/Wario theming is fun at times, but you need to be able to read Japanese to really get much out of it, and the lack of quality of life features make it a chore to play at times compared to more recent Picross games (both free and not-free). If you want Picross to play this can certainly scratch that itch, but there is such a great amount of easier to enjoy Picross out there that I don't think most people will be missing much by skipping this one. When hunting for a copy of Mario Galaxy 2, I came across a Yahoo Auctions lot that was priced as such so that they were effectively throwing this game in as a freebie. I've been meaning to replay the other NSMB games for a while since I beat the 3DS entry last year, so this seemed like a good a time as any to get my 2D Mario on~. I beat the Japanese version of the game 100% over a weekend in about 9 hours.
This being a Mario game, and especially a New Super Mario Bros game, the story is pretty bog simple. Mario, Luigi, and the yellow and blue toads are having a party at Peach's Castle. Bowser Jr. and the Koopalings sneak their way in in a trojan horse cake, and spirit Peach away to Bowser's Castle. Our intrepid heroes give chase, and the adventure begins. Not much to say about it really other than that I love the Koopalings and I'm always happy to see them in a game. Mechanically, it's New Super Mario Bros but with a little bit of some new twists compared to the DS entry. You still have 8 worlds to go through, you still have 3 star coins to collect in every level, and you can still wall jump. However, now you have a spin attack added to your base arsenal too. Like in Mario Galaxy, the spin attack is done by shaking the Wiimote. Calling it an "attack" is a bit of a misnomer, as it's basically just a sort of non-jump double-jump that you can do in mid-air to get a little extra distance. It makes a lot of the platforming just that much easier, and a lot of the harder jumps more or less require it. I just wish it weren't awkwardly bound to shaking the Wiimote. You also have two new powerups: the propeller hat and the penguin suit. The propeller hat gives you an upwards surge in height and can make a lot of tough star coins in certain levels far easier to do (if you can hold onto your powerup, that is). The penguin suit, meanwhile, is more like a supped up frog suit from Mario 3. It lets you swim better, sure, but it also lets you slide on your belly by holding down when you run as well as throw ice balls like an ice fire flower would. They're both interesting additions, although they both feel fairly unfocused and gimmicky compared to the tanooki tail and cape of old or the wing suit added in NSMBU. Yoshi is also present in some levels, but he's mostly a gimmick in the handful of levels he's in, as he can't be taken outside those stages. The world map is unfortunately a No Yoshi Zone TwT Then, of course, was the big draw for this Mario game: multiplayer! You and up to three friends can take on the challenge to save Peach and defeat Bowser if you're feeling able. It definitely makes the game harder, and also has some strange implementation decisions. For example, if you're player one, you MUST be Mario. You can't pick Luigi or either toad if you're gonna play by yourself, and that just seems so silly to me. In addition, players count as physical objects, so you bump into each other and can even pick up and throw one another. This means that multiplayer modes can often lead to accidentally messing up your friends, although if you're the type to troll people when you play cooperative games, then this is a perfect thing for you (especially since all four players have separate life counters) X3. At any rate, you can press the A button on the Wiimote to go into a bubble to fly back to your companions if you've been tossed to your death (or if you're coming back from death). The presentation is more NSMB, really. Same art style as the DS game a lot of the same music too. This game isn't trying to reinvent the wheel. It's only trying to pretty up the new wheel that NSMB DS started rolling out. That more or less goes for every aspect of this game, though. I view the NSMB series as a succession of games of better and better quality, and this is no exception. While certainly better than NSMB DS, it's definitely an inferior experience to NSMB 2. Verdict: Recommended. The whole experience really just comes down to: It's solid enough. There's nothing particularly noteworthy or special about this game other than it's a solid 2D Mario game. It's not bad in any significant regard (unless you're someone who just can't get with how the physics in this handle, which I know is no small amount of people), but it's also not terribly exceptional in any way either. It's certainly worth a play if you want a good time with a 2D platformer, but there's nothing about it that would make me recommend it over its successor games (or even classic Mario games). This game simply "is" in many respects, and if that sounds like it's good enough for you, as it was for me, then it's definitely worth a few bucks to check out. A friend of mine recently made a Youtube video about Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge, and that convinced me to play it for myself. Konami's Castlevania Anniversary Collection was on sale on Switch so that's what I bought to play it on. I got the Japanese version of the collection, which is functionally the same as the English one (just as the English one got a free patch that added the Japanese versions, the Japanese one got the English versions the same way), although oddly a Japanese version of Castlevania II (NES) is totally absent. Either way, I beat it in one sitting in the span of like 4 or 5 hours on my Switch.
The story of the game is fairly simple, as most Castlevania games are. 15 years after Christopher Belmont defeated Dracula, his teenage son Soreiyu (which is amusingly enough very phonetically close to "slay you" X3) is inflicted with a lingering curse from the defeated count that compels him to start resurrecting him. Christopher goes on a mission through 4 castles and then finally Dracula's castle to break the curse over his son and defeat Dracula again. It sets up Dracula, why he's back, and how we gotta kill him again: everything a Castlevania game needs. This is the first and only Castlevania game with a Mega Man-style level select right off the bat. There are four castles to go through before Dracula's castle, and those four can be played in any order. Dracula's castle is two stages bringing the total up to six, and given that these stages are fairly long (using a continue in most levels doesn't even bring you back to the start, just to a half-ish way point), it's a pretty meaty entry in the series for a handheld game. I think the level design is overall really solid. This has the GB Castlevania staple of climbable ropes instead of stairs, and those can be awkward to climb sometimes, but other than that, this has great levels that never feel overly mean or unfair. The game as a whole, from the bosses to the level design, is overall far easier than its console contemporaries, and that was a change I really welcomed. Mechanically, it's Castlevania at its 8-bit finest and familiar-est. Aside from the aforementioned awkward rope climbing, everything you'd hope from a Castlevania is here but with a few small changes. Unlike the first Castlevania Adventure, you have sub-weapons here, but only two. This also brings us to the most substantial change between the English and Japanese versions: The American version got the Axe, and the Japanese version got the cross boomerang. Then they both also have holy water to balance it out. Another difference from the NES games is that your whip can fire fireballs when it's powered up to max, and while not EVERY hit weakens your whip like in the first GB game, it seems only some enemies hits do that. The presentation is very nice, with this being quite a pretty GB game. On that note, it's also no surprise that this game, and not the first, got a color remake on GBC later on in PAL territories. The music is also very good, really capturing the quality of the NES games despite having a different composer. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you're like me and most of the 8-bit Castlevania games are a bit too hard for you to deal with, this is definitely a game worth checking out if you wanna see a retro Castlevania to the end for once (this is the first one I've beaten XD). This is an excellent entry in the Castlevania series, and does a fantastic job of bringing the console experience to a portable setting. My appetite for 3D Mario was not satiated by 100%-ing Mario Galaxy on the Switch a week or two ago, so I ordered myself a copy of the sequel and finished playing through it to nearly the same extent. When I was younger, I had gotten all 120 normal stars in the game, but my older brother had told me that the green stars that follow them are awful and not worth getting, so I never tried. This time I DID try for those, and got all of them! I only let one star slip me by, since I simply didn't have the patience for the incredible gauntlet that is star 242. It took me a little over 20 hours to nearly 100% the Japanese version of the game.
The story of Mario Galaxy 2 is even more bare than that of the first game, but is largely just a more simple retelling of that game. During the shooting star festival, Bowser comes down to heck stuff up, steals Peach, and disappears off into the sky. Only this time, Lumas are already on the ground when Mario is trying to rescue her the first time, so they launch him up into space to chase Bowser. Mario finds himself on a planetoid with the rather chunky Luma Lubba (Ruuba, in Japanese) who turns it into a spaceship shaped like Mario's head. They then use this spaceship to go from galaxy to galaxy, hunting down grand stars to get to where Bowser has gone. It's a very threadbare story, and it's a logical progression to the nearly totally absent story in Mario 3D World. That said, I think it's perfectly fine. This is Super Mario, not Final Fantasy, and as long as the art and level direction are tip top, I don't really care about the story. Luckily, the art and level direction are indeed tip top! This game controls more or less how the first game does, but it feels like Mario's movement has been tightened up just a little bit (but it does quite help). He's not quite as nimble as in Sunshine, but he can definitely pull off backflips a little easier than he could in Galaxy 1. Your spaceship eliminates the hub world found in previous 3D Mario games entirely, serving effectively as a cursor to select which level you want to go to. The planetoids that populate SO much of Mario Galaxy 1 have also been, not eliminated entirely, but significantly reduced and improved. It's now much less of that gravity-bending stuff for the sake of it (so far less of those awkward controlling "can't stop running in circles" moments), and a lot more micro stage concepts put together. Even Luigi is playable much earlier than he was in the first game, and he doesn't have his own separate mode either. The 120 green stars that unlock after the first 120 normal stars are just a part of the overall refinements to how the first Mario Galaxy approached its level design. Each galaxy now has only one prankster comet, not two, so the obligatory purple coin missions are gone. You also need to collect a comet medal in a stage for the prankster comet to show up there in the first place, giving you an extra 50 collectibles through the course of the game on top of all the stars (one medal for each stage). The aforementioned green stars appear once you've beaten the game, and while they aren't totally new content, they're newer content than the "play the whole game again as Luigi" concept that the first game used for its extra 121 stars. The green stars go and hide in all of the old levels, and they make a distinct twinkling sound and sparkle quite brightly in the first place. This turns it almost into a quest of both hunting them down in the stage (a task usually not THAT difficult, but there were two I had to end up looking up the location to), but then also doing the often quite tricky jumps required to grab them. It's not the most compelling content in the world compared to the original 120 stars, but I still enjoyed my time grabbing them. That isn't to say that I had absolutely no complaints with the game, however. In regards to the normal stars, the manta ray surfing minigame from the first Galaxy has been replaced with flying on birds not unlike the flying in Skyloft in Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, and this doesn't even have Motion Plus to help it out. Those sections are so aggravating to control that I'm super glad there are only two of them in the whole game. Beyond that, I have a few more comments rather than outright complaints. The Grandmaster stage at the end is very much like what the Darkest Side of the Moon would be in Odyssey: a morale crushing gauntlet with no checkpoints and only one hit before you die, and I just wish it were a little more forgiving (although given its name, it's certainly not inappropriate that it's this hard). And last, given that there are a few levels that are more simple enemy killing gauntlets or platforming challenges around a certain gimmick, there are also just a fair few stages where the green stars don't really have anywhere interesting they CAN be hidden, so it's mostly just replaying those stages several times to get their green stars. The base game is absolutely fine and totally worth playing, but I can't help but wish at least a little that the post-game green stars felt a little bit less like a fan-made hack of the game, pushing more content into already finished levels. The presentation of this game is also fantastic. This is easily one of the prettiest looking games on the Wii, and I think just playing this on my Wii at 480i via component cables looked better than the upscaled Mario Galaxy 1 I played on my Switch a couple weeks back. That colorful, whimsical design of Galaxy 1 has been amped up a bit to make things that much more bright and cheery now that the story isn't treating itself quite so seriously (although it isn't Mario Sunshine-levels of bright). Your Mario Head spaceship even gets populated by the little aliens as you complete missions for them, giving you tons of little friends to get hints from or just admire the fun designs of. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is an excellent refinement of the Mario Galaxy formula and still super worth playing. While I will admit, through this replay I absolutely rediscovered just how much I dislike motion controls as a control method, I nonetheless still had a lot of fun playing this (I just really hope that this gets a re-release on the Switch like the first game did). Mario Galaxy 2 isn't JUST the first game with new movement gimmicks tossed in (although that isn't a totally unfair description), it also comes win with a far refined approach to level design that would pave the way for future 3D Mario games. This replay really helped me appreciate this game way more than I did the first time around, and all it's done is make me want to play more 3D Mario instead of whetting my appetite for it like I hoped it would XD |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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