Castlevania Crunch

hey guys welcome to game sacks Castlevania crunch in this video I'll be talking about almost every single Castlevania game that's ever been made do you like Castlevania I sure like Castlevania I like Castlevania so much that I have a Castlevania t-shirt do you have a Castlevania t-shirt so what I thought anyway I wanted to preface this video because originally when I made these episodes I didn't make them in the order that I'll be presenting them here in this video I started out with the 16-bit castlevanias and then I went over to the Metroid videos and then back to the 8-Bit castlevanias and then on with the rest but here in this crunch video I'm going to start with the 8-Bit castlevanias and then I'll go to the 16-bit castle Venus and I'll go to the metroidvanias and then I'll cover all the rest so they're going to be in a bit of a different order here but I wanted it to be kind of like chronological to the actual game releases more or less anyway let's get on with the Castlevania Crunch and happy Castlevania ing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you hello and welcome to gameshack it's time to take a look at the Primitive entries in the Castlevania series starting with the very first game now just because these are running on primitive Hardware doesn't mean they're not worth spending a ton of time playing but is each entry a good game well let's find out and I'll be taking a look at these in the order that they were released [Music] the first castle Vineyard was released in Japan on the famicom disc system is akumojo Dracula in late September of 1986 North American mid-1987 in Europe in late 1988. this is a straight up action game where you played the role of Simon Belmont and his quest to rid the world of the evil Count Dracula you're armed with a whip as your weapon and this really made the game stand out back then your whip is slow and this was hardly common in video games however if you grabbed a chain whip icon you can power up your whip as well as lengthen it slightly insert your own joke about male genitalia here this can be done twice you also have sub weapons that you can get and you use these by pressing up and attack these consist of the ax which can be tossed in an arc there's also the cross or the boomerang which is often called the cross of fear in Japan and it returns to you when you throw it then there's the knife which is a fairly fast but weak weapon of course there's a clock which stops time on some enemies but it doesn't work everywhere and it's just yeah I don't like this one lastly there's the holy water which can freeze enemies in this game as a result it's the best sub weapon to have for most of the bosses in this particular game anyway in order to use the sub weapons you need to collect hearts hearts don't refill your life here like they do in nearly every other video game on the planet it's kind of a weird item to collect to stockier ammo you can also collect two and three multipliers so you can toss more than one sub weapon at once quickly all right this game is pretty damn tough at least until you learn everything about it I mean that could be said with pretty much any game I suppose but this one is a bit tougher than most games are for the uninitiated what's really brutal is the stiff control once you jump you're committed to it no turning around once you're in the air here fortunately every time you go through a door you reach a checkpoint there's usually two doors per level or block as they call them here and each checkpoint counts as its own stage in all there are 18 stages if you have to continue you start over from the very beginning of the block the enemies here are all awesome and would be Staples in nearly every game in the series that would follow easy skeletons wimpy goals annoying Medusa heads and red skeletons who crumble after a couple of hits but come back to life seconds later the same can be said for the bosses like the giant bat or movie Monsters like the mummies or Frankenstein's monster and let's not forget the Grim Reaper the graphics are great for the time and I still like them today there's no mistaking this for any other game it has those blocky stairs in this tiled feel that you just associate with Castlevania and the music oh the music it's absolutely classic with Tunes like Vampire killer which plays on the first block [Music] this tune would be heard in most future Castlevania games in one form or another all of the other music here is fantastic as well as you can imagine the game was a hit and that would mean plenty more games in the future for us to kill Dracula in [Music] foreign [Music] ER was released about a month later on the msx2 in Japan it was also released later in Europe and Brazil I'm playing the Japanese version here in case the title screen didn't clue you in this is basically a retelling of the same game you're playing as Simon Belmont trying to kill Dracula with your whip other than that it's almost completely different at least in regards to how the game is structured like many MSX games there's no scrolling at all instead you advance from screen to screen in maze-like stages most of the enemies here are the same and there's certainly no shortage of them the control is decent but when whipping candles you need to hit their base instead of the candles themselves or your whip will go right through them here you need to wander around and find keys in order to unlock doors there's also lots of items to collect in this one like wings and shields your sub weapons are here but I felt they were slightly tricky to use at first anyway once you figure out the stage and get the skeleton key you can fight the boss foreign the graphics here aren't bad at all and are very similar to the NES version though some of the color schemes are sometimes different the music is the same as the NES version except that it sounds like a Sega Master System with its PSG sound chip [Music] I think that this is an interesting take on Castlevania but you'll need some patience that combined with a lot of skill might get you to the end [Music] thank you [Music] Dracula 2 was released next on disc for the famicom in 1987 and is Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest on cartridge everywhere else on the NES in 1988 and 1990. they must have liked Vampire killer on the msx2 because they took it to a whole new level here this one wants to be really trixy you're playing as Simon Belmont again and apparently you suck at killing Dracula because he placed a curse on you right before he died now you need to go collect all of his pieces and battle him again to get rid of the curse this one is not a linear game it's almost a metroidvania in fact you can wander around the areas as you please some areas will make short work of you if you attempt them before you're ready you have items to find and buy and you even level up the leveling up system is weird because you can't just grind like you can in metroidvania games you'll grind sometimes but more for hearts anyway there are six mansions in the game and you can level up once before you conquer each Castle your experience is half the number of Hearts you have it's pretty weird but you don't have to worry too much about it the heart serve is your currency in this game though some weapons like this golden dagger actually do consume Hearts when you use them others like the holy water do not you have towns which have people he can talk to be careful though because some of them are lying jerks you can also heal at the church if the town has one there are also stores to buy stuff but they're not just inside doors oh no instead you have to bust out the floor with your holy water to find the merchants I doubt they sell very much of their inventory this way I imagine they're just hiding from all of the evil demons around when you're out and about the sun will suddenly set and then it's night that means the enemies are twice as strong but they drop bigger Hearts unfortunately the town people all hide at night and the churches are closed so there's not much else you can do except grind for hearts and wait till daytime this is an interesting mechanic but it gets annoying pretty quick and I honestly don't feel that it adds anything of value to the game is there anyone who actually likes this the mansions and castles themselves are pretty cool however there are a lot of hidden pits that look like floor so you need to be really careful you find a guy inside and you buy a wooden stake from him and use it on a crystal to get a piece of Dracula then it's off to the next area once you figure out the quirks to get there the controls are still stiff but they're not quite as bad as the first Castlevania there's lots of stuff to switch around in the inventory screen which sometimes feels like it's not responding also this game lets you save your progress in the Japanese disc version to work around this Konami added a password feature for the international cartridge release you can choose to see it when you lose your last life if you enter it you'll start from the first town with all of your progress intact though you'll have zero Hearts you can also back out of the password screen after you've written it down just to continue from right there the game even has three different endings depending on how much you suck [Music] the graphics are once again well done with lots of new enemies and backgrounds it looks like a Castlevania game for sure but Simon's Quest here has its own aesthetic that feels more advanced than the first game the music is once again outstanding and the familiar bloody tears as introduced Here For the First Time introduced for the first time yeah that's not redundant [Music] the rest of the music is amazing as well even though there aren't a ton of different musical tracks in Japan Konami took advantage of the FM sound chip that's built into the famicom disk system to assist with the music and give it a slightly warmer feel compared to the cartridge versions [Music] I like this game much more than Vampire killer on the msx2 if you have an idea of what to do it's pretty darn entertaining I feel like it's somewhat of a bad rap once you get used to how it works it's honestly kind of addictive I found myself always wanting to play the next area with my new powers it's hardly perfect though as it feels like a first attempt at a proper Adventure game if you want to experience it without spending a huge deal of time then use a guide to help you I think that everyone should at least give this game a good attempt foreign [Music] Castle viney is off to a great start in this one of the more popular franchises even this early into its existence but the next time we'd see Castlevania would be in a black and white on Nintendo's newfangled Game Boy portable system [Music] foreign [Music] the adventure was a launch game for the original Game Boy released in late 1989. you play as Christopher Belmont in this one though nowhere in the game or even on the box or in the manual does it tell you this so you're just gonna have to take me at my word if there's one thing that Christopher hates doing it's moving like at all he moves very very slowly throughout his entire journey and you can just tell this is quite the chore for him supposedly this was done to reduce the amount of blur on the Game Boy screen it's okay though because once you get used to it this game is a blast okay well perhaps blast is the wrong word given this game's pacing but it's really enjoyable there have been some changes to bring Castlevania to the portable screen though gone are all the stairs instead now you have ropes lots and lots of ropes also gone are your sub weapons you can still power up your whip here but when you power it up the second time it lets you shoot a projectile from it which is really cool but here's the catch if you take any damage it goes away and you'll have to power up your whip again it doesn't stop there of course if you get hit again before powering back up your whip goes back to its weakest form pretty cool actually it's not cool I don't like that but that's the way the game works and he'll just have to deal with it there are only four stages here and they're each pretty big with plenty of hidden areas and rooms to find and of course there are boss fights at the end of each some of these bosses might even take you a few times to figure out how to beat Dracula himself can be pretty tricky as he keeps disappearing and reappearing and you absolutely need to memorize this this game introduces some new enemies into the series like the rolling eyeballs not sure whose eyeballs they are or if they're Ascension beings with their own brains along with their own hopes and dreams I don't know then there are these guys who spit out a slowly moving ricocheting ball of energy that can be sometimes tough to avoid the visuals are great for an early Game Boy title though they can be a little sparse the music is fantastic though that seems to be a requirement for all proper Castlevania games [Music] even though this one is pretty slow I still have a good time with it this also got re-released on the Game Boy and Konami GB collection volume 1 in Japan this one features some super Game Boy enhancements if you play it on the Super Nintendo it has a special border and its own custom color palette which is basically just orange Christopher also moves a little faster in this one making it seem less sluggish he's still pretty slow though the Konami GB collection was also released in Europe and it was stripped of its super Game Boy enhancements however if you play it on a Game Boy Color the entire game is given a fresh new coat of paint with a nice color overhaul and I swear Chris moves a bit faster here than he even did on the super Game Boy at the same time though it kind of feels like the game's just been overclocked so the increase in speed varies which can throw you off a bit still this is a great way to play the game especially if you love the original [Music] thank you Konami went back to the series roots with Castlevania 3 Dracula's curse in 1990 in North America once again we have a straight up action game and this is the favorite game in the entire series for a lot of people you play as Trevor Belmont who is one of Simon's ancestors you have the same power Simon did in the first game with similar sub weapons instead of powering up your whip with a chain whip icon you now collect a sword with two snakes or one snake wrapped around it which I personally think looks like a chandelier however this time there are branching paths to choose from after clearing a lot of the stages and even sometimes in the middle of a stage depending on which ones you choose you'll eventually meet up with a character who offers to join your quest there are three different additional characters there's Grant who can climb on walls but more importantly can change direction mid-air during a jump which gives you some flexibility in the control Department if you need it and trust me you will there's scifa who's a tad week but has some cool ice magic and can freeze water then there's Dracula Sun Alucard who is half human he can turn into a bat and fly as well as shoot Fireballs each of these care characters will help you reach places that Trevor himself can't this game is absolutely huge with tons of stages everywhere it almost feels overwhelming at times There are 16 blocks in this one it's also pretty difficult as the controls are still very primitive with the slight exception of Grant stairs going down can still be tricky oops you just need to remember to press only down or you will die like I said sometimes this game can be really difficult you'll need a lot of practice for sure in fact it'll probably piss you off you might even shut the game off in frustration but after you calm down a little you're gonna get the urge to try again and you're going to get past the part that was troubling you fortunately there are unlimited continues and a password feature but they put you back at the beginning of a block needless to say you're not walking through this one and it'll keep you busy for some time the branching paths will certainly keep you coming back for more foreign the graphics are kind of a mixed bag here on one hand you have some really amazing looking areas like this one which have some really cool effects on the other hand there are a few areas like this one which only look extremely good it's all still unmistakably Castlevania though and the variety in these stages is amazing for a cartridge game however enemies are sometimes hard to see and the stairs that go down into the ground are often very difficult to make out unless you know that they're there and the music here is some of the best in the series [Music] once again the Japanese version uses external Sound Processing this time in the form of the Konami VR6 chip [Music] Nintendo was boneheaded and didn't allow an audio pass-through when designing the international NES for some reason so Konami had to recompose the entire soundtrack still either way the game sounds awesome the game is completely amazing but it's not my personal favorite in the series maybe this is because I didn't play it until after the much more refined to 16-bit castlevanias however since it is the favorite of a great many people you can rest assured that this game is no slouch in the series absolutely play this one [Music] thank you [Music] okay real quick before we move on I just want to briefly mention Castlevania the adventure rebirth that's on the Wii some of you may have felt that I forgot to mention that back in the Castlevania Adventure segment but it's not an 8-bit game so that's why it's not in this episode anyway the next Castlevania game that would be released isn't exactly Castlevania foreign [Music] [Music] for the famicom otherwise known as kid Dracula this is a spin-off to the Castlevania Series where you play as Dracula's kid named kid Dracula no references made anywhere to you being Alucard you're just Dracula's new kid I guess and you're already a vampire in this one you're after someone called garamot as you can tell just by looking at it this is going for a more cutified feel it kind of plays like Ghouls and ghosts on a very basic level you shoot fireballs and you can even attack up and down which is nice you also have a charge attack and you can do this by holding the button down for a bit the control feels a bit looser than the other Castlevania games but it's still a tad stiff certainly nothing you can't get used to in a few minutes though each stage ends with a nice boss fight after that you gain a new charge power which is demonstrated to you you can select between these with the select button one of the abilities is a five-way homing shot which I found myself using quite a lot another lets you turn into a bat so you can fly around for a short time sometimes times enemies will drop a coin between rounds you get a chance to play a bonus game for some extra lives if you've collected enough coins everything in the game is super cute and it's fun to play a lighthearted entry in the series it looks super easy but it's not however it's certainly not as tough as Castlevania 3. do you like underwater levels how about ice levels of course you do who the hell doesn't love underwater and ice levels you're in luck because this game has both it also has this quiz section which I can't get past because I don't read Japanese so this is kind of a deal breaker unless you have the Castlevania Anniversary Collection for the modern systems which has this game in English I don't have that though foreign the graphics are pretty basic and they don't try to be more than they need to be there is lots of flicker though even on platforms that you jump on there's a lot of variety in the stages and apparently the game takes place in modern times since it has Subways cities and even UFOs hell even the guy from splatter house is here no that's not Jason everyone knows that Friday the 13th ripped off Splatterhouse even though Splatterhouse came way after Friday the 13th that's just how my logic works the music is super cutesy and it's fun until it starts to loop again and again and then it can get a bit tiring foreign [Music] the same goes for the game itself it's neat for a bit and then you just find yourself wanting to play something else [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] back on the game boy we got Castlevania 2 no quest for Simon this time though this is Belmont's Revenge Dracula is back and as far as you know he kidnapped your son so you go after him you still play as Christopher but you must have taken some pain medication or at least done a little stretching because you're much quicker and more limber this time around lots of things from the first game return here including many of the enemies and definitely the ropes hell there's even more ropes this time around who needs stairs anyway stairs are dumb now you get to choose the order you play the first four stages this is awesome because if you're having trouble with a particular one you don't have to go through the rest just to get there and practice well I guess it doesn't help if you're having issues on the last Castle though you'll just have to Buck up and learn it once you get there you can still power up your whip so it can shoot projectiles but touching the enemy no longer takes this away from you at least not right away oh and the sub weapons are back well at least the ax and the holy water are here I'll take them the Japanese version has the cross of fear instead of the ax but someone at konami's U.S offices thought that this was too similar to the whips projectile attack so they changed it to the ax Which flies in an arc from here [Music] the graphics have taken a huge leap forward from the first game boy title each area is distinctly unique and gorgeous even though it's all still in black and white there are even some flicker tricks outside of the windows here to get a lighter shade of gray or green or whatever color your screen is because the screen simply isn't fast enough to show the Flicker and do I even need to say it yes I do the music is outstanding once again with plenty of memorable themes that might be some of the best tunes on the Game Boy [Music] [Applause] [Music] it goes without saying that everyone who has anything that can play Game Boy game should own this one like the first Castlevania Adventure game this one was also included on the Konami GB collection it's on volume 3 in Japan once again if you play it on the Super Nintendo this one has its own border around the screen with an orange color palette the cross of fear returns here instead of the ax so that's interesting to mess around with and once again this one was also released in Europe for the Game Boy Color without the super Game Boy enhancements this time the volume numbers have been changed around so it's on volume 4 there and yes it's been colored though this time it seems like they kind of rushed it a little as there's not as much color as you might expect it's still a really cool upgrade though even though it's pretty basic and they kept the cross of fear in this version as well definitely check it out if you can [Music] thank you [Music] by this time Castlevania was already tearing it up on 16-bit consoles with tremendous results however there would still be some more 8-bit releases all of which would be on the Game Boy [Music] foreign [Music] Dracula also saw a release on the Game Boy and it was even released outside of Japan this is a sequel to the famicom game even though it feels like kind of a half-assed remake since a lot of things return you're after garamoth again and you've forgotten all of your special abilities from the first game except for your ability to turn into a bat that's okay though as you'll remember them as you progress through the game and learn new ones as well this one is even slower especially in the control Department it's not a game I would ever classify as responsive it sometimes feels like the controls are stuck in molasses also there's not much room on the screen for anything else besides you and your hitbox still it's playable enough to where you can complete the stages with relative ease stages like the roller coaster are back and it goes on for even longer here out of all the stages to extend they extend this one the thing is though is that I get bored with this game rather quickly nothing about it makes me want to keep playing you know what's weird though is that I used to really really like this game I don't know if my gaming tastes have evolved or changed or if someone just pissed in my Cheerios this morning but it's just not as fun for me now as it was a few years ago I really can't explain it so I guess take everything I'm saying about this one with a grain of salt I do like the music more here than in the famicom version so at least there's that and the Splatterhouse guy is back as a boss otherwise this game just doesn't do enough to stand out on its own as anything special foreign thank you finally Castlevania Legends came out on the Game Boy all the way in 1997 in Japan and 1998 elsewhere this was developed by the same team who had previously ported Symphony of the Night to the Saturn with less than Stellar results and it seems that less than Stellar is the Company motto because that's what this game is sadly you play a Sonya Belmont and it's your turn to rid the world of Dracula and all that stuff when you first start playing it doesn't feel bad it's not as nice as Belmont's Revenge was but still not bad this will change quickly though that's because the design of the game itself is lacking and not necessarily the controls themselves like the previous game boy Castlevania games you can power up your whip and shoot a projectile and look at that a sub weapon the joke's on you you can't use it instead it's an artifact that you need to collect and there's one to find in each stage actually there are sub weapons here it's just handled differently once you defeat a boss you're given what's called a soul weapon you use these by pressing up and attack like you normally would if you have multiple Soul weapons you can switch between them in the select screen the problem is is that most of these used a huge amount of Hearts there are a couple that I was never even able to use because I never had enough Hearts to use them but this sonic wave type of weapon only uses one heart and it's actually quite effective unfortunately you don't get it until late in the game speaking of which there are six stages to wander around well technically five but the fifth stage is divided into two parts and they're all full of ropes and these ropes are kind of maddening because flying enemies and even enemies on ropes will attack you as you climb often it's really tough to fend them off sometimes when you strike a candle you'll be taken into a room where you need to beat a ton of bad guys you don't seem to get anything out of this if you win except losing a huge portion of your life bar honestly I just commit suicide if I accidentally hit one of these candles you basically have unlimited lives in this game if you die you start back at the last door that you came through if you continue you start at the last door that you came through so yeah unlimited lives oh and notice how the boss has a life bar but it never moves no matter how many times you hit them you silly goose that's not a life bar for the boss what are you thinking that's for the burning mode if you press both buttons at once you become invincible for a short time you damage enemies if you touch them and also your attacks are twice as powerful that's pretty cool but you can only use it once per Life per level foreign [Applause] [Music] at the beginning of the game you can choose between standard and light modes light mode is an easier setting where you start with a fully powered up Whip and never lose it no matter how many times you get hit combine this with the burning mode and you'll plow right through the game with very little trouble the graphics have taken a large step down from Castlevania 2 and they're quite basic especially for a game coming out so late in the system's life there's not much that stands out here and even most of the enemies look like they're bored the game is compatible with the super Game Boy and here it gets a generic yet Pleasant border that's not at all distracting the music opens with an altered version of the bloody tears theme and honestly it isn't bad at all [Music] but the other stages have forgettable and sometimes even outright annoying music that'll make you want to turn your sound down fast foreign [Music] it's too bad that this game ended up the way it did Koji igarashi removed it from official Castlevania Cannon back when he was in charge of such things I wish they had waited to put it on the Game Boy Color and given it to a better team I think if that had happened it would have been remembered better yes that's right I'm actually saying that if this game had been more gooder it would have been better received it's not more gooder though it's not and it's really not [Music] foreign [Music] games and my favorite obviously has to go to Castlevania 3 Dracula's curse and Castlevania 2 Belmont's revenge on the Game Boy is pretty Kick-Ass as well and I've already covered all of the 16-bit castlevanias as well as all of the metroidvanias in different episodes so check them out if you haven't already and there are still a lot of Castlevania games to cover but I can't really group them into themed episodes like I've been doing so I'm not sure what to call it maybe like the other castlevanias do you have a better idea I sure hope so because that sounds kind of dumb if you do let me know and also let me know what your favorite 8-bit Castlevania game is in the meantime thank you for watching game sack foreign [Music] [Music] seriously I'm probably twice as good as all of you right get them boys [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to gamestack now Castlevania is probably one of my favorite series of games ever and the 16-bit era has some of the best Castlevania games period so I figured this would be a good time to check and see which one of those is the best Castlevania game of that era and we're going to look at them in the order they were released so let's start off with castlevania's first foray into the 16-bit world [Music] Super Castlevania 4 was released for the Super Nintendo in December of 1991. just a few short months after the console itself was launched but my first experience with the game was when my friend Tom and I rented the super famicom version from a local game shop and I played it on his Super Nintendo as I wouldn't get the system until Christmas of that year the only other games I'd played on the system at that point were f-zero Super Mario World and pilot wings and this was also the first game with a mega power that I played on this system I had played a few other eight Meg games on the Genesis before this so I had an idea of what to expect in terms of how much they could pack in here anyway as I played the game I was immediately blown away I think a lot of this is because I went in without any pre-existing expectations the sound immediately grabbed me some of it sounded like a real Orchestra [Music] I thought we'd have to wait until act razor came out to hear music like this because that's the game that all the magazines were hyping for its Orchestra sounds so this was definitely a very pleasant surprise I was also glad to see that the graphics looked a lot better than the fuzzy pictures of this one that I was used to seeing in the game magazines at first it was weird having the limp whip it made us laugh as we played but both that and the whip swinging mechanic were super easy to get a hold of we kept playing and playing and there was just so much variety here I was amazed at how much they were able to fit into an 8 Meg cartridge and we had barely even gotten inside the castle so I just surmised that it must be easier to put more data and better data in the same amount of space on the Super Nintendo than it is on the Genesis I don't know if that's right but it sure seemed like that back then anyway Tom went home and took his Super NES with him but I got the game later after I purchased my Super Nintendo with Christmas money basically this is a retelling of the first Castlevania Game and isn't an actual sequel to the third game so the title Super Castlevania actually makes more sense than Castlevania 4 but they didn't care they just called it Super Castlevania 4 which is by far the dumbest name of any of the games I'm talking about today since it's a retelling of Castlevania 1 you're playing as Simon Belmont on his quest to defeat Dracula once and for all they censored the international release of this game but I really didn't notice at the time they took out the crucifixes and changed the blood level to a slime level this is because as Americans we're very weak and we just can't handle stuff like this or at least our parents were and they probably would have complained to Nintendo or at least Nintendo thought that they would actually it probably would have all been fine if they had just left it alone another bizarre change is the sound of Simon's whip in the Japanese version it sounds much more like a chain in the North American release it sounds more wishy-washy anyway Simon has the aforementioned limp whip which puts a new Twist on the gameplay he'll come across rings in the stages that he can use to swing across gaps and whatnot it also has the traditional style of play where you collect power-ups in the form of Roman numeral twos and threes this will let you throw two or three of your sub weapons at a time respectively but if you grab a different sub weapon the number resets back to one and as far as sub weapons go you have the weak knife the clock the holy water the ax and the cross of fear which the manual calls the boomerang unlike the real Castlevania one where the holy water is by far the best sub weapon you'll want to stick with the cross of fear for the duration of this game if you can also new here is that this one assigns the sub weapon to its very own button personally I like to change my configuration so that the sub weapon is X instead of R your whip also gets the traditional power-ups with the chandelier icon actually it's not a chandelier but I always thought it was the manual calls it a Morning Star and it's a sword with two snakes wrapped around it I think the control in this game feels super precise I never feel like I'm not in total control if I die it's because I wasn't being careful enough or I didn't figure out an enemy pattern yet everything about the control is spot on I absolutely love the feeling of being able to whip in all eight directions I also love moonwalking up the stairs the stage design is very interesting here as the level bosses aren't always at the end of the level for example Medusa who's the boss of stage 2 appears about two-thirds of the way in and when you get to the end of stage 2-3 you just walk off the screen and go to stage three moreover some levels even have multiple boss fights the enemy and boss patterns are very easy to predict after you've played it a few times and honestly this game is easier than the first three games but the dungeon stage does offer up a pretty good challenge as its instant death if you touch any of these spiky things as far as the visuals go they're excellent especially for their time you've got a wide variety of stage design each with tons of colors on screen simultaneously of course they've got to show off some of the Super Nintendo special features so you have a bit of transparency here and there as well as scaling and rotation you even have this curvy room which absolutely blew me away at the time but this is where the game slows down the most as it's probably taxing the CPU quite a bit the music is even better with the orchestral sounds I mentioned earlier not every piece is a symphony though and there's some fantastic and quite catchy stuff [Applause] [Music] six [Music] it all does an outstanding job of setting the mood in the game truly one of the best soundtracks on the console that really shows off with the Super Nintendo can do though I have to admit I'm not super fond of the music in the treasury but yeah that's just me [Music] effects are outstanding as well I had never heard sound like this in a game at the time I first played this one the game itself is fairly long for a platformer with a bunch of different stages disappointingly Dracula's second form looks almost exactly like his first once you beat the game it sets you back to stage one to do it all again and it seems to Loop infinitely overall this one is really easy to pull off the shelf and play it doesn't have a steep learning curve and it's probably the most accessible Castlevania game out there [Music] foreign [Music] all right so the bar has been set really high right off the bat and it'd be a couple of years before we'd see castlevan again but we'd get two Castlevania games in 1993. the first of which would only be released for a personal computer in Japan [Music] foreign the next Castlevania game that would be made would be akumachi Dracula for the shark x68000 computer system in Japan in mid-1993. like Super Castlevania 4 this one is a remake of the original game yep that's right for the very next Castlevania game they just had to go and remake the first one again but this one feels like a George Lucas special edition compared to an all-new reimagining like Super Castlevania 4 was a lot of the original stages are here like the first stage which is almost identical boss fight and all Medusa's stage is also here with the same Rusty red color but there are many more news stages wedged in between once again you're Simon Belmont on your way to take down Dracula everything here is as basic as it gets and follows all of the 8-Bit rules and by that I mean you have extremely stiff and unforgiving controls you have respawning enemies so if you kill an enemy and come back to where he usually lives there he is again who doesn't love that pressing up an attack uses your sub weapon and once again you can get multipliers for your sub weapons oh and this game hates you it's extremely unforgiving stage design and enemy placement are perhaps the most brutal in the entire series Plus usually you can only take four hits before you die in fact the difficulty kind of reminds me of haunted castle the Castlevania arcade game from 1988. this one has probably the cheapest gameplay of any Castlevania game ever and maybe even the weirdest Graphics too this game gives you only one life and a few continues it's a very clumsily made game but hey at least the music is great foreign [Music] the sharp x68000 game here feels like a thoroughly refined version of that one in a lot of ways it's still cheap but at the same time gives you way more of a chance to avoid getting hit your whip gets powered up like the previous game but often they spread those whip power-ups a ways apart you're able to attack straight down and diagonally down though still underneath all of this is a great game the stages are extremely fun to explore even if at times they make you want to scream at the game's designers the graphics are really nice and feature some cool scaling and rotation effects here and there and it goes without saying that the Parallax scrolling is fantastic you know I like this the music has tons of great Melodies and you can even choose different versions of it if you own the midi modules [Music] thank goodness this game allows you to save your progress I just wish you had more lives even though it offers unlimited continues and speaking of lives there's hardly any wall meet at all in this game so once your life meter starts going down good luck getting it back up that's what she said you can get this game on the PlayStation as Castlevania Chronicles and it has a cooler ranged mode with some slight graphical upgrades and CD quality arranged music it also has the original mode which is how I'm playing it here today as a 16-bit Castlevania game is far from the best but it's one of the three Castlevania games that were in development simultaneously at Konami foreign [Applause] that's right there were three Castlevania games being developed simultaneously in fact probably more if you count the Game Boy versions but anyway the second one of these would also only be released in Japan but that didn't stop magazines around the world from talking about it [Music] foreign Dracula X Chino Rondo also known as Castlevania Rondo of Blood was released for the PC engine super CD system in October of 1993. at the time all of the magazines simply called it Dracula X yes the letter X makes everything cooler I pre-ordered this one before it was released in Japan but I missed out on the initial batch that die hard game club got in but I was able to get my copy in the second batch which arrived shortly thereafter and holy hell did Konami step things up with this entry it's hard not to be blown away immediately when playing this one even more so back in the day when it was released and I certainly was blown away I was also the only one of my friends who had a turbo graphic CD and I told them that it had quite possibly the best Castlevania game ever two or three of them came down one of them was Dave they were all blown away as well and we spent many different nights going through every nook and cranny of the game until we reached 100 completion and there's a lot to explore this is Castlevania at its Rost and at the same time as most find this time around you're playing as a Richter Belmont who's a direct descendant of Simon gone are the whip power-ups gone are sub weapon power-ups in fact once you grab a sub weapon you're as powerful as you'll get in the game but you do have a few extra powers to make up for it if you have enough hearts in stock you can press the select button and do an item crash which is basically a super move based on the sub weapon that you have if you try to do an item crash without a sub weapon you get a quick flaming whip there's also a backwards flip that you can do which is more useful than you initially think it might be and of course you can moonwalk early on in the game you get a key that replaces your sub weapon you need to hold on to it for a few rooms because you'll need it to rescue Maria once you do this she becomes a playable character she's way more cutified than Richter is even her attacks are cute with a pair of doves instead of Conventional Weapons her sub weapons are usually living creatures and instead of the typical Castlevania wall meet her health is restored by Castlevania wall candy or wall shakes she also has a double jump which is fantastic but on the downside she can't take as much damage as Richter can she's definitely the game's easy mode but don't write her off completely because you'll actually need her to see all of the game's stages speaking of which the stages in the game are bigger than you think and exploration is encouraged one thing that I really like is that the Bottomless Pits aren't always bottomless like they are in the other games you'll often end up in a new area to explore there are ways to find alternate paths and these can lead to new stages you otherwise can't get to some areas require Maria's double jump to access as a result many stages have two different bosses defeat the secondary boss and you'll go on to Stage 2 dash for example and once you've unlocked the stage you can choose to play it as either character in The Game's main menu there's just so much to explore here and you can really tell that they were absolutely serious about this game during the design process the control is really nice though you no longer have a multi-directional whip at all what is new though is that now you can jump on and off of stairs you could kind of drop off stairs and jump onto them in Super Castlevania 4 but it wasn't until this game that the technique was perfected another thing that's new is that if you have a sub weapon and accidentally pick up another one the previous one drops out allowing you to recollect it if you wanted to keep the old one instead this right here made me want to stand up and scream thank you to Konami for including this speaking of which while the cross of fear is again the best sub weapon the others can and do serve a purpose in some parts of the game you use them by pressing up and attack just like the original games and unlike Super Castlevania 4. [Music] it goes without saying that the graphics in this game are just outstanding they are way better than we've ever seen in any Castlevania game until now featuring lots of subtle details if you take the time to look closely from character and enemy designs to backgrounds absolutely nothing disappoints you've got a half eaten Beast trying to kill you bats with freaking swords skeletons with rifles and even a naked dude there's also a ton of Parallax scrolling all done on Hardware that doesn't even natively support that feature again they really went all out on this game this was one dedicated development staff and that includes the music which is of course CD quality with a ranged Tunes from previous games as well as lots of new Melodies all of them very memorable [Music] sound effects are crazy [Applause] of course there are some voiced cut scenes here as well vampire Hunter the game as a whole is phenomenal and it's just a shame that it was never released outside of Japan in this day but that's because the turbo Graphics 16 wasn't exactly a big seller and things were beginning to wind down for the platform in the us at the time however in 2007 we got a remake of The Game on the PSP and Konami took the time to translate the PC engine CD version here into English both text and voice that version's translation has been extracted so now you can play Rondo of Blood in English on your very own turbo Duo I am Richter Belmont vampire hunter death to you the world is not yours to exist in it is not by my own power that I am Resurrected it is the greed of humanity which calls me back I should mention that Castlevania Symphony of the Night which is a favorite among many is a direct sequel to this game [Music] has been hyped since its release in 1993 and became fairly expensive to acquire by the time everyone else finally got a chance to play it in 2007 and even in recent releases on more modern platforms people discovered that it still lives up to that hype [Music] thank you [Music] all right Rondo of Blood was and still is an amazing experience and yes I know the PC engine is technically an 8-bit machine but come on it's in the same era so it counts and no that does not mean I'm going to talk about the Game Boy games here but anyway the third game in development at this time was Castlevania bloodlines on the Genesis slash Mega Drive would it turn out to be as good or maybe even a little better [Music] Castlevania bloodlines on the Sega Genesis was released in early 1994. only five short months after Rondo of Blood came out looking at the pictures of the game's prototype in the magazines it really didn't look that good to me in comparison to Rondo of Blood but I was still curious curious enough to rent it anyway and my initial impressions of the game were not that great something seemed off it just wasn't right wasn't rushed did they assign their least skilled programmers and designers to this one there was just so much about it that was different for example you don't even get to play as a Belmont instead you now play as John Morris from Texas and the game takes place in 1917. he's related to Quincy Morris from the Dracula novel and is also related to the Belmonts okay okay so he is technically a Belmont but I guess they were just trying to tie it into the book somehow like Rondo of Blood there's also a second character that you can play as in this game it's Eric lucard but you can choose him right away and you don't have to unlock him or anything at first I thought he was kind of goofy looking and he wielded a very strange spear what a sloppy game this is and it tarnishes the Castlevania name but having said all that something about this game eventually clicked after I bought a copy and once that happened I began to realize just how amazing this game truly is this game changes a lot that's familiar with Castlevania besides the aforementioned protagonist there have been other changes that kind of make the game fit oddly into the series when you whip candles you now collect gems instead of hearts for some strange reason they took the cross of fear weapon and changed it into something that actually looks like a boomerang and there's some mechanized areas and bosses that just doesn't feel like Castlevania but the game does take place in 1917 so it's pretty modern for a Castlevania game also you're traveling all throughout Europe instead of just around and inside of Dracula's castle but I'm telling you if you can get past these things it's pure Castlevania through and through while Jon doesn't have the eight-way whip that Simon did in Super Castlevania 4 he can do a lot more with it than Richter could do with his he can attack diagonally as well as straight down with it during a jump he can also use it to swing over large gaps playing as Eric is a bit different he can attack straight up while standing but can't do any upwards or diagonal attacks while jumping Eric also has a super jump which can be done by pressing down and jump as a result the two characters take ever so slightly different paths through a couple of stages Jon can swing over the Gap here for example Eric can't get over there so he needs to keep super jumping up here which Jon can't do they both end up at the same boss fights though Eric's reaches much longer and generally you should choose to play as Eric if you're less skilled for example in this stage if you play as Jon you need to hop up these moving platforms which can be pretty tricky but if you play as Eric you come in from the top and all you need to do is drop down and go to the right literally no skill needed Eric is The Game's easy mode though it's still not an easy game with him others might argue that he's simply more fun to control than Jon is well I admit he's definitely fun to control but since it's a Castlevania game I've got to choose the whip guy if I can choose a whip guy however the inclusion of Eric here did lead the way to including other non-whip wielding protagonists in future games the subweapon multipliers are still gone but the whip power-ups have made a comeback if you do well you can power your whip or spear to a flaming thingymabob which does some nice damage but it goes away once you get hit there's also item crash like super moves that you can do one of the game's greatest strengths is its stage design although there's not much in the way of exploration everything is extremely well thought out to make sure you keep coming back for more as you figure out the best tactics to get past each part of the stage like this crazy section where it splits up into a weird illusion designed to trick you you've got to keep your eyes on your feet and it's very easy to get confused I absolutely love it once this game clicked with me I simply could not stop playing it's one of those that calls it you to come back and play it when you're away doing something else you think about it a lot when you're not playing it to me that's always a mark of an amazing game the control took a bit for me to get used to but otherwise they're right on the money it just feels like John's whip takes a nanosecond or two longer to hit its Target than previous Castlevania games did this can sometimes be an issue because overall the game plays much faster than the previous games thanks to the power of the genesis's CPU and the blast processing contained therein I always have to change the button layout in the option screen so that c jumps and B attacks but that's just me and the sub weapon has been given its very own button again which is perfectly fine if you press up in the sub weapon button you can get a special attack if you have enough gems unfortunately you can't moonwalk in this game trust me though you should play it anyway epics are mostly quite amazing the colors are done well and there's some really cool effects like this reflection here or the rotation of the statue head as you hit it or the rotation of the Leaning Tower of Pisa because you know that's what the Leaning Tower of Pisa does and evidently it's super tall too or how about this part where the sun is shining into the room using the genesis's Shadow and highlight function but there are some weird things here and there like the way some of the stairs are handled John is placed way too low on the stairs here and it looks like he's going to fall through him just really sloppy in my opinion but there's plenty of blood and gore here especially early on in the game at least in the US and Japan sadly though it was just too scary and it had to be censored elsewhere still overall it's a really nice looking game and it sounds just as good at least musically mishiru yamane who would go on to do the outstanding music for Castlevania Symphony of the Night took the reins here and she did a phenomenal job with tons of well-composed and memorable Tunes foreign [Music] effects While most of them are fine there are a few that are just poorly conceived or implemented is that what it sounds like when crows fly quack quack quack quack quack overall though the game is just amazing and I'm sad to say that it didn't really click with me until fairly recently but I'm glad that it did better late than never I put it up here with the best games on the Genesis and I feel that a lot of people overlook this game because it's on a Sega system but it became very apparent to me that Konami put a ton of effort into this and those who worked on it were proud of what they were making if you don't play this one you are absolutely missing out on one of the best 2D Platformers ever foreign [Music] [Music] bloodlife kicks all sorts of ass but Konami wasn't done with the 16-bit era yet in fact since the turbo Graphics 16 was a complete failure outside of Japan Konami thought maybe we can cook something up on the Super Nintendo to help quench some of that thirst foreign 1995 Rondo of Blood got ported to the Super Nintendo where it was known simply as Castlevania Dracula X this isn't a bad game by any means but as ports go it's not tremendously faithful and it certainly can't live up to the original on the plus side it has lots of new stages which weren't in the PC engine CD game but the gameplay mechanics are mostly intact so at least players outside of Japan could get a taste for example you can still definitely jump onto and off of the stairs and you still have a choice when you pick up a new sub weapon if you want to keep it or not and again there's no power-ups for the Whip and no multipliers for the sub weapons sadly the stages themselves are fairly boring and uninspired the visuals are extremely flat and dull a lot of the enemies return but even though they look good they kind of seem like pale imitations however there are new bosses to fight the cartridge music does its best to match the PC engine CD music and some of the tunes actually come pretty damn close [Music] there are a few alternate paths and stages here but they're relatively easy to find for example just fall off here and you'll go directly to stage 4 dash you don't have to fight a different boss or anything you're just suddenly here oh well it's still way better than being completely linear like I said this is a good game but you can tell that the passion just wasn't there with the Developers foreign [Music] all right that was my super quick overview of the 16-bit era castle video games but now it's time to pick a winner fortunately that's really easy because it's Castlevania Rondo of Blood I mean it has great action great music great graphics great platforming great sound effects everything is just great but what game comes in at number two and more importantly which game is the worst choosing between Super Castlevania 4 and Castlevania Bloodlines is incredibly difficult for me no matter which one of these I choose I feel like I'm overlooking the greatness of the other on one hand Nostalgia plays a huge role in my love for Super Castlevania 4 but even if it weren't for that it remains an amazing game that like I said is extremely easy to pick up and play on the other hand my love for Castlevania Bloodlines has nothing to do with Nostalgia it's certainly not perfect but it does so much right despite the fact that it began Life as a side story to the mainline Castlevania series man this is really tough to choose but I'm gonna have to go with Castlevania Bloodlines due to its really cool stage in enemy design still you really do need to play both games a lot now that leads us to choose which is the worst 16-bit Castlevania Game Castlevania Chronicles as it's now known as pretty stiff and unforgiving Castlevania Dracula X on the Super Nintendo is a very watered down Port of the best Castlevania Game Rondo of Blood but at the same time Castlevania Chronicles is just another remake of the first game however it did have a lot of new stages and I feel that those stages were really creative Castlevania Dracula X also has new stages but many of them are bland and uninteresting much like myself so Castlevania Chronicles wins over Castlevania Dracula X but even Castlevania Dracula X is 50 times better than haunted castle which is the true worst 16-bit Castlevania game habit the best 16-bit ERA Castlevania game is Rondo of Blood followed by Castlevania Bloodlines onto 16-bit Sega Genesis and a very very close number three is Super Castlevania 4. down below we've got Castlevania Chronicles as it's now known and in dead last is Castlevania Dracula X actually it's not dead last because it's way better than haunted castle in the arcade and I don't have an arcade PCB to hold up for you those cost 800 and I have a hard time justifying even spending 25 cents to play that one anyway what's your favorite 16-bit era Castlevania Game do you agree with my list or you think I got it dead wrong let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] foreign [Music] the best Dracula X got me 16 bits 32 000 colors and sweet sampled sound yes I'm the king of all 16-bit area Castlevania games die monster you don't belong in this world it was not by my hand that I'm given silicon I was called here by humans who wish to play with my greatness greatness you steal other games features and make them Bland perhaps the same could be said of all ports your words are as empty as your levels gaming ill needs a version of Dracula X such as you what is a game miserable little pile of code but enough talk how about you foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game SEC this time around I'm talking about all of the 2D Castlevania metroidvania style games and love or hate that term you know exactly the kind of game I'm talking about and if you don't this episode's Gonna Learn you you go back and forth you get new powers you're able to explore new areas of those Powers you know you get the idea and no I don't really consider Castlevania 2 Simon's Quest a proper 2D metroidvania I'll cover that another time but in the meantime I'm gonna look at these in the order that they were released so let's go foreign [Music] 1997 Konami graced the world with Castlevania Symphony of the Night for the Sony PlayStation this is a direct sequel to the PC engine CD game that we all know now as Rondo of Blood which was a japan-only game at the time Koji igarashi worked as a writer and a programmer on the game and helped a bit with its design however during production he took over as co-director and he'd be key to the series future when I first played this game I was totally blown away that they let you fight the final boss battle from Rondo of Blood right at the beginning though obviously it's much easier now and while Rondo of Blood had ripped her right away on his horse after the battle this one does things differently you're now playing Dracula's son Alucard and you're on a mission to thwart your dad's evil you're no longer dealing with stages per se but this game is divided up into several connected areas they even added lots of RPG elements like leveling up acquiring and equipping items and weapons and storing Health items you also gain new abilities as you progress most areas are inaccessible until you get the correct ability like being able to double jump high enough to reach a certain ledge or turning into a Mist in order to fly through Gates you can even turn into a weird wolf thing and a bat to fly around freely just as long as you have enough magic points or MP for short to tie it all together you have a map that's accessible with the select button so you can keep track of your progress you don't use your typical whip here but instead you have tons of different weapons and you can equip different ones in each hand though some weapons require both hands to hold them you also have sub weapons like in the previous Castlevania games and even some original ones like Rondo of Blood if you pick up another sub weapon you have a chance to get the old one back again as it just plops out onto the floor for a bit [Music] exploring this game is extremely fun and I get hooked every time I play this game in fact I've completed both the Japanese and the US version several times before this game came out I didn't think that I would enjoy it because I like Castlevania just fine the way it was but boy was I wrong I love just relaxing and taking my time exploring I loved being able to save and come back later I love the Fast Travel warp rooms and I really love the new abilities that I'd get it's super fun to backtrack to areas you've already been to to see if there was something that you missed or couldn't previously get to I remember spending quite a bit of time with the game and getting really close to 100 and fighting what I thought might be the final boss but then the game turned upside down on me literally now I had an upside down Castle to explore with new monsters and the map completion actually goes up to just over 2 200 percent that just goes to show you how good the design of this game is because each area had to be made to be explored in two different ways the graphics and sound presentation is fantastic if you didn't think the PlayStation could do 2D very well this game proved you wrong everything is vibrant well drawn and animated nicely there's lots of transparency effects to make things look well beyond the 16-bit days same with some rotation effects for multi-limbed enemies and even some scaling effects here and there and there's plenty of Parallax scrolling to add some needed depth the industry was really trying to kill 2D gaming in the 32-bit era but this one was having none of that artist ayami Kojima did the illustrations for the game and I love them even if she got Richter totally wrong as he clearly does not have long hair like her illustration does but whatever and the game does recycle a lot of enemy Sprites from Rondo of Blood but in its defense it has a ton of new ones too of course it goes without saying that the soundtrack is one of the best in that entire generation mishiro yamane who previously worked on Castlevania Bloodlines and Rocket Knight Adventures really came through here with perhaps the best work of her life there are lots of different musical tracks and they range from excellent to absolutely outstanding [Music] all right and I've got to at least briefly mention the wonderful voice acting that this game provided you seem human and yet what do you hear this was also ported to the Saturn in Japan only unfortunately the results were not very good as it had a lot of dithered graphics and tons of slowdown it did add a few brand new areas to explore though you could also play as Richter right away and it even added the ability to play as Maria I've covered the differences in this one previously so check out episode 184 piss poor ports if you want all of the details but I had to mention it here is I wanted to include all of the 2D Castlevania games in this genre suffice it to say Symphony of the Night on the PlayStation is one of my favorite games ever and apparently I'm not the only one who liked it and bought it as Konami would go on to make many more games in this style [Music] oh yeah [Music] curiously all of the metroidvania titles after Symphony of the Night would only appear on handheld game systems and that might be because 2D games are deemed too primitive to appear on mainstream consoles I don't know but just because they're portable doesn't mean they weren't awesome Castlevania circle of the moon was a launch title for the Game Boy Advance in mid-2001 and it's the second metroidvania game in this one you play as a gentleman by the name of Nathan graves in the beginning your master is kidnapped by Dracula you along with your friend Hugh set out to look for him separately of course I remember getting this the same day I got my original Game Boy Advance I was so stoked to have it and I played the entire thing to 100 on that non-backlit screen the first thing to note is that this game was made by Konami studio and Kobe and Koji igarashi didn't work on it at all but the team did heavily base everything on Symphony of the Night as you'd expect it mostly plays quite well though the controls sometimes feel a hair stiff your main buttons jump in attack and you can press up an attack to use your sub weapons like the knife the ax holy water and cross of fear the L and R triggers are for your special abilities as you make your way through the game you'll collect items which unlock these abilities such as being able to smash through stone blocks or maybe jump onto and bounce off of a wall using these abilities often requires you to press the art button at the appropriate time when you want to use them there's also the card system some enemies will drop cards after you defeat them or you'll simply find them lying around in the menu you can mix and match these to gain certain abilities like maybe a flaming whip which is actually weaker than the normal whip but it looks cool I guess the one that I really like increases your attack power by 25 percent another increases it even more depending on how much of the map you've uncovered you can turn these on and off by pressing the L button when they're on it eats up mp which is the blue bar underneath your life bar of course you find items to increase the amounts of Hearts you can carry your overall HP as well as your overall MP enemies also drop items that can be worn on your body or your arms which will have different effects on your stats curiously the whip you start out with is the main weapon in the game and the only way to make it better is of course to level up the whip itself is pretty straightforward literally though you can hold down the attack button to make it spin for a weaker attack all he has to do is put some LEDs on that thing and he reminds me of some of the kids in my neighborhood and naturally there are also items to collect which can help heal or cure you [Music] the areas are pretty big but very basic in their overall design many rooms are built to be explored vertically there are of course save rooms and warp rooms scattered all over the place and it's always a good idea to spend some time grinding if you find a convenient place near a safe room like Symphony of the Night you'll spend a lot of time backtracking once you get new abilities to explore the places that you couldn't before a lot of enemies are recycled from Symphony of the Night in Rondo of Blood and this is something that we'll see in all of the other metroidvania games and honestly I'm mostly fine with that there are some new ones here though like this stupid electric skeleton you also get tiny bits of story here and there as you play but it's certainly no literary Masterpiece overall the game took me about 16 hours to completely finish 100 and let me tell you that's a lot of time to spend without the benefit of a backlight it can feel kind of tough here and there but honestly it's not overly Difficult by any means and it sure is fun [Music] game is fairly basic even for the Game Boy Advance that doesn't mean us bad but you can definitely tell it's an early game for the system the animation is extremely stiff with very few frames even on your own character later on in the game the enemies get bigger and have more dazzling effects applied to them and there's even a bit of scaling and rotation here but it's used quite sparingly the stages themselves rarely stand out the music by sotaro tojima and Hiroshi matsuoka is pretty awesome though however most of it is just rearrangements of music from past games with very little original stuff foreign is just straight up lifted from one of the older games with no change at all like the title screen music [Music] as a result it takes away a lot of uniqueness from this game's identity also many of the tunes cover multiple areas so it feels like there's much less music overall than you'd expect but still it's good stuff and the arrangements are great sadly it all sounds extremely grainy due to poor use of the Game Boy advance's pwm sound Hardware though interestingly it's the only Castlevania Game On The Game Boy Advance that's actually in Stereo overall it's a good adventure and while it certainly can't match Symphony of the Night I was still stoked to have a game like this on my Game Boy Advance foreign [Music] got a pretty good start with its outings on the Game Boy Advance but igarashi wanted back in does that mean it was going to get even better thank you Castlevania Harmony of dissonance came a little over a year later arriving in 2002 also for the Game Boy Advance Koji igarashi returned to the series with this game as producer and you can most certainly tell for the most part it seems like a tiny version of Symphony of the Night this game takes place 50 years after Castlevania on the NES or any of its remakes you play as Juiced Belmont or is it justy oh hell I like Juiced better so Juiced it is and Simon Belmont's your granddaddy in fact you have the very same whip that Simon used in Castlevania one and even Super Castlevania IV I mean can't you tell just by looking at it anyway one of your girlfriends has been kidnapped so you and Maxim start exploring the castle to recover her of course you do it separately and of course you're gonna have to fight Maxim later it's all very predictable the gameplay system has changed quite a bit compared to Circle Of The Moon for one it's more balanced and the levels are designed much better it's way more fun exploring this Castle it does seem floaty when directly comparing it to Circle Of The Moon though but you'll get used to it fairly quickly once again your whip is the only attack weapon that you have but it can be upgraded with stones you can kind of wiggle your whip around like in Super Castlevania 4. there's even a stone that you can attach if you want the spinny whip from circle of the Moon again you still have all of the same sub weapons new to this game though are the spell books if you turn these on and use a sub weapon you get an item crash-like effect which can be devastating but it can sure eat up a lot of magic points if you use a different spell book you get different effects for each sub weapon and these are all fun to see there are lots more item types here as well as money to collect just like in Symphony of the Night and yes there's even a shop where you can buy some stuff there's also multiple castles to travel through and of course multiple endings [Music] the game is super fun to play and like I said very well designed in fact it makes circle of the Moon seem kind of amateurish by comparison there's lots of little details here like collecting Furniture scattered throughout the castle you then set up a room with set Furniture just to make it more homey this of course is optional you've also got some really good enhancements to help you get around stuff like a double jump slide super jump and things of that nature you know the usual stuff you don't turn into any bats or fog but that's okay what's interesting is that there seems to be fewer save rooms and teleport rooms than what you'd expect as a result you'll need to be careful because you can get pretty far from a save room and you don't know when you'll get to the next one unless you've uncovered it already this game is pretty short and it only takes about eight hours if you're not going for a 100 completion it could be longer but honestly I'm not complaining [Music] graphically the game is a huge leap over circle of the Moon the stages have lots of cool details all over the place I like the flashing lightning here where sometimes it'll show a monster and sometimes it doesn't there's also much more here in terms of scaling rotation and transparency effects which in turn makes the game feel more advanced yeah I know sorry but it really was the best word to use there's even some nice multi-jointed enemies everything is really bright and colorful and this is because the Game Boy Advance didn't have a backlit screen at the time this is also the reason why Juiced Maxim and even some enemy characters have an ugly outline around them and I've never liked those damn outlines I mean I was able to play through circle of the Moon just fine without any of these dumb outlines musically the game is incredibly boring in fact I'd say it's the worst sounding Castlevania game ever the sound quality is 8-bit at best there's only one good musical selection maybe two michiru yamane only did three tunes for this game why they didn't just have her compose the entire game as Beyond me actually I know why she didn't and I'll get to that when I talk about the next game but the music being so dull and uninteresting really does bring the game down a notch as a whole the cartoony colors and the outline certainly don't help either still though it's a good game and it's definitely worth your time [Music] all right okay so the second installment on the Game Boy Advance was definitely better than the first in most ways not so much in the others but do you think they can knock it out of the park for the next installment the answer is absolutely yes [Music] Castlevania Arya of Saro was released in 2003 and would be the third and final Castlevania game for the Game Boy Advance this one was actually in development alongside Harmony of dissonance for a time it is the year 2035 and you are Soma Cruz you're visiting a shrine to view the total eclipse naturally the eclipse causes Dracula's castle to appear and you find yourself waking up just outside of it the story is cheesy but it's actually kind of cool too you'll run into a lot more bits of stories you play this one compared to the previous games that's because there are many more characters to interact with first off you have a ton of different weapons to find or buy just like in Symphony of the Night it's always fun seeing how a new weapon feels to kill enemies and once you find one you like it's hard to give it up for a stronger yet slower or more Awkward one this game also introduces the Tactical Soul system as he defeated enemies sometimes you'll acquire their souls and you can use these tactically basically you have three slots and each slot lets you switch out certain powers some are for attack since you don't have your standard sub weapons here another might provide a special ability when holding down the R button like being able to float for a while third are the effects that are always on like being able to walk on water this is a cool system and it's not complicated at all it's also really fun to mess around with and it's far better than the systems in the previous two games of course you have tons of items to acquire to help your attack defense and magic abilities [Music] the control is excellent and it doesn't feel floaty at all like Harmony of dissonance kinda did everything is super responsive well unless you have a big heavy weapon or something the stage design is even better than Harmony of dissonance secret rooms are back and it's up to you to find them and reap the benefits of anything they may hold however I'm not a huge fan of the map and by that I don't mean the castle layout I mean the actual map screen I prefer my map to look like this instead of this it really is a very very minor gripe and I can still see where I need to go but I just don't think it's as clear as the normal style maps in fact that's probably my biggest complaint with the game it tells you how good it is well it's also kind of short at around 10 hours or so unless you're a completionist but really for me that's fine however there are additional modes to play after you beat it for example you can play as Julius he's a Belmont that runs around very quickly with his whip he doesn't level up and he can't use items or change out any of his equipment he also doesn't gain any new abilities he has everything he needs right from the start he's strong enough to get the job done if you can stick with him it's good for an additional mode but playing a Soma is where the true meat of the game is and it is quite media indeed as far as the graphics and sound presentation go Koji igarashi definitely listened to the feedback he received from Harmony of dissonance he made sure the graphics were as good or better and they most certainly are that's right no more glowing outlines around any of the characters the colors are mostly still bright but they're a bit less cartoony for sure and finally the screen doesn't scroll wildly every time you jump like it did in the past two games well in the vertically scrolling area as it can but it's definitely been toned down the music and sounds have been hugely improved michiri yamane was the primary composer here since this game shared development time with Harmony of dissonance she couldn't devote as much time to that one and it certainly shows the different musical selections truly do enhance your enjoyment as you play and give each area a unique personality the sound quality of the music is also much better though you'll still hear some of that Game Boy Advance fuzziness [Music] the sound effects themselves are worth mentioning as well as they're pretty beefy when you kill certain enemies it's amazing how these games just kept getting better and better each year and they were all completely new games I truly feel that Arya of Sorrow is one of the best games on the Game Boy Advance [Music] [Music] back then we were getting yearly installments into the Castlevania franchise life was awesome but we'd have to wait nearly two years to get the next one because it was going to be on the new system called the DS [Music] Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow is the direct sequel to Arya of sorrow and this time it's on the Nintendo DS this game takes place a year later and as far as you know you don't have your powers anymore but then suddenly an evil lady from a cult appears and attacks you and you realize that yes you still do have your powers though of course you'll still need to level them all back up otherwise you just rip through this game the story is less interesting this time around but needless to say you're back inside the castle trying to stop the cult since it's on the DS a few things about the gameplay have been slightly altered or enhanced most of what you loved about Arya of Sorrow is in here including the Tactical Soul system though now that screen is Consolidated with your regular equipment screen instead of being its very own menu item and since there are more buttons on the DS you soon get the ability to toggle between two sets of equipment and soul setup simply by pressing the x button this can be convenient for equipping a heavier slower sword that you only need to use here and there or equipping the standard floaty magic to get over a big gap and then flipping back to an attack magic you get the idea in addition the a button will do a special attack with your main weapon at the expense of some MP you can now also enhance your weapons to make them stronger this is pretty easy to do and not complicated at all there's also something here about freeing Souls that I'd never quite understood so I just never bothered with it and it didn't seem to affect me in the long run since it's a DS game the map lives on the top screen while everything else takes place on the lower screen this is awesome because you don't need to keep stopping and pressing select to look at the map just to figure things out and yes the map is the same style as the one from Arya of Sorrow you can toggle this to show Soma's stats as well which is handy when you find a place to grind for experience [Music] once again the control is generally excellent and the game is really fun to play however it uses the DS touchscreen and that really brings it down in my opinion for example you soon get the ability to break ice blocks by touching the screen this isn't too bad but it certainly doesn't enhance the Gameplay at all but the worst part are the Seals a pattern appears on screen and you need to draw it to complete certain things like finishing off bosses if you fail the boss fight will continue and eventually you'll get another chance to do it again and it'll go on forever until you get it right I feel that this is just dumb and it detracts big time from the fun you'll have what's even worse is that as the game goes on you'll collect several of these seals and they get more and more complex there's also this room puzzle where you can use either the touch screen or the d-pad to arrange the rooms in the proper order personally I'm not really a fan of slide puzzle so I didn't have much fun here but hey at least I'm not forced to use the touch screen the game same length is roughly the same as the last one at around 10 hours or so [Applause] [Music] girls have taken a huge huge step up there's tons more color and detail everywhere now I like how the snow falls off of the cars in the intro stage there's even a bit of 3D geometry here and there in some of the backgrounds and tons of enemies are multi-jointed with rotating Limbs and cool effects Soma looks even better now and his animation has been improved even though it was already pretty good and not to mention tons of Parallax scrolling all over the place which makes it look like a little PlayStation or Saturn game everything just looks outstanding the art style for the cutscenes is different though and seems dumbed down ayami Kojima who usually does the illustrations wasn't used at all here this was actually intentional as they wanted to attract a bigger audience I guess the Bare Bones anime look was considered to be the best way to achieve this goal they don't look awful but I really do miss kojima's work the music is outstanding and it's much cleaner now since the DS can basically play back standard MP3 files for its music I don't know if that's what they did here in this particular game but they could have if they wanted to foreign the sound effects are often really cool too overall this is a fantastic game but the touch screen Shenanigans do bring it down somewhat [Music] foreign if it weren't for those pesky touch screen gimmicks I might even say Dawn of Sorrow is as good if not better than Arya of sorrow but just as they did with the Game Boy Advance Konami kept spitting these out again and again next up is Portrait of ruin in 2006 Castlevania portrait of Ruin came out on the DS at this point the series was starting to get a little repetitious so they decided to change some things up some things really helped but other things well I could take them or leave them this one takes place in 1944 and is actually the follow-up to Castlevania bloodlines on a 16-bit Sega Genesis you play as Jonathan Morris the son of the whip dude from Castlevania Bloodlines except that you don't have the power to use the whip yet so in the meantime you use lots of other weapons like summer Cruise in previous games you're accompanied by Charlotte and by pressing X you can switch between them at any time by pressing a the other character will appear and help you on screen fortunately they both level up at the same time no matter who you use they have special abilities like combining to perform a super powerful attack you may need one character to stay in place while pushing with the other then switch characters in order to get high enough eventually you get a dollar store version of the double jump feature where you need to bounce off of the other character's shoulders don't worry you get a normal double jump later this all adds some very slight puzzle elements that certainly aren't hard to figure out but they really didn't do much for me but they don't bring the game down either another new thing is that this game has a main castle and many different portraits that you can enter these all have your own maps to complete and bosses to kill all in all you have up to one thousand percent of the map to discover since the paintings can be anything the designers were not restricted to the typical Castle setting which is really a breath of fresh air I actually love this idea the main Castle acts as kind of a hub world of sorts and you expand upon it once you gain all of the abilities from ruining each portrait yeah I went there [Music] once again the game is presented with the map living on the top screen and everything else below however they went back to the original style of maps for this game and I prefer that this time you have two characters that you need to worry about equipping with stuff as a result there's a lot more things that can be equipped I kind of like this lots of stuff can be equipped by either character but other stuff can only be equipped by one or the other this one also introduces some optional side quests assigned by a ghost named wind to add a bit of beef to the experience one thing that I noticed is that it's a touch harder to grind in this game as the enemies don't seem to give out as much experience this makes the game feel tougher overall but I still think it's fair for the average gamer the best Improvement here though is that there's no touch screen nonsense required you do have to draw an emblem when you start the game but that's certainly no big deal thank you Konami [Music] visually the game remains great the added environments in each painting help give the game some variety as expected there are lots of reused Sprites here there are a few polygonal enemies here and there but not a ton and there's even more in the way of polygons in the background this time but again it's a fairly rare sight and of course the music is once again amazing mishiro yamane did it again but even yuzo koshiro stopped by on his way home to add a few tracks yeah [Music] I found this game immensely fun and very tough to put down the variety really helps and the presentation is all around as good as it can get on the system this is definitely one of the better entries that Koji igarashi has made [Music] foreign I've got to say that I really did enjoy portrait of Ruin however this next game would be the final Castlevania game that Koji igarashi would ever produce though I doubt he knew it at the time let's take a look [Music] finally in 2008 we got Castlevania order of Ecclesia once again on the Diaz this one takes place back in the 1800s and once again there have been plenty of changes for this installment you play a shinoa who's A Shard binder oops actually you're a glyph binder or something like that I really didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the stories honestly it's not very interesting this time around the game is all about glyphs you can absorb them after defeating enemies or sometimes even find them just hanging around waiting for you you can equip these and they become your weapons there are a bunch of different weapons just like the other games and some are quick and others are slow you can assign a weapon to the Y and the x button either the same weapon or two different ones if you alternate pressing the buttons even slow weapons can become pretty fast which is nice you can also install a glyph for a special move like this magnetic thing which can fling you in certain directions there are now a bunch of tutorials which slow down the pace but fortunately they're pretty quick when you use an ability or even attack it'll use up mp that's right even attacking uses up your magic points fortunately if you stop attacking for a bit it'll refill pretty fast by pressing up an attack you use up hearts and this will result in a special attack based on whatever glyphs you have equipped there's a village that basically acts as a hub world for the game everyone's been kidnapped for some reason and you need to find and rescue them oh and don't forget to rescue their cats too once they're back in the village they can help you out the shop has some really expensive stuff to buy oddly you now select your stage with the map screen all of the stages add up to 100 map completion [Music] right off the bat this is definitely the toughest one of these games most enemies barely give any experience points and even the most basic ones are damaged sponges there are a few good places to grind but not many and it takes a while and you don't power up much when you do level up but you'll have to do it otherwise you stand absolutely no chance you can't take much damage and the healing items that you can buy don't restore much help the stages themselves aren't very interesting some areas just have you run to the right and there's really nothing to find or even any bosses to fight they're just there I'm also not a fan of the equipment menu some items are listed twice even though you definitely only have one and some are different colors than others the good news though is that once again there are absolutely no touch screen gimmicks forced on you [Music] graphically order of Ecclesia excels even though you get a lot of recycle Sprites everything still looks incredible I love the lights and the shadows in the prison stage or the crazy waves in the colitis Channel it might even be enough to make some people motion sick The Sound and Music are good but I've got to say that nothing here really stands out it's certainly nowhere near as bad as Harmony of dissonance but it feels like maybe there was some creative burnout happening in fact that's what the entire game feels like I don't blame them I mean they were pumping these out left and right as a player I was getting burnt out at this time too I remember saying to myself that after I beat this one I'm done with these games for quite some time unfortunately these games didn't exactly end on the best Note but that said it's not exactly a bad game by any means this is the worst game in this episode and if the worst is this good I'll certainly take it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] well there you go every 2D Castlevania game in the Metroid style for you so how do I rank them well gotta say that Symphony of the Night is still my favorite it's incredibly awesome I mean it may just be because it's on a console that hooks up to your TV but hey my favorite's my favorite however my next favorite is Arya of sorrow and they just did an incredible job on this one and I think a lot of people agree next favorite portrait of Ruin I didn't really ruin much with this one it's not the best but hey it's still good my least favorite order of Ecclesia is that how you pronounce it well it is now Ecclesia this one is not my favorite that doesn't mean it's a bad game at all it's just the worst 2D Castlevania Metroid game in my opinion what's your opinion how do you rank them let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] foreign [Music] monster you don't belong in this world you're lying man I don't think so oh come on I'll play [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello and welcome to game set it's time to finish up my series on the Castlevania games so far I've covered the 8-Bit games the 16-bit games and the metroidvania games not necessarily in that order but you get the idea anyway this episode focuses on the rest of them many of them are 3D but surprisingly not all of them oh and I won't be covering the phone games or the Pachinko games or the weird 2009 arcade game mainly because I have no way to play them much less record video from them well actually I can do one phone game anyway with that said let's get going and I'll be taking a look at them in the order they were released here's Castlevania from Konami it's on the Nintendo 64. that's right it's not called Castlevania 64 just Castlevania Konami actually thought this game was good and or important enough to supplant the original don't you hate it when Publishers movie studios do that such hubris it rarely ever turns out well either anyway this game was released in early 1999. as you can see this is the first 3D game for the series it starts off okay and almost kind of promising you play as Reinhardt Schneider or Carrie Fernandez taking care of Dracula as the Belmonts do every 100 years or so the Belmonts are absolutely sick of doing that though so it's time for the schneiders and the Fernandez's of the world to stand up to the challenge the control is okay though it requires use of a lock onto Target and hit your enemies the lock-on is generally automatic for the most part fortunately sadly when enemies or candles drop items the game requires you to press a dedicated button to pick them up why why can't I just run through them and automatically collect them like every other game ever made who sat down and thought you know the player would really enjoy it more if they had to manually collect each item with the Press of a button as you can guess the camera is a major problem with this game there are three different camera modes normal action and battle they all suck but I found the action one to be the least sucky but only by a little bit oftentimes the camera is forced and you can't switch it like when fighting a boss I love how far the camera puts me away from my dude as I try to whip these things breathing blue fire on me platforming is also often an issue here you're supposed to climb down these platforms jump across the river and then climb up the platforms on the other side I died here and when I say that I mean I died a lot fortunately there's a safe Point pretty close you spend the first part of the game outside looking for switches to open Gates super fun stuff as you can imagine when you get inside it gets a little better there are Scrolls to find in some areas and these will summon the shop I suggest buying lots of healing items if you can afford them there's also a day and night mechanic where some characters won't show up if it's not the right time you can collect certain cars to adjust the time if you want to if you take longer than 16 in-game days to play through the game you'll get the bad ending so don't take time and smell the roses you gotta rush rush rush not like you want to spend very long playing this one anyway you only get one life before a game over so be sure to save everywhere you can I found myself trying again and again despite the overall clumsy design so at least that says a little something positive about this title while it does feature some Castlevania Staples here and there the game reminds me way more of Silent Hill and not a good Silent Hill the graphics are okay for the system and are pretty much what you'd expect the music is pretty good when it plays but it often doesn't the sound quality of everything is pretty good for a cartridge game and soon the land will again be plunged Into Darkness so is this game as bad as everyone says no there's actually some enjoyment to be had here is it a good game also no especially if you have other games that you could be playing instead foreign [Music] [Music] Legacy of darkness is also for the Nintendo 64. this was also released in 1999 but at the end of the year this is more of an expansion pack slash DLC for the first game rather than a proper sequel you basically run around the same areas you even fight the same bosses there are some new places to explore though the controls are also the same you play as Cornell who can transform into a werewolf this takes place eight years before the other N64 game that I just talked about you're off to rescue your sister Ada from the clutches of evil she is to be sacrificed to awaken Dracula this game takes advantage of the expansion pack giving you the choice of low or high resolution I recommend choosing the low resolution I'm serious the game runs faster and feels more responsive than the previous game if you choose the high resolution mode the edges of the polygons are a little sharper but the game runs out a nearly unplayable frame frame rate very ugly it's seriously not worth it [Music] there have been a few improvements besides the game's overall speed while the camera is still pretty bad they have made things a little bit better here and there like when you're fighting this boss you don't feel like you're as far away and it's much easier to deal with there's also more music instead of just ambient noise in a lot of places the game itself feels much easier than the previous entry I don't recommend this game unless you enjoyed the first it's certainly not worth the full price however if you want a Castlevania game for your Nintendo 64 and you're only going to get one of them get this one overall this still doesn't feel like a Castlevania Game especially since you don't get to play as a character who uses a whip at least not right away once you beat it with the first two characters you can more or less unlock the first game though it's slightly Abridged with some missing voice and cut scenes due to this being a cartridge game oh well foreign [Music] [Applause] while the portable systems would continue to get 2D games the main Big Boy platforms would only get 3D games for a while but how it's much more powerful Hardware like say the PlayStation 2 effect thinks I don't know let's find out four years after the release of the N64 games we got Castlevania lament of Innocence on the PlayStation 2. you play as Leon Belmont and chronologically this game takes place before any of the other Castlevania games an evil vampire is kidnapped your girl and you're off to rescue her suffice it to say you're gonna give Dracula the first major ass weapon of his Immortal Life or will you yeah that's what you'd think but don't get your hopes up the game is much better than the titles on the Nintendo 64. it takes place mostly indoors now which honestly is fine by me that means the camera is less likely to wander and you don't need to worry about the different camera types it's still far from perfect but overall it's much better the control is also certainly better than the Nintendo 64 games Leon feels fluid for the most part though his jump can be a little weird foreign you already have a double jump at your disposal right from the start the game wants you to Parry a lot of attacks with a guard button when things glow purple I never really got into this much but it doesn't bring the game down at all you can also bounce across horizontal poles with your whip which is super weird it usually works okay except when the poles are moving it's really tough to judge exactly where they are and it's easy to miss them this does detract from my enjoyment of the game a little but I don't think it would be an issue if the game were 2D just saying you're still running from place to place finding switches that will open doors that you need to get through some of the rooms will trap you in until you defeat all of the enemies inside once they're defeated if you enter that room again the enemies will all reappear but you don't need to fight them again if you don't want to the rooms are all connected with long boring halls and there are a ton of them most of them look the same there is some backtracking but I wouldn't quite call it a metroidvania the main castle entrance serves as a hub where you can access the five different areas you collect items to upgrade and extend your abilities in life but you don't gain experience in advanced levels like you do in Symphony of the Night I guess that makes it easier to avoid fighting enemies if killing them isn't going to do much for me you do have a shop where you can buy random stuff is this okay each area of the castle is Giant and viewing the map can seem a little weird at first since this is a 3D game but you'll get used to it the visuals aren't bad for the PlayStation 2 though I don't think much here is going to blow you away unfortunately the game only runs in interlaced mode I'm forcing it into 480p here via GSM running on my PS2 and it looks incredible that way sadly that means the full motion videos won't play so you have to skip them I hope someday that the GSM guys can fix that the music on the other hand is extremely good and that is no surprise at all it was handled by meshire yamane who is responsible for Rocket night Adventures oh and Symphony of the Night as well as bloodlines [Music] overall I think this is an enjoyable Adventure I still prefer the 2D games but at least they made a good Castlevania game that works well in 3D thank you foreign [Music] Curse of Darkness was released for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2005. this is the first game in the series to be multi-platform at launch I'm playing on the PlayStation 2 here and I'll explain why this is my preferred version in just a bit here you play as a devil forger named Hector who is decidedly not a Belmont and it takes place three years after Castlevania 3. you're after some dude who killed your woman if you've seen the Castlevania Animated Series this is the same Hector first of all I've got to say that this game feels much snappier as far as the camera is concerned it's not fixed like the one in lament of innocence was you now have pretty much full control over the camera with the right analog stick that's not to say the camera is perfect because it can still get pretty messed up especially during some boss fights Hector also feels a touch more fluid in his attacks and other moves since he's not a Belmont he doesn't use a whip and can equip different weapons throughout his quest in fact it's set up very similar to Symphony of the Night in this regard and yes this time you also level up Hector pushes forward each time he attacks I'm not sure why some games do this but I really wish they wouldn't unfortunately like a lot of games in this area you can get stuck in an animation if you press a button too many times you have to wait for Hector to stop doing whatever he's doing before the controllers returned to you let it be known that this is a feature that I do not enjoy this wasn't as much of an issue in lament of Innocence you have familiars which this game calls IDs they can help you do things like open treasure chests heal you or fight with you they can be leveled up as well and of course there's a shop to buy stuff at you can obtain or buy tickets that will let you warp back to the shop or a save point that you've registered as a point to return to previously the areas are super big and it can take Hector a while to get around them in fact I think they might be a touch too big as many of the areas feel pretty empty the game uses the same map system as found in lament of Innocence but I found myself looking at it more here that's probably because it's easy to get turned around due to the non-fixed camera the graphics are once again pretty good the PS2 version only offers 480i but the Xbox version can run it in 480p however the Xbox version is seriously messed up first of all the game is a lot darker I've actually noticed this on a lot of Xbox games I'm not sure why so many games on this platform tend to be so dark not only that but the text is pretty jaggy and messy looking compared to the PS2 version if that's not enough the entire game has glitched visuals at the bottom and the top of the screen it doesn't matter if you change the settings on your Xbox they're always there granted back in the days of CRTs and early LCDs this would have been drawn to the overscan area but these days it's pretty ugly forcing the PS2 version into 480p with GSM results in a much sharper brighter and better image in fact it blows the Xbox version Away which is really quite surprising the full motion videos even tended to work pretty well in this game when it's forced to 480p but this one crashed on me as it ended can't win them all I guess once again the music by meshire yamane is fantastic in fact I think it's even a bit better than the stuff in lament of Innocence [Music] overall this is another really good game and I think I like it a bit more than lament of Innocence it's not perfect by any means but it's definitely enjoyable [Music] foreign [Music] here's Castlevania judgment which was released in 2008 exclusively for the Wii this one was developed by aiding which was formed from lots of ex-compile staff and well it's a fighting game just what the Castlevania franchise needs in concept it's not a bad idea but in practice this game just doesn't work very well it wants to play like a one-on-one fighting game but the main issue is the camera fighting games even 3D ones need to keep the action on a 2d plane in this game the camera goes all over the place and sometimes the enemy is even standing between you and the camera it's bad the good news though is that at least you can use the GameCube controller lots of characters that you know from throughout the series are here which is what you'd expect but why is Grant from Castlevania 3 now like voldo from Soul Calibur like seriously what the actual hell I want answers Camilla is like Ivy but at least that somewhat makes sense anyway as you can fight you can toss out weapons and even change them by picking up items you can also increase the rate at which you toss them by picking up the number boxes they honestly don't help that much what does help is your super special move which takes off way more than half of your opponent's total life you want to know how to do that special move press a single button that's it most of the time you'll be attacking empty air as you wait for your animations to finish also the guard button doesn't seem very effective at all there's a story mode where you go from opponent to opponent with only one round each the arcade mode is pretty standard and it needs you to win two rounds to advance then there's the castle mode here you go from room to room accomplishing stupid things like defeating all of the enemies or collecting some hearts or whatever then you move on but you can only save after some rooms the graphics are pretty nice for the console and the music features lots of cool Arrangements of familiar Tunes so that's definitely a plus it doesn't save the gameplay though as it's not refined at all I can't really recommend it unless you're just trying to collect as many Castlevania games as you can I don't know we get a brief respite from the 3D games during the wheeze era that's right I'm going to cover a 2d game actually I've got three different 2D games to show you in this episode in 2009 we saw a return to 2D with Castlevania the adventure rebirth for the Wii this digital only title via Nintendo's we wear was developed by M2 makers of the world renowned Gauntlet 4 on the mighty 16-bit Sega Genesis console you play as Christopher Belmont in this remake of the original Game Boy Castlevania game and you can use the GameCube controller to do it too and by remake I mean remake as it Bears very little resemblance to that game there's the rolling eyeballs and maybe a couple of other small things like the way your whip Powers up but that's pretty much it when the whip is at full power it can shoot a projectile which is fun to use but its use is limited this is old school Castlevania for the most part you can only whip horizontally you don't have a dedicated button for your sub weapon and things of that nature the difficulty isn't as brutal as the original games but it's not a walk in the park either there are six levels and there are multiple paths through each so there's definitely some replayability even if there weren't multiple paths you'd still want to play this game again and again because it's excellent the graphics are really nice and went for the Retro look before it started becoming super popular it basically looks like a nice 32-bit 2D game running in 240p with lots of scaling and especially rotation except that this game won't output in 240p in fact if you want the sharpest image from your console be sure to set the system to 4x3 Output in the system settings if you do your image will be decently sharp like this if you leave it set to 16x9 you actually lose horizontal resolution so the image becomes Ultra Soft like this gross I don't know about you but I'd rather it look like this the music is amazing as well and it goes for that FM style sound with lots of samples thrown in for good measure [Music] the large majority of it is arrangements from previous games but when it's this fun to listen to I don't care overall this is a fantastic game and it was great to see the series return to 2D even if only briefly unfortunately the Wii shop is no longer in operation this game was never released physically at least as of the making of this episode as a result it's now impossible to buy this game there is always hope for the future though foreign [Music] Castlevania Harmony of Despair was released digitally on the Xbox 360 in 2010 and on the PS3 in 2011. I'm playing this on the Xbox 360. this is another 2D game but it's decidedly different you're basically on a single huge map running around trying to make it to the boss area you can view the entire thing at once and everything is super tiny I mean look at that you can zoom it in a little so you can see some actual detail but everything is still really small or you can zoom it in all the way the stage is a giant Labyrinth and you have to run back and forth and unlock a few things to progress Everything feels like it moves extremely slowly granted it doesn't help that the Xbox 360 has one of the worst d-pads ever to exist in the history of ever using the analog stick is definitely more responsive but it just doesn't feel right to use an analog stick for a 2d game still that's how I recommend you play this one the most difficult part of the game is actually finding the boss sure you can see them on the map but getting there is a mission unto itself oh and you can't pause the game and you have a limited amount of time there are these things scattered about and this is the only place where you can manage your items here you can equip new clothes and weapons to make yourself a little tougher you can also equip a potion but only one at a time once you use it another doesn't automatically take its place even if you have multiple even when you use a high potion it really doesn't restore much life suffice it to say these item managing stations are few and far between once you finally do make it to the boss you'll be thrilled to discover that they don't have a life bar at all which only adds to the fun of course I'm being a smart ass every boss should always have a life bar still I hope you're ready because the bosses do not go down easily even if you die you keep the money and the items that you collected you can buy new stuff in the shop before you start the game and then equip it right as the game begins graphically it looks pretty nice in 1080P though almost all of the assets have been reused from previously existing games in the series the music is awesome as well and it's rearranged from older games which is fine but you'll spend so much time wandering around the stages that it might grow tiresome after too long the game is probably better with online multiplayer as a single player game it's alright the Xbox 360 version offers online multiplayer whereas the PlayStation 3 version has local co-op overall this one is interesting but not particularly amazing [Music] Castlevania was completely rebooted in 2013 as Castlevania Lords of Shadow for the Playstation 3 Xbox 360 and PC the PS3 was the lead platform during development and that's the version I'm playing here Konami wanted to reboot the franchise without Koji igarashi's involvement and this game from Mercury steam was the one that won out during development hideo Kojima even helped with a few pieces of advice you play as Gabriel Belmont in a game that feels like anything except Castlevania you'll hardly find any castlevanian-ness in this game's world and story until the very end and even then it's like what you do have a whip and you are named Belmont but I've got to be honest I may have had more fun with the Nintendo 64 games than this this one comes from an era where games desperately wanted to be cinematic more than anything else it plays like a combination between god of war and Uncharted with more emphasis on the God of War except that it doesn't do either of those Concepts very well like so many many games at the time you can get stuck in attacking animations which makes the game feel extremely laggy to its credit the game offers a variety of different environments and play Styles like attacking enemies riding on the back of a magic horse who appears out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever oh and there are QuickTime events but these are not done well for example some bosses require finishing moves for no other reason than to toot their cinematic horn like God of War so often does you have to time some button press usually R2 with these moving circles and then press the indicated button and that's what I do but practically every time I mistimed it and had to redo the entire fight I can't tell you how annoying this is and finally getting it right after so many fights was not satisfying at all graphically mint's not horrible for a PlayStation 3 game the frame rate isn't impressive but it's normal for a game from this era on this console the music fits the action I suppose but it doesn't do anything to stand out against the countless other games with full orchestras more concerned with cinematic action than anything so yeah it's not extremely memorable if it weren't for the QuickTime events or if the QuickTime events were competently designed this could have been a really good game just not a Castlevania Game whoever decided QuickTime events should be included single-handedly ruined this game drop foreign [Applause] well we can kind of see how the series is starting to go downhill now however the second game in The Lord of Shadow series is more of a 2d game than the first one will that help things out again I don't know find out together Castlevania Lords of Shadow Mirror fate was released on the 3DS Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in 2013 and on the PC in 2014. the 3DS versions came first and of course the other versions are called HD to signify that their visuals suck a tiny bit less you start out by playing as Gabriel in the tutorial which takes place before the first Lords of Shadow game then you see him impregnate his wife with Trevor who eventually fathers Simon Gabriel didn't know about the pregnancy anyway you started out playing assignment and of course he has a Scottish accent that's not enough I need to see more the gameplay is now in 2.5 D and honestly it's a lot more interesting than the first game not that this game is very interesting mind you in fact it's kind of bland but hey you still get to use a whip you also eventually get to play as a couple of other characters that you may be familiar with this kind of metroidvania-ish so be on the lookout for the entrance to brinstar which is inside Dracula's castle I get it funny right no okay moving on the control is similar to the first Lords of Shadow with a heavy-handed use of the R2 button to do most things and once again you also need to block and Dodge you can get some magic powers like your mom who protects you from enemies and falling Souls the gameplay isn't very fluid but it feels normal for the era once again you have the pushing forward as you attack you gain experience and can level up so that's cool for some reason there are purple Scrolls that you can read that give you experience I'm really not sure how the designers Envision this adding anything to the game as all it requires of you is pressing the R2 button visually the game is Bland lacking color and overall non-descript much like myself in fact some of the enemies look kind of cool though the main character designs are definitely not something I'm a fan of Simon looks way cooler in literally any other Castlevania Game he's in the music is once again trying to be super dramatic and it's still not very memorable but it can be cool and creepy when things are calm like walking beneath these falling Souls thank you overall I enjoyed this a lot more than the first but I still got extremely bored with it after about an hour or so [Music] wow [Music] Konami decided to continue this farce of a sub-series with Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 and 2014 for the Playstation 3 Xbox 360 and PC you're still playing as Gabriel Belmont who is now Dracula the gameplay is similar to the first but now you have different weapons you can switch to like a sword to steal life from enemies and Claws to bust through some Tough Armor and shields the combat is still great magnitudes of suck though it relies heavily on blocking and there are very few games with the block button that I enjoy and this is not one of them again like many games of this era the controls don't feel fluid since the game has animations to process which seems to take the priority you can shape-shift into different things to get around like a rat to get into various nooks and crannies or a Mist to pass through bars and whatnot you can even briefly possess enemies if you need them to do something so you can make progress it even adds a camera that you can actually control it's okay it's certainly not great but I am happy that they give you some control this game features a lot more exploration and I kind of like that I just don't like the combat especially with the drawn out boss fights the QuickTime events are still here and I still hate them if the overall story wasn't already weird enough it gets even weirder when you jump ahead a thousand years to Modern Times visually the game does have some nice splashes of color here and there but on the whole it's still very dark some of the enemies are gigantic just like in God of War but somehow seem far less impressive here sound wise is similar to the last two games in this sub series The Music usually tries to be overly dramatic or fairly calm but always unmemorable I really wish Konami hadn't gone this route with the series if I wanted to play God of War I just play God of War instead of this actually screw that I played Dante's Inferno come back [Music] [Music] lastly we have Castlevania grimoire of Souls which was released digitally for phones and Mac in September of 2021 this is a 2d game where you can play as a bunch of different characters in the series it tries to keep everything stitched together with some kind of story but I just didn't care it really feels like a free-to-play game as there's daily events and other nonsense that I don't understand and I simply can't be bothered to care about I guess technically the genre of the game is called gacha at least I think that's how it's pronounced I honestly don't care but I do know that I don't like it you can play it if you subscribe to the Apple arcade service which is five dollars a month as a game I mean it certainly doesn't help that I'm playing with touch screen controls but even if I synced up a controller I don't think I'd enjoy it that much more as the gameplay itself just isn't appealing you play through very short stages of defeating enemies and collecting things this is another one where your character pushes themselves forward as you attack what do developers think the appeal of this is some of the common enemies take way too too many hits to defeat but at least they have life bars finish the stage and get lots of rewards which honestly aren't very good rewards unless you like things that are crap back at the Hub screen you can power up your weapons and do all sorts of nonsense normally this would be cool but something about this game just made me not care at all it's a bit too complex for its own good like I said it feels like a free to play game with all this stuff designed to keep you glued to the screen that may work for the kiddos but not for old farts like me and that's not something I'm exactly ashamed of the graphics are a mixed bag the 2D backgrounds look really nice the 3D polygons used for the enemies and the characters not so much in fact Simon looks hideous he doesn't play very well either the music is pretty good and again it's just rearrangements of older stuff after I captured footage of this game I immediately canceled my free trial for Apple arcade so I wouldn't get charged five dollars I've read that the non-apple arcade versions there are micro transactions to make it even better but you know don't quote me on that or do I don't care all I know is that playing this game makes me feel dirty for some reason I can't really quite explain it overall this is not what I want to play and it's not on any platform I want to play a Castlevania game on oh [Music] yeah yeah [Music] there you go that was all of the Castlevania games I'm physically capable of showing you it is such a fantastic series at least up until about 2008 or so in the last DS game came out now I really do like the rebirth game on the Wii as well and no I didn't talk about the compilations they're nothing new they're just compilation so they don't count get your fingers off of that keyboard unless you're gonna compliment me actually that's kind of a tall order so complain away anyway what do you think about the games I talked about in this episode and what do you think about the Castlevania series as a whole let me know in the meantime thank you for watching game sack [Music] man I sure wish I was a Castlevania Game me too I'm here I mean we try and try but we'll just never be part of that amazing series Oh look The Lonely imitators we're real Castlevania games it sure must suck to be you guys wait what I'm way more of a Castlevania Game than either of you so am I me too I'm gonna have to agree with these guys they're closer to the Castlevania series than you guys are look go on get hey now guys that doesn't mean we're besties so scram okay okay [Music]

Channel: Game Sack

Views: 366,047

Keywords: sega, nintendo, turbografx, gameplay, videogames, retro, genesis, snes, nes, msx, castlevania, castle vania, metroidvania, dracula x, akumajo dracula, akumajou dracula, akomajou dracula, akomajo dracula, Kid dracula, symphony of the night, rondo of blood, order of ecclesia, vampire killer, simon's quest, haunted castle, dracula's curse, bloodlines, circle of the moon, aria of sorrow, portrait of ruin, lords of shadow, arcade, simon belmont, trevor belmont, castlevania 3, famicom

Id: vVVpEEx4BVs

Length: 138min 9sec (8289 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022