Castlevania Series Retrospective | A Complete History and Review

Castlevania the ancient Citadel of Count Dracula an evil and twisted place from which the Servants of Darkness spill out to torment the hapless people at wallachia pray that you never set Eyes Upon its cold facade and may God have mercy upon the souls of those who do this evil castle is the iconic symbol of a series that spans 33 different games across almost 20 consoles All released to over four decades it's a name synonymous with not just Gothic inspired action platforming but the very industry itself sprawling spiders whether a franchise with longevity that most series can only dream of and yet it currently lies dormant without a major release in almost 10 years and not even the faintest whisper of Revival for its fans to hold on to despite the series selling millions of copies spawning entire genres giving us some of the greatest games ever made Castlevania much like the count who inspired its creation has slipped into the world of myth it's a situation which is particularly perplexing as the franchise is currently more popular than ever with Incredible art Direction Sumptuous animation and voice acting that Rivals the very best of Hollywood Castlevania has been reborn as a Netflix animation and has experienced a boom in popularity that few would have ever predicted it consistently ranks in the top 10 most watched original series on the platform and currently spans Five Seasons an unprecedented success in the Cutthroat world of streaming media so where are the video games where's the resurrection of the castle and count that should surely follow an explosion of interest in the series well to understand that we need to unpick the vast and tragic history of the Castlevania franchise because the roots of this sad story reach all the way from its Origins to its final entry it's a story that will take us to all the corners of the world from Soaring Heights to crushing lows and leave no doubt about just how longevity and influence can be married with commercial failure and corporate mismanagement this is a lengthy Castlevania retrospective and it's time to discover just what a man really is as ever we'll set out a few ground rules and disclaimers before we dive into the retrospective firstly I won't be covering any of the arcade games and will stick to home releases only this is mainly because capturing footage and actually playing these poses a lot more effort than it rewards it's only two games haunted castle which is hardly even a Castlevania Game and Castlevania the arcade which is notable for using a whip as a light gun and very little else the biggest point to consider is how we'll be discussing the series music unfortunately the copyright situation on YouTube as it currently stands doesn't really allow you to highlight tracks without risking demonetization which is obviously something I want to avoid we'll still discuss the music but it'll be in a more General sense usually at important junctures like a change of console or a new series composer and we won't be diving into specific songs or spend a lot of time discussing the musicality of each soundtrack as I'm not a musician I don't think this is any great loss but is it something which the series is particularly aim for I wanted to explain its lack of attention within the video finally and obviously there will be spoilers for the entire franchise so that's every main Series game and every spin-off so if you're desperate to experience The Saga of the Belmont clan for yourself consider this your first and last warning now hear that Bell chime hear that wolf howl and feel the cold down your spine Castlevania Rises on the horizon and we are beckoned in to explore its dark Mysteries foreign as with so many of the greatest horror Tales Our Story begins in relatively humble circumstances it is 1986 in toyanaka Osaka and we find ourselves in a small back office of an arcade game manufacturer called Konami our hero is a young ambitious developer called hitoshi akamatsu who dreams of creating cinematic video games that drawn his two great loves pulp horror and Western action films he doesn't know it yet but he is about to Father this entire franchise Konami had been in the video game industry for quite some time originally formed as a jukebox repair company in 1967 they quickly transitioned across to building their own coin-operated game boxes and had had so much success that they began exporting them across the Pacific to the United States they had a string of hits with Frogger space Cobra and rock and rope in the early 80s and it meant that when the home computer boom started just a few years later Konami were more than ready the almost immediately became one of the biggest third-party developers in the world and seemed to just churn out monster here after Monster hit on the NES they had gradius Contra and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and on the MSX home computer a young and talented hideo Kojima put together the very first Metal Gear Game they'd quickly become one of the biggest video game developers in the world and this meant they were able to give their younger team a lot of freedom to explore ideas and experiment with new Concepts which brings us back to that little back room office and hits akamatsu after proving himself a reliable developer on konami's Arcade products he'd been given permission to put together a small team and pursue an idea that he'd been long trying to get budget for an adventure game unlike anything else in the market equal parts action platformer and Gothic horror title in Japan it would be known as akamajo Dracula which roughly translates as Dracula's satanic Castle a title which horrified Konami of America vice president Emile heidkamp he would only give the go-ahead if its name could be changed in Europe and America and out of this Castlevania was born the premise is beautifully simple player Simon Belmont Vampire killer who stands outside the gates of Count Dracula's castle the aforementioned Castlevania and by pressing start we enter the Citadel with a single mission to reach the Pinnacle of the structure and slay the vampire that resides there as this is not the first video about the series its reputation likely precedes it and for the most part that revolves around its incredible gameplay mechanics but before we dive into that I want to talk about castlevania's less recognized strength which is its groundbreaking aesthetic design you've got to remember that at the time there wasn't really a horror genre and Castlevania represents the first time a console developer would try to Lean Into Darkness and morbid imagery and putting together a game's look we're not fighting cartoony looking enemies like in Mega Man or Mario and instead do battle with an evil horde bloodthirsty monster bats horrifying fishmen merciless Dark Knights it's miles from the fantasy Adventure feeling of something like Zelda and its Gothic horror Castle setting gives the whole game an atmosphere of malevolence that even darker titles like Metroid and Ninja Gaiden don't get remotely close to what's particularly impressive is that it achieves this oppressive atmosphere with familiar imagery as despite having its own lore Castlevania is really a collage of ideas taken from other properties Simon Belmont's design is clearly a mixture of Conan the Barbarian and Indiana Jones and almost every single boss is taken from some sort of classic monster movie we fight interpretations of Boris karlov's IMO tap the mummy and Frankenstein's monster along with Ray harryhausen's Queen Medusa and every single enemy is in some way influenced by the Aesthetics of these films what stops the whole experience turning into a parody is that amazingly akamatsu and his team were able to weave all of these de sapra influences into something that feels very cohesive and the way the game's structured is a huge part of why this works unlike in other titles like Contra or Super Mario where it's not completely clear how the levels actually link together Castlevania uses brief screens to illustrate our journey through the castle and then has each level themed around a different location the unique enemies backgrounds and challenges we begin in the castle grounds before passing through the entranceway and into the main hall we see the chapel and catacombs before rising up through the clock tower to face Dracula right at the very Summit seems like such a simple idea but this gives everything we do a real sense of forward momentum there's so many other games from 1987 lack it's not just a progression of increasingly difficult levels but a journey through the halls of Castlevania by the time we finally Ascend the final staircase against a backdrop of aggressive Moon it feels like you really are stepping into an outcropping high in the night sky with the game's conquered levels spread out beneath you in the Citadel below considering that most games of this era hardly even had backgrounds this degree of environmental storytelling is astoundingly ahead of its time and really something that the game doesn't get enough credit for now as good as the graphical design might be the main reason that people are still playing Castlevania today is it's extremely unique take on action platforming which might be the perfect expression of hard but fair it is a notoriously difficult game asking you to get to grips with its mechanics before you can make any progress whatsoever and specifically punishing those who charge ahead without stopping to think a huge part of this challenge is driven by how deliberate almost everything you do needs to be Simon's jump has a set High which unlike Samus Mega Man or Mario can't be adjusted depending on how long you hold the button and also can't have its trajectory changed once you've committed this also applies to attacking which requires a short backswing that means you can't rely on quick reactions to deal with enemies and platforms needing to take things at a considered and careful pace punishment for not doing so is castlevania's Infamous knockback which pushes Simon backwards by a few blocks if he takes damage it certainly takes some getting used to and can feel really brutal at times leading to getting stun locked between enemies or worst of all being knocked off of platforms and into instant death pits it's a fearsome mixture of mechanics and it's made all the harder by The Game's enemies which can often feel like they've invaded our cartridge from another series altogether while Simon has very deliberate and set movements enemies will fly in from all sorts of angles coming at you on diagonals or through walls and refusing to move in predictable and reliable ways it's at his most difficult when facing castlevania's Infamous Medusa heads which flow up and down across the screen in an endlessly respawning hard to predict pattern they've become an utterly reviled Talisman for the series and when paired with the tricky platforming or other enemies that you can't ignore can almost feel like akimatsu had designed this game specifically to torture hapless players luckily we're not completely helpless in the face of the undead horde and Simon has a tool set that more than balances the game's punishing challenge our primary attack is his legendary whip the Vampire Killer and it is an amazingly satisfying weapon to use often in 2D side scrollers melee Weaponry is pretty hard to implement which is why the vast majority of games in this style use guns or simple jumps as your main method of defeating enemies Castlevania manages to find a brilliant sweet spot where your weapon can be used at range but still has that visceral feel of Close Quarters combat while you can increase its length and damage with upgrades it never feels overpowered in fact because of those unpredictable enemy patterns you really have to be quite precise with the whip timing your attacks and your jumps in a way that takes real skill outside of the Vampire killer Simon can pick up an arsenal of sub weapons which are fueled by collecting Hearts which act as ammo and are found in the game's candlesticks and candelabra which you can destroy while traveling through the levels the point of the sub weapons is really to add an element of strategy into the gameplay before the very first boss the vampire bat you'll find the ax which is clearly the optimal way to take on the beast but for almost every other boss it's not quite as clear you'll often have a spread of sub weapons available throughout the level and it's left completely up to you to decide how you want to tackle the game's villains do you keep that ax to provide an attack on a diagonal and help with the game's many Airborne enemies maybe the clock to freeze time and give you some breathing space or the dagger to have an attack with a much greater range the holy water can stun and the cross does the most damage so they all have benefits and drawbacks depending on the level or the boss fight and it's up to you to work all this out it's the part of Castlevania that akamatsu felt most proud of and he spent a huge amount of time agonizing over the placement of balancing of the weapons so they could provide modular difficulty there's of course optimal strategies but there's nothing stopping you from sticking to the sub weapon that you feel the most comfortable with and for the truly skilled there's always the option of tackling the game with only your whip Castlevania is a finely tuned dance of difficulty and player skill but things really tip over the edge in the final few moments which might be some of the hardest I've played in any game the second last boss is the Grim Reaper known in the Castlevania universe as death and it's one of those old-school hard battles that I seriously have no idea how I actually be he throws out circles seemingly travel in random directions and his own movements feel completely patternless I must have died 50 times before I somehow made it back to him with full health a fully upgraded Whip and the triple Holy Cross and even then only made it through thanks to sheer luck things don't get any easier after that as the count himself might be the hardest NES boss of all time he teleports randomly around the room and fires a wave of fireballs that you have to time your jump perfectly to avoid thing is avoidance isn't enough as your only opening to damage him is that the Apex of this jump meaning you also have to position yourself exactly right in order to land a blow I can't understate just how hard this is to time and it must have taken me three or four hours of non-stop attempts before I finally got that perfect run and managed to nail the 16 hits required to down our Undead Nemesis now in an act that I can only attribute to Pure developmental malice once he's defeated Dracula will transform into his true form a horrible deformed beast and you'll have to go another round where again you can only damage him via his head if the heavens are smiling on you you'll land that final blow banishing the bane of humanity and destroying the evil castle that holds him Dracula might be insanely difficult bordering on if possible at times but it's a suitably epic climax that really does feel like Simon is Conquering otherworldly Powers beyond the comprehension of mere mortals these are devils from Beyond the Veil of human life and the challenge of beating them makes seeing the castle crumble into dust all the more satisfying upon release Castlevania was a huge success in both Japan and America and akamatsu's little passion project was quickly Plastering the cover of Nintendo Power praised as a brilliant combination of the mature world of horror storytelling and the sort of tight action gameplay that you'd expect from Nintendo themselves these days it's available on pretty much every single platform and is so easily emulated that you can even play it in a browser and this makes it easy to recommend as despite that punishing difficulty you'll be hard-pushed to find a more tightly designed and supremely satisfying action-platforming experience one that rewards you but really getting to know it inside and out while Castlevania kept selling copies and quickly became a household name around the globe sadly for akamatsu Japanese developmental culture robbed him of the recognition that he deserved outside of the Konami office in the 1980s developers and producers would often credit themselves under joke names and this sadly meant that for a very long time nobody really knew who had made Castlevania in fact the only reason we actually know anything about the series creation is because axcon Army staff have recently taken to talking about its development on Twitter which led people to ReDiscover the work of hitoshi akamatsu a hyper-talented developer who's been seemingly lost in the haze of history that mystery about what happened to the series Creator why he was forgotten by the industry is something we'll get to later as first we need to take a detour into the Strange World of 1980s franchise building where sequels and spin-offs are rarely what fans expect foreign was really a gamble by Konami who hadn't expected the game to sell remotely as well as it did they wanted to make sure that they got good return on their investment and this involved a little trick they'd been pulling all throughout the 80s you see the home video game Market in Japan wasn't just occupied by Nintendo and in millions of homes gaming was done on an MSX home computer series like metal gear Wonderboy and Bomberman all got their starts on the MSX with an install base of 7 million units it was a market that no serious Japanese developer could ignore the problem was that not every development team had hideo Kojima leading it which meant that often konami's MSX games involved cutting a few corners and reusing elements of existing games this was their master plan to make sure that Castlevania was profitable while arkamatsu's team worked on the NES version a separate small team led by akihito Nagata repurposed the asset into Vampire killer a game that disguises a very different direction under a very familiar surface at first glance everything looks almost identical we start with Simon approaching the castle before entering into Castlevania via the main gate it's not only the exact same premise but the very same soundtrack Sprites and even gameplay with whip driven action platforming making up everything you do where things take a big departure is in Vampire Killer's structure which takes Simon's assault on the castle and turns it into a much slower Pace exploratory experience each level is a spread of interlocking screens which you can move freely between including up and down and in which the purpose is to find the stage exit it's not quite as simple as it sounds though as each door needs to be unlocked with the stage's skeleton key and as boss fights now only take place every three levels this cycle of finding the key and then finding the access forms the majority of the game if this sounds markedly less interesting than the Thrills of Castlevania on the NES you're absolutely not wrong and this system becomes incredibly grating after just a few levels compared to castlevania's meticulous design it just never brings the same level of excitement and any satisfaction that the puzzle exploration could deliver is dampened by a few key design choices for starters almost all of the keys are hidden in Secret locations which means you have to attack almost every block in the stage in order to find one rather than having them just occur naturally as most of the levels loop back around on themselves once you've reach the edge of a stage it's extremely easy to become disorientated and for some reason you only have access to a math if you find it in a chest and then only have limited uses of it now while all that sounds very negative Nagata did actually come up with some interesting ideas some of which would eventually work their way into the main series while looking for skeleton keys you sometimes uncover Merchants who will sell you items in exchange for your heart there's actually quite a spread of different equipment to buy ranging from limited time power-ups to Shields that block projectiles and completely different main weapons it's not exactly an RPG but it certainly does add in a sense of progression it makes it feel like you're developing a version of Simon that reflects your play style annoyingly though all of your equipment resets after you beat a boss which is a pretty massive handicap considering the lack of continues final thing to note is The Game's Dracula fight which is a very strange remix of the iconic NES battle instead of that insanely tricky jump attack this time we can simply duck under his Fireballs which makes the whole thing substantially easier there is a second phase but in a strange twist this late moment of Vampire killer actually serves up an original asset and we do battle against a huge living portrait of the cow as we'll discover in the rest of the series strange Dracula second forms would become something of a tradition so by that metric and that metric alone will allow Vampire killer into the clan although that's despite all of its other odd takes on the vampire slaying formula foreign killer had reviewed and sold fairly well it wasn't intended as a true sequel the responsibility for delivering that would once again fall to our unlikely alter hitoshi akamatsu with just a year to work with his tiny team put together Castlevania 2 Simon's quest which was released in 1987 and attempted to take their action-platforming formula and rework it into something truly ambitious Simon's Quest is a strange game to talk about because despite it being 35 years old its reputation wasn't really set in stone until 2004 when the Angry Video Game Nerd put out one of his first ever videos and in what would become his classic style tore the game to Pieces as the video game industry had exploded in size since the game's original release and YouTube was on the crest of doing exactly the same this review was the first time many people had ever even heard of Simon's Quest and it was not a good first impression the review itself is pretty damn funny but it focuses entirely on the game's negatives using them as fuel for the Nerds ever increasing anger all culminating in him declaring that Castlevania 2 is the biggest up in video game history now obviously the Angry Video Game Nerd is not trying to provide objective analysis but such was the booming popularity of the character that the damage was done Castlevania 2 was Now worse than a warm bottle of Rolling Rock nothing it was going to claw back its reputation and to be honest kind of deserves it Simon's Quest has some ridiculous design choices and can often be a hilariously obtuse experience but that is not the whole story we're going to take a much more holistic look at the game as there's a lot more to like here than our angry friend originally let on we once again play the role of Simon Belmont who despite defeating the evil count atop Castlevania in the last game hasn't been able to move on and live a life of Peace thanks to Dracula's Unholy nature injuries Simon sustained during their battle have never truly healed and this curse is slowly destroying his soul one day he has a vision of a beautiful Maiden telling him that the only way to save himself is to gather five artifacts of the cow and burn them in the ruins of his castle this takes us to the very first screen of the game with Simon beginning his quest in the town of Jova setting out to find the pieces of Dracula and his salvation as a premise for a sequel to a pretty story-like game I think this is an interesting direction to head in as rather than a rematch with Dracula we've got Simon dealing with the aftermath of his victory in a much more open-ended objective this is not just a bow to the top of a castle but a quest across the land and that difference is really the foundation for all of the huge changes in gameplay unlike in Castlevania 1 which is a linear series of Highly designed individual levels Simon's Quest gives you a huge world to explore then asks you to head off in whatever Direction you want what makes this particularly engaging is that neither direction is wrong or right the game is completely non-linear and finding the pieces of Dracula is dependent on your navigation skills and knows for exploration this in of itself deserves some credit because NES games that didn't follow a regimented level structure were fairly rare and those that did were often considered extremely high quality titles like Metroid Zelda and Final Fantasy or attempted to create more cohesive and immersive worlds and Simon's Quest is absolutely attempting to do something similar Transylvania is a coherent setting with townspeople and shops places of protection against the undead and a Wilderness full of danger thanks to hundreds of years of vampiric domination that immersion and sense of place are also elevated because just like its predecessor Castlevania 2 is a great looking game every environment you travel through has unique backgrounds and distinct tiles which sounds like faint praise but really wasn't all that common at the time especially for larger sprawling titles like this it all helps create a real sense of atmosphere when overground areas flow seamlessly into underground areas or you discover unique rooms with disturbing backgrounds that exploration feels rewarded rewards also come in the form of some very rudimentary RPG mechanics which adds some purpose to one of the combat Simon can now level up which gives you more Total Health instead of finding sub weapons hidden in candelabra you now purchase them from vendors with the hearts that you collect head to the depths of RPG complex either the series will go on to reach it's extremely simplistic but it can't be understated how having a form of progression helps alleviate the tedium of constant combat now the most notorious mechanic in Castlevania 2 is its day and night cycle which falls into the category of ambitious but poorly executed every five minutes a text box will appear stating what a horrible night to have a curse then the game will switch into its night mode where enemies are more numerous do more damage and have more Health points the idea behind this that there's actual risk to Simon having the curse is a cool idea and having Nightfall when you're in a precarious spot genuinely does create moments of tension but it's just not executed well enough to repeatedly have that effect the whole transition just takes way too long and having it happen every five minutes instead of say 15 means it becomes an all too frequent roadblock to your progress during these nights all the shops are closed and NPCs go into hiding which makes sense but leaves you simply waiting around for the sequence to end even if you can get into the game's frustrating Pace its whole structure is also really spoiled by how badly it relies on highly obtuse puzzles which feel like they were designed to be played alongside a copy of Nintendo Power many of the game's dungeons are gated behind key items which usually have to be purchased from certain vendors this is where the NPCs come in as you're supposed to speak to them take the clues they give you and use them to work out which items are supposed to be used where in theory this makes complete sense as you're on a journey across the world Gathering clues about your quest but it simply doesn't translate well because of a few fatal flaws the biggest is easily the game's translation which is so bad that it ruins some of the clues giving completely wrong information and hiding progress behind mechanics that seem impossible to work out the most notorious is the red Crystal which you're supposed to hold at Deborah Cliff causing a magic tornado to take you off to a dungeon now in Japanese a villager tells you to press the red Crystal against Deborah Cliff kneel and the wind will take you well in English this has been somehow translated to wait for a soul with the red Crystal at Deborah Cliff which makes it sound like you're supposed to wait for someone to give you the red Crystal rather than looking for it to access the next dungeon the very same issue confuses how you're meant to get past the cursed swamp the clue in Japanese is a person without a living Laurel will die in The Cursed swamp but in English the clue is simply the curse has killed the laurel tree which is just nonsense it makes the whole game so much harder to navigate than it should be another area of Simon's Quest that takes a lot of criticism is its dungeons or Mansions as they're referred to in game you'd imagine that these would represent the perfect opportunity to include a slice of that highly designed linear Castlevania 1 gameplay but oddly these sections are rather more influenced by Vampire killer than akamatsu's last title the aim of each Mansion is to get the Red Orb which contains a piece of Dracula but finding it alone isn't enough first you need to locate a vendor who sells you an Oaken stake which then has to be used on the orb in order to break it open just like most of the mechanics in Simon's Quest it's more exploratory than it is action-packed in another strange twist only two of these five Mansions actually have bosses which seems absurd for a sequel to a game renowned for its end level fight including Dracula you fight against death and a flying face called Camilla and all three are ludicrously easy they can be stun locked and really struggle to actually do any damage to you which feels a million miles from the punishing versions we fought in Castlevania one along with bosses that don't pose a modicum of challenge the final dungeon of the whole game that fateful return to Castlevania doesn't contain a single enemy you just wander through empty hallways towards your final battle it's another decision that took a lot of flack from the nerd but in a strange way actually quite like it it's a somber and Atmospheric moment managing to deliver more storytelling than all of the horribly translated texts put together for those of us who beat that first game it's a reminder of that original Journey while it doesn't exactly look like the levels we fought through it's enough to prompt those memories of vicious battles gone by with the Count's Revival and defeat but given different endings depending on how quickly we were able to beat the game which rather annoyingly isn't stated anywhere else so you'll almost certainly get the worst ending on your first run through it's based on how many full day cycles have taken place and in order to get the best ending where Simon cures a curse and lives into his old age you have to win in just seven days or less it requires pretty intricate knowledge of the key items hidden walls and following an exact sequence of events to make it to the count in time beating the sprawling Adventure in just 45 minutes is a feat only a scan for you are going to be able to achieve the reality is that Simon's Quest is a complicated game to talk about it's creative and interesting taking huge risks and attempting to do things that many other series wouldn't incorporate for years but it's also frustrating poorly localized with an execution that Mars that lofty ambition I rarely use the phrase but I think Simon's Quest has just not aged all that well not because of its mechanics or design but because the environment for it to be really groundbreaking just doesn't exist anymore in 1988 huddled around a television set with your copy of Nintendo power to guide you and friends or siblings to share the tedium with well this must have been a breathtaking experience but it's just not possible to play Simon's quest in that atmosphere anymore in 2022 it's clear that it's not a perfect game but it does deserve some credit for what it tried to do and honestly if you're happy to use a guide It's Perfectly playable and miles from the steaming pile of goat that the nerd once described it as on release it was popular enough to be featured on the second ever cover of Nintendo power and even for a brief moment became notorious thanks to parents sending in complaints about the violent imagery that Nintendo had used it didn't sell remotely as well as the first game but made a respectable return in both Japan and America with Konami releasing tie-in merchandise in the East where the game was particularly popular akamatsu's team had shown that Castlevania wasn't just a flash in the pan and Konami finally convinced that the series could be more than just a source of assets decided to expand the brand taking the story away from Simon Belmont and onto completely new platforms foreign throughout the 1980s video games had been exclusively stationary Affairs either played on a big arcade machine or at home on a computer or console but this status quo abruptly changed in 1989. Nintendo and Sega had been in a long-running battle to be the top dog console manufacturer and the next Frontier of this war was in portable handheld game players in a space of just 16 months at the turn of the decade both the Game Boy and Game Gear released causing an explosion of small-scale video game play that no longer required power cables and a television set sporting Hardware that was a lot easier to develop for and having a much Superior battery life the Game Boy quickly struck into a mighty sales lead which Konami wanted to take full advantage of they quickly put out what were essentially D makes of some of their most famous titles gradies Contra and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Castlevania also getting the black and green treatment just a few months into the game boy's life Castlevania the adventure released reimagining that formula from Castlevania 1 in a way that could fit in the palm of your hands the adventure is set a hundred years before the events of Castlevania and Simon's Quest and serves as a prequel establishing a lot of the tropes that would come to define the series moving forwards we play as Christopher Belmont an ancestor of Simon who hears that the evil Count Dracula has been conducting rituals hoping to achieve a mortality as the counts dark minions have become terrorizing the people of Transylvania he arms himself with his family's Whip and sets out to defeat the self-proclaimed Prince of Darkness there might be literally no story in the game whatsoever as all of this background is found in the instruction manual but it deserves some recognition for sparking the fire that would really form the rest of the franchise now the game itself is rather less influential and it's probably better known for being an example of the difficulty that console developers had adjusting to the extremely Limited specs of the new handhelds we fight our way across just four levels which can beat in as little as 40 minutes and that battling is exclusively in the form of whipping and jumping as there are no sub weapons whatsoever instead Candles now drop coins which boost your score Hearts which heal you and red orbs which upgrade your whip just like in its NES cousin the upgrades add length and damage although now there's a fourth tier which allows Christopher to shoot Fireballs it all adds up to a pretty lean experience you do some platforming sections you kill a few enemies and really there isn't a whole lot to think about now you might think that makes for an easy game but brother you could not be more wrong somehow Castlevania the Avenger manages to be one of the most insanely hard games I've ever played despite having less mechanics than I have limbs for stars that whip Fireball attack is extremely powerful but you'll rarely ever actually have it as for some reason your whip downgrades in power every time you take a hit in Castlevania 1 this only happened when you died which felt a touch more fair than managing to finally get four upgrades and having them all take it away in a split second by a rogue bat on top of this outside of the very first level almost every single moment of platforming is done above either instant death pits or instant death spikes meaning just a single wrong move results in being sent all the way back to the start of the level what makes this all the more punishing is that Konami haven't really nailed the Thai platforming of the console titles and Christopher's hitbox feels smaller than his model they're a huge series of precise jumps where you really have to overshoot what feels natural in order to land safely when you can take your time and pick your spot carefully it's just an annoyance but during level three things reach a whole new level of absurd the second half has you racing away from a rising platform spikes and the jumps you need to hit in order to actually beat this part are ludicrously precise if you make a single mistake it's game over and I had an awful time grinding this over and over until I finally had a miracle run where I cleared it the level after doesn't get any Kinder either you have to complete these crazy series of jumps while being peppered by enemies and the hallway before Dracula involves fighting four copies of the first level boss in a row thanks to Christopher's criminally slow move speed these high difficulty moments just feel brutally unfair not old school Nintendo hard just badly made a way that really shows that this was Konami stepping into a new world that they weren't all that familiar with that all being said Castlevania the adventure reviewed quite well getting some pretty generous scores from magazines that were clearly dazzled by the sheer concept of playing games on the go in fact the main criticism was astonishingly the Castlevania fans might not like the music which feels like the last thing they'd be concerned about time has been much less kind to our first handheld foray Into the Wilderness of Transylvania it's largely now thought of as the worst game in the franchise thanks to its brutally unfair difficulty an insanely slow pace and despite now occupying an elite group of people who have actually seen the credits I can't disagree with that sentiment luckily this would not be the last time we'd see Castlevania on the Nintendo Game Boy and it would not be the last time we'd see Christopher Belmont as both would return in much better form in just a few years time thank you something used to be very popular in Japan during the late 80s and 90s was developers producing parody versions of their popular games now unlike the funny games spring to mind when you imagine a parody Conkers Bad Fur Day or South Park's Stick of Truth these parody titles tend to be really light-hearted or cutesy reimaginings that often brought a sense of Japanese Ridiculousness to the proceedings Konami with an Undisputed master of this Niche genre lampooning their own games with such skill that many went on to be well respected franchises in their own rights with Castlevania proving to be a popular breakout franchise it would of course also have the parody treatment and this brought us kid Dracula which released on the famicom in 1990 and later on the Game Boy in 1993. you play the titular role although it's not exactly clear if you're Dracula's kid or Dracula as a kid and the plot doesn't exactly offer any clues strangely instead of it having much at all to do with the adventures of the Belmont the premise is that the Evil Lizard King garamoth has teleported himself to Transylvania from the year 2 billion BC and it's up to our spiky head protagonist to defend the homestead and it's not just the story that's broadly unconnected to the games we've already covered kid Dracula plays a lot more like a Capcom game than anything koton army ever put out feeling very similar to the Mega Man series kid Dracula is armed with a short-range fireball attack and your jumping is far more controllable than the precise and deliberate movements of Simon and Christopher it goes beyond that though the whole structure of the game is eight distinct levels with bosses that when defeated bestow the young count with new power-ups which give you more attacks to choose from and various abilities required to Traverse the levels it's not so much a parody of Castlevania as it is a parody of Mega Man with a very cutesy Dracula theme pasted over the top it's very strange and I don't really understand why it was made but this is the same company that made a gradius game where you fight cancan dancers and pig sumo wrestlers so I think trying to make sense of it or is somewhat fruitless amazingly this wasn't the last we'd see of kid Dracula and in 1993 Konami released a sort of remake come sequel in the form of the simile named kid Dracula for the Nintendo Game Boy despite it being on a much lower powered platform I actually really prefer this version and I think the Simplicity you expect from Game Boy game suits kid Dracula a lot more than the NES they've really pushed the boundaries in terms of animation and graphical design and kid Dracula looks seriously impressive for the Game Boy they've got cut scenes that genuinely look pretty good and the young count has all these little flourishes when finishing his zone or using an ability that are quite high quality animations compared with other titles from the same year like Alien vs Predator or Aladdin this looks a whole generation ahead which is particularly impressive considering what a poor job they've done with Castlevania the adventure just a few years before despite the Improvement we sadly never got another entry in this funny little sub series and it's a shame that we never got to see the kid count again on the SNES or Game Boy Advance it would have been fantastic to see a parody version of Symphony of the Night or Rondo of Blood but unfortunately this lesser-known duology Remains the series lone Venture into the world of comedy video games foreign were busy experimenting with the formula outside of the NES akamatsu's team were hard at work on the next console installment and this time they found themselves hyper motivated to create something extremely special it might sound strange to hear but back in the late 80s and early 90s long before Silent Hill Metal Gear Solid Pro Evo or Yu-Gi-Oh konami's biggest franchise was their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games and they were selling absolute bucket loads due to the insane popularity of the Half Shell Heroes the franchise absorbed a huge amount of attention and focus internally for members of development teams that weren't working on TMNT often felt bitter that they weren't afforded the same resources this is absolutely the case for akamatsu and his team and when they sat down to discuss what they wanted to produce for the next Castlevania Game dethroning the turtles was their only goal it would require putting together one of the most ambitious and complex NES games of all time the next step not just for the franchise but for the entire action-platforming genre and well without spoiling it that's exactly what they did from the very first moments of Castlevania 3 it's clear that akamatsu wanted to push that cinematic influence to the next level we see a shot of the sprawling expanse of Castlevania before lightning strikes revealing the title card and a text scroll detailing the premise between this atmospheric opening and the film Real effect rolling down the sides of the screen it's like watching the opening of an old 1930s cereal and it sets the tone for a game that puts a lot more emphasis on storytelling than anything we'd seen before while it might be the third game in the series Dracula's curse is actually set a hundred years before Castlevania the adventure and details the very first conflict in the series timeline everything begins with a dark sorcerer from the nation of wallachia known as Vlad tepesh his Greed for eternal life led him to make a deal with an evil God who transformed him into the monster we know as Dracula and which began his cruel reign of terror over the people of Transylvania with the church a loss for how to handle this demonic threat the pope turned to the outcast Belmont family renowned for their abilities in defeating dark magic and the call was answered by Trevor Belmont who whip in hand heads to wallachia to free its people from the dark curse of Dracula we find our hero kneeling before a crucifix head bowed in prayer before lightning strikes once again and with a flick of his cape Castlevania 3 begins the first thing you'll notice is that this is a return to the pure action platforming of Castlevania 1. those Adventure game RPG systems from Simon's Quest have been completely rolled back there are no towns to explore levels to gain or items to buy and it really feels like a sequel that's made to build on everything from the first game and not the second but right back into that action-packed but deliberate platforming formula where you carefully placing jumps collecting Hearts to power your sub weapons and pulling your hair out with its insane level of challenge Castlevania 3 is absolutely notorious for its brutal difficulty and in a surprising twist it's actually the American Port which is the harder version for some reason when the game was localized for Western markets Konami also remixed the gameplay in some key areas asking you to perfectly memorize and execute huge portions of the game and giving Dracula's curse a completely warranted reputation as one of the hardest games ever made well I might be made of stern stuff but it's not quite that Stern and so for this review I played through a translated ROM of the Japanese version which is still damn difficult but actually gave me a chance of finishing it in time for this release along with a more sane level of challenge this version also uses a much nicer font for its dialogue and has an additional sound chip which wasn't included outside of Japan while it might be the easier option it's the definitive version in terms of presentation and that will always win out in my book now despite the game returning to a linear level-based structure we've not entirely abandoned the exploration of Castlevania 2 and you have a lot more agency over the route that Trevor takes to his vampire Nemesis at set points in the game everything will pull out to a map screen be given a choice of two directions you can head in it's a lot more complex than just an option of two different levels though as it can result in wildly different routes at the castle and some of the branching paths don't even lead to your destination requiring you to double back after beating the levels obviously this adds a huge amount of replayability to the game but it also adds an important sense of place to the Transylvanian Countryside Trevor isn't just a vampire hunter but a Wanderer an outcast and despite being structurally linear Dracula's cast manages to feel like just as much of an adventure as it's more open predecessor now as cool as the reworked level structure is Castlevania 3's greatest Innovation and its most interesting new mechanic is the partner system at certain Crossroads Trevor can head down three optional paths a clock tower a graveyard and an underground lair and upon defeating the boss of each stage you can recruit a party member who travels with you to your final battle by pressing select Trevor will swap places with his partner allowing you to play as them and while both share the same health bar each party member brings a host of different abilities to the table first partner we encounter is Grand the nasty who we meet at the top of the clock tower he's a rebel in prison for fighting against Dracula's rule desperate for vengeance for the death of his friends and family Grant brings a completely new Dynamic to the gameplay as he has a much higher jump than Trevor and can be repositioned in mid-air as precise jumping is one of the pillars of the challenge in these games playing as a character who essentially controls more like Mario feels extremely powerful and as he can cling to walls there are moments where you can bypass entire sections of the game the downside is that his ranged dagger attack is very weak and he only has access to the ax sub weapon meaning in combat he's very limited and can't really go toe to do with a single boss the second partner is completely different in a graveyard we meet Cipher belnardas a witch with a burning hatred for everything evil sent by the church as part of their war on the vampire lord she controls just like Trevor with an identical jump and movement speed although can only attack with a very short range staff making her almost useless in combat where she comes into her own is with three magical spells which are all fueled by heart and are all extremely powerful she has a flame attack which absolutely devastates bosses a homing lightning attack which makes mince meat of enemies coming at you from any direction and finally she can freeze foes and then shatter them in a single hit with her Rod she's a big part of what makes the shortest route to the castle so much easier because you can use Trevor to fight your way through stages before switching to Cipher in order to crush the bosses the final partner has a less obvious gameplay implication but probably is the most interesting from a story perspective deep in the underground Caverns on the longest route to the castle we fight against a boss that plays just like the Dracula encounter from Castlevania 1 and if you emerge Victorious you can recruit Alucard Dracula's son who mysteriously is seeking to destroy the count rather than side with him without any further explanation we set out in a union of vampire and vampire killer and it's a pairing which probably takes the most skill to make work her first Alucard seems extremely weak his only attack is a range Fireball which doesn't do a huge amount of damage and as he only has access to the stopwatch sub weapon he can feel really underwhelming in combat his true strength lies in his ability to transform into a bat and fly around the stages completely bypassing platforming in a way that makes Quran look like hard mode there are certain sections of the game that alicard can make completely trivial but it's all about knowing where these sections are and making sure that you have enough Hearts to fly around them he's deep on the hardest path for a reason and really only the most experienced players will know when and where he's at his most powerful when playing through the levels as Trevor Castlevania 3 can look like a simple rehash of the first game but this partner system adds an insane level of complexity to how your adventure plays out which is really unlike anything else found on the platform we can play as four different characters two at the same time at any given moment we've got three distinct routes to the castle and that's all all on top of the base formula of whipping jumping and dying that's still just as strong here as it was in the original game Castlevania 3 is a Triumph of pushing the famicom and the NES to that very limit and it really is one of the most grandiose and impressive titles of this early console generation so regardless of which characters you decide to Ally yourself with eventually you'll step foot into Castlevania itself and there are a few Nifty Throwbacks to Simon Belmont's first Adventure the first few screens of the castle are almost identical with the huge windows and zombie-filled hallways being the first challenge you face and there's even a sequence where Birds drop flea men onto you which I'm sure is going to induce PTSD in anyone who soldiered through that part in the First game they're small touches but it creates a sense of continuity between the two games and it really does make it feel like Trevor and Simon were both fighting through the same location when we eventually step out onto the final staircase and once again see the Moon Lighting Up the Sky outside the throne room it's impossible to not be absorbed by the drama of it all which is an incredible feat for a pair of 8-bit video games much like everything else in the game the fight against Dracula is grander than ever although I've got to say despite the impressive spectacle this is probably the easiest incarnation of the count that we've faced yet the first phase calls back to his Jewel against Simon although instead of fireballs we need to leap over you've just got to position yourself to avoid being trapped between pillars of Fire as long as you can leave enough space between yourself and Vlad it's really not too hard to make it through this phase with almost a full health bar and you can easily get more than one hit in if your positioning is particularly good same actually goes for the next phase where he transforms into this multi-headed otherworldly being the six damaging blood onto the floor it's a gruesome image but armed with the Holy Cross which is conveniently found in the candle right outside the throne room it's once again incredibly easy to get multiple hits on different faces and tear through this phase finally his humanity is completely Stripped Away and the whole throne room is taken up with this huge demonic bird form which despite looking incredibly imposing is probably the easiest phase of the lot you have to stand on these circling platforms and Dodge lasers that he Fires at you but as there's always a Flash before they fire they're very easy to avoid the whole final battle is just a strange moment it's cinematically the most impressive thing in the entire game looking and sounding incredible and as it's the first three-phase fight in the entire series it makes the count feel like that true final boss something beyond all the other evil found in this world the issue is it is just too damn easy and while the American version increases his damage and makes the pattern a little harder to dodge it's still a huge anti-climax in terms of the massive challenge the character characterizes the rest of the game I'm sure we can explain it away as Trevor just being that much stronger than the rest of the Belmont Clan which might make sense considering he's the progenitor of the entire Dynasty but it's a weird change of pace that most of the other games in the series will do their best to avoid everything ends with that iconic shot of our hero standing atop of a cliff watching Castlevania crumble into dust we get a very short text epilogue that lets us know what happened to each of our partners Grant commits to rebuilding the ruined nation of wallachia and a card heads into isolation thanks to the guilt of killing his only family and it's heavily implied that Cipher and Trevor fall in love as the game Fades out with the two embracing the final text tells us that the Belmont family will be honored for all time and with the conclusion of this prequel the clan of vampire Hunters would be forever sealed in people's minds as the true adversary of Vlad tepesh the Counterpoint to the evil Count Dracula Dracula's curse has become the definitive early Castlevania gang codifying the eternal battle between Belmont and vampire and firmly establishing the style that would define almost everything that comes after it it's in fact so popular that it serves as a basis for the Netflix show which transformed the Battle of Trevor Cipher and Alucard into a high budget anime one that was successful enough to Warrant Four Seasons no less given that reputation it might be surprising to hear that on release Castlevania 3's reception was much more mixed famitsu which at the time is the Arbiter of video game opinions gave it a 30 out of 40 and made big complaints about the difficulty that same issue plagued the game's North American release where the game became maligned in video game shops for simply being far too hard for most people to be while plenty of reviews spoke about its impressive graphics and incredible advancement of the formula from the first game people simply weren't up to the challenge and it led to lower sales than both of the previous games in terms of its content akamatsu's team had absolutely dethroned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but in those all-important sales numbers they felt very short indeed sadly the pain for akumatsu doesn't end there in the 1990s Konami were just as Cutthroat as they are now and with two sequels that failed to improve sales despite bigger budgets and more resources hitoshi akamatsu was demoted and sent into the arcade Department to work as a support developer reportedly akamatsu never recovered from konami's utterly disrespectful treatment of him and he increasingly became detached and uninterested in the games he was assisting with confined to working on baseball and fishing titles rather than telling his cinematic Tales of vampires and monsters in the early 2000s he simply quit the industry altogether completely disappearing with most of his co-workers clueless as to what happened to him while other developers from that early console generation would go on to be household names Kojima Miyamoto sakaguchi and Naka akamatsu was robbed of his legacy by a company far too quick to pull the trigger and far too reluctant to give credit to the individuals who had brought Konami its success if there's one thing to take away from this video it's that you now know who is responsible for the creation of this famous series a truly talented and ambitious developer called hitoshi akamatsu who absolutely deserved more from Konami I hope wherever he is now that he's happy and that he knows just what an incredible job he really did in a move that makes akamatsu's demotion even crueler Konami wanted to move on from the Creator but not the creation and they felt there was enough life in the Castlevania brand to keep developing games this led to yet another attempt to convert vampire slaying into handheld form and capitalize on the popularity of the Game Boy which had only continued to grow in every single Market in 1991 Castlevania 2 Belmont's revenge released and despite the confusing title this was intended as a sequel to Castlevania the adventure and had very little to do with the actual Castlevania 2. the team that put together Castlevania the adventure were off the job and programming was entrusted to toru hagihara a young developer who had been in charge of konami's Contra Game Boy Paul operation C which had been received a lot better than the adventure and just a few moments playing Belmont's Revenge it's clear that it's been put together by someone with real talent and is a huge Improvement on its predecessor in almost every single way we're once again playing the role of Chris Christopher Belmont and in the instruction booklet we actually get a somewhat fleshed out story just as he was about to retire and pass the mantle of vampire slaying onto his son so heal Belmont Dracula reappeared kidnapping the boy and used his power to reclaim control of the land for imposing citadels rose out of the earth and meant it was once again up to Christopher to destroy the count and rescue his son in the process it's only a faint semblance of a narrative but having the life of your son in danger does give Belmont's Revenge an Ever So slight air of originality and that's continued from the moment you start the game as unlike its predecessors you're given a level select where you can choose between four different themed stages instead of just blasting through everything in a linear order now it's a cool touch that gives a sense of a wide land that Christopher is traveling around but if you don't get anything from the different levels the order you tackle them in really makes no difference you have to be all four to progress to Castlevania so outside of giving some slight context to where the levels are happening the structure feels like quite an afterthought luckily though the core gameplay of Belmont's revenge is anything but and it successfully fixes almost every single problem from the adventure managing to feel like a true handheld Castlevania Game some weapons are now back with you able to wield either the holy water or the ax which adds a much needed different dimension to the combat similarly the whip upgrades are now only graded by certain attacks so you get to use the ranged fire whip quite a bit more and it's actually possible to preserve it for a boss fight something which in the adventure was borderline impossible the final big Improvement is that the hitboxes have been fixed and platforming finally feels more akin to the tight and precise movement from the NES games it's still a touch on the slow side but most of the actual Hardware slowdown has been removed so quick decision making and faster Pace jumping is finally part of the gameplay flow when paired with much more ambitious Graphics both in terms of Sprites and backgrounds you just got a game that feels good to play hagihara genuinely was a talented developer and it's clear that he really knew what would make for an engaging Castlevania title even on a much weaker platform with far less resources to work with now with all these quality of life changes you might think that the game is going to be a lot easier than the adventure and while that's certainly true in terms of the basics of jumping and fighting Belmont's Revenge gets a lot more creative with its mechanics and that's where a lot of the difficulty comes from levels are generally speaking a lot more complex and as the four castles all have their own unique themes there are a lot of clever gameplay moments that can be pretty tricky to navigate in the Rock Castle which is set underground if you destroy candles while looking for upgrades or Hearts the room will darken so you have to weigh up acquiring resources versus being able to see where you're going likewise in the cloud castle the levels full of pulleys and robes which move while you jump across them and the whole stage has an upwards momentum that suits the theme of flying through the sky obviously thanks to the hardware that Belmont's revenge is on it's pretty simplistic stuff but it's memorable and importantly a huge leap up from the extremely basic ideas in the adventure things reach a real climax in terms of difficulty and complexity when we finally destroy the four castles and make our way to the newly rebuilt Castlevania after a few more traditional feeling levels Christopher faces off against his corrupted son and we get the first Vampire Killer versus Vampire killer duel in the entire franchise it's surprisingly atmospheric and we get a brief bit of dialogue beforehand wear so he'll taunts his father claiming that he'll never be able to strike down his only son while there was some text in Castlevania 3 this is really the first sign that we've had plot progression taking place part way through again and it gives the fight against Christopher son an emotional Edge that we've never really seen before if you do manage to defeat him so he'll comes too unaware of his actions and Christopher rushes off to exact revenge on the count in the final Encounter of the game weirdly the Dracula fight in Belmont's Revenge isn't really much of a fight at all and it's more of an exercise in learning where safe to stand Dracula teleports around and unleashes this spinning ball attack but that's it and if you learn where to position yourself you can make it through without taking a single point of damage compared to the father-son confrontation it's a bit of a walk in the park and really the Belmont vs Belmont action is The Game's true climax so with the Prince of Darkness once again defeated Christopher stands atop a cliff watching the collapse of Castlevania this time accompanied by his son who will assume the mantle of Vampire Killer a text epilogue Scrolls up the screen and tells us that the legend of the Belmonts will always continue presumably leading into the adventures of Simon and setting up the cycle of conflict overall it's a fantastic little game that I couldn't recommend more it's exactly what cast of any of the adventure should have been which is a small bite-sized version of the console experience but with just enough fresh ideas to make it interesting for veterans of the series The difficulty Konami had actually nailing this formula shows that simply D making games for the Game Boy and keeping the fun was a far harder proposition than it seemed it required real skill to be able to make good games without all the bells and whistles found on consoles and toru hagihara's skill at delivering so much with so little brought a lot of attention and interest to what he'd do next we've got a few games to look at before we've returned to the story of hagihara but it was clear that just like our eternally resurrecting Nemesis the series had found a way to regenerate despite the loss of its spiritual father thank you foreign Army the chance to reinvent Castlevania on home consoles came around very quickly as in 1991 Nintendo released their much anticipated sequel to the NES known in Japan as the super famicom and in the rest of the world as the Super Nintendo it was a generational leap so big that it really is quite hard to appreciate now the SNES had doubled the bit image meaning much more detailed graphics and a processor almost three times the speed with more than four times the amount of memory audio was doubled to eight channels that could also utilize samples and the console itself could be upgraded by unique chips that cartridges could be built with all this meant that games on the platform could be wildly more ambitious than their NES counterparts and Konami wanted to make sure that their games hit the SNES Market early and established themselves as a big player in this new generation with akamatsu relegated to the dark Halls of the arcade team the responsibility for an SNES Castle Sylvania was given to mashahiro ureno a relatively unproven programmer with only a few games on his CV whether this was because Konami had lost faith in the series or because they saw something in oeno's work is a question that unfortunately there's no answer to but for whatever reason veraino put together a small team and began to try to work out how to take a series that was definitively nes and evolve it into its next form despite its title Super Castlevania 4 is actually not a sequel to Castlevania 3 and is instead a souped-up remake of the first game once again starring Simon Belmont as he traverses Castlevania to defeat Dracula it might seem like an odd decision but actually this was quite common for early Super Nintendo games there have been a huge parent-led backlash against the console when it was first announced with the very idea of transitioning to new hardware seen as a scam to make kids re-buy their games Nintendo got around this by positioning the Super Nintendo as something you'd have a long inside your NES featuring more challenging and complex versions of the same titles for more experienced or older Gamers it led to a lot of sequels that were really just remakes gradius 3 Super Adventure Island super ghosts and ghouls were all High Fidelity versions of the very same game from the last generation even Nintendo themselves were careful to ever take their franchises too far from their NES routes the Super Metroid Super Mario World and a link to the past all closely resembling the 80s incarnations rather than the more experimental sequels unlike akamatsu who is increasingly trying to push Castlevania in more adventurous and interesting directions ueno was only really a fan of the first game and wanted to make something in that style so the concept of a remixed SNES version of the first title suited him perfectly in Japan Konami was much more upfront about this and the game was titled akumaju Dracula literally advertisers Are Back to Basics remix clearly this was too complex for American and European markets so instead we got the rather more hokey and massively misleading title Super Castlevania 4 which really should have just been Super Castlevania opinions about Castlevania 4 have been a strange thing to observe since the game originally released in 1991. when I was a lot younger it was generally held up as an incredible game one of the best the series had to offer and just as good as other SNES Classics like Donkey Kong Country or Yoshi's Island weirdly though a sort of inverse appraisal has happened in recent years with commentators becoming more confident in criticizing some of its more unique design choices and its role as an influential and important video game has been seemingly minimized with every fresh review well I am here to do the exact opposite restoring Super Castlevania 4 to its place at the top of the 2D action platforming pile it's an experience so pure and so fun that it transcends its issues and truly deserves to be considered a jewel in the crown of this franchise for the very opening moments of Castlevania 4 it's clear that while this is a remake it's going to be anything but an identical experience to that first 8-bit battle against the opening tax scroll that's so cinematically set up Castlevania 3 has been carried over and reworked its allusions to Classic pulp cereals abandoned in favor of genuine drama and atmosphere the music is haunting and Atmospheric and the Misty image of a broken tomb sets the tone for an adventure that's far darker than anything we've seen before thanks to the super Nintendo's huge advancements in graphical power almost everything about the series has seen an increase in detail backgrounds are now full of colored unique elements that all scroll over each other meaning for the first time in the series zero additional imagination is required to see the true darkness of Dracula's dominion and that same detail is all over the foregrounds pathways are cracked and crumbling banners lay torn in tatters and missed rolls across sections of the castle we've seen so many times this cycle of Belmont versus vampire but this version of Castlevania truly feels like a citadel that's existed for centuries the most controversial changes still argued about to this day is the decision to switch from smaller single position Sprites to much larger figures that are made up of multiple moving parts Simon now takes up double the amount of pixels and the same is true of almost every enemy with the huge level of detail coming at the cost of screen real estate some people absolutely hate this look and the criticism goes that the larger Sprites make the game awkward to play as your window to react danger is massively reduced there is a speck of Truth to that but personally I absolutely love the look of the game and I think it's more than worth that reduced amount of things on screen the entire game has a sort of Clash of the Titans marionette look to it which really suits the unsettling dark atmosphere every Sprite moves in weird and unnatural ways including Simon which gives the game a distinctive look that's not found in any other SNES title the Sprite work is at its very best in the boss fight where they're often modest sized enemies of Castlevania 1 and 2 have been reimagined as huge hulking multi-part beasts the very first boss in the entire game is a skeleton Knight whose horse's head moves completely in dependently and burst into explosions of bones with every hit we fight against a humongous Stone Golem who shrinks in size every time you strike it and a transparent bat made of living gold the level of imagination and ambition is just off the chart and even bosses that are familiar from previous entries like the water snakes and mummy both look amazing rendered in 16 bits now as Castlevania 4 was releasing so close to the launch of the SNES there was a real desire to have the game be a Showcase of all the new features of the console allowed for and this led to a handful of levels that have been rather ungenerously titled the gimmick levels during a few moments the game Dives fully into the snes's mode seven and we see some sections where levels rotate and spin in ways that the NES would have never been able to handle they absolutely blew people's minds when the game first came out but has since taken a lot of criticism for being all style and no substance the rotating Corridor for example is really just a series of very basic platforms with a very fancy background I think it's a little reductive to Simply call them gimmicks though the fancy graphical touches might not affect the gameplay but they do break things up with a little moment of something else and that's something that Castlevania 4 does really well it's the first title in the series that begins to incorporate little unique set of pieces sometimes it's a screen way of running away from a horde of bats on a collapsing Bridge or later on racing up a set of platforms while a razor blade spins below you these moments Elevate the game by making it not all about the combat and moving platforms I think the mode 7 sections fit this requirement really well so let's address the biggest criticism of the game which is that thanks to the increased size of Simon's Sprite his Vampire killer whip is now extremely powerful and unbalances that careful Orchestra of weapon and sub weapon has made the series so satisfying up to this point along with the whip being much longer than we've ever seen before Simon Canal whip in every single Direction which dramatically improves your ability to fight against enemies above and below you those Medusa heads which approach from strange angles or a knight that just won't move from the top of a set of stairs well they're no longer the punishing challenge they previously posed and Simon feels monstrously strong compared to his last incarnation obviously that makes the game substantially easier than Castlevania one or three but really the main criticism is that this new hyper powerful whip means the sub weapons are rendered fairly useless previously you had to make difficult choices about if you wanted the ax to attack diagonally or the cross to hit enemies from range but now neither are required as your whip does both there are also a huge amount of smaller changes which really file off a lot of the harsher gameplay Health pickups can now drop randomly from candles meaning you always have a way of getting your health back Simon can also be controlled ever so slightly in the air which makes the platforming a lot more forgiving even something so small is giving the sub weapons their own dedicated button on the SNES controller means those accidental throws of an ax when you're meant to head up some stairs just can't happen anymore that David versus Goliath Dynamic from the NES has been replaced with something fastly more accessible and it's clear that ueno wanted to create a Castlevania game that anyone could enjoy now for some people that means the spirit of the classic Castlevania games hasn't been preserved but I think that willfully ignores just how undeniably fun Castlevania 4 is the type of game you can just pick up and play and as anyone can be in with just a little dedication it's something that you'll return to time and time again so this philosophy of making the game a lot more accessible means it's likely the best place to start if you're new to the series although don't let that trick you into thinking it's any easier to see the credits despite all the quality of life improvements the final sections of the castle present a challenge that is more than worthy of its predecessors in the last few stages we have to go through a few of the aforementioned set pieces the toughest of which is easily a vertical race away from a spinning saw blade that transitions into this strange floating platforms part the relief of finally beating this section was short-lived though as Castlevania 4 then serves up four bosses in a row two of which come straight after the other without a checkpoint even with the elongated whip which massively helps with aerial bosses they are damn hard to put away with enough Health left to take on the next and for the first time brute forcing your way to the next stage isn't a viable option unfortunately the same can't really be said for the climactic fight against Count Dracula which might be the worst console iteration yet while the SNES is incredible graphic give the fight a cinematic feel that we could have only dreamed of before the mechanics of the fight aren't actually that good the first phase plays out almost identically to the fight from the first game although this time instead of having to carefully time your jumps you just have to whip the firewalls before you can strike the boss once that's done instead of his typical Transformations into a monstrous True Form Dracula's head changes into a sort of zombie mode the attacks by summoning fireballs and pillars of lightning this face is arguably even easier as with some pretty obvious positioning you'll be able to fly through in just a handful of attempts it robs the game of that incredible moment of satisfaction that Castlevania one did so well and I'd say it's the one place where the balance is tipped too far away from difficulty towards accessibility with his life bar depleted a window smashes and the morning sunlight bursts into the throne room burning the count alive and leaving Simon once again is the Conqueror of Castlevania and the savior of humanity that refocus on accessibility worked a treat and on release Super Castlevania 4 was a big hit with critics lavishing it with the sort of Praise that the series hadn't enjoyed since it first started Nintendo Power gave us close to a perfect score as they'd ever given magazines couldn't stop talking about just how impressive its visuals were and what a big difference the changes to gameplay made in terms of sales it's hard to know exactly how many copies were sold thanks to how secretive Konami are about many of their games but it looks like half a million to a million worldwide is a pretty commonly accepted estima now that might not sound like a huge Blockbuster hit but it actually doesn't tell the full story of the cultural impact of this game the SNES was hard to come by when it first came out so the majority of people's exposure to It in America and Europe anyway was playing around at friends houses as the idea of immediately buying the next console was still a pretty alien concept thanks to this very small install base and the huge prevalence of rental shops the those numbers actually represent a frankly incredible attach rate and an impact far beyond what the pure sales represent this interpretation of Castlevania 4 is a less successful title is also helped in no small part by what happened to urano the success of his first full directorship Les him being promoted into a more managerial role never returning to direct development without his influence Castlevania IV never received a proper true Sequel and remains a sort of strange evolutionary dead end in the series but does that mean it's an overrated game absolutely not in my opinion it's the high Watermark of action platforming on the Super Nintendo and a package that could not be more fun if it tried even with all of the somewhat questionable design choices if you're looking for a place to jump into the franchise this is a fantastic place to start and much like those early SNES adopters back in 1991 you won't be disappointed foreign the eagle-eyed amongst you will have probably noticed that so far we've almost exclusively covered games for Nintendo platforms which is pretty surprising considering Konami with the definitive multi-platform developer in the early 1990s this was largely because instead of Simply porting games to other consoles they had an internal policy of expanding their franchises through original creations this meant that despite having many series spanned both Sega and Nintendo the games are always very different for example conjure 3 on SNES and Contra hardcore on the Genesis or their Ninja Turtles games hyperstone High stop Genesis and Turtles in Time on the SNES this meant that despite our series booming success on the SNES there would not be a Sega version of Super Castlevania 4 and something more tailored to the Genesis would have to be designed this job was entrusted to konami's in-house Sega specialist tomikazu kirita who had produced almost every single major Konami Sega release Amazon An Almighty hot streak he'd overseen the development of Rocket Knight adventures and sparkster two of the best original Platformers on the platform and had successfully transitioned both the Ninja Turtles and Contra now this will probably shock younger Gamers but in the early 1990s the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were seen as pretty different consoles with audiences that expected quite different things Nintendo's 16-bit system was Colorful full of crazy graphical effects at its best when it was pushing its Hardware to the limits with ambitious RPGs like Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda the Sega Genesis on the other hand well it was all about speed and action positioning itself as the hardcore system where Blood and Guts weren't censored and you get true arcade experiences it was the perfect environment for karita and his team we wanted to produce a game heavily inspired by Castlevania 1 but remixed to take advantage of all that Genesis speed and energy as the team's experience was already primarily in fast-paced Platformers it was a match made in heaven and in 1994 after just a short development cycle Castlevania Bloodlines released worldwide as it was internally seen as more of a spin-off the team was given total freedom and this allowed them to break a lot of series conventions the most upfront change is that the story of Bloodlines is very separate from the Belmont focused Tales we've experienced so far and really draws heavily on more modern vampire mythology our main characters John Morris and Eric lecard are both vampire Hunter apprentices of Quincy Morris one of the main characters in Bram Stoker's Dracula and who is responsible for defeating the cow at the end of the novel in fact the whole game is really positioned as a sort of loose sequel to that book as the manual makes constant reference to the last battle of 1897 which is when Stoker's book is set that real world vampire influence also extends to the game's villain Elizabeth Bartley a vampiric witch attempting to resurrect Dracula and who are protagonists Chase across the European continent it's clearly a reference to Elizabeth Bathory a 16th century noblewoman accused of slaughtering hundreds of her servants and providing the original inspiration for Stoker's vampire count in an interview with beep magazine scenario writer yoshiki yamura explicitly stated they wanted to separate this game from the existing lore of the series and I'd say from a narrative perspective Bloodlines almost feels like it's from a completely different Series in Europe and Australia Its subtitle was changed to Castlevania the new generation and frankly that feels pretty damn appropriate while the narrative Direction might be very different the gameplay offers more subtle variations which might not seem that big at first but actually contribute to a game with a very different flow to the rest of the series we now have a choice between two different main characters and while both tackle the same six levels in the same order they play fairly differently John Morris is our Belmont standing wielding the Vampire killer Whip and offering gameplay that's a touch more familiar to Veterans of the series while our other hero Eric lecard is something completely new he uses a spear which allows him to attack at a much faster rate although he's restricted to attacking only in front or directly above him it creates an interesting dynamic as while John Morris doesn't have anything like the offensive tools that Simon has in Castlevania 4. he's retained the ability to whip diagonally while jumping which means both characters can do something that the other can't the whole pace of the game also runs a lot faster than anything else in the series John and Eric move and jump like athletes compared to their sluggish ancestors thanks to this it feels a lot less deliberate than previous games and as the knockback from enemies has been massively toned down the vast majority of the challenge stems from the huge amount of combat you engage in almost every screen is packed full of enemies and it's clear that the team behind Bloodlines was really embracing that all-out action Sega style the amount of sub weapons has also been reduced from the traditional five to just three the stopwatch dagger and Holy Cross have all been removed and in their place Remains the ax the holy water and a new item the boomerang which works like the cross but has a bit more of an arc on it this might sound like a big step backwards but thanks to sega's three button controller there's actually a lot more depth to this system all sub weapons can be activated like normal with the c button but by combining this with holding up you can fire off a Super Attack that uses modules and is much more powerful so despite having less sub weapons there's actually more strategy the final change is to how weapon upgrades work which is where Bloodlines make some serious improvements we've now got a third level of upgrade which takes your weapon up to Mystic tier where it's enveloped by blue fire and does a huge amount more damage than normal on top of that it transforms your sub weapon into a monstrous hyper attack a homing water serpent for Jon and a screenwide electric field for Eric this upgrade essentially melts every single enemy in the game and the difference between fighting a boss with a Mystic weapon versus an unupgraded one is very big potentially doubling the amount of hits you need to get in it sounds completely overpowered but it comes with a trade-off just like back in Castlevania the adventure a single hit of damage removes this buff so keeping it either requires extremely careful play or intimate knowledge of the levels as the game naturally forces you into constant combat and throws endless surprises at you there's a real exciting attention to getting into this hyper powerful mode because it can be so easily snapped away another area where Bloodlines really excels is in its level design which gets extremely wacky in some parts and always manages to be memorable it's at its very best in levels like the Leaning Tower of Pisa where the settings been reimagined into a sort of M.C Asher Maze of stairs and corridors the tower just seems to endlessly reach into the Skyrim by the end of the level we're leaping around sets of floating platforms battling gargoyles with the Monstrous Tower swaying beneath us Bloodlines is full of little sequences like this racing through a waterlogged ruin trying not to fall and drown leaping across a crumbling Bone Bridge against the night sky or trying to climb a spiral staircase as it spins wildly beneath you it might be one of the shortest Castlevania console games but every moment has been crafted with care and it's crazed European setting easily eclipses The Stables clock towers and dungeons of Transylvania everything reaches a thrilling climax at Castle prospina the lair of Elizabeth Bartley and possibly the greatest final castle that we've had so far we have to battle through upside down reverse screens and then whatever the hell this is supposed to be it's like we're looking at a kaleidoscope of a Castlevania level and it's just the perfect way to indicate that you're heading into a dark and otherworldly Place once we're at the top of the castle we come face to face with death who thrusts us into a really cool Twist on the traditional Boss Rush these cards spin around them and by hitting them you're taken into all of the previous boss fights where it becomes interesting is that you have full control over the order you fight them in and there's a card which contains a full heel so you need to plan out your approach and when you're going to cash in that much needed Health refill immediately afterwards we come face to face with Elizabeth barley and the final confrontation is made up of a really cool two-phase boss fight you take her on in a Twisted monster form first which is more of a traditional boss fight before she reverts back back into a human witch form it's a clever little subversion of all the Dracula fights where you're normally fighting something vaguely human looking before it becomes monstrous and it's a fantastic way to cap off a brilliant reimagining of the series and then we fight Dracula again now if it wasn't already obvious I love Bloodlines but this extra fight just makes no sense to me the whole point of the game was that it's a sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula and a distant continuation of the Belmont Saga and both of these mean that the count should not reappear at the end of the game the whole goal is to prevent Elizabeth Bartley from resurrecting him and somehow despite killing her we still end up in that same old final fight it's a disappointing moment but clearly the development team felt that for all their changes removing the series iconic villain was a step too far the game ends with possibly the most badass vinyl screen of all time a shot of your chosen hero standing Atop A Pinnacle watching Castle prospina crumble into dust it's the perfect symbol of everything bloodline stands for hearkening back to the old but giving it a massive injection of hypercharged action bravado so it seemed like tomikazu kirita had done it again delivering Konami another successful series migration with Castlevania Shirley about to pick up a huge Legion of new fans that had never been exposed to his vampiric majesty well unfortunately much like many of the series other titles it's critical reputation wasn't matched with sales success and Bloodlines was an unmitigated commercial failure now this was helped in no small part by the huge issues that Sega was experiencing as a console manufacturer in 1994 the Genesis was really on its last legs and was being ravaged in the media by previews of Nintendo's Ultra 64 and Sony's new PlayStation which both made the Genesis look extremely Antiquated it was a rough environment to release any game into and as Konami didn't really allow for any marketing Castlevania Bloodlines simply didn't have any momentum and was forgotten almost as soon as it was released obviously the fault lay entirely with Konami but unsurprisingly they blamed Sega and internally it was decided that castlevania's main titles would be released on only Nintendo platforms moving forwards an easy decision is they had huge hopes for Nintendo's next 3D Focus system but before we get to that we need to return to toru hakihara the Mastermind behind Belmont's Revenge who had been quietly working away on another Castlevania game one which went under the radar for most fans and might just be the greatest game in this entire retrospective foreign so if it wasn't clear by this point Konami really had very little overall direction for the series during the 16-bit era no single Studio or director had sole creative control and while teams were working on individual games nobody ever stuck around long enough to iterate on any of their Creations it had become an odd franchise in a way big enough to attract decent sales but never so successful that demand for more games became impossible to ignore and really Konami were content to just put out a new game on each platform and see what took this next game was born out of that chaotic philosophy despite it growing quite the reputation over the years it was originally intended as an experiment to see if something different would sell in North America and Europe the console wars were primarily fought between Sega and Nintendo but in Japan the battle lines were very different there was in fact a third competitor Hudson soft who was a manufacturer of the PC engine now thanks to a really delayed release and poor marketing the console never caught on in America but in Japan it was a monster here and it actually outsold the famicom sitting in the number one spot for quite a few years all that change from the SNES released and hudsonsoft had to find a way to make their 8-bit console competitive what they settled on was an add-on to the core console the CD-ROM 2 which allowed them to beef up the PC engine and incorporate much higher quality visuals audio and most importantly pre-recorded video it proved to be quite the success in series like ease Wonder Boy and Bomberman all did really big numbers thanks to their futuristically Advanced Graphics in 1991 Hudson put out a follow-up machine the super cd-rom2 which had even more storage and peaked konami's interest enough for them to want to dip their toes into this new market so this is where we returned to toru hagihara the creator of Castlevania 2 battlemont's Revenge he'd done such a good job converting Castlevania into portable form that he was promoted to the big leagues and given a console directorship to oversee this new pc engine CD Castlevania would be that game and despite all the attention lavished on Castlevania 4 and Castlevania Bloodlines it would be this strange experiment only released in Japan which would provide the foundation for the future of the series from its opening moments it's clear that Rondo of Blood is a Castlevania title unlike anything we've seen so far and while it shares the series trademark cinematic ambition its influences come from some pretty wildly different places instead of draping itself in Gothic horror and classic monster movie imagery Rondo's Aesthetics are cribbed straight from late 80s anime in Japan series like Dragon Ball Captain Tsubasa and the works of Hayao Miyazaki had exploded in popularity and thanks to the CD-ROM too these fresh approaches to animation and storytelling began to bleed into the world of video games nahagihara never made explicit mention of this but it's impossible to imagine that his team weren't influenced by Vampire Hunter D a film adaptation of a series of novels concerned with vampire Slayers in a dark Fantasy World the movie had built a huge cult following and Reinventing Castlevania in its image seemed like an obvious golden opportunity this meant that the action movie inspired character models text scroll introductions were out the door and in its place Sean fully animated fully voiced and fully anime cut scenes the game opens with a voiceover revealing that once again as happens every 100 years Dracula has been resurrected by his evil followers and the Citadel of Castlevania has risen above the Transylvanian Countryside responsibility for this Falls once again to the Belmont Clan although unlike the muscle-bound stoic characters of the past we find ourselves playing as the Slender and cheerful Rick to Belmont whose design is less Conan the Barbarian and more Fist of the North Star much like in hagihara's last outing where we played as Christopher Belmont trying to rescue his son Richter isn't just hunting Dracula for Destiny's sake as his fiancee Annette along with three other girls have all been kidnapped by the count servant the dark priest's shaft and nobody is going to save them except for our headband wearing hero it's pure Shonen an anime a young hero taking on an Unholy Nemesis but with a side portion of High School drama after all what good is saving the world if you don't save the girl at the same time Jokes Aside it's a pretty major change of pace for the series and reflected the changing desires of video game players in Japan it wasn't good enough anymore to Simply stick the premise in the instruction manual and so through voice acting and constant cutscenes it feels like we're playing out a proper story it's the first time that the series is ever dared to step into these Realms and while the tale of Richter's journey to rescue his girlfriend isn't exactly deep stuff hearing his voice and seeing his reaction to events makes him feel so alive compared to his side and ancestors now despite the complete makeover in its presentation the gameplay is surprisingly traditional and all of its major Innovations are a lot more subtle than those found in its SNES or Genesis contemporaries where Bloodlines brought speed and hyper-powerful upgrades and Castlevania 4 had Simon attacking in all directions Rondo returns to a status quo more reminiscent of Castlevania 3 movement of combat are once again very deliberate with Richter only able to attack in a single Direction and is jumping requiring precision and thought rather than the Mad reflexes that players have become used to it might sound like a step backwards but back to the fact that we can now jump on and off stairs and that you can swap out sub weapons rather than accidentally lose them the whole game just feels less unfair and really it's the very best expression of the Strategic and slower paced action-platforming formula which had already made the series such a big success sub weapons are back to being a huge part of the gameplay thanks to the reduced power whip now as whip upgrades have been removed there's never that punishing Double Jeopardy of dying and then having to rebuild your Arsenal similarly time limits and limited continues have also been removed so it's really just about if you can navigate The Game's challenges with all those little Antiquated annoyances removed that's not to say Richter isn't without his own style though in true anime protagonist fashion with enough Hearts you can activate a Super Attack called an item crash which looks damn cool and does a ton of damage obviously you'll want to save your heart so unleash these on the bosses but thanks to the d-pad whip it brings back that decision making from the first few titles is it worth going Super Saiyan on the boss if you have to struggle along without being able to attack from every angle this claim to the legacy of those past games isn't just found in the gameplay though and there are some really cool Throwbacks that link Richter's adventure to pass Belmonts in a way that hadn't really been attempted before the first level of the game takes place in a burning Town under attack by the forces of Darkness but upon closer inspection you could see that it's actually one of the Villages from Simon's Quest similarly when Richter stands before the gate the castle and heads up into its main hall it's eerily similar to that opening level from Castlevania 1. complete with a room that perfectly matches the first Boss Arena later on we're rushing through Castlevania 3's cast of villains and it just feels like a love letter to akumatsu's masterpieces where Rondo really carves out its own Niche is in its level design and the structure of Richter's journey to destroy Dracula see most of the stages have multiple X's which in turn lead to different levels and while you always start in the burning Village and end up in the throne room consecutive playthroughs can look completely different with alternative boss fights and stages with Unique Mechanics hidden away on certain paths what makes it really clever is that unlike the branching level screens from Castlevania 3 this is all handled completely naturally within the game and requires you to physically take Richter off the obvious path it can involve destroying walls or unlocking a hidden door and some even require you to fall down specific holes a fate that in any other game would result in an instant death but here is encouraged with a reward it all adds a monstrous amount of replayability because not only does your path vary every single time you play but it adds this desire to see everything the game has to offer which naturally prompts multiple playthroughs from the main menu we have a first ever level select screen with a percentage that literally shows you how much of the game you've seen and it's impossible to resist the urge to get that up to a hundred percent this mechanic also plays a role in Rondo's optional secondary objective which is rescuing the maidens kidnapped by Dracula and is required to get the best ending in four of the game's levels there is a hidden Zone where one of the girls is trapped and in order to save her you'll need to locate the key the hidden away in specific candles and when picked up they've replaced your sub weapon which means you're pretty massively de-powered until you use it it's no big issue if you know where the maiden is but seeing a key suddenly drop without knowing where it's supposed to go prompts a heavy dose of that classic Castlevania difficult decision making in interviews before the game's release hagihara spoke about how he wanted Rondo to be the most replayable Castlevania game of all time and between the crazy variety of routes you can take and the host of secondary objectives you gotta say that he really did achieve that goal and then some an area that's always been a huge part of classic Castlevania formula is the boss fight and Rondo is absolutely no slouch in this department using that increased storage from the CD-ROM add-on to give these climactic fights a huge dose of drama and challenge we're now treated to little animations at play which introduce your foe the werewolf howling in the background a Minotaur stepping out of the Shadows or death revealing his Scythe in the distance in our world of big budget AAA games it's easy to think this is nothing but it adds such a sense of drama to these moments the bosses themselves are also far more complex than anything we've seen before with lots of attacks that use hugely detailed animations these are not the randomly moving Sprites of the 8-Bit era and each one has so much character to go along with that punishing mechanical difficulty of course you can always just hoard hearts and hit each boss with the holy water item crash but there is a certain satisfaction in Knowing You outplayed The Boss Rush or defeated the dark pretty sharp with just the Whip and some razor sharp reflexes altogether Rondo of Blood is one of the finest 2D action Platformers ever made but what takes it to the next level and pushes it into the territory of an all-time classic is the inclusion of another playable character Maria Renard early on in the second level you can free the first Maiden who unlike the others is very much not a damsel in distress despite looking like a typical cutesy anime girl Maria is from a family of vampire hunters and offers to help Rick to track down Dracula an offer which she promptly laughs off well really The Joke is on him as after this cutscene you play through the entire game as Maria who may well be the most powerful character in Castlevania history on top of being able to double jump with a huge amount of control over her Sprite in mid-air Maria is assisted by magical creatures which form her attacks and sub weapons a basic attack is two ranged doves which function like boomerangs and in combination with an assortment of cats Cardinals Turtles and drag seconds she can tear through most of the toughest enemies in the game in absolutely no time at all in interviews hagihara explained that his team wanted to create a way for Less skilled players to see everything the game had to offer and creating a sort of secondary easy mode character was decided upon as the right way to approach it in my opinion it's a very clever idea as thanks to its obviously more comedic approach it doesn't devalue the main experience as Richter and as she plays so differently it's still well worth experiencing despite its easier difficulty level when playing as Maria really anyone can see the credits but I still had bags of fun when using her sliding around on the floor unleashing JoJo style stands and turning the cut scenes into something more akin to Sailor Moon the Vampire Hunter D the fact that we have two separate characters means we also get two distinct endings both of which have wildly different tones and really are both worth seeing once Dracula is defeated instead of Disappearing back into the abyss he and Richter share a final conversation which really tries to repaint the conflict at the heart of this series Dracula claims that the reason he's called back every hundred years is nothing to do with him as he's only answering the call of greedy selfish humans who want to utilize his power for their own game Richter being the good hero he is obviously disagrees and claims the existence of love and friendship prove that humanity is worth saving it's some basic evil is in the eye of the beholder stuff but once again hagihara is showing that the series can be so much more than what we've already had the very idea that Dracula isn't an evil individual that must be stopped but a force of nature with the blame really lying in the humans who would abuse it leaves the game on a very somber no as Richter stands watching the castle crumble to dust we'll left a Wonder can this cycle ever be broken and can Humanity ever move past its simple and selfish ways funnily enough the Maria ending subverts this with a surprisingly funny alternative conversation Dracula starts out in the exact same way but Maria Cuts him off pouting that she doesn't understand what he's talking about and that he's me Dracula's clearly taken aback by this and just sits in stunned silent eventually he snaps the as long as greedy humans exist he'll keep Reviving and then he disintegrates while laughing clearly finding this situation as hilarious as hagihara and his crew intended it to seem it's like a cliff notes version of the ending Richter sees or that deep introspection replaced with Goofy images of Maria and her gang of animals fleeing the collapse in Castle if there is a single classic Castlevania game that I would recommend it would absolutely be Rondo of Blood it's the perfect combination of the challenge that makes these older titles so addictive but with just enough modern tweaks that you don't really need to get into the mindset of playing an older title so much of the frustration borderline unfair difficulty has been smoothed out and in its place is a sprawling and deep game with more content than any action platformer from 1992 has any right to have thanks to its undeniable quality Rondo of Blood became a big hit on the PC engine CD and both was and is still broadly considered to be the finest game on the platform hagihara had completely returned the faith Konami had put in him and shown that he had the Talon to helm a bigger project his days of toiling away on Game Boy license titles were well and truly over and Konami immediately set him to work on another Castlevania project this time for Sony's brand new PlayStation what's funny though is that this success was confined entirely to the shores of Japan as a PC engine CD never actually released in America or Europe meaning Rondo of Blood became a distant dream and for the longest time was one of the video game Industries biggest white whales it would be fan translated imported and emulated but never actually released officially despite fans being tortured with magazine article after magazine article talking about just how incredible this lost Castlevania title was well luckily for us in 2022 it's available on a huge amount of platforms thanks to the release of Castlevania Requiem and the oft-forgotten hard work of the emulation Community if you're yet to experience this Bonkers anime interpretation of the world of Belmont's Dracula you owe it to yourself to experience one of the finest 2D games ever made [Music] foreign the Fantastic critical reception that Rondo of Blood received American and European audiences were extremely excited to get their hands on it only issue was that the PC engine CD had hardly made a dent in the international market and Konami decided it wasn't worth spending the money on the costly translations and re-recordings then English version would require that didn't stop people speculating though and fueled by independent magazine coverage and the import scene interest in Rondo at blood always remained High amongst the Castlevania faithful it meant that when news broke in 1995 of a Super Nintendo Port anticipation was through the roof unfortunately all that excitement was wasted as the game that eventually released Castlevania Dracula X despite looking just like Rondo was a pretty markedly different experience and one that didn't really live up to the reputation of its legendary Japanese forebear Dracula X is the story animations and Sprites of Rondo of Blood but remixed into a completely new game we're still playing as Rick to Belmont on a journey to rescue Annette and Maria but almost everything that made Rondo so special has been stripped out and we're left with a very feature-like game obviously this is thanks to the game being condensed onto a cartridge which meant that the sprawling mini root levels have been removed in favor of much shorter linear stages there's also nothing resembling a cutscene or really any Narrative of any kind Maria is also no longer a playable character and the stage select and hidden secrets are all absent meaning even by early 90s platformer standards this is a very short game you can beat the game in as little as 20 minutes if you know what you're doing and there's very little reason to head back in and experience it all over again one of the main accusations leveled at Dracula ax by its critics was that from a gameplay perspective it presented a real step backwards for the series now there's nothing inherently wrong with that and it's the very same direction that Rondo went in although without the buckets of new and interesting features there needs to be some rock solid level design in order to keep the gameplay interesting the problem really is the further you get into the game the worse the level design becomes when you find yourself scratching your head at just how uninspired some of these stages are unlike every other game in the series where you fight against a real variety of enemies Dracula X has an astoundingly small villains gallery and loads levels with some of the most annoying enemy placement I've ever seen if I endless spear soldiers which have been given the ability to deflect crosses daggers and axes which means getting in close is the only way to dispatch them it's not so bad when you're one-on-one but the game increasingly becomes about fighting two or three of them at a time and on multiple levels as well there's one section in level 5 Where you fight through three of these guys only to find a jump that you literally cannot make because of a Spearman on the other side the only way you can make it is to take him out with an ax but as they can deflect them it's a tedious process of trying to kill him and not run out of Hearts which is basically akin to a soft lock as if that wasn't bad enough huge sections of the game involve lengthy sequences of platforming over instant death pits all while you're assaulted from every direction by flying enemies dear Lord whoever programmed this game must have been obsessed with bats and Medusa heads as you are constantly swarmed by them they're one of the Castlevania enemies that's really quite annoying by its very nature but they make for a good challenge when used sparingly and usually in areas where being knocked down doesn't mean a total reset Dracula X is just not that fun to play and somewhere along the line that fundamental balance of Challenge and satisfying gameplay was lost probably the most notorious section of the whole game is its Dracula fight which might be the worst designed boss in the entire franchise it's essentially a remix of the final fight from Rondo of Blood but this time the entire battle takes place across a series of pillars and if you fall between them or are knocked back by his attacks it's an instant reset this just absolutely sucks and it feels awful to be doing well and then have a slightly missed time Jump cost you the entire attempt I'm totally sure that this was only done to counteract the game's ridiculously short run time but instead of adding some sort of challenge that really pushes you like in Say Ninja Gaiden or ghosts of ghouls it's a stupidly difficult encounter that likely results in most people just quitting the game rather than soldiering through it the only remotely viable strategy I found was picking up the ax in the room outside and then praying to God in heaven that you get a favorable pattern but you don't have to move around all that much there is a second phase and of course it's just as bull you have to do battle with Dracula's Blue Man Group devil transformation and now his abilities are even harder to dodge again the only thing I found that remotely worked was getting to this section with a big enough chunk of Health then trying to time my ax throw so they destroyed his Fireballs as well did it work every time no it did not but after what felt like maybe 500 attempts I did manage to beat him and made the unbelievably tense final jump to the Red Orb which marked the end of the game honestly I think the relatively low quality of Dracula X has actually done a lot to contribute to the Mystique around Rondo of Blood the fact that Konami served us up aversion which was so obviously second rate just elevated the reputation of the version that people felt we should have got Whispers that there was a version of Dracula X with another playable character with multiple Roots through its stages and with actual well-designed levels of bosses well that's the sort of myth that lives on in message boards and magazines long after the consoles have come and gone there's been some degree of reappraisal attempts in some circles mainly claiming that if you take it in isolation away from the comparisons to Rondo Bloodlines and four it's a competent SNES action platformer but I'm not so convinced the mechanics are there for something fun but there's very little reason to ever boot up this game and if you want a tightly designed short blast of horror action platforming there's nothing here that isn't done better in Castlevania 1 or Castlevania 3. it's just a bad game and unfortunately it marks the point where konami's chaotic approach to managing the series began to come undone foreign development strategy produced yet another disappointing title in 1996 the Nintendo Game Boy had been out for almost 10 years but was incredibly still selling like absolute mad thanks to the explosion in popularity of a little-known franchise called Pokemon the release in Japan of Pocket Monsters blue and green kick-started an international wave of pokemania that had kids going crazy for the series and game boy selling like never before Konami wanted to take advantage of the system's Newfound popularity and in typical fashion threw together a team to produce a fresh handheld Castlevania title development would be handled by Casey Nagoya a team that were coming off the back of the modest success of Vandal Hearts it was a strategy RPG that despite being somewhat derivative of Shining Force had done well enough to Warrant a global release and had convinced the head honchos to trust them with one of their big franchises now as the idea of Legends was to capitalize on those new Game Boy owners the plan was to create a title that would introduce them to the rest of the series it was decided that Legends should be a distant prequel set right at the start of the series timeline hence the legend subtitle we play as Sonia Belmont a young woman with extraordinary powers and a fierce hatred of anything that causes pain to others as she heads out to free Transylvania from the clutches of the evil Count Dracula even with the expanded backstory in the instruction manual it's amazingly light on any kind of narrative and for a game that's explicitly positioning itself as the start of the franchise Legends doesn't really offer up anything we haven't seen before the plot is basically identical to Castlevania 1 3 the adventure and arguably Rondo of Blood so instead of feeling like an integral brick in the franchise it's more of a simplified jumping on point sadly the gameplay doesn't save the situation and legends is arguably the worst entry in the entire franchise really feeling like it was thrown together in order to cash in rather than because kce had a real vision for what Castlevania should be and it's a shame too as there are a few twists of the established formula which could have been interesting firstly sub weapons have been entirely removed and now throughout the game Sonia unlocks different magical powers which can be chosen at any time from an inventory screen it's an interesting idea but it's just implemented far too poorly to have any great impact on the gameplay the powers are gained by defeating bosses but as the game only has five levels and you need to beat the first boss before you gain anything you spend most of your journey without much to choose from and only have a full set for the very last stage there's also a real issue with how functional a lot of the powers are your first unlock works like the traditional stopwatch sub weapon and it's really the only one I ended up using with any regularity most of them are just various forms of ranged attack and as Sonia has access to the fireball whip upgrade from the other Game Boy titles they feel somewhat redundant the only Power that really offers anything game changing is a heal we get from the second boss now for players who are less comfortable with the game's modest challenge this is a pretty important upgrade although considering it costs a massive 20 Hertz it's either something you'll use exclusively or not at all now the final tool in Sonia's Arsenal is burning mode which is a sort of Super Saiyan transformation which makes you invincible faster and do double damage with your whip the catch well there sort of isn't a catch and again it's very strangely implemented you can activate burning mode once per level but it refreshes on death and is there an infinite continues there's nothing stopping you from using it on every single section of the game and then dying on purpose to reset it if that sounds unappealing you can just save it for boss fights which turns them into a complete joke with Sonia bursting them down before they ever get to do anything now all this might be forgivable if the game had good level design but that's probably the area where Legends Falls the flattest not only are the individual stages really lacking in the detail and theme the previous handheld titles had but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay is really off in places for some reasons Legends uses the whole enemies respawn when you return to their location thing and that absolutely does not suit a game like Castlevania and it's so easy to get swamped by endlessly respawning foes especially in the game's vertical sections where enemy placement really doesn't feel well thought out if it's something that Belmont's Revenge which came out six years earlier feels like the more modern title with distinct thematic levels clever set piece moments and a difficulty curve that actually works it's a better game top to bottom and we need to just see a few seconds of Castlevania Legends it would be hard to believe that this game came out the same year as Final Fantasy VII or Abe's Odyssey really the only place that kce's RPG pedigree shows is in the final moments of the game where the story finally bubbles to the surface with some legitimate dialogue our penultimate boss fight is against the son of Darkness himself Alucard who appears to have quite the close relationship with Sonia the fight is apparently a test to see if she has what it takes to face his father but in the process Alucard becomes too weak to accompany her and has to return to his vampiric Slumber the implication is that these two share a romantic relationship with both referring to the other as my love which fans have taken to mean that the legacy of the Belmonts is born born out of this Union there isn't actually anything in the game that confirms it but for the longest time it was considered as good as gospel as to where the Belmont's unique ability to fight evil came from everything ends with a monologue from Sonia about how Humanity will never Bend to Dracula's will and that is it barely longer than an hour and pretty much completely failing to establish anything like an original or interesting start to castlevania's timeline what's so disappointing about Legends is that there is real potential there the concept of a super state that you can strategically activate or a spread of powers that have different uses are both interesting ideas but it's so obvious that the studio had almost no experience with this type of game and lacked the talent to step up to the play the rest of kce's existence would be marked by similarly ambitious but poorly executed games the next project was a mystical ninja goemon game for the Game Boy Color but it was once again poorly received and after a host of middling Sports titles and the painfully average Azure dreams on the PlayStation 1 Casey Nagoya Studio were wound up in 2002. all their personnel were rolled into other departments with the studio having failed to make their mark on the industry and on the Castlevania series foreign so here we're going to jump around the timeline a bit and cover another strange side project Castlevania Chronicles which released in both 1993 and 1999. that's right it came out twice there's some pretty odd differences between the two versions although we'll get to why that happened in just a moment it was originally devised as an exclusive game for a completely new platform that released in Japan in the early 90s the sharp x68000 this was a home computer system with internal Hardware specifically designed to be able to run arcade games without having to degrade them and titles like life force final fight and Bubble Bobble were available in their full coin operated Glory as per usual this new market appealed to Konami but they wanted to release something that felt special an experience that you couldn't get at the arcade something designed specifically for the x68000 impressive Hardware the idea they settled on was a complete remake of the first Castlevania and a small team led by hideo ureda who had previously worked on titles like parodius and Axle was put together to make it a reality now on the surface this is really a pretty comprehensive remake and you can tell right away that every single ounce of the x68000s advanced specs were being used Sprites backgrounds and animations are all dramatically more detailed than the NES counterparts and the game is positively stuffed full of little graphical effects that were only possible on this beefy Hardware there are enemies now made up of hundreds of little particles and environments that degrade and collapse in real time slowdown is a thing of the past and every level pops with the depth of color that Nintendo couldn't even come close to but 1993 which is only three years after Castlevania 3's release it is a fantastic looking and sounding game the mastermade x68000 owners very pleased with their purchase now the big issue with akumaju Dracula x68 is that it is hard as in it is easily the most difficult game in the entire series and frankly asks an often inhuman effort of its players to be able to see the credits according to ueda this was because owners of the system were seen as more advanced Gamers and so they wanted to crank up the difficulty in order to make sure that players didn't blast through the game in a matter of hours but it's clear that they pushed things way too far even mentions in an interview that on the feedback postcards that were included with the game difficulty was the number one complaint from buyers and he speculates that they may well have overestimated the appetite for punishing skill-based gameplay the clock tower is the perfect snippet to illustrate this it's full of floating and grounded enemies tricky jumps that can completely reset your progress and these gears that drop out of the background which are impossible to see coming I don't know how anyone could beat it first time round and the sheer frustration of being knocked all the way to the bottom is absolutely not matched by the relief of getting to the top you might think well Clock Tower stages are always pretty tricky but it's often just random screens where the challenge spikes really hard in one of the final stages there's a moment where the castle sets on fire and the graphics obscure a host of different attacks that come from all directions it's so difficult to see what's going on there making it through without taking serious damage is a fantasy it's all the harder because heart drops have been toned right down and your tools now really have to be conserved for the very worst situations that's a particularly big issue thanks to the game's one big gameplay Innovation which is the introduction of the herb sub weapon for the extremely high cost of 10 Hearts it will restore a portion of your health which I think is supposed to balance out all this difficulty as most of the food drops from the original game have been removed unfortunately the herb is a rare drop that can only appear from killing certain enemies which means you'll likely never have it and thus the gameplay ends up being grotesquely weighted against you if you were amongst the few who have actually seen the End by your own hand you have my infinite respect and deserve far more than a credit screen for your efforts so fast forward to 1999 and the PlayStation was exploding in popularity far outselling anyone's expectations essentially putting Sega out of business and relegating the once Mighty Nintendo to a distant second place Konami needed to keep up their pipeline of games in order to capitalize on all this momentum and so it was decided that the x68000 version of Castlevania would be ported to the platform and repackaged as Castlevania Chronicles this is the version that I attempted and while it might look very similar there are actually some profound differences the first is that alongside a full port of the original game there's now a new Mode called arrange mode which gives you a few gameplay options to choose from and for some reason completely redesigned Simon's Sprite instead of his classic Conan the Barbarian look he's now sporting extremely long purple hair which I think was an attempt to establish him as a more unique non-conan clone character the high quality Sprite bass cut scenes from the start and end of the game have also been reworked into late 90s 3D both look pretty rad nailing that janky PlayStation aesthetic although they're unfortunately so short that they don't leave a huge impact on the overall experience really the main difference is in those new options where thankfully we can now choose between three difficulty levels and additional lives the all-new easy mode reduces the amount of damage you take lowers the knockback effect and it increases your damage and I have absolutely no shame in letting you know that I immediately switch to this mode after 12 games absolutely rocking my crash every single night I opted for the easy way out now that being said even with all those advantages Castlevania Chronicles is still an astoundingly hard game and took quite a lot of focus and effort to reach its final moments this really boils down to how much of the game's Core Design doesn't really change just because you could take an extra hit the werewolf boss for example is a notorious wall that causes people to give up he leaps all over the screen attacking from all manner of angles with about five unique moves that all have to be dodged in a different way simply being able to take an additional hit doesn't really make a difference as if you can't work out his pattern and then execute it flawlessly you're not going to make it past this boss anyway the exact same applies to Chronicles version of death who's outrageously designed to be even more challenging than is ludicrously hard NES counterpart along with randomly spawning size and his own movement which can of course damage you he now launches his main Scythe around the room and can trap you in a Vortex which requires you to predict the attacks he's going to do in order to survive to make the modern comparison it's like the boss is from Eldon ring if you don't know what you're doing and how the Mechanics Work It doesn't matter how much health or armor you have or how much damage you do they are quite literally impossible the game is designed for you to spend a long time stuck learning the nuances of the fight and eventually Landing that perfect attempt the issue is that while Dark Souls and Eldon ring cleverly augment this approach to boss design with RPG mechanics and a large world to explore the classic Castlevania games are highly linear and once you're stuck on a boss you've got no other option but to throw yourself at it over and over again with the only reward for victory being accessed to the next ludicrously difficult fight ultimately it's this gameplay Loop that meant I didn't enjoy Castlevania Chronicles and it's what I believe contributed to its pretty lackluster sales on the PlayStation if we judge it solely as a remake it's graphically an orally extremely impressive but really it's more of a Castlevania challenge mode than a reinterpretation of that Original Adventure the biggest criticism it received from magazines was that it was simply outdated and that this was a style of game from the 1980s and not something you'd expect people to be playing in 1999 that very same year square software put out Chrono cross and Final Fantasy 8. Nintendo would release Donkey Kong 64 and Pokemon Gold and Silver and konami's own team silent redefined horror games with Silent Hill the industry had moved on from linear level-based side scrollers and players were beginning to demand more from their games greater complexity ambitious storytelling and fresh experiences that took advantage of Modern Hardware it was time for Castlevania to grow up and in order to do so it needed massive reinvention in 1994 the video game industry was blown opened by Sony's entrance into the market and their cd-powered PlayStation immediately stormed into a hardware sales against Nintendo and Sega with much lower production costs huge amounts of storage and advanced 3D technology it was a platform no serious developer could ignore just like Capcom Namco and squaresoft Konami were early adopters and very quickly put together a library of critically acclaimed PlayStation titles like suicidin police notes and tokimeki Memorial the sales far exceeding anything they'd experienced as a Nintendo or Sega developer and the low production costs returning huge profits it was clear that their big franchises also needed to make the transition and throughout the mid to late 90s the company experienced a golden age publishing titles like Metal Gear Solid Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden Memories Silent Hill and Dance Dance Revolution possibly the greatest game come out of this period of creative genius was Castlevania Symphony of the Night a game that single-handedly catapulted the franchise back into mainstream relevancy and in the process created a whole new genre its reputation is obviously enormous but just like Castlevania won before it its Origins are surprisingly humble after Rondo of blood's critical success toru hagihara was once again entrusted with the Castlevania series and originally had been in charge of a team working on a title for sega's 32x Genesis add-on under the title Castle Castlevania the bloodletting as it became clear that the strange 32x wasn't catching on and that the PlayStation was roaring into life the bloodletting was scrapped and the team are asked to put out something for the upstart new console development began in 1995 and hakihara used this fresh start to bring in a young Talon who he'd long wanted to work with Koji igarashi had joined Konami in 1990 fresh out of college and after working his way up the ladder as a programmer he got his big break working on tokimeki Memorial as a scenario writer it might be surprising to hear but this thoughtful dating simulator was a cultural phenomenon in Japan and igrashi suddenly found himself as one of the most talked about young developers at the company obviously the suits wanted him to produce and direct a tokimeki sequel but eager had other plans his wife was also a programmer and during the development of tokimeki Memorial she'd been working on Rondo of Blood which meant he'd gotten to know the Castlevania team really well and felt very passionately about where they could take the franchise next with the team moving over to the PlayStation and an open brief from the board it was a perfect opportunity to bring in igarashi and together with a particularly ambitious hagihara they decided to produce something that broke all of the established rules about what Castlevania could be in an interview with persh square in 2012 igarashi outlined how at the start of the development process his team had sat down and worked out exactly what they didn't like about the older titles and then tried to build their game from the ground up by addressing them the first problem was that they felt the games could be beaten too quickly and after seeing countless copies of Castlevania 4 in the used section of his local video game shop eager actually came up with the idea of a much larger free-form world for the player to explore one which could incorporate the replayability of Rondo but on an even bigger scale inversely the second objective was to create a game that didn't rely so heavily on intense difficulty and could actually be beaten by casual players both igarashi and hagihara were huge fans of Nintendo's Legend of Zelda an influenced by how Link's inventory grew over the course of the game they decided to incorporate an equipment and leveling system in order to give players a way to overcome obstacles at their skill level couldn't handle finally and probably most importantly they wanted to move the series away from the action hero car monster movie Aesthetics of the past and create a look that was unique for the series igarashi's central idea was to switch the dynamic a Vampire Killer and vampire butting the player in the shoes of a creature of the night and having them do battle against one of the almighty Belmonts the only issue with this was that while igarashi and hagihara had lofty ideas nobody at Konami could actually execute them and this led them to bringing in an outsider who was up to the challenge by scouring anime shops for artists that caught their eye they eventually found a Yami Kojima an incredibly talented artist who used watercolors and oils to create Sumptuous Baroque inspired art the igarashi felt was perfect for his vision of the night both beautiful and horrifying in equal parts with Kojima responsible for the art Direction igarashi was free to concentrate on the story treatment and decided to bring back one of his favorite characters to play the leading role instead of a whip-wielding warrior we would be playing as Alucard the son of Darkness from Castlevania 3 and the plot would revolve around the aftermath of Rondo of Blood featuring Richter Maria and the dark priest shaft all trying to work out how the castle of Dracula had risen outside of the 100 year cycle armed with an incredible cover-up that portrayed Alucard in the castle like a piece of Renaissance art the team spent two long years developing their ideas and getting to grips with the PlayStation's architecture things weren't entirely smooth sailing for the team though and about halfway through production hagihara was promoted to a board-level position and had to leave the project which meant that eager Ashi having never produced or directed a game before had to step up to the play and finish the job they had both started despite a frantic rush to finish the game it made its March 1997 release date and immediately made a huge impact critics absolutely loved it and it remains to this day one of the best reviewed games on the PlayStation sitting at an incredible 93 out of 100 Metacritic sales were slow at first mainly thanks to its 2D look but very quickly Word of Mouth spread and copies were flying off the shelves in both Japan and America strangely The Games Were Somehow misremembered as a commercial flop which couldn't be further from the truth in fact sold so well that it was cleared for a greatest hits run just a few years later and thanks to the incredibly low production costs of making games for the PlayStation it was the most profitable title in the series for a very long time it seemed that Castlevania had found its new form and in igarashi a passionate Guardian more than equipped to take it into the Next Generation but that is only the story of The Game's history and I think it's high tide that we cracked open the casket and dived into this generational masterpiece Symphony of the Night establishes itself as a sequel right out of the gate with one of the first examples of a Trope that would become incredibly popular over the next two decades the flashback tutorial almost as soon as we select a new game we're thrust into a remixed version of the final chapter of Rondo of Blood playing as Rick to Belmont while he confronts Dracula atop his castle now obviously this scene has become more famous for its wonky English translation that robs it as some of its dramatic way but I think this sequence is a lot Stranger Than People realize as almost everyone outside of Japan hadn't played Rondo of Blood this introduction would have been even more confusing than the dialogue already makes it it's a thrilling start to the game showing off the team's ambition with Incredible 3D backgrounds and a pulse-pounding boss fight but as a narrative starting point it's hilariously obtuse luckily Things become a lot clearer as we flash back to the present day and take control of our main character Alucard awake after Sen entries of self-imposed Slumber racing towards his father's Castle determined to discover why it's reappeared after only a handful of years here we get yet another Trope that would go on to become a staple of the adventure genre the ability fake out during this opening section of the game we play as a hyper powerful version of the son of Dracula armed with powerful equipment that kills every enemy in a single hit it's a taste of the power to come but is quickly Stripped Away when Alucard comes face to face with death he's similarly confused about his re-summoning and while he refuses to stop Alucard with Force he instead steals his gear which sets us up to regain our powers over the course of the game we step out into the first area with nothing but our fists and Symphony of the Night begins in Earnest with a huge castle to explore gear to find and a mystery to solve first let's deal with the castle itself as this structural difference is easily the biggest departure from the series traditions and the foundation that enables every other new mechanic unlike the segregated levels of previous titles Symphony of the night's zones all flow from one into the other forming a vast castle that Alucard explores over the course of the game you're free to return to areas once a boss has been defeated and doing so with New Movement abilities usually returns upgrades or new equipment which in turn makes it easier to explore new zones while Rondo did incorporate some elements of exploration Symphony takes it to a completely new level and the sheer breadth of the castle will seem ludicrously imposing considering there's virtually no indication of where you need to go and when to do it cleverly this has been alleviated by the game beginning with a linear journey across the length of the castle taking you from the main entrance on the left all the way to the outer wall on the right hand side it gives players a chance to acclimatize with the controls and through fighting boss and gaining a few upgrades the core Loop of the game is established without having to overload the player with potential places to explore once you're atop the outer wall you're introduced to the games librarian who conveniently agrees to operate a small shot and here the first non-linear elements are introduced by purchasing the stone of open suddenly alicard can unlock blue sealed doors which means you now have access to two potential routes through the holy Chapel back at the main entrance or down into the underground found just after the first boss it's never spelled out but there's only one correct way to go and that's to the holy Chapel but the fact that Symphony allows you to head off in the wrong direction to explore and find Secrets means there's really parallel progression systems working here there's the progression through the story advancing the plot through beating certain events in a certain order and there's alucard's progression done by finding new equipment gaining money and upgrades all of which is done in no order and completely at the player's discretion thanks to death you begin the game with absolutely no equipment and one of the core objectives is increasing your power by finding better gear unlike the Belmonts before him alucard's tool set is incredibly varied and really depends on what items you want to use and what suits your play style you can equip knives and rapiers that attack quickly but with less power huge Claymores That Swing slowly but hit much harder and all manner of strange weapons in between from rods to throwing weapons to Shields that block attacks you'll generally just stick to whatever weapon does the most damage but it brings a huge level of variety to the endless whipping of previous titles now before this is starting to sound a lot like a role-playing game you'd be completely correct along with all the weapons and armor Alucard also gains XP from each enemy defeated which eventually causes level ups that improve your health it adds a huge amount of purpose to the combat and means that backtracking no matter how lost you get always carries a benefit it's one of those Concepts you can't quite believe didn't exist before this point and obviously it's become hugely influential spawning a legion of CopyCat clones that blend light RPG mechanics into existing genres as a way of creating progression these days absolutely everything from FIFA to Call of Duty has some kind of leveling system and you can make a pretty strong argument the symphony was the first to deliver this outside of a traditional RPG while it never stops being satisfying seeing the level up animation freeze the screen or solving a little puzzle that rewards you with an interesting new weapon the whole system does have The Accidental effect of making Symphony of the Night an incredibly easy game one which is almost unrecognizable in challenge when compared to its brutal 8-bit ancestors depending on how long it takes you to reach the librarian or if you head into the underground before you reach the holy Chapel you can arrive at this early point of the game ludicrously overpowered and Symphony never really manages to claw back a semblance of balance as more of the Castle opens up and you have more and more directions to head in this process can repeat over and over leading you to face bosses that don't remotely pose a threat to you eager Ashley had wanted to create a Castlevania that anyone could be and he certainly achieved that goal although it was definitely at the cost of those incredible moments of satisfaction the akamatsu ueno and even hagihara had managed to craft after the chapel the game very quickly settles into its core flow which is discovering items and abilities that unlock new areas at the castle and visiting them to see if they contain the next set of upgrades or what Alucard levels up and gains more power cleverly all of the zones have been designed to have really distinct color palettes and unique Aesthetics which means that you don't always need to rely on the map to guide your way this is where the PlayStation's muscle is a powerful Next Generation console really gets to shine as in certain areas Symphony of the Night looks simply breathtaking in a chapel we're treated to sprawling 3D backgrounds that depict a monstrous Gothic Cathedral and up on the battlements swirling effects Creek and otherworldly atmosphere which makes the castle feel more alive than it ever has before the Coliseum is a mash of dirty Browns full of armor-wearing skeletons in the long Library we battle against demonic books that burst out of the wall and in the alchemical laboratory mechanical switches and levers reveal hidden locations and operate lifts combined with alicard's smooth as butter animations which perfectly realize a Yami kojima's flowing art in a gameplay system that never stops rewarding you for your actions it's extremely obvious very quickly as to why Symphony of the Night became such an instant classic and is still so beloved to this day it's one of those Magical games where ambition and invention came together and truly broke new ground now that being said it's not without its faults and the sheer quality of the rest of the game makes these moments stand out all the more starkly for starters the actual sequence you're supposed to follow to progress through the games is really quite obscure at times without a map that tracks potential new routes you're often left wandering the castle without any direction once you get the leap Stone which allows Alucard to perform a double jump a huge amount of new areas suddenly become available the thing is none of them actually progress the story and you're meant to go to a clock in the middle of the castle and then leap up to the left when the clock face is set at a certain time I have absolutely no idea how you're supposed to work this out on your own and as fun as it is to wander the halls of the castle it's immensely frustrating to find dead end after dead end annoyingly this actually happens in more than one place the clock face path eventually leads to the Coliseum where Alucard gains the ability to transform into mist which allows him to pass through steel grates but that's only used in a very small number of locations and as the greats don't separate rooms you can't clearly see on the map where you need to return to once again it leads to a ton of aimless wandering that's going to have you reaching for a walk through what you're meant to do is take it back to the library and use it to unlock the final transformation power the bat which allows you to fly and access all of the remaining areas it's an amazing upgrade which completely changes how you approach navigation but it immediately makes them Miss power and the double jump redundant and contributes to symphony's very odd structure clearly a large cause of all of this was because eager Ashley's team were discovering how a game like this should work with no established genre conventions to fall back on while it might feel obtuse and confusing compared to something like Hollow Knight or guacamelee within the context of the mid 90s it's still a very impressive game so just like how we ran into death during the opening sequence Alucard regularly bumps into other characters during his wanderings and it's through these encounters that the vast majority of symphony's mystery plot is delivered very quickly he meets a much older Maria Renard who's searching for Richter Belmont as he went missing shortly after defeating Dracula in the prologue Alucard and Maria initially treat each other with suspicion but after seeing him dispatch the Servants of Darkness Maria confides in our hero that she suspects Richter might have something to do with the Castle's reappearance this fear is shortly confirmed when deep within the Colosseum Alucard encounters the Belmont sitting upon a throne claiming ownership of Dracula Citadel and commanding the forces of evil that reside within it for Americans and Europeans who'd never really seen Richter before I'm sure this wasn't a big deal but if you come into symphony knowing the character it's a huge surprise and one that goes far further than igrashi's desire to have the game be based around fighting a Belmont this isn't just any Vampire Slayer it's probably the most light-hearted good guy of the whole Belmont family now redesigned as a nefarious villain it's a shocking move considering just how heavily the series relied on traditional good versus evil Concepts and Incredibly that isn't the only subversion that igarashi designed for Symphony of the Night after gaining the bat form there's actually nothing stopping you from heading straight to the throne room and challenging Richter who reveals that he's doing this to be able to fight Count Dracula for all eternity as without his Nemesis his life lacked any purpose he's often referred to in Castlevania law as the strongest of all Belmonts and this boss fight absolutely does that reputation Justice without good enough gear air and a big enough Health ball he will rip you a new one with lightning fast whip attacks and full access to all of his item crashes from Wander of blood when Alucard emerges Victorious Richter passes away with a haunting line that really shows the script of this game wasn't completely butchered in Translation what use is a Shepherd when all the wolves have gone away the castle crumbles to dust and alicard stands upon a cliff pondering everything he's seen he decides that Richter must have chosen a life of warfare as it was all he'd ever know and lacking any other explanation he leaves the land of his birth swearing to never return with no real explanation for Richter's actions or exploration of alucard's Heritage it's a profoundly unsatisfying conclusion and that's because it's not the real ending of Symphony of the Night you see igarashi decided to include a fake out for players who didn't explore the entire map and this early ending comes before the halfway point of the game in their conversations Maria constantly asks Alucard to not her Richter refusing to believe that he's turned to Darkness and imploring our hero to find another way to prevent Dracula from resurrect if you do scour the entire Castle you'll find a host of additional abilities like the bat echo which lets you move through pitch black areas and the spike armor which allows you to break impossible terrain and through using them Alucard will find two rings which when worn in the central Clock Tower open a secret path Into the Heart of the castle inside we meet Maria for a final time she accepts that Richter is to blame for the castle returning but she still won't give up on him and hands over the holy glasses to see if there are any evil illusions that might be surrounding our Fallen Hero lo and behold if you put them on in the Richter fight you'll see a floating green orb which you can damage remixing the fight into a game of cat and mouse where he tried to dodge his brutal item crashes and Target the strange object when it's destroyed the truth of the game's Central mystery is revealed Richter was being controlled by the dark priest's shark the antagonist of Rondo of Blood once again returning to act as Dracula's Lieutenant on Earth through using Richter he could Resurrect The Count while his brainwashed Belmont destroyed all who opposed him although he hadn't banged on Alucard returning after hundreds of years of Slumber unfortunately despite freeing Richter the ritual of Resurrection is still completed and out of a swirling magical vortex in the sky a second castle descends mirroring the one we've just explored but inverted a reflection of a place that was already evil and in its Central chamber Dracula Rises once again this is the true Twist of Symphony of the Night and it's a reveal that dwarfs anything taking place in the plot there's another Castle to explore and your victory in the throne room is only half of your battle against the count now realistically this is a pretty well known surprise and the vast majority of people will have likely already heard about the inverted castle if they've heard anything about Symphony of the Night at all but don't let that trick you into underestimating this section of the game which is a lot more clever than people give it credit when you step into the beam of light and are transported to this alternate Dimension the structure of the game changes quite dramatically and this is where Symphony of the Night really becomes the open world non-linear experience that this genre has become known for once you reach the central clock room you'll realize that you need to collect the five artifacts of Dracula in order to face alucard's father and as they can be collected in any order this whole section is just a pure expression of symphony's exploration combat gameplay as you have access to every single movement ability and there are no more to find from the second you arrive you can head to any part of the inverted castle and really any progression through this space is utterly defined by you along with a more free form objective the enemies also get a much needed increase in power which resets the balance somewhere back to near the start of the game with regular foes easily able to kill you and health company a premium it means that rather than simply racing around looking for the relics you're encouraged to take things slow and search for upgrades like you did in the normal castle and it's something you're going to want to do as the inverted cast will come to its own set of new boss fights which pack quite a punch once you've explored the entirety of the inverted castle and collected all of the relics of Dracula it's pretty impossible not to return to that hyper overpowered State and as the level UPS Health upgrades and fresh equipment keep flowing by the time you're ready to face down shaft at the count it's pretty hard not to feel very confident in alucard's abilities and that's a shame as the finale is easily the most cinematic and gripping moment that the series has ever been able to put together fully realizing igrashi's vision of a Castlevania game with real substance to it we first do battle against shaft who floats around in a strange alchemical machine but who really poses absolutely no threat to the vengeful Son Of Darkness Alucard delivers the final blow with a fitting action film one liner you claim to love the darkness go then and dwell there for all eternity with that the screen melts away and we finally get the family reunion that the whole game has been building towards and this is where igarashi delivers his final surprise the count of salucard why he fights with the humans and if he's forgotten what they did to his mother you see in the normal Castle you can step into a corrupted save point in which a succubus tries to torment Alucard with his Memories the event chosen is the death of his mother Lisa burned of the stake as a witch for her relationship with Dracula and who in her dying breath asked alicard to forgive them and do them no harm this familial loss is the source of the conflict between Alucard and his father stretching all the way back to Castlevania 3. Dracula unable to forgive and forget unleashes his venge upon Humanity punishing them for taking away the only woman who loved him while his son desperately clings to his mother's last words by locking himself in Eternal Slumber it's a complete reimagining of the far more pulpey origin story that we got in Castlevania 3 adding depth to the character of Vlad tapish by taking huge influence from the 1992 movie Bram Stoker's Dracula which similarly presented the vampire as a grief-stricken tragic character rather than a malevolent monster in a world of Final Fantasy and Silent Hill audiences wanted more depth from their characters and somehow in this short scene igerashi manages to redefine a character who for most people is the iconic cartoon villain it's an incredible moment of video game writing after a fight where the count takes the form of a monstrous living Throne the two share one final conversation Alucard tells his father that he was do assumed from the moment he forgot how to love an account sarcastically replies with a Bible verse Matthew 16 26. for what profit is it to a man if he gains the world and loses his own soul with that haunting realization he whispers for Lisa's forgiveness Fades back into the abyss defeated not by the hand of the Belmonts but by his own flesh and blood it is a fantastically written ending for a game that largely focuses on gameplay and pretty much spoils that caricature of Symphony of the Night as a poorly translated mess it might have some strangely delivered lines but it's pretty hard to argue with a narrative that manages to subvert almost every idea found in the franchise while also feeling like its ultimate expression now as we've already discussed Symphony of the Night was a huge critical and Commercial Success but as its sales came very slowly this has had the effect of making it quite the unique game within the franchise despite the Monstrous shadow that it casts over almost everything to come soon after 1997 titles like metal gear solid and Silent Hill became big International hits and konami's focus shifted completely away from 2D games meaning there was little appetite to commission a sequel the team behind Symphony had immediately gone their separate ways and eager as she was too busy working on a PS1 RPG called eldergate to be lobbying the board for permission to work on another Castlevania game as we'll discover in the rest of this video when he eventually did return circumstances were very different and it meant that incredibly despite the wild critical reception this Remains the only game where we play as Alucard and the very last big budget 2D Castlevania Symphony of the Night may be one of the greatest games ever made but just like those sales slowly building over time it would take an army a while to realize just how important this game would be to the future of the series foreign had clearly defined the future of the series can only still weren't convinced and instead of pursuing this maximalist side-scrolling Direction They instead opted to follow the rest of the industry and transition the series to 3D during the mid to late 90s it was the question that all developers and Publishers were having to answer despite the complexity of developing in this style more and more companies found it delivering huge success traditional 2D companies like squaresoft and Nintendo were having unprecedented commercial success in 3D the studios that were once minnows like naughty dog and core designs became household names thanks to the runaway success of titles like Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider it was a pot of gold too good to turn down and konami's first ether in this space couldn't have been more of a success hideo kojima's Metal Gear Solid took Stealth gameplay and mixed it with a cinematic direction that was literally impossible in 2D and it had the effect of catapulting metal gear from a niche Japanese series into a global Blockbuster the future was obviously 3D and internally it was felt that Castlevania needed to make the jump to survive now that's all fine in concept but Konami had a small problem outside of hideo Kojima they didn't really have any developers with any 3D experience and so to manage this new Direction they decided to set up an entirely new studio in late 1996 Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe commonly referred to as Kobe Studio was set up with the sole purpose of developing a 3D Castlevania game while it was a pretty inexperienced team production duties were handled by etsunobu a bisu who was the brains behind the gambare goemon series known in America and Europe as the legend of the mystical ninja there's absolutely no information about why obesity was moved on to the Castlevania franchise but given the quality of the goemon series it's not a surprising move despite Metal Gear solid's success Kobe Studio opted for the Nintendo 64. likely to capitalize on the series long history on Nintendo consoles and it first saw the light of day in a preview at the Tokyo game show in 1997. the game would apparently marry the cinematics of metal gear solid with the action gameplay the series was already known for telling a story that was spread across four distinct campaigns and featuring a fully fleshed out multiplayer mode it was very ambitious and really got journalists excited but unfortunately as the team got further into the development process they began to hit bump after Bump by late 1998 it was clear that the game had to be delayed and ibizu took the decision to dramatically streamline the game multiplayer was stripped out two of the campaigns were removed and whole levels were simplified in order to make an early 1999 release date and actually get something to Market when it finally released in January it was a shadow of what was originally promised despite some surprisingly positive contemporaneous reviews Castlevania 64 has developed one of the strangest reputations of any game I've ever seen just like Simon's Quest before it most people's first exposure to the game was thanks to early online creators who in true mid-2000s style painted it as one of the worst games of all time unsurprisingly the Angry Video Game Nerd was once again at the center of it all in his review which has a staggering 6.6 million views horrifically misrepresents the game for comedy say it's full of incredibly minor nitpicks criticisms of things that had long been in the series and ends with this absurd sequence where he makes it look like you can soft lock the game despite only needing to press a single button in order to get out of his predicament I love the nerd but this certainly isn't his finest hour and it really did a huge amount of damage to how people perceived this title kind of amazingly in recent years this has flipped on its head and we've now got what I can only describe as a positive backlash where more modern creators have started painting Castlevania 64 as a misunderstood Masterpiece a Hidden Gem of atmospheric horror excellence and often hand wave away any of the old criticisms as people just not getting it the reality is far less exciting than either of these perspectives Castlevania 64 is a highly flawed game and while it's ambitious and interesting and full of character it's also frustrating to play often badly designed and clearly and obviously suffered from its mass of a development cycle it might not drive clicks but it's time to finally uncover the truth about this off disgust that rarely played Black Sheep at the franchise unlike Metal Gear Solid or Ocarina of Time which paired the move to 3D with a huge expansion in storytelling ambition Castlevania on the Nintendo 64 has a pretty damn basic narrative and really feels like a soft reboot of the very first game Dracula has risen to torture the people of Transylvania and two Heroes rise to the challenge of defeating him these are our two remaining campaigns one where you play as the whip wielding Reinhardt Schneider and the other starring Carrie Fernandez a magical spellslinger in the style of Maria Renard from Rondo of Blood it's the first game since Blurred Lines to not feature a Belmont in any sort of role but rather disappointingly neither of our replacement protagonists do much to stake a claim to that lead spot they both lack developed personalities or backstories and we never find out why either of them are so desperate to destroy the cow in that sense it really is similar to the original Castlevania with a focus that's squarely on ascending the castle defeating the demons within you do this by progressing through a range of stages which are split between more linear levels that are focused on combat and platforming and a few that are more open-ended with gameplay based around exploration and puzzle solving it's an odd mixture because at times it can really feel like you're playing a true conversion of the classic 2D formula while at others it's like nothing else on the platform let alone in the Castlevania series it's a really odd blend of gameplay styles that mean despite being quite a short game there's a lot going on in Castlevania 64. both good and bad let's start with the bad stuff first because despite those glowing modern reviews Castlevania 64 is deeply flawed and has some really big issues that impact almost every second of its run time the first is arguably not even Kobe's fault but still needs to be mentioned the Nintendo 64 Controller is just a goddamn strange design and like most Studios that weren't Nintendo Kobe struggled to find a way to make its unconventional layout work movement is governed by the main control stick jumping and attacking are on the A and B buttons pretty simple so far right well everything else makes a lot less sense the Z trigger activates a fairly useless slide which you almost never need to use and is a weird choice for one of the primary buttons on the controller the R button centers the camera behind you and the L button locks onto the nearest enemy although you inexplicably can't move while locked on probably because you need to let go of the main stick to even use it this means that you'll largely rely on the auto Target which is pretty tricky and leads to most players using carry as our magical spells automatically home in on targets obviously something which I opted against playing through the game as Reinhardt things get really weird on the C buttons up activates a first person view down fires off your sub weapon left is a short range dagger attack and right opens doors picks up items speaks to characters and activates objects in the world it's just a nonsensical massive commands that really does take a concerted effort to learn especially as you need these actions in the heat of fast-paced combat don't want to accidentally go into first person mode when you're trying to throw holy water or grab a health pickup it's made all the worse by the very slidy platforming which doesn't even attempt to replicate the deliberate and precise movement of its 2D cousins both Reinhardt and Carrie Zoom around the maps when you're jumping thanks to them retaining a whole load of momentum when they land it makes traveling around some of the larger linear levels a lot more bearable but in the moments where you're meant to be landing precise jumps it's ridiculously frustrating even when you're taking things slow you'll constantly die from slipping straight off of Platforms in a way that makes judging where you should land pretty damn hard in addition to this most of the platforms built around Tomb Raider style ledge grabs that of course means if you don't hit them at just the right angle you fly straight right past your destination and to your doom the game has a reputation a feeling really quite janky and between the platforming and weird controls I think it's very disingenuous for anyone to argue otherwise amazingly the soul-saving grace here is the camera which had so many other 3D Platformers is an utter handicap while you can Center the camera at will with the R button Kobe took the decision to pre-direct most of the game's camera angles and this works surprisingly well while it still suffers from the same depth perception issues that other games traditionally struggle with moving around in Castlevania 64 isn't really anywhere near as bad as it could be the biggest thing that hurts the game is its level design which is very uneven sometimes putting together really memorable set pieces and at other times feeling like Kobe was simply happy to get something functional into the cartridge when playing as Reinhardt at one point we descend underground and have to pass through a tunnel system in order to sneak into the depths of Dracula's castle it's just a sludgy brown mass of an area that has you wandering back and forth looking for a way out but without any landmarks to indicate that you might be getting closer to the exit the first level in the forest of silence is somewhat similar but every time you find and activate a switch a gate opens which at least gives you a sense of what you're supposed to be looking for in the tunnels there's simply nothing and without a walkthrough for reference it's absurdly easy to become lost in its identical Pathways that same confusion also plagues the non-linear zones which is a shame as they really are quite unique little sections of gameplay during the villa and Central Castle stages instead of Leaping and battling your way to the exit we have to explore various rooms looking for keys and solving puzzles they feel very influenced by Resident Evil and given the backtracking and little door animation that plays in between areas it's hard to imagine that Kobe weren't inspired by capcom's horror Mega hit in the Villa it really feels like this approach works well there's a great horror atmosphere as you're introduced to Dracula's vampire servants and the NPCs you meet all have a strange otherworldly presence it adds a huge amount of character to the wandering around and ultimately makes searching for the key to access the next Zone a satisfying gameplay Loop but this doesn't work so well is in the central Castle which might be the most notorious gameplay section in this entire franchise the idea is you need to blow up a wall in order to progress further into the castle but to do this you need to bring together a Nitro tank and a mandragora which is a lot easier said than done to get the mandragora you need to first get to the top of the stage which takes you through a whole bunch of rooms where the doors lock until you've beaten all the enemies and at the summit you'll find a lizard man who gives you the torture room key that's all the way back down on the bottom floor which means back through all the combat rooms and into the lock dungeon where the mandragora are kept nothing too complicated right well also on the top floor is the Nitro storage room and in order to get that back down to the cracked wall you have to engage in one of the most annoying game mechanics I've had to put up with in years the Nitro will explode if you jump or attack which means you need to make it all the way down through the entire stage without taking a single hit and without falling off of a single platform in tandem with the game slippery controls this section is utterly tedious nonsense requiring constant resets thanks to you slipping off of walkways or getting caught by Rogue Fireballs your only possible defense is to use sub weapons and let me tell you this they are nowhere near enough if you do somehow manage to get the Nitro and mandragora together the wall blows up except it actually doesn't and you need to destroy a completely different wall in another section of the level in order to remove a magical seal preventing you from progressing this means another jaunt through the combat rooms to get a mandragora and then another slow pace crawl with the Nitro trying to avoid blowing up once this is done you can solve a little puzzle which finally removes the seal and lets you do it all over again for a third time letting you finally get out of this God forsaken level it's just horrible to play through featuring some of the worst game design tropes of early Adventure titles this is the famous moment that caused the Angry Video Game Nerd to quit Castlevania 64. but amazingly it wasn't because of any of these negatives in his video he couldn't work out how to activate the mandragora or Nitro which is done by just pressing the right C button you know like how you've been activating every single item in the game up until that point it's this sort of disingenuous criticism which is why Castlevania 64 has experienced a positive backlash although you might be wondering exactly how that's possible given the host of brutal flaws we've just been over funnily enough there is actually a lot to like about this game and away from the broad Strokes of gameplay it's full of some lovely touches which really show off the natural Flair at sonobu ibizu had for creating games from the very first moment you boot it up there's a real palpable atmosphere the main menu is a really cool theatrical shot of malice a young character you interact with during the game playing the violin against the midnight black backdrop his haunting tune Echoes out echoing you into an adventure that blends the Beautiful with the Macabre similarly when you first encounter Dracula it's such a well put together moment at the top of the castle walls a solitary Bell begins ringing out and then you see him camera pans up to reveal our nemesis floating in the sky the wind howling around him it's this nose for creating interesting moments with the 3D engine that really saves Castlevania 64 from being a completely miserable experience and despite having a very basic story to tell it does it with Panache and makes some clever adjustments to the formula we've grown so accustomed to in the Villa's Garden we meet Rosa a woman who's been bitten but doesn't want to give in to the curse and begs both Reinhardt and Carrie to end her misery this whole subplot is just beautifully tragic we see how trying to end her own life by stepping into sunlight trying to force our hand into fighting us and ultimately she sacrifices herself to protect our main character prompting death to ridicule the notion of a vampire hunter who prays to God for the Forgiveness of a vampire's soul you'd think this inclination towards a more mature style of Storytelling would culminate in the game's finale but Castlevania 64 ends in a really strange way that I think Kobe thought was more clever than it actually is when you finally defeat Dracula whoever you're playing as leaves the castle with malice heads off into the sunset the only thing that might indicate things are not what they seem is a final shot of the mysterious young boy and a slightly ominous shift in the music you see this is actually the bad ending which you trigger by overusing The Game's sun and moon cards which shift the time of day and are required to progress through certain doors it's a strange decision as there's absolutely zero indication that this mechanic impacts the story and it robs you of seeing the true resolution of the narrative if you don't use the cards it turns out that malice was actually Dracula all along and have been trying to trick you into thinking he'd been defeated so he could Escape Transylvania unnoticed it leads to the most insane Dracula second phase yet where he's a sort of dragon demon scorpion monster which you fight in this desert hellscape and frankly it looks pretty damn amazing it's really emblematic of the entire a game because clearly a lot of thought was put into this climactic moment but as a functional boss it's absolutely terrible and you can defeat this Colossus by just standing behind him and spamming your most basic attack if you do it as Reinhardt Rosa comes back to life as a normal human and the two head off to live in peace as Carrie Rosa doesn't have the same luck and for some reason she stays dead while the young girl visits her mother's grave and that's Castlevania 64. it's a real mixed bag of a game which has contributed to having this strange parallel reputation yes it does have some really clever touches and yes it manages to create an atmosphere that very few Nintendo 64 games can match equally it's impossible to pretend that it's fractured development didn't have a massive impact on it and the flaws are there for all to see in the end the real killer blowed to Konami and Kobe's Ambitions was nothing to do with the content of the game and was everything to do with when it released had it managed to make that original early 1998 release window I think people would have probably been a lot kinder to it ignoring its more rough edges because I simply wasn't the same level of reference points in the space of just a single year the industry moved so far forward we got Soul Reaver Majora's Mask Silent Hill and even shenmue on the Dreamcast which made Castlevania 64 look quite literally like something from an older generation with the Nintendo 64 sales slumping hard against the might of Sony's Playstation and sega's Dreamcast blowing out the water in terms of graphical power interest in even Nintendo's first party games had really dwindled and for a title that had long burned past the media's interest there was no hope it barely scraped half a million sales globally particularly disappointing in Europe where the franchise had always been historically pretty strong it was a huge disappointment and konami's plans for a 3D Dynasty quickly shifted from excitable ambition to frantic damage control oh foreign rather amazingly the decision was made to give Kobe Studio another bite of the cherry and in December of 1999 just 10 months after the release of Castlevania 64. we got Castlevania Legacy of Darkness now this might seem incredibly patient by modern publisher standards especially for cone Army who even back in the 90s were fairly Cutthroat but the reality wasn't quite as wholesome as it sounds Konami were desperate to recoup some of the massive investment Kobe had already spent a legacy of darkness is less of a new game and more of a director's cut re-release of the original the idea was to take the unfinished parts that had to be cut late in the previous game's development and flesh them out into a finished product which Konami could then charge full price for essentially double dipping on their work and in the process producing a very strange but arguably quite underrated game Castlevania Legacy of darkness is both a prequel and a remake of Castlevania 64. featuring two all-new characters who run through a redesigned version of the games campaign we head back to the forest of Silence we explore the halls of the villa and end up traversing the Clock Tower with everything running in a very familiar structure it's so similar in fact that Reinhardt and Carrie's campaigns are both included and Kobe had originally planned to call it Castlevania special edition I'm not sure this Paints the full picture though and Legacy of Darkness does feel quite distinct from its predecessor The Lion's Share of new content is found in the first campaign you play Cornell's story a prequel set eight years before the events of Castlevania 64. he's a member of an ancient clan of man beasts who harnesses the power of their God to transform into a werewolf and one day he returns to his village to find it destroyed and his sister Ada kidnapped the hunt for her captors leads him to Transylvania and after making his way across the wreckage of a ship in the docks he heads into the forest of silence and towards the castle of one Camp Dracula now while his gameplay might look virtually identical to what we've already seen in 64. there have been some really positive changes to how Cornell controls which make the game much more enjoyable to play the platforming has been tightened up with a far more generous window for grabbing Ledges and a much faster animation for pulling yourself up it's only a very slight change but it makes leaping around the levels far easier and with save crystals now play before almost every section of platforming you can really go for it and gamble on jumps in a way that you never would dream of doing in 64. the same goes for the combat where slight changes make the whole package much more interesting Cornell attacks via this ranged laser slash but as you can now move while locked on and can attack while jumping and sliding you don't feel as much of a sitting dark and can actually start to enjoy getting into fights and there's a lot to enjoy sub weapons can now be upgraded if you pick up multiples of the same type and along with increasing in power they get new animations which all look pretty gray the cherry on top is Cornell's werewolf form which thanks to his status is the blue crescent moon of his clan can be activated at any time massively increasing the damage losing the size of your attack and switching your model out for this rad wolf Super Saiyan form with tighter platforming and combat that actually gives you mechanics to engage with it's just top to bottom a much better experience from a pure gameplay perspective and it feels like Kobe knew this too all of the level redesigns have minimized those open-ended puzzle sections and really weighted Cornell's Adventure much more towards in your face action the very first level features a frantic race out of the hull of a sinking ship and then a really quite cinematic battle against a huge sea serpent who can knock you miles into the air there's hardly a key to find or puzzle to solve all the way up to the villa which even then has a lot of its more obtuse ideas snipped off inside it's now unlocked doors we meet the previous owners the uldry family and Cornell has to do a little touring and throwing defeating the vampiric J.A old tree before heading into the Hedge maze at the request of Mary to save their son Henry thankfully that's really the extent of the open-ended sections and after this we're thrown into pure action platforming all the way through to the credits immersively that terrible Central Castle with the Nitro and mandragora has been utterly erased now I can already hear the Cry of the Castlevania 64 apologists frustrated that these supposedly atmospheric and soulsian sections have been largely removed but what we have in their place is genuinely much stronger a legacy of darkness is final few stages are a fantastic example of what 90s 3D action platforming could have looked like for the series each of the towers you visit on your way to the throne room revolve around different Unique Mechanics and never last so long that they outstay their welcome or become too complex to understand quickly in the tower of ruins for example we have to work our way around a maze of identical rooms looking for three switches that unlock the exit that sounds horrible but there are in-game maps littered throughout the level which take the pressure off of navigation and let you focus on enjoying the level's core idea sometimes it's not even this complex though in the tower of science everything takes on a very futuristic aesthetic and Cornell has to dodge turrets and flamethrowers while trying to get into the control room at various points the perspective switches over to the side and we get these almost side-scroller-esque moments of fast-paced gameplay it's just a cool little touch that shows Kobe had really learned where to focus their attention and what makes for a satisfying 3D game so far this has been a pretty damn glowing review and while I wouldn't exactly say Legacy of Darkness has any huge problems the redesigns to the structure of the game have removed some of the more interesting ideas found in Castlevania 64. that game was based around a day and night cycle with enemies stronger in the day and weaker at night and certain doors you could only pass through at specific times in the huge sprawling levels this was a way of gazing off hidden Resources with the trade-off being that doing it too much gave you the bad ending in Legacy there is only one ending an absolutely zero repercussions for using as many sun and moon cards as you like sounds like a huge Advantage but they're only really used in The Villa and the art Tower as all the other levels are too tightly designed to Warrant including optional side areas which reduces the mechanic to a real afterthought the same goes for the shop between Castlevania 64 was another interesting idea as it caused you to have to fight an extra boss if you spent too much money once again without those bigger levels you simply never gain enough money to reach the threshold and nor would you need to as most of the challenge comes in the form of falling down pits rather than burning through all your resources and needing to replenish them the story is also a bit of a weak point as despite being advertised as a prequel Cornell's tale isn't really all that linked to the events that take place eight years earlier you quickly discover that his village was destroyed by his childhood friend Ortega who is jealous of his status as the blue crescent moon and struck a deal with Dracula to trade Cornell's sister for a dose of demonic Power by the time we finally catch up to Ortega he succumbs to the Demonic influence and transformed into a chimera but defeating him doesn't save Ada as she's whisked Away by death and taken to the throne room ready to be absorbed into Dracula in order to unlock his full power once we're at the summit of the castle it's another two-faced fight just like in 64 but dear Lord in heaven did they listen to the criticism of that game's final encounter Dracula's second phase in Legacy is absolutely backed insane he's transformed into an absolutely massive demon and it all takes place on this weird angle where he's kind of off to the right hand side of the screen and it makes avoiding his many many different attacks very hard once that's done things get a little murky and I'm not exactly sure what's supposed to be happening during the ending I think that Dracula is about to drag Aida down into hell with him but instead she gets swapped with Cornell's wolf form which is now somehow a separate being the two siblings make their escape but it somehow emerges that this was actually all part of dragon's plan and that they needed the wolf form in order to resurrect the true Dracula who would take the form of malice in Castlevania 64. why he'd want to be a purple-haired violin player instead of a giant mega demon I have absolutely no idea and I'm not sure Kobe did either regardless everything ends with the sun rising over Transylvania and Cornell and Ada heading off with young Henry oldbury presumably living a comfortable and long life despite Dracula resurrect just eight years later now Cornell's story isn't the only new campaign as Kobe included another to finally fulfill that promise of four playable characters taking place parallel to Reinhardt and Carrie's Adventures the fourth story sees us playing as a grown-up Henry sent on a rescue mission by the church to save seven children who have somehow become mixed up in Dracula's Resurrection plot if that sounds weird it's because it really is and the campaign is so obviously slapped together to meet that old promise rather than because Kobe had any great ideas for a fourth story there are no cut scenes or dialogue and we get absolutely zero explanation for why any of this is happening it's effectively a bonus mode although given just how hidden some of the children are you can easily spend just as long fruitlessly hunting around for them as you spend in the main game incredibly when Legacy of Darkness released it received much harsher reviews than Castlevania 64 for all sorts of reasons IGN and Gamespot recognized it was the better game but marked it down for konami's blatant double dipping while other Publications like famitsu egm and Game Informer simply tore it to shreds for what they described as outdated gameplay the reality is both of these arguments aren't wrong which is why it's unsurprising that Legacy of Darkness fed even worse than Castlevania 64 when it went out to Market returning sales figures so low that Konami didn't even release them what I find so crazy about all of this is that its Legacy of Darkness not Castlevania 64 that really deserves to be reappraised by modern audiences its controls have been tightened up the combat's more developed and its levels don't actually feel like they were designed by a team that knew what they were doing with a 3D engine sadly it's completely inferior older brother takes all the modern plaudits while Cornell's surprisingly playable werewolf Adventure languish is forgotten in a Dusty corner of History with two failed 3D releases in a single year Konami became very antsy about the prospect of future attempts to evolve the Castlevania franchise and this led to the cancellation of another big console release just four months later Castlevania Resurrection was a project for sega's Dreamcast which was in pre-production at Kobe while the main team finished off Legacy unfortunately as it became clear that 64 and Legacy had failed to sell in any territory and with news of the PlayStation 2's upcoming release which virtually everyone predicted would kill off the Dreamcast Konami simply called a fold and canceled Resurrection before it could do any damage amazingly you can play a demo build of the game that was put together for E3 1989 which leaked a few years ago although it doesn't exactly tell you much about what Resurrection was supposed to be in just a few years Castlevania had lurched from its highest ever point to its lowest ebb and Konami as they had failed to do throughout the 90s needed to work out what exactly Castlevania was going to be moving forwards and so is the 1990s turned over into the 2000s we find the Castlevania series yet again in incredibly strange Place konami's big budget 3D efforts had failed to capture audience's imagination and thanks to the power of word of mouth and its inarguable quality it was Koji igarashi's open-ended RPG influence side scroller that set the tone for what Castlevania fans wanted to see this dichotomy meant that in 2001 we got the Oddity that is Castlevania circle of the Moon a Game Boy Advance game heavily influenced by Symphony of the Night but developed entirely by Kobe Studio without any input from igarashi whatsoever at spaceworld 2000 Nintendo had unveiled their Game Boy Color successor the Game Boy Advance which boasted a landscape design and the ability to run games that were light years ahead of anything the portable Market had seen so far Konami as they always had done wanted to support this new console straight out of the door and committed Kobe Branch to producing a launch title as atsanobu ibisu had recently left to found his own independent company good feel it was felt that Kobe should avoid any major risks and develop something that they knew that fans would like luckily as the Gameboy Advance was essentially a portable Super Nintendo the idea of making a simpler 2D title that heavily borrowed from Symphony made complete sense and it led to massive sales becoming the first Castlevania title to break a million units sold worldwide and critical Acclaim with some magazines even nominating it for their Game of the Year Awards this surprise success just makes its long-term reputation all the more confusing as just like Kobe's other Castlevania efforts history hasn't been particularly kind to Circle Of The Moon this High review scores and massive sales masks some pretty serious issues set in 1830 the game begins with our series antagonist immediately resurrected thanks to the power of the dark witch Camilla within moments three vampire Hunters burst into the room Maurice Baldwin his son Hugh Baldwin and his fellow Apprentice Nathan Graves despite his weakened State Dracula sends the boys down into the depths of the stronghold and captures the older Baldwin intending to use him to regain his full power now deep underground Hugh insists that he handle the rescue mission alone and the two boys go their separate ways with the player taking control of Nathan as he begins his own search for their master and explores the haunted rooms of Camilla's Castle essentially it's a rerun of the Richter plot from Symphony with Dracula and Camilla slowly taking control of Hugh to disrupt Nathan's progress through the castle the idea is that his jealousy is farther gifting the hunter whip to Nathan instead of him made it possible to prey on his emotions and throughout the game he becomes more confrontational until the two apprentices are doing battle in the game's final moments it's very much not a game driven forwards by a storytelling and instead it wants you to focus entirely on its exploration combat and RPG systems luckily the core gameplay Loop is still just as strong as it was in Symphony with leveling up exploring the castle for upgrades and mastering new abilities providing a real solid base for Circle to build upon arguably its greatest strength is in the design of the castle which thanks to its slightly smaller size feels a lot easier to navigate than in Symphony and makes it harder to forget places you might have to backtrack to despite only having five warp ponds the zones are designed so they all have multiple entrances and exits meaning even the most directionally challenged player will eventually learn how to get around without any frustration it's clear that the way the zones flowed and how the castle links together was a big priority for Kobe and it really shows because it's one of the best Castle layouts in the whole series sadly that same level of attention is missing in some really key areas which make circle a lot less fun than it should be firstly the movement is just weird for some reason Nathan walks incredibly slowly but has a monstrous jump with a very quick full time it means that most of the lateral movements feel very sluggish but vertical platforming is extremely Snappy it's an odd decision on the Game Boy advances wide landscape screen which you think would be perfect for the complete opposite it's made all the more frustrating by the decision to have two movement speeds the very first upgrade you find is the dash boots which give you the ability to run by double tapping left or right obviously you'll want to do this constantly as it extends your jumps and is a literal requirement against bosses but having this activated on a double press is just criminally tedious and you'll get sick of it by the time you're out at the very first Zone Kobe have managed to get the hard part right by creating a world that's inviting to explore but messed up the most basic requirement for the game which is that it's actually fun to play now to their credit they did come up with one real Innovation a new system to paste over the top of the symphony action RPG formula and that is the Dual setup system or DSS as it's known in game through killing certain enemies you can find magical cards which are associated with either your attributes or actions the idea is that you link them in pairs which produce different spells that Nathan can cast using his magic meter and have all sorts of applications that the game's combat is built around for example the Mercury card governs your web and by aligning it with the salamander card it becomes a fire attack that deals bonus Elemental damage different combinations of mercury with different attribute cards produce different Elemental whip attacks which can be used to Prey Upon enemies weaknesses it's not just all attack modifiers though the Jupiter card produces defensive spells through swirling Elemental orbs and the Diana and Mars cards both transform your whip into a host of different melee and ranged weapons with other combinations you can summon monsters for a huge super attack a familiar that fights alongside you and a whole host of Buffs and heals that change how you approach combat amazingly there is a hundred different combinations to mess around with so you're always encouraged to experiment and to find something that complements your play style it's a great system that adds a unique action RPG feel to Circle Of The Moon but unfortunately things aren't perfect and just like with the Thunder dementos there are some key issues that hold it back from its full potential the only way to get cards is from percentage-based drops from certain monsters which means across a normal playthrough you'll likely only end up with a small handful to play with there's no in-game way to know which monsters drop which cards and as you need to use the abilities before the game reveals what they do it's frankly impossible to fully enjoy the system without using a guide it desperately needs an in-game best area that can guide what you're supposed to look for and without this the DSs just becomes a great idea that doesn't really come together in the execution circle of the moon has a reputation as a damn hard game and while a lot of that is because of the game's control issues it's also thanks to some really punishing design choices unlike Symphony of the Night there's no shop where you can buy potions or better gear which means just like with the DSs cards you're relying entirely on drops from enemies to gain resources that also means you can't stockpile resources for the game's boss fights and you're going to wish you could as they are a real Step Up in difficulty from symphony's gallery of weaklings lots of the bosses have multiple forms or surprise attacks and just like in the NES titles if you head in without the correct sub weapon or DSS cards fights like death Hue and a drama leg are going to take you a long time to beat amazingly another element of circle's Stark difficulty comes from how you're playing it if you're emulating it or playing it via the Castlevania collection it'll look just like a normal GBA Game but on launch Circle had a very unique problem that artificially made it much harder its Graphics were too dark and on the non-lit Game Boy Advance screen you quite literally couldn't see the game properly this was something developers were supposed to consider and Kobe Studio somehow totally missed this areas like the machine Tower and observation tower which are full of smaller hard to see flying enemies a frankly impossible to beat when playing the game this way and if you're in that small group of people that actually did complete it on the original Hardware you have my eternal admiration and frankly that goes for anyone who's beaten circle of the Moon in any form as its final fight might be the single most notoriously bull Dracula encounter in the entire franchise once you reach the throne room Nathan and the count face off while Hugh rescues his father and after a few throwaway lines of dialogue about how Nathan also has hatred in his heart the two get down to business this however is only the Calm before the storm and once this first phase is over the true battle begins here the count takes on a massive demonic form and we need to clear another two phases in order to dispatch him in both of them you can only do damage via the giant eyeball embedded in his chest and all of his attacks do massive damage and are a lot harder to dodge which is fair enough as this is the final boss what isn't fair though is how broken the design of this fight gets you see the very last phase involves the count doing this huge charge attack from off screen which you need to Dodge with a predictive super jump if it hits you even once you're basically dead as he chains multiple charges together and your timing needs to be pinpoint in order to survive this is supposed to be followed up by a phase where you can damage him as the vulnerable eye then floats around the battlefield wreath in a colony of bats after a set amount of time he changes back and you've got to repeat this until he dies except it is virtually impossible actually Landing any hits on the eye is ridiculously hard thanks to having no set pattern and the positioning of the platforms really not working that well with the game's awkward movement system sometimes the phase will begin and you won't even see the eye until it's too late or your jump trying to reach it and end up taking damage from the bat it's brutally frustrating because depending on your level it can take anywhere from 25 to 30 hits which even with the best of luck means you're going to need to dodge that sequence of instant death charges maybe seven or eight times in a single attempt if it's not the hardest boss fight in the entire series it's certainly the longest and it must have taken me two or three hours of grueling repetitive attempts to finally land that last blow and destroy the Prince of Darkness after going through all that turmoil no ending is ever going to be worth it a circle of the Moon predictably ends with a dull Roundup on a Cliffside as the castle crumbles to ruins and the boys reconcile their differences now at the start of this section we discussed how circles quite a controversial title and I think a lot of the design choices are obviously responsible for that it sold a huge amount really thanks to the fact that it was the first handheld game of its time rather than because of its inherent quality while elements like the DSs system and the design of the castle are really well executed it's full of frustrating misfires that make it a far worse experience in a modern world full of high quality 2D action RPG Platformers amazingly this mixed Legacy was also fostered by none other than Koji hirashi himself a few years later while putting together an official Castlevania timeline eagarashi purposefully excluded both the Nintendo 64 games and circle of the Moon effectively rendering Kobe Studio's efforts non-canon as they viewed Castlevania as more of a template to tell stories within there'd never really been any effort to create coherence and as igrashi's big idea for the series involved a sprawling ongoing mythology the two approaches were incompatible well in 2002 this conflict was permanently resolved as Kobe Studio was shut down by Konami after more of their developers left to go and work at Goodfield with etsunobu ubisu sensing an opportunity to make his vision a reality igarashi made his play and was promoted to franchise director with full creative control and a mandate to take the success of Symphony of the Night onto other platforms this new role was announced to the world in July of 2001 and in an amazingly candid interview with cvg.com igarashi effectively buried circle of the Moon by outlining what he saw as its main flaws and promising fans that the next handheld title would be something that better reflected his vision for the franchise considering circles sales and critical reception it was a bold move but ambition might as well be eager's middle name and armed with the core of his Symphony of the Night team they immediately set to work on hotly anticipated sequel thank you releasing just 13 months after circle of the move Castlevania Harmony of dissonance landed on the Gameboy Advance in June 2003 and as promised by igorashi it represented a complete rejection of almost every single element of its Kobe made predecessor development was handled by the reformed Symphony of the Night team which meant that igrashi provided story outlines gameplay Concepts and produced while his close colleague Takeshi Takeda handled Direction and programming during the run-up to the game's release they both frequently took interviews together and it's very obvious from the tone of their answers that they both shared the same vision for harmony which was to emphasize the action in action RPG and tie the game Into The Wider series mythology one of the most important ways this was done was through another returning contributor ayami Kojima who is responsible for the character designs and produced a host of concept are in her now Classic oil painting style just like in Symphony it's the basis for every single Sprite and character portrait and is proudly positioned front and center on the box art featuring a slender white haired character and is clearly drawing an allusion to the design of Alucard now given igorashi wanted these handheld titles to link into the franchise's overarching storyline he'd be forgiven for presuming that this would be a sequel to his PlayStation title but funnily enough Harmony of dissonance is set in the aftermath of Castlevania 2. our main character and star of the Box are is just Belmont and despite him looking just like Alucard he's actually Simon Belmont's grandson who's inherited the Vampire killer Whip and the title of Vampire Slayer unlike his grandfather though just has grown up in a time of peace and our Story begins when that Tranquility is mysteriously broken his childhood friend Maxim kershing is found with horrible injuries but no recollection of what happened to him the only thing he does know is that their mutual friend lady erlinger has been kidnapped and taken to a nearby Castle the two set out to rescue her but within moments of arriving just and Maxim are separated by a monstrous Living Armor after exploring a few of the castles crumbling hallways our hero encounters the Grim Reaper who surprisingly claims that the castle is not being manifested by the forces of Dracula and decides to head off and uncover the mystery for himself just like in Symphony this mystery is the Crux of the entire game and frankly I think it's a great premise when the majority of the experience involves exploration which naturally lends itself to an investigative atmosphere in circle the only goal was to defeat Dracula which meant what little dialogue there was could largely be ignored but here it's a crucial part of understanding what's going on an eager Ash's influence means we actually get a plot worth experiencing now while the story plays out in a familiar way Harmony's gameplay and visuals are built on huge changes which make it unlike anything else in the franchise instead of dark and dingy Gothic horror was served up an absolute Feast of color with every Sprite environment and spell bursting onto the screen like a kind of horror Kaleidoscope it was obviously done to remedy the criticism of circle's super dark graphics and it's a design Choice that's taken a lot of flack over the years mainly from people who don't see it as looking Castlevania enough but I actually really like it and I think it gives Harmony a very unique identity it's hallucinogenic horror rather than Gothic and the strange swirling colors and flashes of green when characters take damage give the game a very unnatural atmosphere to go hand in hand with a new look and a strange new atmosphere Harmony also plays extremely differently to Circle and is much more adrenaline fueled instead of needing to unlock additional movement skills just starts out with the ability to not only Dash backwards but also forwards and you can activate this virtually non-stop off the shoulder buttons along with a jump that feels a lot more suited to the dimensions of the game boy's screen movement feels responsive and precise which in turn actually makes engaging in combat fun as the focus is now so heavily on action the RPG systems that saved Circle have now been stripped right back and in its place is a mechanic that's much more of an extension of the traditional style of Castlevania gameplay hidden in various locations around the castle are Elemental spell books which when equipped change the properties of whatever sub weapon just is carrying transforming it into a spell Fusion attack for example the Holy Cross when paired with the fire spellberg turns it into the burning cross which does a huge amount of damage but if you pair it with the ice spell book you summon an ice star that fires projectiles from a distance with six sub-weapons and five different spell books there's a lot of experimenting you can do but thankfully all of the components are found naturally throughout the castle which means absolutely no grinding they're a compliment to the normal flow of whipping dodging and using sub weapons so despite the DSs system being one of circle's best ideas its absence is missed in the slightest once you're familiar with the mechanics and have a few victories under your belt just discovers a teleportation room but unlike in Symphony and circle this doesn't take you to another part of the castle and instead warps you to another dimension igrashi had wanted to incorporate an idea similar to the inverted Castle but rather than hiding it away at the end he dreamed up a system whereby the game would take place across two separate spaces requiring teleportation between them on paper it sounds like a really interesting idea but in practice it's easily the worst thing about Harmony of dissonance the two castles are completely identical in terms of layout and it can make the exploration extremely repetitive an area in Castle a might have Medusa heads while in Castle B it has skeleton Knight but that's not really enough of a change to make beating these zones twice over remotely worthwhile it also makes working out where to use new abilities it extremely confusing as the intended next location might be all the way on the other side of the other castle and playing through Harmony without a walk through is a real exercise in frustration the only place where the two Castle system really feels like it's working is in the narrative where it's implemented quite well and forms the foundation of the mystery plot while traveling between the two castles just will repeatedly run into Maxim who seems to oscillate between a really confrontational and Brash Persona and a much Meeker one who has no memory of the other encounters with a bit of help from an equally confused death just eventually works out what's going on and what exactly is happening to Maxim turns out that in a fit of jealousy prompted by lydie's admiration of just maximid gathered the remains of Count Dracula and had attempted to revive the vampire so he could defeat him mimicking Simon Belmont's actions in Castlevania 2 and proving him the Belmonts equal the plan went dramatically wrong and instead of Reviving The Count the evil magic in the relics manifested two castlevanias reflecting Maxim's conflicted personality and splintering the warrior in half meaning just has been interacting with two different versions of his friend during his journey now I'm not going to pretend that this is the greatest story of all time but what I am going to praise is how well woven into the Dual Castle mechanic the plot becomes in both castles the game ends in the central throne room but you get a different ending depending on if you're in Castle a or Castle B in one the good Maxim begs us to kill him and the final fight is more of a euthanization ending with Lighty and just mourning the loss of their friend but knowing that they did the right thing in the other Castle just arrives to lay and Lydia has been drained of her blood by the now vampiric Maxim and the final boss fight is tinged with sadness with just unable to save anyone if those endings sounded a little morose you'll be happy to hear that just like in Symphony of the Night there is a third hidden ending if you explore the entirety of both castles collect the five relics of Dracula that Maxim found and head into the throne room wearing two bracelets Which lady gifted just and Maxim he'll unlock a final battle against Dracula which is the true good ending taking this route adds a lot of run time onto the game and honestly I'm not really sure that the quest is worth the reward as this whole hidden ending feels very badly designed from a gameplay perspective the five relics are just randomly dotted around the two castles and without a walkthrough they're borderline impossible to locate there are no bosses protecting them or new areas which open up that might hold them so it's really just a mind-numbing game-wide backtrack combing over areas you've already Revisited scouring both maps for a hint as to where they might be what makes the whole final section even worse is that by this point the difficulty curve is really fundamentally broken in harmony you level up really quickly when killing enemies and as you wander around searching for the relics it's easy to become grossly overpowered and reach a point of near invulnerability as enemies also drop money you'll end up with more than enough to max out your inventory by the time I stepped into the throne room I had 99 potions which pretty much robbed the final Encounter of any tension or atmosphere in this version of the ending Maxim sees the bracelets just as wearing and realizes that his friends still care about him despite the awful things he's done it prompts the two maxims to merge back into his normal self and purges Dracula from his body The half-formed Wraith of the count then merges with the five relics and it's up to just to fulfill his family's Destiny and repeat what Simon did two generations earlier obviously with 99 potions and a ridiculous amount of level UPS it's not a very challenging Dracula fight he does have a really cool second phase where he's made up of the unformed body parts used in the ritual but his model is so large that it's really easy to land endless spell fusions on him and in the pantheon of Belmont vs vampire this is one of the more low-key encounters everything ends as expected with just Maxim and Lady watching the now merged castles crumbling to dust in the distance but we actually get one final surprise lady confused used and disorientated asks the two what exactly happened and just as Maxim is about to confess just intervenes and tells them both that nothing happened Maxim was upset at the idea of keeping Lighty in the dark but just insists nothing happened and with that tense and surprisingly not very friendly final word the three characters head back to town and the credits roll just like in the castle a and Castle B endings the lack of reconciliation between our characters has a real Touch of tragedy to it and would be an indication of where igarashi would want to take the series moving forwards Harmony of dissonance reviewed and sold very well with an 87 out of 100 or Metacritic and a respectable return of around 120 000 units shipped they're the numbers of a really great video game but they don't really tell the whole story of The Game's Legacy that 87 out of 100 seems pretty generous despite its story and gameplay being a huge improvement over circle of the Moon and it clearly has its own set of problems that are quite hard to ignore obviously I've laid out my thoughts about the game here but notoriously Harmony has absolutely horrible sounding music thanks to resources that would usually handle the sound needing to be redistributed towards its Mega colorful Graphics thanks to the series reputation As A Feast for the ears and most people's dislike for the garish facelift it's led to a lot of people writing Harmony off and as the user score on Metacritic is over a whole point lower I'd wage that most casual fans experience was even more negative than that surprisingly as well those sales numbers also hid a big issue they were almost exclusively generated by U.S and European purchases and Harmony basically flopped in konami's home territory which was at that point still the biggest market for all video games and especially handheld titles it would mean that while the sequel was absolutely guaranteed eager Ashley felt they needed to go back to the drawing board again and try to work out why Japanese Gamers turned away from the series this would be the third reinvention in as many years but this time the Stars aligned and the Castlevania team struck gold once again foreign in 2003 kojigarashi outlined how after Harmony of dissonance the development team sat down and discussed where they wanted to take the franchise next and surprisingly found out that they were all in agreement they wanted to do something different decided to make a game that retained the core fundamentals of Symphony Circle and Harmony but challenged all the other established tropes that the series had come to rely on it was a direction that eager Ashley felt they had to move in as not only did they need to recapture that Japanese audience which hadn't liked Harmony but he felt the constant reusing of Belmont's fighting Dracula every 100 years was becoming stale and leaving them with very little creative space interestingly he tells the interviewer that the team was incredibly nervous about doing this as after 17 years and 17 games fans had come to expect a certain level of Castlevania nurse and with area of Sorrow the intention was to serve up something like nothing else in the franchise importantly this time around they were rejoined by machiro yamane a member of konami's sound team who'd been responsible for the incredible soundtracks found on Castlevania Bloodlines and Symphony of the Night as Harmony's music had been a point of particular criticism it was important that this issue was resolved in the next game and as she was responsible for some of the best soundtracks in the franchise there was nobody better to take on the challenge along with redesigned music there was a huge shift in the game's Aesthetics and setting where eagerashi decided to take a bold step outside of the series comfort zone instead of a Gothic medieval setting Arya of Sorrow was going to take place in the near future and Kojima was given a brief to modernize the character designs blending her Baroque Style with something slightly more realistic it led to a cast of suit wearing highly stylish characters with the main role occupied once again by another Whitehead Alucard stand-in although this time wearing a fur-lined coat jeans and cowboy boots as we'll discover in just a moment it's not an aesthetic that totally dominates the game but considering everything that the series had become known for it felt like a massive shift and magazines and websites really made a big deal out of it from a development perspective things went incredibly smoothly thanks to the fact that this was the first time since Castlevania 3 that the same team had been allowed to create a follow-up game on the same system for all the series critical and Commercial Success konami's chaotic approach often meant that developers wasted a lot of time working out how to create on new consoles and as eager's team had already gone through this with Harmony they were afforded a freedom to focus on design the Castlevania teams often didn't get well about to find out it was a process that bore some serious fruit an Aria of Sorrow might be the single best game in this entire video the very first words we see on screen immediately Mark Arya as something unique the year is 2035 and we find ourselves in Japan as a young transfer student called Soma Cruz he's on his way to meet a childhood friend Mina at the top of a Tory Shrine so that they can watch a solar eclipse together at the top of the stairs Soma begins to lose Consciousness and as the moon moves in front of the sun he catches a glimpse of a monstrous Castle floating in the sky he shortly woken by a confused Mina outside the gates of a stone Citadel and the two are confronted by a strange man in a black suit he calls himself Genia arikado and informs them that they're inside of Dracula's castle which is no longer in Eastern Europe but inside the solar eclipse before any further explanations can be given a host of monsters attack and when Soma lashes out to defend Mina something very strange happens as the creature is defeated its Soul bursts out and is absorbed by a young student genier surprised at what he's just witnessed tells him that if he wants to have any chance of returning to the Earth he needs to take advantage of this newfound ability and use it to reach the Master's chamber at the summit of the castle with his strange tutor promising to protect Mina Soma heads off armed only with his pocket knife and this new ability with the sole objective of scaling the imposing Castle in what has become franchise tradition Arya is a fundamentally different gameplay experience to the title that released just 12 months before it the design of the castle has been much improved by pairing back the scope and focusing on just a single location which leads to much better level design and a far more natural flow than Harmony's overly confusing structure warp points save rooms and boss fights are now positioned at Key Crossroads and it removes a huge amount of the enforced backtracking which makes exploring the castle the enjoyable experience that it should be in a really clever move igrashi's team have reduced the size of most of the in-game Sprite which means that unlike the clunk of Circle of the moon or the chaos of Harmony of dissonance we get combat platforming and exploration that are all nicely balanced against one another the reduced pressure on the graphics thanks to the smaller Sprites also allowed material yarmony more leeway when it came to designing the music an arya's soundtrack is among the best on the platform despite lacking the sampling of the PlayStation yamane managed to deliver a maximalist Orchestra of sounds pulse-pounding emotional and Atmospheric all in equal parts which more than live up to her work on previous titles amazingly despite having less resources to work with thanks to the now functional soundtrack the environment savaria of Sorrow also look really sharp I think that's thanks to the team having already cut their teeth on the system everything from Soma's coat flapping behind him during his walk animation to how mirrors reflect action happening in the foreground highlight how confident igrashi's team had become working on the GBA and it really is a visual Triumph on such a low powered machine funnily enough its art Direction doesn't really lean into that futuristic setting all that heavily generally speaking the environments you explore are in the same Gothic medieval style that we've come to expect it's clock towers and Chapel halls and crumbling cabins rather than anything to sci-fi or outlandish any disappointment in this lack of ambition is quickly forgotten thanks to the sheer quality of the team's work in many places there are huge multi-layered backgrounds that give the castle an incredible sense of scale and the sheer amount of detail on screen shows they were pushing the GBA to its limits take the save rooms for example these virginal statues exude a warm light that flickers against the crumbling walls and really Hammer home how these rooms are sanctuaries hidden away from the chaos raging in the castle they might not have had any of the fancy 3D effects that the PlayStation afforded Symphony but it's impossible to argue against Arya of Sorrow as a technical Marvel now instead of deviating from symphony's gameplay formula like Circle and Harmony Arya instead uses it as a foundation for its systems and out of that we get some incredibly engaging changes that dramatically improve the combat and exploration just like Alucard before him Soma attacks by wielding a variety of weapons that are found throughout the castle although here there's clearly been a big effort into upping the differences between them in Symphony we really only had a choice between fast and slow attacks but Soma has a far larger Arsenal to choose from we can of course use fast-paced rapiers and slower claimers but there's also Elemental swords Spears axes fist weapons guns and even a whips board that briefly turned Soma into a de facto Belmont it's the first time that real Choice has ever come into the equation as the animations are all sufficiently different that there will naturally be some that you're more comfortable with than others that same degree of choice also governs arya's main gameplay mechanic the Tactical Soul system which takes the very best from the DSs and reworks it into something much more interesting that's also deeply tied to the plot the ability to absorb Souls that Soma possesses is called the power of dominance and by defeating enemies you can gain a range of different abilities which are equipped like armor to three different slots red Souls replace sub weapons which amazingly don't feature in Arya at all instead of Hearts providing ammo for axes daggers and holy crosses they now restore Soma's magic which is used to power all of the abilities in the game it was something that igrashi was very worried about as sub weapons were seen as something you simply didn't tamper with but by changing them over to the Tactical Soul system the fundamental gameplay has been retained while allowing them to get insanely creative with the abilities you get to use there are 55 different bullet souls to find all with their own unique animations and different strengths and weaknesses which adds a huge amount of depth to the combat far more than you could ever get out of 5 sub weapons and the cycle of discovering and experimenting with new Souls stays fresh for the entire game what's particularly clever about this system is it's not just used in combat as all of the relics and Transformations which previously gated your exploration have also been reimagined as tactical Souls the blue Guardian souls are activated on the R button draining your magic and deactivating when you run out there are things like Shields and heels but they can also be familiars which fight alongside you and themselves level up most importantly the blue souls are where your bat form and slow fall are which ties those movement abilities into this core system and makes it feel like all of Soma's power comes from his dominance ability rather than a host of different sources the final set of the yellow and haunted Souls which are all entirely passive and give you permanent stat boosts although you can only use one at a time there are some pretty basic ones like the end wrist which boosts your XP gain or the Golem which gives you a big strength boost but it's also where the more unique abilities are found undeen and schooler allow you to walk on or in water while the Peeping eye reveals hidden secrets and the Iron Golem removes knockback on damage you're constantly switching them out and depending on what area of the castle you're in or what boss you're about to find it's typical to completely change every single soul and you'll almost never find yourself using the same three for any lengthy period of time the way it relates to every single pillar of gameplay from combat to Stats to exploration it's just a masterful way of creating cohesion between every mechanic and by wrapping it up in a Pokemon style collectible system it never gets boring to see a soul burst out of a defeated enemy it's without a doubt the best RPG system in any of the 2D Castlevania games and even without everything else it would be well worth the price of admission on its own another area of real success is how Arya dramatically improves both balance and difficulty you can now only hold a maximum of nine of each item which solves the ridiculous potion issue from Harmony of dissonance that means that bosses now once again become a test of skill and strategy rather than a matter of how many heels you have it might not feel like that at first as the initial bosses like the creaking skull and the Manticore are really pretty simple to defeat but as the game progresses some of the late stage fights are really up there with encounters from Generations gone by we get the first ever three-phase regular boss in the Headhunter who requires you to learn a huge amount of patterns to comfortably defeat it and the death fight which is usually difficult anyway reaches a surprisingly tricky climax once he unleashes a bone sight and begins spinning it all over the arena for the first time since Rondo of Blood there's that powerful sense of satisfaction that you get from beating or really difficult but fair boss all this contributes to a game that is fantastically fun to play but amazingly the very best part of arya's design comes from something that the series has so often given secondary status igarashi had already shown the Symphony of the Night that his vision for Castlevania was far more dramatic and story driven than it had ever been in the past and in Arya he finally delivered a narrative that could stand Toe to Toe with the best stories in the industry very quickly after starting out on his journey to the Masters chamber Soma stumbles across a host of other people who have found themselves drawn into the solar eclipse and how they relate to each other and the Mystery of the castle is The Game's central question the very first character we meet is Graham Jones a clean-cut religious leader who despite his polite exterior believes that thanks to a prophecy he's about to inherit the powers of Dracula you see in 1999 the Eternal vampire Was Defeated for good and the cycle of Resurrection that had been raging since medieval times was finally ended by the last of the Belmonts along with a group of companions they sealed his ruined castle inside the darkness of an eclipse and Humanity was finally able to move on from its vampiric nightmare the only problem was that a prophecy was made that during the next solar eclipse the power that made Dracula so fearsome would be inherited by another dark lord and unfortunately for Soma and Mina their next eclipse was taking place right above Japan in 2035. Graham believes that as he was born on the exact minute Dracula Was Defeated that he's The Reincarnation of Vlad tepesh and he warned Soma to stay out of his way and to not interfere with his destiny shortly after this horrible realization we also meet Yoko balnadas a distant descendant of Cypher balnadus and she offers a much-friendlier face turns out she's been sent by genya who she accidentally reveals to be Alucard in Disguise to watch over Soma and his Newfound power Somers obviously put off by the idea of using Darkness to absorb creatures Souls but she reassures him that just like genya Darkness doesn't necessarily mean evil the situation becomes all the more confusing when Soma later runs into a third mysterious man known only as Jay he has no idea why he's in the castle as he's completely lost his memory waking up in a hospital on the day of Dracula's defeat in 1999 much like Graham the prophecy Drew him into the castle and as his memories are slowly returning the more he explores he leaves Soma offering no help and asking for none in return this question of who is going to inherit the power of Dracula is particularly interesting not just because you're kept waiting to see who the central antagonist is but because it also represents the next step in the Castlevania Series in interviews in the run-up to arya's release igarashi referred to this plot as the beginning of the second edition of Castlevania and frankly it's a long overdue injection of fresh ideas the simple fact was that after 18 games igrashi knew the series could bloom into something better and Arya proves that concept by keeping narrative suspense alive until the game's very last moment much like in eager's other games Arya has a bad ending which quite overtly tells you that there's more to the plot than is being let on after defeating Balor which is an amazing looking boss fight that fakes out a fight against the giant bat Soma claims the bat's soul and Upon returning to the boss room he finds that doing this has caused a huge wave of memories to come rushing back to Jay he is Julius Belmont the last and greatest of the Belmont Clan who once and for all defeated Count Dracula with his power restored he has a single purpose to find the one who will inherit Dracula's power kill them the two race to the throne room and Soma gets there first just in time to see Graham Jones take control of Dracula's Powers warping his calm and collected demeanor into an emotional and ragged mess for the crime of stealing The Souls of his minions he sentenced his Soma to death the two do battle with graham using a huge mixture of Dracula's attacks from previous games before transforming into a twisted Angelic monster as Graham is defeated genya rushes into the throne room and with the power of Dracula swarming around them he tells Soma to command the castle to reopen a portal to the Earth and to reseal itself inside of the eclipse amazingly this works and back on Solid Ground Soma asks if the castle will ever return genyo with sadness in his heart replies that it still searches for its master and eventually they will have to do battle there once again Soma replies that he can still feel the pull of the car Castle and the screen Fades to Black and the credits roll now I've had a single criticism of Arya of Sorrow it's that unlike in Symphony and Harmony where you can get the full ending by simply exploring the entirety of the castles the true conclusion of Soma Cruz's tale is unnecessarily hidden away behind an incredibly strange gate in order for the game to continue and for the real conclusion to play out you need to defeat Graham while you have three specific Souls equipped succubus the flame demon and the bat now the only way to know this is to find three hidden books which simply say the first spirit is a demon the second is a bat and the third is a beautiful Nightmare and absolutely no indication of what these Clues relate to what makes it all the more obscure is that the demon soul can only drop from a single enemy found right at the bottom of the castle and as its drop rate is extremely low there's almost no chance of you picking it up without purposefully grinding for it you'd have to find the books preserved with the ridiculous grind to get the souls and then somehow think to equip them in the final fight it's a shame too as the ending is one of the finest twists in video game history one that not only presents a fascinating conclusion that contains most of the game's best moments but also redefines the plot in that excellent way that the best twists do if you're in possession of those specific Souls as Graham is struck down the dark power hour of Dracula swirls around the room and begins to flood into Soma and when the process is complete he makes a final and horrible realization he is The Reincarnation of Dracula ganya once again appears in the throne room and reveals what has been happening they'd never intended Soma to become caught up in the plot to defeat Graham but such was the pull of the castle to its master that he found himself there regardless and once again you saw the power of dominance in action he knew that there was no other way and they had to allow the power to return to his body the only way to prevent Soma from being consumed by the returning power of Dracula is for him to travel into the spiritual realm and sever the connection between himself and Chaos the malignant representation of all of Mankind's evil that gives him his immortality it's my personal favorite moment in the entire franchise and a Twist so masterfully executed that I think it deserves to be held in the same Acclaim as Bioshock Knight to the Old Republic or Final Fantasy VII of course it's a clever way of adding an additional final area and having the game resolve with something other than it was Dracula all along but the real reason it works so well is that it redefines not only the plot but the very gameplay itself the inheritance of Dracula's power isn't something that happens in a ritual or because of some ancient magic but it's the very action of collecting Souls that we've been doing while exploring every time we destroyed a monster and absorbed a new ability the prophecy came that little bit closer towards being fulfilled Graham was always a sideshow to the true story of Dracula returning to his castle and unknowingly reclaiming what is his the big elephant this leaves in the room is Julius Belmont whose Soma has inadvertently returned to full strength and is compelled by his bloodline to destroy Dracula in any form he takes in the floating gardens against a backdrop of the crumbling Castle the two ancient enemies finally do battle and it is a boss fight more than worthy of the occasion Julius hits incredibly hard can phase and leap around the battlefield and has a huge host of vampire slaying techniques that drawn everything that the Belmont Clan has ever used it's not only supremely difficult but supremely dramatic the true final realization of that concept igrashi came up with for Symphony of the Night when the fighting comes to an end Soma realizes that Julius was holding back and the last Belmont tells him that it was because he sensed that he had not completely lost his Humanity he agrees to allow Soma the chance to free himself from this cycle of Resurrection but promises that if he fails he'll have no choice but to strike him down with the truce agreed we head into the chaotic realm and battle through a short final Zone that brings together Twisted elements of every part of the castle before thrusting Soma into a last confrontation with the most disturbing and otherworldly boss in Castlevania history chaos is inscrutable a mash of human Angelic and monstrous forms attacking in strange hard to predict ways and all taking place over a kaleidoscopic background of deformed shapes once you work out where you can actually damage the beating it's not really all that hard but from a symbolic perspective it's one of the best Final Bosses in the franchise and truly seems like more of a metaphor for something that's happening in a spiritual dimension in a really cool touch if you do die against chaos the game Fades to a shot of Soma sitting upon Dracula's Throne Cup in hand in the iconic pose from Rondo and Symphony while Julius arrives to fulfill the promise he made of course you're meant to win the fight and once you do the castle slips out of existence with the eclipse no longer needed to contain its evil power Soma floating between Dimensions Here's the final goodbyes of the people he met throughout the game and finally just like he did in the opening sequence he comes to Consciousness lying in Mina's arms but this time back on Earth they look at the sky and see that the eclipse has ended and along with it the story of Vlad tepesh Count Dracula Arya of Sorrow is a magnificent video game and I'd argue that if fundamentally improves upon the foundations set out in Symphony of the Night the Tactical Soul system is an inspired streamlining of all the desperate RPG elements and its narrative is not only the perfect segue into a new era but just a damn fine story it has top-notch action thrilling boss fights a fantastic castle interesting systems and above all it manages to redefine what Castlevania can be without losing its identity it's easily my personal favorite game in the series while it might not enjoy the fame that his PlayStation predecessor does it's beloved by a great many people upon release it received absolute critical Acclaim and its review scores sit at an imperious average of 91 out of 100 which was no mean feat considering just how many high quality games released on the Game Boy Advance sales quickly follow and it easily outsold Harmony of dissonance although interestingly it actually sold less than circle of the Moon likely because the franchise actually had some RPG competition on the platform even with that instant success its reputation would only continue to grow over the years and you can now find it listed near the top of almost any discussion of the greatest portable games if not at the very Summit for igarashi it was another hit and his vision of a narrative-driven Castlevania that put real stock in its history had been proven to be a winning formula yet again Konami knowing that they were onto a good thing were content to leave him to work on the franchise and under his stewardship Castlevania moved confidently into the Next Generation with the huge financial and critical success of the series on the Gameboy Advance it's easy to forget that Castlevania had always primarily been a console franchise while working on Harmony and Arya egrashi had also been hard at work trying to put together something The Returned Castlevania to what he saw as its rightful place despite pretty modest budgets his customary ambition was as large as ever and he wanted to make something that not only pushed Castlevania forwards but also amended past mistakes ever since the development of Symphony of the Night he'd constantly spoken about his frustrations with the franchise's narrative and wanted it to allow for more creative storytelling with Arya of Sorrow that formula that defined the series since akamatsu first put it together had finally been put to pasture and to go hand in hand with this igrashi wanted a concrete origin story to provide the series with a clear and defined starting point while in North America the game would be titled Castlevania lament of innocence in Europe and Japan it was known simply as Castlevania signifying its place as the series new genesis and importantly dropping the akamaju Dracula title which all Japanese versions had previously gone by as if that wasn't an enticing enough Prospect igrashi was also determined to bring the series into the world of three dimensions once and for all in an interview with Game Spy he frankly stated that if the series was going to survive it had no choice but to reinvent itself in this way and made the Bold prediction that moving forwards all future games would be in 3D and would build on the formula established by the self-titled rebirth well it goes without saying that things didn't quite turn out that way what we're left with is a strange game pampered by low budgets and development issues which somehow manages to both succeed and fail at achieving those lofty goals lament of Innocence takes us all the way back to 1094 a Dark Age where the Catholic church and feudal Lords rule Europe and wage war against heathens from the East through the employ of medieval night two such Knights lead an undefeated company Matthias kronkfist a skilled strategist and Leon Belmont a Peerless Warrior both are childhood friends and both serve the church without question or hesitation while they're away fighting a campaign matthias's wife Elizabeth dies suddenly and the grief causes him to withdraw becoming bedridden Leon is left to manage their company on his own until one day monsters begin to appear in his land and to make matters worse his betrothed Sarah goes missing and the church refuses to lend Aid to help find her finally emerging from his sick bed Matthias tells Leon that he has discovered the source of the monsters and Sarah's captor a vampire called mortar earnhard living deep within the forest of Eternal Night upon arriving at the castle grounds Leon is greeted by Ronaldo Gandolfini an alchemist who water allows to live near his Citadel aiding would be challenges in their efforts to defeat him treating their attacks like a game Ronaldo tells Leon that in order to access the throne room where Walter and presumably Sarah await him he'll need to defeat five monstrous generals and so offers him an alchemical whip with which to fight and the use of his shop to spend any money that he finds in the castle and with that the game is set we play as Leon and head into the castle of Eternal Night to open the way to the throne room rescue our beloved and exact Revenge upon the vampire who took her now really my issues with lament which is how I'm going to refer to it begin right here in the opening of the game as far as premises go it's not actually all that unique for the series and while there's slightly more detail about who we're playing as the kidnapped to love one angle has been done quite a few times before similarly while water isn't Dracula we're still invading a castle ruled by a vampire and really were the names to be switched around you'd hardly notice anything amiss also those lower budgets that igrashi had to work with really don't help establish the story in a particularly engaging way we never actually see Matthias or elizabetha or Sarah let alone Leon's exploits in the Crusades which contribute to a feeling of shallowness in this setup it's disappointing because as we'll discover later the narrative is actually quite interesting but it's clear that the team simply didn't have the resources to tell it properly that's also mirrored in lament's structure and how the moment-to-moment gameplay functions lots of ambition but never really fulfilling its true potential once Leon arrives in the castle he quickly discovers a room with five teleporters each leading to a unique Zone the house is one of the five monsters he needs to destroy they can be tackled in any order and each contain unique upgrades which then can be used to access Secret locations in areas already visited each Zone has its own puzzle mechanics and individual enemies which sounds like it should make for a really interesting interconnected game but in reality this doesn't ever mesh into the sort of spider's web of a map that we've come to expect in interviews eager Ashley stated that the original goal was to take the world design of Symphony of the Night with its Myriad of non-linear zones and replicate it in 3D unfortunately the team really struggled to implement this and while igrashi dreamed of snaking Pathways and hidden doors their creation didn't translate into an enjoyable gaming experience to resolve this a decision was made late on to segment the game into much smaller areas and to massively simplify the design of each of the five levels small loading screens were inserted between every single one of the game's many rooms and virtually all of the exploratory backtracking was removed it results in a game with extremely Bland level design and one that really fails to create that natural inclination to wander that makes other titles in a series like Symphony or Arya so damn addictive almost every level is completely flat lacking any kind of verticality puzzles never amount to anything beyond hitting certain switches and most of the series iconic environmental hazards have been removed in favor of rooms that lock you in until you've defeated every single enemy platforming and puzzle solving have been massively reduced in importance combat forms the vast majority of how lament of Innocence plays and Tamika rashi's credit his team have come up with a pretty good 3D Action System Leon now attacks with combos of light and heavy strikes and sub weapons which much like in harmony of dissonance can be aligned with a school of magic in order to produce different spells where things get a little more 3D action game is that by holding R1 you can block by tapping the left stick during a block you can execute a Dodge and really the combat revolves around getting Combos and sub weapon attacks off and evading attacks it's impossible to imagine that this wasn't heavily influenced by Devil May Cry as really the basic ideas are almost identical we have a fixed camera for each room groups of enemies that need to be defeated in order to progress and even a combo meter that racks up the more hits you land in a row now despite the unoriginality the basic elements of the game are pretty well executed Leon's attacks pack a satisfying punch and experimenting with the different sub weapons is really easy thanks to Quick menus on the triggers which let you change your setup on the Fly interestingly that same system is used for items and you can no longer just pause the game and chug down healing potions on the right stick we have all of our equipment and consumables and you have to access them in real time which is a great idea and creates that frantic trying to find your potions in the middle of a fight feeling a Whole Decade before Demon Souls made it popular when the systems are all flowing together lament is genuinely a great action game and it's easily at its best best during the game's boss fight which are very well designed with a lot of variety and thought put into these climactic moments the very best of these are against the game's hidden bosses which push the mechanics and graphic design to some really impressive places in three of the game zones you can do battle against the decidedly humanoid Elementals which work a lot like a one-on-one Jewel both of you have basic and heavy attacks along with access to spells and the fights require a precise dance of dodges and Strikes to bring them down lament of Innocence also contains igarashi's personal favorite boss in the entire series The Forgotten one which is hidden away in a secret chamber near the end of the game it's an absolutely huge rotting demon that leaks blood and gore and spits out maggots as Leon destroys parts of its body and it was actually so intense that it's solely responsible for bumping the game up from a teen rating to a mature one igrashi apparently loved how shocking it was to discover this cursed being and honestly I wish they'd learned more in this direction giving us a brutal and bloody world that reflected the Dark Age setting now as good as these fights are there are lots of little missteps that make lament quite a dull experience in between these high points unlike in Devil May Cry where XP that you get from playing the game stylishly is used to unlock new moves here you simply gain more combos by killing an increasingly large amount of enemies which is not only a boring progression mechanic but also means you have almost no combat abilities at the start of the game and really just Meander from room to room looking for the first few bosses one of the most baffling ideas is that you can only hold one sub weapon at a time and just like in the classic games they're changed over at certain Candles now that mechanic worked well in a simple and fast-paced side scroller but here in a more complex 3D action game they really should have last choose from them on the Fly which have allowed players to experiment more freely you could even have the sub weapons discoverable in different levels which would add in a sort of Mega Man struck structure where you head into the Pagoda to get the ax and then take it into the laboratory to fight the Golem which is strong against without these more complex Design Elements the game has a tendency to feel like a very basic Dungeon Crawler you spam the same moves over and over travel between near identical rooms all in the hope of discovering a boss fight where the game actually clicks into gear now despite all this frustrating unfulfilled potential the story is actually quite intriguing especially once you've cleared the five levels inside the main hall of the castle Leon finally comes face to face with Walter who surprisingly releases Sarah without a fight saying he'll see Leon in the throne room with Sarah rescued Leon takes that out to Ronaldo's cabin but here tragedy strikes the anti-vampire Spells which protect Ronaldo suddenly trigger grievously injuring Sarah and throwing Leon into a panic Ronaldo reveals that Sarah has been bitten by Walter more soon turned into a vampire herself the only way to prevent this from happening is to defeat Walter but without a way to harm the powerful vampire Leon is clueless as to what to do with a somber tone in his voice Ronaldo claims there is a way to defeat Walter but it requires the ultimate sacrifice by using Alchemy they could combine the magical whip with the vampiric power inside of error but doing so requires Leon to kill her with the life of one who truly trusts him necessary for the bonding spell to work obviously Leon is disgusted by the idea but Sarah knowing her life as a human is about to end begs him to do it and asks him to swear to use the whip to wipe out vampire kind and make sure this can never happen again tears clouding his eyes Leon agrees and with a single swipe the process is complete and the legendary Vampire killer whip which every future Castlevania protagonist will wield created armed with his new powerful weapon Leon sets out to seek his revenge and after fighting through the main Halls of the castle we Ascend the moonlit stairs to the throne room here the vampire sits suitably pleased with the game he's been playing at Leon's expense but this facade cracks as soon as you land a hit on him and he realizes that the Vampire killer has the power to destroy him which leads to a panicked water unleashing his full power in a climactic fight against our vengeful hero when the final blow is struck Walter can't believe he's actually been defeated and as Leon strides forward to finish the job the vampire gives one final taunt that his power means he will be resurrected and cannot truly die and this is when the game serves up An Almighty twist as he begins to slip into the underworld suddenly water is absorbed by a powerful alchemical artifact and when the mist's clear its owner is revealed to be none other than Matthias kronkfist the bedridden strategist from the opening cut scene Leon demands an explanation a Matthias then delivers a crushing Revelation when his wife Elizabeth died after he had spent his life waging the church's Wars he became consumed with a burning hatred and swore to do everything he could to pursue Vengeance against the religion that he felt had abandoned him he'd LED Sarah to the castle of Eternal Night knowing that Leon had arrive to rescue her and in doing so would defeat Walter who in a weakened State could be absorbed by Matthias passing on his Supernatural powers in his new form Matthias is a powerful vampire possessing Unholy abilities matched with an unparalleled cunning and at his command are the forces of evil ready to plunder and Destroy God's creation and exact his revenge he offers the very same power to his one-time partner but Leon refuses returning to the oath he swore Sarah to destroy all of vampire kind and prevent any more of the pain they've caused Matthias replies that he thought Leon of all people would understand and then as Dawn Rises He commands the reaper to kill him abandoning his childhood friend to his fate this brings us into the final fight of the entire game and with Leon's Victory the castle crumbles and he sets off into the world ready to uphold his vow to destroy vampire kind and take revenge on the thighs the credits roll and we're shown a final text crawl stating that this Begins the struggle of the Belmont Clan against evil and while Leon would never again meet Matthias his descendants would continue the battle an Exquisite play from which two Souls shall never Escape it's an enthralling origin story that treats the conflict between Belmont and Dracula with a level of seriousness and drama that I'm sure most hardcore fans would have loved but I'm not gonna lie much like everything else in lament of Innocence it falls short of meeting its lofty ambitions the biggest issue is obviously that while the twist is extremely surprising if you've missed the opening cut scene or simply forgotten about the few lines of text that mention Matthias you'll be left wondering who exactly he is lament desperately needed some early levels or a flashback that showed the two knights battling together possibly highlighting their disillusionment with the church in order for the big Dracula reveal to have maximum effect even the vow of the Belmonts to destroy Dracula wherever he rises isn't perfectly executed as in order for the Belmont Clan to continue Leon presumably must have remarried and had children which somewhat weakens his characterization as a man so devoted to his betrothed that he'd give up everything for her in terms of establishing a unique mythology for the series I'd say it broadly succeeds and despite all my criticism I actually like a lot of the concepts it's a fittingly tragic starting point for a series that has always concerned itself with The Morbid and morose and even with its obvious design missteps I think it makes for a fascinating and well-intentioned video game and one that's still worth some attention all these years later and that was a sentiment also shared by contemporary critics the game reviewed quite well gaining a 79 out of 100 or Metacritic with some high profile reviews from IGN and Edge really praising igarashi's attempt to renew the series in the third dimension unfortunately as has ever been the series curse critical praise didn't automatically convert to sales and while lament wasn't exactly a flop it didn't sell anything like the numbers the other similar franchises were shipping that very same year Devil May Cry 2 and Prince of Persia sands of time both released to Blockbuster sales and in various interviews igrashi always lamented the troubled development process his own action game went through which he felt Rob bit of a chance of hitting similar numbers personally I think he's being a little harsh on himself as really Konami has a lot to answer for for the game's lackluster sales marketing was almost non-existent and they made the frankly awful decision to abandon ayami kojima's incredible cover-up for the game's Japanese and European releases which must have made lament look so incredibly dorky on the shelves next to the style of Devil May Cry 2 Silent Hill 3 and Max Payne 2. luckily its modest return and critical reception had done enough to convince the suits to give igarashi another attempt and with a slightly larger budget this time the team immediately set to work on another PlayStation 2 game one which they dreamed would correct laments issues and catapult the franchise back to the top of the AAA pile foreign but before we get to that it's back to the world of handheld where the team are working on the much anticipated follow-up to Arya of Sorrow announced in January of 2005 Dawn of Sorrow broke new ground for the franchise as incredibly it was the first true sequel since Castlevania 3 almost 15 years earlier igrashi said he knew Soma and the Tactical Soul system were too good to waste on a single game and as the team were moving over to a new console having that Foundation already laid would allow them to focus on a smooth transition when it finally released in August of 2005 it seemed that igrashi had done it again with critical praise and rave reviews lavished on the series first two-screen outing and sales sure to follow now this might prove to be the most controversial take in the entire video but I am not actually that big of a fan of Dawn of Sorrow despite its smoothly reimagining Arya on the Nintendo DS I sadly think a lot of the magic has been lost in the process let's deal with the obvious difference first which is that Dawn of Sorrow uses two screens rather than one which might sound weird but actually works extremely well on the top screen we have either your stats or the castle map and on the bottom is one of the action side scrolling gameplay being able to get your bearings with just a glance makes this genre feel designed for the DS and it is surprisingly hard to go back to a world where it's locked away on a separate screen another obvious Improvement is The Game's Graphics which take the Core Concepts of Arya and then push them to a whole new level the Nintendo DS was substantially more powerful than the Game Boy Advance and the very first version came with a CPU four times as powerful and four megabytes of onboard Ram it allowed games to be far more detailed without losing any performance and a complex side-scrolling RPG like Dawn of Sorrow was exactly the kind of game that could take full advantage of it almost every screen has 3D elements and multi-layer Parallax scrolling in the background with tons of little graphical touches that have been implemented like snow falling off of cars or Ash floating through the air frankly it's more comparable to Symphony of the Night than its GBA predecessor and really stands as a testament to how far portable video games had come in such a short period of time while it's incredibly impressive from a technical perspective and uses those two screens to great success we have to address the elephant in the room which is Dawn of Sorrows highly controversial change in art Direction while Arya of Sora had shipped big numbers just like Harmony of dissonance before it they had been primarily in America and Europe and regardless of how igrashi changed the formula the team couldn't seem to put something together that captured the imagination of Japanese Gamers this lack of success in their home country coupled with some extremely bad analytics about the average age of a Nintendo DS owner led to the utterly horrible decision to move from the distinctive artwork of a Yami Kojima over to a more traditional child-friendly anime look from the Gordy opening cut scene to the ridiculously Bland character portraits there just isn't anything nice to say about this decision and it really robs dawn of that unique look that Kojima had worked so hard hard to craft for the series characters who previously exuded a sophisticated style like genya Soma and Julius now look like poorly drawn Saturday morning cartoon characters and it undermines almost every moment of dialogue draining scenes of their mystery and replacing it with something that feels more like a Toonami production now this might be more understandable if the content of the plot was seemingly toned down for a mainstream audience but incredibly dawn of sorry contains some extremely Macabre imagery and tells a story that were it not for the Digimon presentation would be considered one of the darkest stories in the entire franchise a few years after the events of Arya of Sorrow Soma and Mina enjoying their lives in peace when they suddenly come under attack by the minions of Celia Fortner luckily ganya aracado is on hand to help out and Soma makes short work of his attackers it turns out the gang from the last game Genia Julius and Yoko had been monitoring Celia who's the leader of a cult dedicated to the resurrection of the Dark Lord by killing Soma the cult hopes he will be resurrected as someone more interested in leading them to World Domination and not the fur coat wearing high school student who goes shopping with his girlfriend obviously Genia doesn't want to risk Soma's dark Powers returning so warns him away from their mission but in true hero style Soma turns up at the cult's headquarters anyway and joins in with the gang's mission to prevent the return of a dark lord very quickly we're introduced to Celia's two candidates to inherit Soma's power Daario and Dimitri who just like Graham Jones were born in 1999 when Count Dracula originally died and defeating the three of them is the only goal of the game there's no mystery or surprise twist just a straight up tale about our vampire slaying Scooby-Doo gang taking down a cult of bad hombres sounds ideal for a lighthearted anime romp but as we'll find out later things get pretty dark pretty quickly so as we begin to explore the cult's headquarters everything falls into a very familiar pattern we wander levels looking for upgrades collect an arsenal of Souls and Converse with our Supporting Cast while defeating a host of bosses it's a proven formula so what could possibly go wrong well to my taste quite a bit for starters the cult headquarter setting is really very weak and a real missed opportunity for the franchise to move on to creative new things now that Castlevania has disintegrated into the past while levels are beautifully presented they really lack cohesion don't feel like a real place Dracula's castle was full of areas that you traditionally find in a castle but this cult base is full of odd environmental choices like a clown-filled guest house a Wizardry laboratory and a portal that literally leads into hell it never feels like summer an organization would be operating out of and it comes across as very video gamey like it was designed to facilitate mechanics with very little thought given to how the environment plays into the narrative that same lack of story integration really plagues the bosses which have virtually no reason to exist other than to provide the game with big end of level fights previously we were fighting against Dracula's evil servants who lived in the castle but in Dawn there's very little explanation for why the cult are keeping a huge Cyclops monster or a giant bat in their headquarters and that's a real shame too as the boss fights are easily the standout element of Dawn of Sorrow an erashi's team seem to have really taken on the criticism that their fights could often be too easy hideous monsters like the gerg off break through the Arena floor causing a mad collapse into another location and strange beings like a badon and Zephyr have Unique Mechanics that go far beyond simple pattern recognition my favorite by some distance is the Puppet Master a horrific looking marionette that drags a voodoo doll of Soma over to four iron maidens which you need to destroy before they can do massive damage to you it's a clever idea for a boss and on my first attempt it really caught me off guard as I was just so taken aback by its terrifying design and I couldn't work out what was actually happening now at the end of the day this is a gameplay driven Series so the aesthetic complaints shouldn't really ruin the experience but dinosaur is also let down by some seriously drab level design most rooms have incredibly basic layouts and usually just have the same enemy pasted four or five times in a row rarely coming up with anything interesting or any unique sequences amazingly there isn't a single New Movement ability or transformation and it leads to a surprisingly one-no game where you simply follow the exact same structure as Arya but in a less interesting castle and with a less interesting plot now if it sounds like I've been very negative so far I've not even got to the worst part which is The Game's utterly baffling magical seal system in order to defeat a boss you need to complete a magical seal which is done by tracing a specific pattern on the bottom screen if you fail to do this in time the boss recovers part of its health and the fight goes on until the seal reappears and you get to attempt it again it utterly sucks as a gameplay mechanic adding nothing but frustration to what otherwise should be some of the best boss fights in the series having to suddenly take your hand off the side of the console and then Trace some really quite complex patterns in just a few seconds is one of those design decisions that you can't quite believe made it past QA but sadly here it is in the final product luckily as I'd already experienced this agonizing mechanic when I played it on release for this video I decided to treat myself to playing a ROM which Auto completes the seals and I think that's a big part of why I was able to enjoy the boss fight so much more with gory captivating designs and really interesting mechanics they simply don't need this ridiculous gimmick and to this day you can still get message boards raging by asking Castlevania fans if they want magical seals to return now despite all these criticisms Dawn of Sorrow is not a bad game and I'd say that if you played this before Arya or Symphony you'd likely miss all these strange quirks and still have a fantastic time with it it's really saved by the fact that at its core it's still an eager Rashi developed exploration side scroller and that's just one of those video game formulas that's always going to be fun regardless of how many bad decisions end up being plastered over the top of it something else that really saves its reputation is that it ends extremely strongly saving virtually all of its good ideas for the final hour and even delivering some interesting surprises when you finally reach the Pinnacle of the cult's headquarters instead of being confronted by Celia or Dracula we Face Off against Dario a fire Mage who does battle in front of a giant mirror reflecting the evil demon that's fueling his power when you defeat him the castle begins to crumble and Soma and the Gang have to flee which allows Celia to escape giving us the most overt and unconcluded bad ending of the series so far now what you're supposed to do is have fully explored the castle which results in you defeating the pandemonium boss and gaining the ability to enter magical mirrors generally speaking they just hold hidden treasure chests but if you use it on the mirror in the Dario fight you'll instead face off against the demon possessing him which rewards you with the final magical seal and access to Celia's grotter in the center of the castle here Soma finds his worst nightmare a triumphant Celia standing before a captured meaner strung up on a tree being used as bait to draw the evil out from within our hero before there's any time to react the cult leader ends Mina's life and thus triggers the dark Awakening in Soma consumed with rage Soma abandons his promise to keep his powers in check and after disintegrating Celia in Revenge the camera cuts across degenya and Julius who with heavy hearts set off to defeat the reborn dark lord it's another fake out bad ending although this time we get something very worthwhile for seeing Soma succumb to the darkness this cutscene unlocks Julius mode which is an absolutely fantastic alternative playthrough where we control Julius Yoko and genya as they battle through the cult's headquarters in order to defeat a now evil Soma alternative playable characters have always been a part of Castlevania since Rondo of Blood and while you could play through Symphony as Richter or Harmony as Maxim Julius mode is easily the most fleshed Out featuring cut scenes unique bosses and a gameplay style that's arguably better than the base game it's heavily influenced by Castlevania 3 and you can switch between the characters at any time with all of them having different abilities that you need to use to defeat bosses and navigate your way to the throne it strips Dawn back to its fundamentals which are actually quite strong and shows that Castlevania can still be a satisfying action game when it won as the team arrive in the throne room we're treated to another beautifully dramatic boss fight with Soma's complex move set easily providing the biggest challenge in the game I particularly like all the allusions to previous Draculas he teleports around the arena like the NES incarnations has a beastly second phase cribbed straight from Rondo of Blood and we even have what looks like a portrait of Matthias kronkfist up on the wall finally linking our 2035 Dracula back to his ancient Origins it's such a satisfying alternative ending but I almost wish this tragic finale was the true conclusion of Soma's story Castlevania has always been a series that's put huge stock into matters of fate and destiny and Dracula finally giving in to his true nature feels like a suitably Gothic way to sign off on the series of course it's not actually the real ending and you get that by heading into celius Grotto with Mina's Talisman equipped which allows Soma to sense that Celia has has only killed a fake and the real meaner is safe at home waiting for his return somehow this all leads to Dimitri resurrecting from the body of the Dead fake and him and Celia heading off into an area called The Abyss which acts as a stand-in for the chaos realm from Arya the final moments are also where that clash between in-game visuals and art Direction reaches Peak disconnect as the abyss is Castlevania at its most depraved the last room of the game is a huge warped Hall made out of human flesh and we find Celia now being offered as a sacrifice strung up on a cross made of Limbs it's like something from a Clive Barker novel and it's impossible to not dream of how beautifully horrific this could have looked if it was Guided by ayami kojima's haunting art Dimitri's sacrifice results in a demon tearing through his body and our final fight takes place against his massive deformed carcass which the game refers to as Menace it functions like a cross between a classic Castlevania boss and something out of Shadow of the Colossus require firing you to LEAP around a huge Arena destroying multiple fleshy weak points in order to topple the Abomination it's an absolutely incredible looking fight and despite all my complaints it's a fitting end to a game that at the very least knew how to put together some damn fine bosses the game concludes with the Scooby going standing on a cliff watching the headquarters crumble into dust like so many Belmonts before them ganya reassures Soma that despite everything that's happened with all his friends around him he has the strength to always resist the darkness and while Pretenders to the throne may always appear they will continue to defeat them for as long as they can and so the sun sets and with it the story of Soma Cruz this game is the very last moment in the timeline as its two spiritual sequels which we'll cover shortly both dive back into the 100 year cycle the igrashi spent so much effort trying to get away from Soma Cruz is more than a fitting end for the story of Vlad tapesh but honestly I find his battle against Celia fauna to be a bit of an underwhelming conclusion to The Saga and really I think it would have been completely fine if they just simply left the story at Arya striking out in a completely new direction for a new console like they had so many times in the past where the game does succeed is in providing a proof of concept for igarashi's exploration side scrollers on the Nintendo DS which frankly feels like it was designed to allow games like this to shine with two screens more buttons and just the right level of graphical power it was an incredibly strong Foundation that would lead to two more extremely interesting games foreign but the successful transition of handheld titles from Gameboy Advanced to Nintendo DS was actually managed by a relatively small team as the vast majority of the Castlevania crew was busy working on the console follower to lament of innocence in early 2005 Koji garashi took to the media to reveal Curse of Darkness much to everyone's surprise it was absolutely nothing like lament of Innocence during the reveal eager was extremely candid about the issues in his last 3D game saying openly that he thought fans hadn't enjoyed the focus on action and that he was personally dissatisfied with how the development process had impacted things like the camera and level design instead of producing a direct sequel they'd started over from scratch and Curse of Darkness was going to be a return to the action RPG blend that the series had become known for this change of Direction leaves us with a game that's apparently toxically one of the most engaging and frustrating in the entire franchise full of original and well-designed gameplay ideas but always coming along with an equally impressive dose of everything wrong with this genre it might be a whole new approach but as we'll find out it repeats many of the same sins now despite the wholesale changes to the design of the game which we'll get into shortly the most surprising decision about Curse of Darkness is that it is a narrative sequel to Castlevania 3 from all the way back on the NES in 1989. IGA had always been open about it being his favorite Castlevania and thanks to the creative freedom afforded by moving the series away from the classic Belmont vs Dracula storylines he could put together his own tribute to that seminal title we play as Hector devil Forge master who abandoned his position as one of Dracula's generals after finding love with a human woman named Rosalie as the game begins he comes face to face with another devil Forge Master Isaac whom hectors want to kill after he framed Rosalie for witchcraft which caused her to be burned at the stage by the locals the whole plot of the game revolves around Vengeance with Hector tracking Isaac across the land and his bloody Mission driving us forwards in interviews igarashi claimed that he wanted to create a game with no good or bad characters given where playing as an ex-general in Dracula's Army it does feel like this could be an interesting exploration of why people serve evil Masters and what happens in a power vacuum when they disappear unfortunately what we get is not really anything like that and curse of darkness's narrative is easily its worst element despite a larger cast of characters more cut scenes and much more dialogue than we got in lament none of that changes the fact that it's just badly written while hunting for Isaac Hector encounters the priest Zaid who provides information the witch Julia who runs the local shop and a time traveling Dandy called Saint Germain and while we get a handful of cut scenes with each we never really learn anything about them and it feels like they exist to propel us to the next level rather than having a proper role in the story much like in lament there's absolutely no NPCs but where that previously worked thanks to the small scale of the story here it has the effect of making the world feel incredibly empty dialogue only ever happens in cut scenes which means it's often very detailed light when a character randomly pops up deep inside a dungeon feels shoehorned into the flow of the game nowhere is this worse than how the game handles Trevor Belmont an inclusion that should be an incredible moment of fan service and instead ends up as a wasted opportunity when you discover that the hero of Castlevania 3 is also hunting down Isaac it's a genuinely cool moment especially as he instinctively turns on Hector and you have to survive against him while pleading your innocence the problem is that outside of this boss fight he doesn't actually do anything and barely has any impact on the plot we never see Alucard Cipher or Grant and this opportunity to pick up with the cast of Castlevania 3 delve into what happens to people after Dracula is defeated is totally missed now a huge reason that the narrative and characters seem so one-dimensional is that Curse of Darkness was one of konami's first attempts to widen the scope of their releases and include other forms of media they'd commissioned a two-issue manga also called Curse of Darkness that delved into the backstory of the cast and provided the setup for the conflict we play through important plot points like Hector's history with Dracula Isaac's murder of Rosalie and just what exactly the Curse of Darkness even is are all entirely found in these comics and it means the game suffers from that same old issue that multimedia projects often fall foul of you need to engage with everything or the story just doesn't work so outside of the big narrative changes the other areas eager Rashi really wanted to focus on were the camera and level design but amazingly neither are particularly better than what he put together in lament the camera is no longer fixed and with the right stick you're free to position it however you want which sounds liberating but barely makes a difference to how the game actually feels to play there isn't any platforming or complex movement of any kind so in practice you just lock onto the closest enemy and leave the camera to do its own thing when you're fighting one-on-one it works perfectly well but up against larger groups it actually starts to fall apart you can change Target with the L2 button but it often doesn't switch to the nearest enemy and it makes encounters against fast-paced flying demons or big very groups a real mess to try and navigate the new approach to level design is also another very mixed bag instead of distinct levels we now have a much more open structure to the world with larger zones that flow seamlessly into one another and instead of everything taking place indoors the copy and paste Square rooms have been replaced with a far bigger variety of environments while that sounds great on paper the reality is igrashi's team was still working with the same engine and so zones are still segregated into lots of smaller areas separated by short loading screens the rooms might be larger and look slightly more interesting but really all this is done is increase the amount of time it takes to get around and the general flow of slowly filling out your map and looking for a boss room is functionally no different in fact it's actually worse from a structural point of view because without the Hub leading to different levels once you do beat a boss it's incredibly unclear where you're supposed to go next and as you can only view the map of the area you're in and any new routes are marked acquiring a fresh skill then actually working out where you can use it becomes a ludicrously boring chore without a walk through so this Probably sounds like a pretty terrible video game right well no despite all those hideously glaring flaws Curse of Darkness is entirely saved by its new RPG systems the idea is that when Hector left Dracula's Army he also shared all of his power and in order to kill Isaac he's got to slowly rebuild it over the course of the game this means that level ups and experience points and Equipment have all been brought back and to be fair this does add some much needed purpose to the constant battling now this is all pretty typical stuff where curse gets really interesting is the innocent devil system as a devil Forge Master Hector can summon and bind different demonic servants to his will you very quickly build up a team of different creatures each one has a unique function for example the fairy type can provide heels and Buffs the battle type gets stuck in with the fighting and the bird type Peppers enemies from the sky just like Hector they also level up and gain skills which you can activate from a spell bar with a triangle button and it adds a really quite traditional RPG twist to all the action combat while you're dodging and pulling off combos with Hector you're also selecting which spells your innocent devil should cast and switching them out depending on different situations in the longer fights where you need to switch multiple times and really plan when and what your devils are doing this comma system is absolutely fantastic and it really is the first time that Castlevania in 3D has felt like it has its own unique identity what's really cool is that each of the Devils has a sprawling evolutionary path that ties into what weapon you use much like an Arya and Symphony are devil Forge Master can equip a wide selection of weapons but unlike in those titles where it really just amounts to a question of which item you feel comfortable using here there is a deeper system of play each of the weapons is part of a colored set red swords blue axes green lances and yellow fist weapons and as you defeat enemies with one of these equipped they'll drop colored evolutionary orbs which trigger devil Evolutions depending on the color you farm it's an awesome system because Evolutions can be quite different for example the sword line in the battle type Devils eventually produces the Raza Samurai devil who's relatively weak but unleashes rapid fire sword combos that deal huge amounts of damage if you go down the knuckle path you instead unlock the liquid Golem who doesn't really contribute much in a fight but has the Mercury mode spell where he turns into an invincible ball of liquid metal that ravages the battlefield now all these interwoven RPG ideas are tied together by one of the best action game crafting systems that I've ever seen a compliment that I did not think I'd be dealing out to a 3D Castlevania the in-game shop is really only meant for buying potions and the way you improve Hector's equipment is by using drops from enemies to craft better weapons as your overall level rises you unlock more recipes and thanks to the pretty generous drop rates and the fact that you can steal with just the Press of the circle button it's very easy to get hold of ingredients and end up with some strong gear without having to farm or look things up it means you're constantly seeking out combat so you can get more drops to create better weapons to far more evolutionary orbs to evolve your devils and reach new heights of power considering just how bad the story is and how sterile the level design gets it's amazing that eager Ash's team have put together such a well-balanced and well-realized action RPG and as I said earlier it saves the entire game and it bloody well needs it too as the final moments of cursor darkness's plot are absolutely ridiculous there's yet another attempt at a big surprise twist but just like in lament it comes out of nowhere and doesn't really redefine the plot like a good twist usually does turns out Zade the monk is actually death and he's been secretly manipulating Isaac and Hector to fight in order to use one of them as a vessel to resurrect Dracula how exactly has he been doing this well it's apparently through the Curse of Darkness which both the devil Forge Masters have contracted and slowly engulfs them in a murderous rage it's a cool concept for a Twist but its execution is just really lacking outside of the opening tax crawl the curse never really factors into the storyline outside of this moment without being able to see how Hector and Isaac acted before the events of the game any twist that involves them mysteriously acting differently loses any impact so despite Hector realizing he's been manipulated Isaac ends up dying anyway which means once again we're thrust into a final boss battle against a recently revived Count Dracula now I'm not gonna lie it is a pretty fantastic boss fight from a gameplay perspective requiring you to use every demon in Your Arsenal and successfully taking the ideas of the best 2D Dracula fights and Reinventing them in 3D there are patterns to learn taunts to recognize and a monstrous otherworldly second phase the issue is really that from a narrative perspective it's just more of what we've already seen so many times before and it doesn't really live up to that promise of giving us a fresh morally gray Castlevania storyline it's doubly frustrating because had the game focused on hexter's Lust For revenge and had him fall further into his darker old ways they could have ended things with a surprise final boss against Trevor Belmont which could have used that fan service moment in an interesting way instead of just retreading this same old story Beats as I said at the top of this section Curse of Darkness is a complete Paradox in many ways it represents the utter nadir of igarashi's time in charge of the franchise with over ambition wasting the chance to build on the good foundation that lament of Innocence laid clearly little was learned from that experience and his teammate virtually all the same mistakes producing a poor story a wonky camera and a terrible Game World to play in but that action RPG system that unique blend of Devil May Cry with shin Megami tensei but that is so good and so engaging that I can't actually help but recommend Curse of Darkness over lament of Innocence it really is the moment that Castlevania discovered what it could be in three dimensions and put together something that brought together the best of its RPG influences with its old school action route it desperately needed a sequel to iron out its glaring issues but sadly that chance would never come when kerser died is released in late 2005 it failed to impress critics and actually ended up with a lower Metacritic score than its predecessor this lukewarm reception translated over to sales where cursor Darkness absolutely flopped selling a measly 50 000 units in Japan and barely breaking 400 000 sold in its entire publishing run for executives that held the series purse strings this was yet another failure to convert the series into three dimensions and really damaged the trust that they had in igarashi's management of the franchise he'd proven time and time again that he could produce incredible 2D games that satisfied both critics and fans but that elusive console hit just seemed ever so slightly out of his reach and Curse of Darkness would ultimately be his last attempt at making it happen foreign portrait of Ruin to be one of the hardest games in this series to write about it might just look like the next portable Castlevania but it is in reality quite the surprising left hand turn full of creative new ideas that catapult the series onto uneven new ground incredibly portrait originally began Life as a Cooperative multiplayer game as eagarashi and his team have been really impressed with how the Nintendo DS handled connectivity after realizing just how complex this would be the project was reworked into something more familiar although many of those core ideas stuck around and formed the foundation of this next title instead of a solitary protagonist we now have two main characters Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Allen a Vampire Slayer and witch who've been sent by the church to investigate the sudden reappearance of Dracula's castle thought to have been caused by the eruption of World War II that's right unlike the tales of Soma Cruise in the near future portray of Ruin Dives back into the past and is surprisingly a narrative sequel to Castlevania Bloodlines from the Sega Genesis Jonathan Morris is the son of our Mega Drive whip wielder John Morris and huge amounts of the plot revolve around ideas that originated in curator's action-packed spin-off just like in Bloodlines we're not fighting against Dracula and the role of antagonists is played by Brawner a vampiric painter based on the very real surrealist artist Victor brauner now where Elizabeth Bathory made sense as a stand-in villain in Bloodlines brauna strikes me as a much stranger Choice namely because I'm not exactly sure what he did to Warrant eager Rashi reimagining him as a creature of the night his artwork is otherworldly and at times disturbing but compared to Vlad the Impaler or The Blood Countess I can't help but feel poor Victor was dumb the dirty here almost as soon as the game begins we settle back into that now oh so familiar combat exploration and upgrading gameplay cycle that's come to Define that entire series on Portables although this time it comes with two pretty major twists the first is the partner system which takes the game's original multiplayer ideas and blends them up with a heavy dose of the Julius mode from Dawn of Sorrow unlike Bloodlines which gave us two perspectives to see the levels from in portrait we control Jonathan and Charlotte at the very same time it sounds like a complicated idea but it's actually implemented really well by pressing X you instantly switch over to the other character and while each has different abilities and equipment to manage they share the same HP and Magic Bar which makes them feel like two halves of the same character Jonathan is our Belmont standard starting the game with a whip but quickly moving on to other weapons as despite being the son of John Morris he was never trained in the ways of the legendary found by a killer along with the expected arsenal of Spears axes and swords Jonathan can also equip a massive range of different sub weapons which effectively replace Soma's bullet Souls although with a much more classic vampire Hunter flavor to them it's a lot to manage and it gets even more complex when you factor in Charlotte thanks to her being a witch her abilities are more magical in nature and while she's a lot weaker in a direct fight you can get hold of a simile eye-watering amount of spells that do everything from massive attacks to heals to Shields to Transformations where this differs from Julius mode is that by pressing the R button you can call in your partner to activate their sub weapon or spell kind of like an assist move from Marvel vs Capcom and by pressing the Y button they'll join the battle directly permanently fighting alongside you until you run out of Mana different situations require different characters abilities and you're always weighing up if you should be going in for dual attacks controlling just Jonathan or Charlotte or calling one in to activate a spell combined with castlevania's now trademark RPG side-scroller foundations it makes for a pretty potent combination and for a lot of people this is enough to make portrait one of the best games in the franchise but for me it's more of a Faustian pact where we gain something very interesting but lose quite a lot in the process since Symphony of the Night castlevania's gameplay had always been about a careful balance of exploration combat and platforming all taking place within a single location and in portrait of ruin's second big innovation igrashi's team attempted to mix this up Jonathan and Charlotte quickly discover the Brawner along with his two vampire daughters Loretta and Stella a stealing Dracula's power through the use of magical paintings which are scattered throughout the castle they can only be destroyed by entering into them journeying through their Twisted Landscapes and defeating the Monstrous commanders found within which fundamentally changes the structure of the entire game the castle is now substantially smaller than ever before and really takes a back seat to these new linear style painting levels which take us far away from the halls of the castle and out into the wider world Sandy grave is set entirely within an Egyptian pyramid and replaces those Gothic medieval Aesthetics with a kind of Coptic horror or mummies and sand worms similarly levels like the city of Hayes and 13th Street reimagine 1940s Paris as a necropolis where hideous beasts roam the streets after the drab and repetitive zones of Dawn of Sorrow these magical paintings feel hugely engaging but sadly it's almost entirely from an aesthetic point of view as almost all of them lack the level design to back up the interesting presentation virtually all of them are completely linear dropping off at an entrance and then having you fight left to right and ending up in a boss room there's only ever one route to follow and almost no scope for stepping off the beaten path even in some of the more complex levels like the dark Academy or Sandy grave now there's nothing intrinsically wrong with linear level design and in fact it's the very Foundation of this entire franchise but where previous Games built themselves on tense combat and tight jumps portrait is still using all of the mechanics of an exploration focused game most enemies still die in one or two hits which makes fighting your way around a linear level surprisingly dull without the Bottomless Pits of Super Castlevania 4 or the deliberate combat of Rondo of Blood these kind of tightly designed zones really don't work all that well and their inclusion might add variety but it detracts from what igarashi's handheld games do so fantastically as so much of the game is spent inside of these painting levels the castle really takes more of a backseat role and instead of wandering its Halls looking for secrets and discovering different areas it really exists to funnel you from portrait to Portrait while our heroes do unlock some new movement abilities and a couple of transformation spells they're only used to gate these linear levels and there's surprisingly little scope for backtracking or reward for doing so now while there might not be any need to organically explore the castle there is actually a system that has you revisiting past areas although yet again it's not exactly well implemented near the entrance to the castle Jonathan and Charlotte set up a base camp with a monk named Vincent who's been assigned to act as their quartermaster but all three are shocked to discover that their Sanctuary has another Resident in the Next Room is a mysterious ghost called wind a specter who died trying to defeat Dracula in Years Gone by and now finds himself trapped within the walls of the castle he acts as a guide and Mentor directing us towards the next objective after each painting but also and in a first for the portable titles handing out side quests because the castle and levels are now so much more linear this is the system by which we revisit older areas with wind saying something along the lines of go and defeat 10 hilguards which requires you to go back to the forest of Doom in order to find the the enemy and fulfill the requirement it's explained in the plot as our ghostly tutor trying to make sure that the two protagonists are prepared to face Brawner but in reality it's a very shallow system that converts the natural backtracking of previous games into a checklist of menial tasks none of the quests are ever anything interesting ranging from the absurdly easy speak to me when you have no MP to the brutally tedious defeat 3 000 enemies or raise X stat to a hundred also a lot of them involve heading into a level in order to find a unique item but this is the real kicker as it's actually possible to discover the items outside of quests and then accidentally sell them which locks you into the Quest for the rest of the game with no way to buy them back off of Vincent it's one of those ideas I'm sure made sense in development as a way to get more mileage out of the linear zones but it just doesn't work in execution and by the time you finished three or four tedious search quests it's pretty hard to have the pace to sit through all 37 of wins tasks now while design decisions made around the gameplay and structure might be somewhat controversial I think an area portrait does do well is in its storytelling which feels a lot more cohesive than in door of sorrow and actually tells a tale that matches up with the light-hearted art direction throughout the castle Jonathan and Charlotte constantly come into conflict with brauna's vampire daughters Stella and Loretta and after defeating Stella in a boss fight our heroes discover that she's dropped a locket which prompts a startling Discovery wind is none other than the ghost of Eric lecard the spear wielding accomplice of John Morris who defeated Dracula at the peak of Castle prosopina 20 years earlier he'd come to the castle to defeat brauna and had been killed and in the process his two daughters were turned into vampires and brainwashed into believing that they were our evil painters own flesh and blood he begs Our Heroes to find a way to save them and therein lies The Good and Bad Endings by heading to the top of the tower and beating the twins like you would any other boss the game simply concludes with Brawner escaping taking the girls with him and wind slipping out of existence with his wish unfulfilled what you're supposed to do is with the toad transformation spell head back into the Sandy grave portrait and get a hold of the sanctuary spell which Wynn tells us has the potential to heal vampirism the goal then becomes trying to land this on the sisters which is actually much harder than fighting them head-on as it's a two on two fight there are attacks flying all over the place and if Charlotte takes even a single point of damage all you move her off screen the spell won't go off when the spell finally completes the two girls are purified and having remembered their Heritage as vampire Slayers they agree to guide Jonathan and Charlotte to brauna's personal Studio an aid in any way they can turns out we need to defeat another collection of paintings to get there but as there's no more Castle to explore all this consists of is heading into the next room and then playing through four remixes of levels that we've already visited to be blunt it's not a great sequence and it really makes it seem like the team ran out of ideas and then engaged in some pretty Shameless padding to bulk out portrait of ruins run time the new zones do have fresh bosses and enemies to fight but just like the first time around the combat often isn't enough to make traveling through these areas interesting and without any new mechanics it's just another helping of something that wasn't all that thrilling to begin with once we've destroyed these final paintings the twins also reveal that Jonathan needs to get hold of the Vampire killer Whip and this is done via the lecard ritual the now healed stellar and Loretta are more than happy to do this for us but it requires Jonathan prove himself worthy by defeating the whips Guardian spirit now this is actually a cool mix-up as the fight is against Rick to Belmont using all his old abilities and moves and you can only fight him as Jonathan without Charlotte's magic it's extremely challenging and the game even acknowledges this by letting you take him on as many times as you want once the whip is in Jonathan's hands we get a final Revelation courtesy of Eric Picard who unveils the fate of John Morris and explains why he was such a distant father to Jonathan turns out if you're not from the Belmont Clan using the Vampire killer slowly drains your life force and Jon having used it to defeat the count fell into a sickness that he never recovered from the reason Jonathan has never trained was in order to protect him from this fate but with his father gone Eric falling to brauna and his daughters captured there was no option but to allow our young hero to make the choice himself it's a pretty typical anime Coming of Age storyline and unlike the harrowing content of Dawn of Sorrow it actually matches up with the game's child-friendly tone funnily enough I think this makes it a strange sequel because while Bloodlines had virtually no plot it was advertised as a classic Blood and Guts action Fest and portrait really couldn't be any further from this it's a very bright and cheerful game that often doesn't even feel like it comes from a tradition of Gothic horror I really doubt many people would consider these two games to be part of the duology like Rondo and Symphony or Arya and Dawn ironically where the two games do share something is in their final confrontation as just like in Bloodlines we have a shoehorned in last minute Dracula fight throughout their time in the castle Jonathan and Charlotte keep running into death who's been brought back to life along with the castle and is similarly trying to defeat Brawner in order to restore his true Master to the throne once the vampire painter has been defeated within his dark Studio the Grim Reaper steps into exact Vengeance and using the body of The Pretender he brings the count back from the abyss and we're thrust into that same old final confrontation that we fought so many times while it's an unexciting narrative conclusion almost a reversed deus ex machina in a way the actual fight itself is pretty damn great taking the two on two formula the portrait does so well and asking you to defeat both death and Dracula at the same time they both use their classic attacks from previous games and it feels like a fitting finale for The partner system balancing out your two super-powered vampire Slayers against the series two most iconic villains once they're defeated the plot wraps up with all of our characters standing outside the crumbling Castle saying goodbye to Eric lecard as he Fades away despite the Heartbreak of losing their father the twins agree to honor his memory and our team of now four head out to defeat Darkness wherever it raises its head a supremely positive ending for a game that feels about its cheery as Castlevania ever gets now like I said at the top of this section I found portrait really hard to write about and I'm sure this conflicted perspective probably comes across in this video it reviewed very well with critics and is generally considered a fan favorite but for all its fresh ideas and Innovations I can't help but feel it doesn't come together into that tightly designed package which igarashi's games usually serve up for every interesting New Concept there seems to be a counterbalancing negative and the more I think about the game the more I find it to be a pretty uneven experience it was clear that the Castlevania team wanted to innovate and break away from doing the same old things and while for many people portrait represents the perfect balance of old and new that specific combination isn't quite to my tastes foreign the opportunity to expand beyond the confines of Nintendo's Portables emerged when Sony released the PlayStation Portable a disc based handheld console capable of full 3d as ever Konami were extremely Keen to support this platform straight out of the gate and within just a few years of its release we had multiple Metal Gear titles multiple Yu-Gi-Oh titles and your pro Evo releases and the first Silent Hill game in almost five years Castlevania was also seen as part of this opening Salvo and igrashi was asked to produce something that could entice in both Nintendo owning Castlevania fan and PSP owners who probably hadn't seen the series since Symphony Dracula X Chronicles is the result of this project it's both the series first ever 3D side scroller full of animated cutscenes and fully voiced dialogue and also a throwback to the 16-bit era finally delivering that mythical Western localization of Rondo of Blood during the marketing before the game came out igarashi explained that the reason for wanting to remake Chino Rondo was that it always frustrated him that his most successful game Symphony of the Night was tied so closely to something that had never released outside of Japan apparently plans had existed to remake Rondo for almost a decade in the release of the PSP had finally given them the opportunity to make it happen anticipation around the game's really East was actually quite large not just because the West would finally get to play a long saw after game but because Dracula X Chronicles was part of the Vanguard of remake culture that now has the industry in a vice grip it's a shame really to look back on interviews with igrashi and hear such Noble reasons for creating a remake he genuinely wanted fans to experience a game that they'd never had a chance to play and wanted it to be the best version of that game possible it's a mindset that I think modern developers and Publishers could learn a lot from rather than relying on name recognition to resell games that are not only easily available but also don't need additional attention in terms of design Rondo of Blood and Dracula ax Chronicles are almost exactly the same we play as Rick to Belmont on a journey to rescue his girlfriend Annette and in the process to feed Dracula and the dark priest's shaft we fight through the same branching path levels and exactly like the original you can rescue Maria Reinhardt and then play through the campaign as her every boss mechanic remains exactly the same in all of the branching paths are located where they were before so depending on your familiarity with the game you'll either spend hours feeding out its many Secrets or plow through it like you're speed running thanks to my repeated playthroughs for this video I think it only took me about 45 minutes to beat the game's career which might sound impressive but that's actually almost half an hour longer than the fastest recorded time a measly 14 minutes where things mainly separate from the original is in Dracula X Chronicles presentation which is a markedly different direction to Chino Rondo's early 90s anime Aesthetics all of the characters have been completely redesigned by ayami Kojima and now run a lot closer to the flowing ink painting style that come to define the series Richter's anime headband has been replaced with a lengthy Victorian overcoat and Maria has seen a complete transformation a flowing hair and cutesy dress have been swapped out for a more functional jacket and trousers which reflect the more serious tone of the game it's not just the character's appearance that's been reworked though the game Now features a small amount of voice acted dialogue and cut scenes all designed to bet flesh out the story which previously required the instruction manual to fully understand the dark priest shafts reason for kidnapping the four maidens is now given some context and Maria's involvement is much less like a joke additional mode and is instead treated like a critical part of the Rondo story considering the greater emphasis on storytelling that eager Ashi had brought to the franchise this new approach fits perfectly alongside the Nintendo Game Boy and DS titles and despite controlling like an old school action game it has all the narrative weight and cinematic Flair of something much more modern in this respect it's the definitive version of The Adventure of Richter Belmont but I have a few personal gripes that mean I'd still opt to play the original if I had a choice between the two as good as the new 3D Graphics are I think a big downside of the new models is the lack of accuracy in the gameplay which has the effect of making everything feel a little loose instead of everything being based on pixels models now have hitboxes which means it can often feel like your whip is harder to use than in the PC engine version and there are frequently moments where Richter slipped off of edges while I tried to position him it absolutely has to be a consequence of how the new models interact with the stages and igrashi himself mentioned that trying to recreate pinpoint platforming in 2.5 D was the single biggest challenge his team faced on top of this for some reason Richter and Maria's full speed is now much faster than it was in the original which has made the timing of some of the boss fights ever so slightly different it's something you'd never notice unless you'd played the two titles back to back but for me it was a really annoying and pointless change if you're looking for the best version of Rondo of Blood I'm not entirely convinced that this is it and personally I still think that the original is the way to go if you want the purest expression of this game the new sections of dialogue and animated cutscenes are certainly nice there's a a sort of antiquated appeal about the pixelated anime look of the original which I think gives it a very unique and Charming identity now that doesn't mean that Dracula X Chronicles isn't worth picking up and actually I'd say that this is a must-stone for any fan of the franchise or anyone looking for an insanely good value for money game that is because igarashi felt that the Remake alone wasn't enough to Warrant charging full price and so in a moment of pure genius he decided to also include a full remaster of Symphony of the Night and the entire original Rondo of Blood that decision to Simply include the original game pretty much invalidates all of my criticisms because you can just switch over to the PC engine version if you prefer it it turns Dracula X Chronicles from a simple remake into a historical passion project trying to bring together modern fans with an older title an account for the life of me understand why this practice hasn't become more commonplace just imagine how interesting it would be for fans of Blue Points demon souls to be able to give the original PS3 version a go or if there was an option in Resident Evil 2 remake or Final Fantasy VII remake to see what all these new ideas were originally based on now as cool as that inclusion is it's the unlockable remaster of Symphony of the Night that really pushes this game into near Orange Box levels of value for money along with the simple fact that this is one of the greatest games of all time playable on a portable system without a single compromise moment it also includes a lot of the additional content that was included in the Saturn version that most people would have missed out on there are two completely new areas which come with their own unique items to collect and through the name screen you can play as Richter or Maria from the very start of the game without having to run through a complete playthrough first there's just nothing to criticize and Dracula X Chronicles perfectly collects this golden period in castlevania's history in one place when it released in 2007 it was a huge deal for Castlevania fans and I bought it on day one just for the remaster of Symphony of the Night which arguably would have been enough to shift copies on its own the comprehensive nature of the collection led to some pretty good reviews and while almost every publication warned potential buyers of the decidedly old-school difficulty it was impossible to deny the sheer value the eager Rashi and his team had included the strange thing was that despite the game's success and how well the team executed their objective this would end up being the only Castlevania game released on the PSP rumors are bounded that we'd soon get a Dracula Chronicles 2 remake of Castlevania 3. as igrashi repeatedly mentioned that he thought Dracula's curse was the best game in the series but as the years ticked by it never materialized years later it would be confirmed that Konami had been putting off of developing more titles for the system thanks to its sales really tailing off despite a strong start the PSP was pretty comprehensively beaten by the Nintendo DS and as it began to lag behind Sony's weak attempts to draw people back to the platform didn't Inspire confidence in developers like Konami with the Nintendo DS now the uncontested primary handheld platform and no plans for another console title the entire Castlevania team focused their attention on one final dual screen project a climactic realization of all of the ideas that are driven their Nintendo development since circle of the Moon it would be the most complex Castlevania game ever designed and one that would Mark the end of the franchise as we knew it foreign considering that the Castlevania team had produced nine titles in just eight years since igarashi took over the franchise you could forgive any expectations that The Well of creativity had begun to run dry after all that's a sort of publishing schedule that you'd expect to see from FIFA Madden or Call of Duty incredibly it seemed that the team would never tire and in 2007 a e for all Expo igrashi cheerfully informed fumitsu that they were hard at work on yet another title for the Nintendo DS and the fans could expect it to be very high quality as the entire team was now focused on this single project interestingly most of the hype for this next release came from a decidedly new phenomenon in January of 2008 a handful of screenshots from an early build leaked online and flooded sites like IGN and GameFAQs with discussions about who this mysterious female character was and if the leaks were even real despite Konami issuing a firm no common in the October of that year they were proven to be anything but fake and after months of speculation people got their hands on the game and quickly realized just how wrong their theories had been the woman from the leagues wasn't just a side character or someone to share the spotlight like Maria or Sharla as for the first time in almost 10 years Castlevania had a female lead character according to igarashi the decision was taken in response to Fan emails who constantly asked when Castlevania would feature a Belmont sister or daughter and in order of Ecclesia he had a story perfect for this change our protagonist is shanoa a member of the titular order of Ecclesia a secret group set up to research methods of combating Dracula in the aftermath of the Belmont Clan's disappearance we're once again back in the 18th century and this desperate need to find a way to defeat the count without the Vampire killer whip forms the foundations of the story in an introductory cut scene we see chanoa and the Ecclesia Grand Master Barlow attempting a process called the ritual of Dominus which will bind a magical glyph to our heroine bestowing her with the power to defeat Dracula should he ever return everything is quickly thrown into chaos as the ritual is interrupted by Albus a fellow Ecclesia agent who claims it was him and not chanoah that was promised the honor of bearing Dominus with the ritual gone wrong Shinola lays grievously injured on the floor and Albus ignoring Barlow's desperate pleas takes Dominus for himself and disappears into the countryside chanoa eventually recovers from her injuries but is permanently damaged with the shock of the ritual's failure robbing her of her memories and emotions and leaving her as a hollow and unfeeling Warrior after a period of retraining Barlow sends her out with a single purpose to track down Albus and reclaim the power of Dominus unlike the large castes of Dawn of Sorrow and portrait of Ruin chanoa's Adventure is a much more personal story heavily influenced by igrashi's own life and drawing on his personal relationships it might not be an epic action story or a clever redefinition of the series mythology but what we do get is a much more emotional tale about rediscovering who you are and the lengths people will go to protect the ones they love what allows all this personal storytelling to work is that eager actually finally saw sense and adjusted the art direction to match the tone of the story he was trying to tell while a Yami Kojima still wasn't involved the art design was handled by masaki Haruka who brought a great deal more detail and maturity to the game's Aesthetics they might still have an air of anime about them but it was a much more realistic style and immediately Drew praise from critics and fans alike who loved the return to a more serious tone should Noah in particular is probably one of the most iconic modern Castlevania characters the flowing black hair gives her a touch of the a la cards and the huge back tattoo doesn't just look cool but also serves a purpose within the story she slender and feminine but also powerful and intense the perfect combination for the series first real female lead character once Genoa steps outside of the Ecclesia headquarters you're immediately confronted with one of the games major changes which is a map screen that separates the game's levels into distinct locations now this is likely horrifying for fans of igarashi's previous games as an interconnected structure is one of the fundamental pillars of his style but kinesia is actually far less fractured than it looks and in practice it's just using a different way of presenting how the different zones interlock for example one of the first areas we head to is the ruvus forest which connects to the colitis Channel and then onto the Minerva prison and Lighthouse these areas do naturally flow into one another in a way that makes sense and many of the locations have multiple X's which each open up new locations on the map now what this new system does really well the previous titles often didn't is really make it feel like shinoa's pursuing Albus across a wide and varied Land We battle through swamps full of powerful enemies navigate through complex underwater caverns and assault evil stronghold it's a real Adventure while many of the locations are very linear in design it's impossible to not be engaged by the storytelling of the locations you visit in fact despite order of Ecclesia being a spiritual successor to Dawn of Sorrow and portrait of Ruin I find it feels the most connected to Simon's Quest instead of a huge non-linear building where hunting for Clues across a broad Countryside and frequently returning to town to stock up on resources in a way that feels more classically RPG than ever before and that traditional RPG implements is also all over the gameplay which has seen its most fundamental redesign since Symphony of the Night and finally Nails the more complex direction that the series had been heading in unlike every character in every Castlevania game before her Chenoa cannot do a basic attack and instead of finding and equipping weapons to use alongside her spells these have all been rolled into a single system glyphs this is the nature of her magical tattoos and the ability which made her the candidate to Bear Dominus through absorbing different glyphs found out in the world which come from being bosses or in hidden locations or even stolen from enemies you can equip them to either the x or y button and they become part of your Loadout similarly to how everything in Arya and Dawn was governed by Souls the glyphs form all of your traversal skills and special moves but importantly also your basic attacks and in order to use a sword or Lance or Scythe you'll need to equip the appropriate glyph now this gets really interesting is that they use up magic just the same as any other spell and in turn them with a magic meter that regenerates outside of combat order of Ecclesia essentially functions like a rudimentary side-scrolling Dark Souls in previous games most enemies would die in a single hit but here even basic monsters can take three or four strikes and they hit really hard in return so utilizing chanoa's darjean carefully managing your magic meter are huge parts of doing battle effectively and that's something you're going to need to learn to do pretty quickly as as order of Ecclesia really doesn't mess around and has a difficulty level that at times is more comparable to the old-school NES games rather than its Cakewalk Diaz brothers along with far more powerful basic enemies both money and healing items are hard to come by and the amount of save points has been dramatically reduced which means dying outside of boss fights has once again become part of the equation Elemental weaknesses are now extremely important and attacking an enemy with the right weapon is the difference between destroying it in two hits or five which given how much danger you're always in is something you cannot ignore on the B button you can switch instantly between three loadouts and you're meant to create different sets that can be activated on the fly in order to deal different kinds of damage for example you'll want to strike glyph such as the Lance and a blunt glyph like a hammer and then need to decide which spell glyph complements your primary attack as different combinations can be used together in Union glyphs which are powerful attacks that draw on both the X and Y slot and use up your hearts what's cool about these is that just like the goal old and healing items hearts are also pretty hard to come by and really you have to ration them out weighing up if you want to save a full tank of Union glyphs for a boss or spend them to make it through the level with more Health when it's all working together this combat system is Simply the Best that 2D Castlevania has ever felt and it's so good that it entirely makes up for the linear zones that have relatively little exploration there are some levels like Oblivion Ridge which are essentially just a straight walk from right to left but thanks to the nail biting combat they're still insanely engaging and battling new enemies and trying to work out the best ways to defeat them never gets old now as you chase Albus from location to location chanoa discovers that he's been kidnapping the local Town folk and by freeing them she can repopulate the abandoned Weigel Village which has a pretty big impact on the gameplay each villager you rescue has a different vocation and by completing Quests for them they either reward you with unique items or contribute inventory to the shop which has almost nothing useful in it at the start of the game for example if you find herbs for Abram you'll be able to buy antidotes and high potions and if you give different kinds of ore to Eugen he'll make powerful armor and pay you for supplying the materials there's a cook to provide ingredients for a dressmaker looking for silks and even an old woman who asks you to make sketches of different in-game locations in exchange for useful hats it's essentially this game's version of the quest system from portray and while it does have a few problems I think it's far better implemented here and feels a lot more natural within the game's world for starters shinoa actually gets to know the villagers over the course of the quests and each little sequence completes with some really heartfelt dialogue as they try to help her engage with the world while lacking any emotions also the rewards are far more meaningful than the endless weak sub weapons that wind gifted us and make the backtracking and hunting for ingredients feel far less like padding the cooking Quest For example feel borderline mandatory because food heals so much more than potions and is substantially cheaper which makes a massive difference in such a difficult game the only issue is that so many of the items needed to complete the quests are found in ecclesia's Treasure Chest which frustratingly work on a random Loot drop system each chest gives you an item from about three or four possible choices and It ultimately leads to having to run through levels over and over looking for the right items to drop so once you've fought your way across the entire map you'll end up in the mystery Manor which is an insanely tough area that culminates in the long-awaited confrontation between Chenoa and Albus as Barlow had warned Albus is unable to contain the power of Dominus and through the course of the game he slowly become more unhinged and now finally cornered he declares himself The Reincarnation of Count Dracula shinoa simply replies that despite losing her emotions she pities what he's become and the two do battle for control of the powerful glyph and this is where igarashi delivers his trademark surprise twist once Albus is killed Chenoa absorbs the Dominus glyph finally reclaiming the power to defeat Dracula but something is clearly wrong and as the power floods her mind so too to albus's Memories they had known each other during their time in Ecclesia in fact they'd been extremely close with shinoa referring to Albus as her big brother and admonishing him for always putting himself In Harm's Way to protect her when she was chosen as the bearer of Dominus Albus stepped in because he knew that to wield the power was to die as its activation requires a human soul he'd begged Barlow to allow him to Bear the burden but was refused and when we meet these characters for the first time we're seeing a heartbroken Albus steal the power not out of jealousy but out of love for shanoa desperately trying to protect her from this Destiny tragically his attempts to try and control Dominus all fail and by the time shinoa finally catches up to him he's been consumed by his power which robs the wielder of their emotions and memories and drives them insane the final remnants of albus's being deliver one final plea for her to never use Dominus and to not trust the author of this dark power Barlow the Grand Master with her world view completely flipped on his head shinoa returns to Ecclesia and confronts the old man demanding answers about who she really is and why he had lied about albus's actions now if you hadn't worked it out so far Barlow is not what he seems and after shinoa refuses to complete the full ritual of Dominus The Mask slips and he reveals himself to be a servant of the darkness working to resurrect Dracula rather than defeat him turns out that the Dominus glyphs were made from the remnants of Dracula's body those relics used by Simon and just Belmont in order to re-summon him despite containing great power their use trades the life of the wearer to bring the vampire lord back from the Genoa is obviously horrified to discover this manipulation and her and Barlow do battle but her Victory is short-lived with his last breath the deceiver sacrifices his own life in order to finish the ritual and once more Castlevania rises from the earth cradling its vampiric Master Within on the map screen we have a new location the Monstrous Citadel of Dracula and this is where order of Ecclesia changes up the action RPG formula and delivers a whopping great dose of classic igarashi gameplay the castle is a huge singular location easily matching the size of the castle in portrait of Ruin and contains everything you'd expect from a game descended from Symphony of the nine we're exploring looking for new traversal abilities in order to open up pathways through the castle and between multiple War points six unique bosses and a non-linear objective it's everything you could possibly want from a traditional Koji garashi title its inclusion is just so clever when the final location on the map opens up you simply presume it's going to be another short area but when you take those first few steps into Castlevania and realize it's about 10 times the size of any other location it delivers a surprise that's just as memorable as the inverted Castle moment personally I'd argue it's even better as once we begin exploring the castle order of Ecclesia quickly ramps up the intensity and contains most of the game's best moments up until this point the glyphs chanoa has been using have been stand-ins for the traditional weapons and spells seen in Dawn and portrait but in the castle we find some really crazy attacks that feel fantastic to use there are wolf heads that unleash vicious bites huge Stone fists that can unleash a union glyph that destroys half the screen and a set of wings that allow you to permanently fly just like in a classic RPG by the end of the game shinoa feels unbelievably powerful and while previous Castlevania games did this by pumping up your numbers Ecclesia gives you a visual representation of it huge spell effects make those piddly swords and hammers from the early game look like the tools of mere mortals we're also treated to some of the series very best boss fights which is a real compliment considering just how good the team had become a designing memorable encounters we do battle against the massive eligor which requires you to attack weak points and climb all over its body and Blackmore an insanely cool boss who manipulates his monstrous Shadow asking you to dodge its attacks based on the man in the foreground rather than the Creature cast against the wall there's even time for a funny little gimmick boss the wall Master you don't directly fight and instead need to position yourself so you aren't hit by his attacks and can absorb his glyph when you see him die in an instant it's impossible to not crack a smile at how the team was still managing to create memorable moments after delivering six very similar games in a row at the top of the castle we of course have to do battle with the resurrected Count Dracula and frankly it's a climax more than worthy of the rest of the game firstly I'm going to say that I love this redesign his pupilus red eyes pallid skin and dank hair give him a really disturbing look which most of the other games shy away from he looks like an Unholy monster that's been sealed away for a century instead of the Regal and eloquent Master of the castle that we become so used to the mechanics of course play out like a classic Dracula fight with the Vampire teleporting around the battlefield laughing at shinoa's attempts to defeat him although this time around he has far more attacks than ever and you'll need to learn how to dodge about eight different spells if you want to have any chance of beating him luckily armed with a huge arsenal of healing items thanks to the Goodwill of the villagers and a host of powerful glyphs I managed to bring the count down but unsurprisingly that is not the end of the story as Leon Belmont discovered covered all those years ago in the forest of Eternal Night vampires cannot be killed by mortal hands and it requires the power of that own kind to defeat them while he opted to create the Vampire killer whip Chenoa has another option and breaking her promise to Albus she activates Dominus and destroys Dracula with his own power she slumps to the floor exhausted her life force draining away and the screen Fades to black as albus's memories once again come rushing back to her memories of their time spent together and how they cared for and looked after one another she decides this must be a final Vision before her death but death does not come and instead she finds herself speaking to the spirit of Albus a leftover remnant of his being surviving thanks to the sheer power of dominance he has a gift for shanoa his spirit is able to return her emotions and memories to her and with tears rolling down her eyes and herself finally repaired she thanks Albus for allowing her to feel happiness before she passes away but that's not the end of albus's generosity Dominus Demands a soul for its use but it's satisfied to take his instead of shinoas and just like he had done for all those years they had spent together he puts himself In Harm's Way one final time all he asks is to see her smile and the screen cuts across to a heartbreaking full picture of Chenoa tears streaming down her face in anguish and brimming over with happiness at finally being able to recognize her beloved Big Brother for who he really is with that last heartbreaking exchange Alba slips away and a silent chanoa leaves the crumbling Castle it's a tragic and also uplifting ending our heroine finally regaining herself but at the cost of everything that's ever meant anything to her although for the first time in her life she'll be the master of her own destiny and be free to walk whatever path of healing she decides upon it's the most emotional and touching story that igrashi has ever been able to conjure and you need to be utterly stone-hearted to feel nothing for the tragic tale of Chenoa and Albus in a franchise full of classic movie Monsters anime action heroes and a very traditional view of Good vs Evil order of Ecclesia stands out for all the right reasons drenched in Gothic tragedy but without leaning into the Absurd it's a story about loss and self-realization and that's something anyone can relate to deeply satisfying from both the gameplay and narrative perspective and rounds out the series time on Nintendo handhelds with a triumphant final flourish broadly speaking the critics also felt the same and the review scores settled around an 85 out of 100 exactly the same as portrait of Ruin but considering this was really dragged down by a few very negative scores from certain Outlets that really didn't get it it's safe to presume that most people considered it the superior game unfortunately much like the tragedy at the heart of order of ecclesia's story its sales ended up being equally heartbreaking in Japan it bombed selling less than 20 000 copies According to some sources and effectively confirming the Japanese Gamers had lost complete interest in akumaju Dracula the bigger problem was that while previous titles had always made up for this lack of Eastern success with Stellar Western Sales franchise fatigue had begun to set in and after portrait delivered lower numbers than Dawn Ecclesia repeated the trend and seemingly returned far lower sales in both America and Europe now this was helped in no small part by konami's own publishing strategy which printed an amazingly low number of units in case the game didn't take off but this then had the opposite effect of creating a scarcity that meant even semi-interested fans couldn't get hold of a copy it was a situation that must have been so frustrating for igarashi and his team they produced yet another generational Masterpiece one of the finest DS games ever made and had almost nothing to show for their work in interviews in the run-up to its release eager told journalists that he honestly felt that Castlevania had the potential to be the biggest action Series in the world but with another sales disappointment on their hands that goal seemed further than ever and the team was left wondering what exactly they did wrong well sadly for our cowboy hat wearing protector of the face the worst was yet to come with sails beginning to slow it'd become clear that the Castlevania series desperately needed to expand beyond the handheld Market while igrashi's games were critical Darlings and have held up extremely well over time the team's constant rate of releases had caused an oversaturation that consumers just couldn't keep up with between 2001 and 2008 Konami had put out seven portable titles at a rate of one a year and it was obvious that something needed to change in 2007 Nintendo had released the Wii and its focus on casual gaming and motion controls had sparked an explosion of sales that dwarfed anything Microsoft or Sony could dream of by the end of 2008 it was Far and Away the most popular console of the generation with an install base of over 50 million units worldwide and that was something Konami wanted a piece of igrashi was told to produce something for the platform which in of itself isn't anything surprising but what eventually appeared on the showroom floor at E3 2008 was an enormous surprise to everybody Castlevania judgment was that game a multiplayer 3D fighter that was operated entirely with motion controls a move that baffled everybody who checked out their Booth Luke Plunkett of Kotaku put out a damning preview titled I wish I hadn't played Castlevania judgment telling curious fans that the game was so bad it ruined his entire trip as negative fan reaction built eagerashi was forced to do a round of interviews to reassure everyone that the game would match up to the quality people had come to expect and that his team were trying their very best to make something worthwhile it was a short-lived reprieve as this Frosty reception was quickly followed by even more negative coverage focused around the game's art Direction Konami is sought to regenerate the look of Castlevania by bringing on board the manga artist takeshia Bata who put together the ridiculously successful series Death Note he was given free reign to reinterpret the characters of Castlevania however he wanted and surprisingly had a huge amount of impa into how igrashi's team brought his Creations to life now while about his previous work had earned him a huge amount of respect as an artist and writer his ideas about Castlevania did not go down well with the fans who broadly hated the transition from Gothic fantasy to full-blown anime it's a shame too as I think the designs aren't completely without Merit characters like Trevor and Simon Belmont look straight out of the pages of a 1990s Shonen manga and the Slender features and long white hair of Dracula and Alucard really suit about his style in fact I don't think it's the quality of the designs but more the wild reinterpretations that warrant the criticism Eric lecard from Bloodlines for example is now reimagined as a young boy who wields a comically large Spear and that makes absolutely no sense considering igarashi had gone out of his way to try and rehabilitate the character in portrait of Ruin Grant a nasty from Castlevania 3 is now inexplicably a voldo-esque mummy instead of a heroic thief and death one of the series most iconic villains is now just a Death Note Shinigami along with these outlandish redesigns the roster of playable characters is also pretty questionable Rick to Belmont Maria Renard and Soma Cruz are all nowhere to be found despite featuring in multiple games and there's no representation from the 3D games with Hector Leon Matthias and Isaac all left on the bench instead we can play as a random Iron Golem Camilla the one-time villain from circle of the Moon and most bafflingly Cornell the werewolf from Legacy of Darkness on the Nintendo 64 who seems to have recovered from his igarashi-induced decanonization the justification for all these characters coming together stems from Castlevania judgments sole original creation a time traveler called aeon apparently a monster known as the time Reaper has arrived from the future to destroy the past and as a member of what I presume is the time police aeon has gathered History's Greatest champions in order to find someone who can defeat the futuristic Menace now obviously fighting games aren't generally renowned for their storytelling but this is a particularly bad example we get an introductory cut scene which sets up the quest but outside of that there's absolutely nothing to indicate that all this fighting is supposedly tied together with a narrative there are no cut scenes for beating the game as different characters no unique interactions before matches and absolutely zero effort to provide any sort of single player offering which is insane considering this was being made to appeal to fans of a series that only ever produced single-player games of course these misfires could all be forgiven if Castle near judgment was a tightly designed multiplayer game as the main focus would be on the excitement that comes from playing endless matches but alas that's not the case and arguably judgment's weakest element is its gameplay which completely justifies all those worries about the Studio's ability to put together this kind of game basic attacks are done by waggling the Wii remote with special moves and guard breaks done by holding different buttons while you flail around you might imagine that different directional movements produce different attacks but they do not a huge horizontal swing is the exact same input as a tiny wiggle and the animations for the attacks are always the same regardless of how much you move the remote it's at its absolute worst with how it implements dodging which has been mapped to a waggle of the left nunchuck for some crazy reason actually using this is borderline impossible as it's just far too big of a movement to pull off in the split-second windows that you have to react to attacks matches devolve into a random mess of Wii remote Movement we have no real control over what you're doing and the result of the match is simply in the hands of the Gods now thankfully you can opt to play with a GameCube controller instead and this remaps all of the inputs onto button presses which feels much more natural and gives you some degree of control now the problem with that is that the whole point of judgment was to capitalize on the popularity of motion controls and is the best way to play this game is by removing those elements you've got to say that Castlevania judgment fails pretty hard at its main objective now when you're in full control judgment might look like any old 3D fighter but it actually plays very differently to something like Tekken or Soul Calibur actions in those games are very deliberate you're always locked onto your opponent which keeps the focus squarely on the combat by comparison judgment is a very loose experience where players can freely move around the map and you're meant to interact with parts of the stage in between bouts of fighting Arenas all have environmental hazards that take influence from things you'd see in a traditional Castlevania level you can fall into spiked pits destroy candles for hearts to power sub weapons and even fight smaller enemies that will spawn into attack both players but none of this really feels like it ever impacts the outcome of a match as movement is such a big part of the equation it would have been cool to see igrashi's Team designed to much more complex stages that actually felt like 3D versions of famous Castlevania locations imagine leaping between gears in a clock tower while doing bad with your opponent or facing off against waves of enemies in the symphony Colosseum the idea of blending traditional action platforming with a fighting game is quite an intriguing concept but it's just executed here in such a simplistic way that you'll often hardly even realize these things are taking place really judgment is just an extremely clumsily made game and it's top to bottom full of mistakes that a studio with real experience in this genre simply wouldn't make balance is all over the place with certain characters completely useless and others ridiculously overpowered super moves do far too much damage and take forever to play out which means they're utterly necessary and also extremely annoying unlocking the full roster requires beating the story mode 12 times over and that's in addition to the stranger the meager amount of content and the fact that you literally cannot play with the console's default controller I wanted to be kind when talking about Castlevania judgment it's a premise that I really do believe has potential and where the game to function more along the lines of Marvel vs Capcom or Persona Arena I think the story might have been completely different these All-Star ensemble cast franchise Fighters can be good but the problem is that Castlevania judgment simply isn't it released into an atmosphere of skepticism and did absolutely nothing to Abate that garnering all four reviews that have it sitting at a 49 out of 100 on Metacritic although hilariously IGN decided to award a 7 out of 10 for some reason which has dragged the average much higher than it would have otherwise been unsurprisingly Konami didn't publish any sales figures but rumors were that they were incredibly low with as little as 10 000 copies sold in Japan a territory that was otherwise going crazy for the Nintendo Wii for Koji igarashi this failure proved to be the final straw and he was officially moved away from his role as creative director of the series bringing an end to over a decade of his ideas dictating how the series was designed while it might have been a sound financial decision with eager Ashi clearly having lost his midest touch for creating Blockbuster selling games I can't help but feel like this demotion was really part of a wider change in the industry while my Artistry and passion began to bleed away in favor of the desperate pursuit of profit Koji igrashi was a Man Who Loved Castlevania and desperately wanted it to be as bold and ambitious as it could be he was constantly trying to innovate on the formulas that had catapulted him to success and frankly other than judgment I wouldn't say he ever produced a truly terrible game in fact certain titles like lament of innocence and Order of Ecclesia deserved far better sales than they ended up bringing in and are now considered cult Classics many years later some might criticize the quality of his storytelling and yeah it wasn't always fantastic but you really can't ask for anything more than for a series to be managed by someone who truly feels passion for what they're making it was ultimately an Inglorious end to a glorious era and while igrashi was asked to stay involved it was only in a very loose management sense the creativity that had essentially single-handedly codified the metroidvania genre was finally bottled up and cast aside history has been much kinder to Koji garashi than Konami ever were in his contributions to the industry are now widely acknowledged and respected but that would be something that took a long time to surface just like hitoshiakamatsu before him in 2008 he disappeared into the background and Konami went looking for new ways to make money out of their vampire killing Legacy foreign the adventure rebirth might be one of the Lesser known titles in the franchise but it actually represents a really important intersection in our story with igarashi no longer in complete control of the franchise this would Mark the first time that a studio outside of konami's internal teams would produce a Castlevania game it was an idea that a decade ago would have been unfathomable but with sales plummeting and igarashi no longer trusted to turn things around Outsourcing was seen as a cheap way to produce games that would definitely give a return on investment now I'm sure this sounds like a very cynical corporate move but instead of playing it safe Konami opted to take a gamble with the studio that they selected the lucky team was M2 a Japanese developer with a long history of handling ports but who'd never actually worked on an original game suddenly developing from the ground up for a globally renowned franchise was a huge task for the small Studio and it was made all the more complex by konami's request for not just one but three titles each based on one of the Publisher's Classic series this contract led to M2 producing the rebirth Trilogy which took gradius Contra and Castlevania and reimagined them a smaller DLC titles that were available exclusively through the we wear platform which was Nintendo's answer to the Xbox Live arcade 2006 and 2007 Konami had released a Symphony of the Night in this manner and it had been a huge success really Paving the way for developers to start releasing older titles in downloadable form with the Nintendo Wii still breaking sales records in every territory and Konami having a lot of Justified faith in this sales model the move from physical to digital just made too much sense to pass up and it was a move that quickly bore through gradius rebirth was a modest success that garnered some praise for its hardcore retro challenge but with the release of Contra rebirth later the same year people started to really notice what M2 were doing it wasn't just a fresh paint of coat over the original title and it was in fact a completely new game with new cutscenes new characters and all new levels which made it well worth playing Nintendo Power even went as far as nominating it for their Game of the Year Awards which made people really excited to see what M2 could make out of the bones of Castle Albania with igarashi assigned to the project to make sure that it didn't stray too far from what Konami wanted Castlevania the adventure rebirth released in October 2009 and capped off the rebirth Trilogy with another critical hit what's really surprising about this title is that despite the name it's not really a remake of Castlevania the adventure which in case you'd forgotten was konami's 1989 attempt to bring the series onto the Game Boy and is a very grueling and unpleasant experience instead M2 opted to really back themselves and their game really only shares a handful of things with its handheld ancestor we still play as Christopher Belmont we can still upgrade the whip into a flaming ranged version but that's really where the comparisons end the brutally precise platforming from the Game Boy game has been tidied up and you can now control Christopher in mid-air which makes all the classic side scrolling feel as smooth as it should do in a game where jumping is your primary verb the sub weapons have been further fleshed out and now instead of just the two you had in Belmont's revenge and the zero in the original Adventure you have access to the full classic 5. all of which feel perfectly balanced Against The Game's new focus on combat and navigation instead of the Endless rope climbing and instant death spike traps we've got a real variety of enemies with a lot of different ways to tackle them and fast-paced platforming that rarely ever punishes mistakes with an immediate game over in a sense it feels very similar to how Bloodlines approached its game design wanting to be action-filled but without demanding that you know exactly what's coming to be able to progress there's similarly a huge dose of Rondo of Blood as Christopher can find keys in the game stages which can then unlock a host of different paths throughout the levels these alternative routes often play out really differently with some having unique bosses others being much shorter but harder and even a few that reward you with hidden caches of items all that's wrapped around the same strategic decision making weighing up losing your sub weapon for a potential shortcut and it still works just as well adding a huge amount of much needed replayability to a game that's only about five levels long now there are some issues with the adventure rebirth which are less rooted in Personal Taste and are more just objective mistakes in its design for one you can't jump on and off stairs which is a really strange oversight considering that was one of the major Innovations of the 16-bit era similarly I've got no idea where you can't swap between sub weapons as that's been a staple mechanic since Rondo of Blood now even with those small issues Adventure rebirth is a really great game and considering it released for only a thousand Nintendo points which was a little over seven pounds at the time it's extremely good value considering experiences like this just weren't made at the time sadly with the wiiware channel discontinued as of January 2019 and Konami never commissioning another sequel or re-release Adventure rebirth is now impossible to legally play and that's only contributed to a further slipping between the cracks of our Collective memory despite its good reviews and respectable sales numbers I'd wager this is one of the least played games in the series and the one that people will be most unfamiliar with hope is not completely lost though in 2020 M2 once again worked with Konami on the series putting together the incredible Castlevania Anniversary Collection and the Castlevania Advance collection which brought two eras together in extremely high effort compilations while Adventure rebirth wasn't part of either it shows that the lines of communication are still open hopefully one day we can see this small but important milestone in the history of the franchise gets some of the recognition that it deserves foreign ly alongside their digital Wii titles Konami also had plans to release a digital only title on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. along with transitioning to a new distribution model this game would also Mark the last time the Koji garashi would work on a Castlevania game while he'd already been largely demoted from his position as Siri's creative lead he'd been involved in an advisory role with the adventure rebirth and once again he was on hand to help with the development of this new digital title although without any control about the direction they were headed in rather tellingly at E3 2010 when asked what he was working on next by Nick Chester of Destructoid he simply answered I'm not sure and even joked that he might not make it to the next E3 we'll finish that story shortly but for now we need to look at the game he was promoting Castlevania Harmony of Despair which released in August 2010 on the Xbox Live arcade and then the following year on the PlayStation store at first glance it might look like another return to the series 2D Roots but in reality this was a huge experimental leap into what Konami saw as future of the industry it was digital only it had micro transactions and it was entirely multiplayer focused now that might sound pretty awful but the concept behind Harmony of Despair is actually quite intriguing and while the game has its fair share of problems it's a surprisingly well executed attempt to transform the series into something you can play with your friends the premise is that all of the events of the previous Castlevania games are recorded within a magical book called The grimoire and thanks to some dark magic its Pages have come to life blending all of the series history together into a glorious franchise-wide Battle Royale it's up to a team of past Heroes to save the day but really this plot only exists to give a loose explanation for all this Castlevania stuff being thrown together as there are no cutscenes and no dialogue the bass version comes with six characters to choose from and as the game's heavily inspired by the igarashi titles the gameplay is that familiar blend of action platforming with light RPG elements everyone can equip gear use consumables and importantly they each have their own Unique Mechanics that reflect the game they originally came from for example Alucard can discover Scrolls which teach him the Spells he used in the symphony and Jonathan Morris learns different martial arts that add Mobility to his torsa now while that sounds like the team had spent a huge amount of effort fully realizing these characters the truth is rather less impressive all they've done is taken the Sprites from eager Ash's latest games and blown them up to work in HD a lift and shift job rather than anything creative it's why we've got characters like Soma Jonathan Charlotte and chanoa but none of the other 2D egorashi characters like just or Maxim as they would require new Sprites to be made that also means that there are no reimaginings which means no 2D Hector or Leon Belmont and none of the 8-Bit characters are involved at all the whole game is essentially a load of old assets rearranged into a new title which is surprisingly how the concept for harmony despair came about in an interview with Destructoid igerashi claimed that they'd simply loaded up a development kit and tried to see how many Sprites they could stick on a single screen apparently the team found this concept quite fun and the large single screen levels of Harmony of Despair were born out of there it's impressively Thrifty but also shows how far the franchise had fallen this was all they could get by budget for a once Titan of the industry cobbling together a new game out of the bones of old ones now despite looking like a pretty typical Castlevania Adventure albeit with multiple people playing at once the actual structure and flow of Harmony of Despair is pretty damn different to anything else we've seen so far instead of a focus on action platforming and exploration the game plays out much more closely to something like Borderlands or Diablo where the main goal is finding Lou that improves the strength of your characters rather than constant forward progression through the levels defeating enemies rewards you with stronger skills and by opening the many chests scattered around the six stages you can get stat boosting equipment and money to spend in the game's shop interestingly the shop is only accessible between runs and it gives Harmony a very rogue-like feeling where you'll load into a level without the intent of actually finishing it only looking for better equipment and more money to improve your chances of being the boss it's a funny system to find in a Castlevania Game grinding and leveling up had been a feature of the series since Symphony of the Night but it'd always been treated as something optional a way to lower the difficulty if you needed rather than something mandatory by comparison Harmony of Despair is very much built with that grind as the very core of its gameplay Loop now in order to accommodate all this diablo-esque looting the levels are much bigger than we've ever seen before and to their credit they're well designed enough that running through them multiple times doesn't get quite as monotonous as you'd imagine each one has multiple routes to the boss and optional areas that reward you with Lou and it's actually quite impressive how all this variety is packed into a single screen without a moment's loading at any point where the stages really come alive is when the players split up and start heading in different directions which is massively encouraged by the fact that opening a chest rewards everyone with loot many of the puzzles require two players coming from different directions obviously with six players it can get pretty chaotic but it's that kind of beautiful hilarious mess that great multiplayer games do so well trying to get to a chest and realizing your body is already fighting the boss or desperately trying to revive someone who died on the other side of the map are those naturally memorable moments that these kinds of games endlessly serve up one really clever idea is that instead of a map screen the right stick now pulls the camera all the way out so you can see the entire level and this lets you check on where other players have gotten to and importantly keep track of what the boss is doing in the first level the gergos can fire a laser beam from across the map and the Panic as its Tracer appears over you changes what would otherwise be a pretty simple level into a really fun game of cat and mouse this idea of the boss interacting with the rest of the stage adds a unique atmosphere to each of the levels beyond their Aesthetics and some of them are really well implemented the puppet master in level 2 can follow you outside of the boss room and the Menace From Dawn of Sorrow is reimagined as a hulking monstrosity that destroys most of the level once it's awakened it's easily Harmony's most creative idea and it keeps you guessing even when you're running a stage you've already beaten quite a few times now the biggest issue is easily it's balancing which feels completely weighted towards multiplayer and makes that loot grind pretty absurd if you decide to head in Solo most of the enemies in the game feel like they have health pools designed for multiple players to be attacking them and the damage of a single character is so low that even basic enemies in the first level take multiple hits to kill it turns the bosses into a ludicrous gear check that requires running the level you're on maybe five or six times over before you genuinely have the power to even attempt them without friends sadly the multiplayer also isn't without issues both offline and over the Internet for absolutely no reason the Xbox version doesn't have local co-op which means if you want to play in the same room as your friend you'd better have a PlayStation this baffling decision is made a little easier to swallow because the local cop is not actually that great and it's pretty obvious that Harmony was designed with online multiplayer in mind only when two players on the same console Go in different directions the camera pulls out and forces you to play in the tiny overview mode which it was clearly not designed for we've also not really touched on the game's micro transactions which are a trend that had unfortunately began to creep into the industry at this point along with five other characters including Julius Belmont Maria Renard and Richter you could purchase five additional stages and two separate music packs now this is a lot of microtransactions and it represents almost 50 percent of the total content Konami made for the game Harmony of Despair cost 15 pounds on release but if you wanted to experience everything the game had to offer it would end up costing you closer to 35 which is an insane rate to pay for a downloadable title that's virtually unplayable as a solo experience this pricing model along with the new focus on multiplayer led to a lot of criticism from websites and magazines who saw it as a cynical move on konami's part to try and monetize the series reviews were pretty rough on it and the final Metacritic score of 65 out of 100 is one of the lowest in the franchise I think that's a little harsh as the reality is the team are working with a virtually non-existent budget and produced a game that in the right circumstances can be extremely fun and even has some creative ideas like how the bosses interact with the stages like so many games in the series before it Harmony of Despair could have really used a sequel in order to smooth out some of its issues but in true frustrating Konami tradition a follow-up never came and Harmony is aged into a very strange Trend chasing side project rather than that permanent step into the series future with middling sales and reviews it was clear that the experimentation that had so often saved the series in the past was no longer working and with video game development exploding in cost thanks to the new HD generation Castlevania was at a Crossroads the big missing piece had always been that AAA 3D Castlevania Game and Konami knew that going forwards this would be the only way to keep the franchise in business they made the dramatic decision to completely reboot the franchise and went out to Market to find a developer who was up to this monstrous task I have done question [Music] the idea of going big on a triple A console Castlevania game wasn't a new one as this had been egorashi's planned direction of travel before he was demoted the team had begun to work on a PS3 an Xbox 360 Title starring Alucard which was tentatively titled Castlevania and progressed far enough for a teaser to be shown off at the Tokyo game show in 2008 with the back-to-back commercial failure of Ecclesia and judgment development on this title was canceled but the idea of a big budget reboot stuck around and Konami decided to follow the route they'd gone with the adventure rebirth and bring in a promising new studio to handle its creation around the same time they'd been pitched a fantasy Adventure Game by a small Spanish studio called Mercury steam led by two highly ambitious designers David Cox and enrich Alvarez while Konami decided against going ahead with that title the Japanese leadership team were impressed and asked David and Enric to put together a prototype of what they thought a rebooted Castlevania could look like it was a huge opportunity for the small Spanish team as while they'd been in existence since 2002 they'd only managed to produce two full games American McGee's scrapland and Clive barcus Jericho and while both are very interesting and ambitious games they were riddled with Technical and design faults which meant they hadn't made a big impact this Castlevania pitch was a major deal for them but crushingly Konami didn't really like what they put together it began to have cold feet about the entire concept of rebooting the franchise it seemed like Mercury steam were headed back to Spain empty-handed until they were say saved by konami's Golden God a man whose creative influence dwarfed even the biggest figures in castlevania's history the Prototype caught the attention of hideo Kojima who felt there was real promise in it and convinced the Konami board to forge onwards with production it was as close to a home run as mercury steam could have hoped for suddenly they were working on one of the industry's most famous franchises with a huge budget and had the personal backing of one of the greatest Minds in video game development there was real excitement about what they could produce and the studio quickly grew to almost 100 people in order to accommodate the massive ambition of Cox Alvarez and Kojima news of this reboot quickly swept through the video game media and with every press release and announcement a wave of hype seemed to build and when the first trailer dropped it seemed to be justified internationally renowned actors like Patrick Stewart Robert Carlisle and Jason Isaacs were all attached there was a sweeping orchestral soundtrack and the visuals were breathtaking showing off a scale and cinematic direction that the series had never even come close to interest in the franchise had never been higher and when Castlevania Lords of Shadow released in 2010 that hype converted to sales Lords of Shadow quickly became the best-selling game in the entire franchise bursting past a million units shipped in just a single month and reaching almost two within the year it was a level of success that was Unthinkable for a franchise that had come close to cancellation just a few years earlier now you'd think that would lead to a huge outpouring of love for the game as mercury steam had effectively saved Castlevania from the Konami chopping block but its long-term reputation has proven to be one of controversy and disagreement amongst both fans and critics it's primarily focused around two key accusations the first is that Lords of Shadow is not a true Castlevania game and the second is that it's an unoriginal clone and we are about to refute both of these arguments but in order to do that we need to First Look at what laws of Shadow actually is we play as Gabriel Belmont acolyte of the Brotherhood of light a warrior who is battling across a ravaged Romanian Countryside in the hope of finding the lake of Oblivion which rumor has it allows one to contact all dead as the Brotherhood of losing the battle against the forces of evil he's been sent to seek guidance from the heavens but for Gabriel this Mission has another purpose his beloved wife Marie was recently murdered and our hero is Desperately Seeking for a way to bring her back from Beyond the Veil of death this initial Quest acts as a sort of extended tutorial and across Gabriel's short Journey to the lake we're not only introduced to Lords of Shadows gameplay systems and characters but also get a taste for that cinematic approach which Mercury steam teased in the trailers in just half an hour you do battle with a horde of werewolves leap between The Columns of a huge ruined Viaduct solve puzzles for a magical Thorn and scale the Colossal body of an ancient Golem it's a Non-Stop roller coaster of heavily directed action set pieces and this is the foundation for the rest of the game while fighting the Golem of the lake Gabriel is joined by a fellow soldier of the Brotherhood zobek and with his help they bring down the creature which opens the long-sealed lines of communication between the living and the Dead face to face with his deceased love Gabriel pleads with Marie for any information that might help the Brotherhood but all she can offer is Whispers of a prophecy and a phrase the Lords of Shadow it means nothing to our hero but zobek tells us that this prophecy is a long cat secret that a pure-hearted warrior would one day defeat the three Lords of Shadow and rebuild the link between Heaven and Earth and could potentially bring the dead back to life it's all the motivation our broken Belmont requires and the two Warriors set off to defeat these Lords and claim the power in the name of their order the rest of the game follows a similar script a highly directed linear roller coaster of combat platforming and puzzles that's all structured as a story zobek is recounting great with his narration driving the plot forwards from one adrenaline fuel set piece to the next so that brings us on to the first accusation which is that Lords of Shadow is not really a Castlevania game in my opinion it's an idea that doesn't really have anything to do with Lords of Shadow itself you see to the people who think this there is no Castlevania without igarashi Kojima and Yama and the Very idea of a rebooted Castlevania while it's a heresy not worth considering but I think this fundamentally misunderstands castlevania's history and frankly does mercury steam a pretty big disservice Castlevania is a franchise built on a foundation of Highly linear action-focused games that placed a premium on cinematic presentation that was the fundamental concept behind akamatsu's initial creation and all through the NES SNES and Sega Genesis years this is what Castlevania was I think Mercury steam really understood this which is exactly why Konami and Kojima wanted to go ahead with their ideas in fact David Cox revealed an interview after the game's release that Gabriel had originally looked much more similar to Simon Belmont from Castlevania 1 with the team intending it almost as a remake it was actually hideo Kojima and the Konami leadership that pushed them to strike out on their own and design a fresh character with a new story there are signs all throughout the game that mercury steam weren't looking to discard the past but build their own version of it and Lords of Shadow is full of references and nods to past titles bosses like the evil Butcher malfas and all rocks are all reinterpretations of past fights and classic names are recycled in ways that make sense the lord of the lichens is called Cornell and the lord of the vampires is called Camilla the creator of the gadgets that Gabriel uses is called Gandolfini and there is a scroll that insinuates that the Citadel the vampires occupy once belonged to a powerful nobleman called Walter Bernhard now I'm sorry but if you're making multiple references to lament of Innocence this must be a game crafted by people who loved Castlevania the idea that they were looking to Chuck out everything from the series history just couldn't be further from the truth and to me it's just as deserving of its title as anything made by kirita etsunobu or hagihara so if the game's cinematic action Focus isn't the issue and it's rebooted plot and setting on either well that's the game's reputation saved right well not really as the second major accusation is the far bigger of the two I'm sure even without any prior knowledge it won't surprise you to hear that a lot of comparisons were drawn between Lords of Shadow and God of War with some commentators even going as far as to say that it was a clone of Santa Monica's brutal Greek Masterpiece on the surface it seems spot on where an angry chain-wielding Warrior fighting his way through an ancient fantasy setting only pausing to do a bit of climbing and puzzle solving I mean there are even kill animation qtes so Mercury steam must have been trying to copy something popular right well no and I think that's quite disingenuous for a few reasons firstly Castlevania already had a 3D action game where you fought with a whip in an extremely similar style lament of Innocence which came out out three years before God of War was even announced given the references we've already discussed and the fact that studio head David Cox had literally worked on that game before he joined Mercury steam I refused to believe that they went in this direction entirely to copy Kratos and not just because they were building on a system that was already proven to work on top of this the very concept of a God of War clone makes little sense to me as God of War itself is really just an amalgamation of ideas from Devil May Cry and Prince of Persia taking ideas from something that works and refining or reimagining them is a process that's fundamental to the industry and without iteration we'd have been robbed of so many great games like Bayonetta Dead Space Dino Crisis or even stardew Valley as they all borrow liberally from existing games if you believe that Castlevania Lords of Shadow is a shallow attempt to cash in on popular Western Trends I'm sure all of this explanation is easy to ignore but by doing so you'll miss out on a game that does more than enough to step out from the shadow of the looming Giants in its history and genre it would be completely remiss of me to begin my praise with anything other than the game's Direction which is at times absolutely incredible every environment you explore has a mystical and ancient design to it and they're all presented on a scale that uses every ounce of the 360 and PS3's next-gen power according to Alvarez and Cox the films of Guillermo del Toro were a massive influence on them and just like in Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy we're presented with a dark fantasy world that manages to avoid most of the generic medieval Gothic tropes that often plague the genre it's just a complete Feast for the eyes and never stops serving at moments that live up to the legacy of visual storytelling the akamatsu designed all those years ago now probably my favorite element of Lords of Shadow runs completely counter to this inclination towards massive spectacle and that is this surprising amount of puzzles that split up the combat and platforming there is a ludicrous variety of brain teasers for Gabriel to solve and while there are some basic find the switch and press the buttons in the right order situations early on very quickly things get quite a lot more creative and there are some seriously memorable moments that revolve entirely around the puzzles deep inside Camilla's Castle we run into her vampire daughter Laura who will only let us progress if we beat her in a game of chess this whole section has its own Unique Mechanics and strategies and you can practically taste The Passion of the developer who puts it together I'm sure it's the result of long nights spent balancing and perfecting a section that only lasts about 10 minutes and never returns I just can't see how anyone could think that a game with this level of care pulled into it could possibly be a shallow cash grab and nowhere is this more evident than in the game's very best sequence the music box after defeating the lord of the Lycans and the lord of the vampires Gabriel needs to face the Lord of death but reaching his necropolis is something that no man can do alone he seeks out the help of Baba Yaga an old witch who lives in the woes more and despite being as unsettling as is physically possible she agrees to help him if he'll be shrunk down and retrieve a blue rose from within a magical music box the Box itself is outlandishly ornate and looming massive in the sky is Baba Yaga laughing and taunting and encouraging Gabriel as he tries to work out how to access the rows what you've got to do is find different colored gems that all represent different bars of the classic Castlevania song Vampire Killer and by playing them in the correct order different paths through the music box unlock eventually leading to the Rose for anyone unfamiliar with the original song it's going to be damn near impossible to solve but after playing through 30 games for this video it was the moment of fan service that got me the most excited not just tickling my Nostalgia but actually using it in a clever way now clearly we've been in defensive mode so far fighting back against the many unfair criticisms of Lords of Shadow but it's time to come crashing back down to reality and deal with its shortcomings because they really are quite hard to ignore the biggest is without a doubt the combat system which despite doing its best to come up with something unique ends up as a really wonky mess that actually discourages you from enjoying all the options available very quickly Gabriel comes into possession of the light and dark medallions which can be activated on the lb and RB buttons and add two modifiers to your basic attacks red dark magic adds additional damage and blue light magic converts a portion of that damage into Health they're both recovered by absorbing orbs which drop from enemies and the game's combat is entirely built around expending and regaining these resources in theory it's a pretty great system but in practice it's just not that interesting just like in most character action games you can unlock more complex combo chains with the points you get from defeating enemies but using anything other than the most basic attacks usually just results in you taking damage weirdly enemies can't be staggered which means launching into a complex multi-button 5 or 6K combo simply opens you up to a counter attack and against swarming hordes of enemies or hyper aggressive bosses there's very little reason to do anything other than turn on your magic get in a few quick strikes and then Dodge away to safety it causes almost every single fight to play out in an identical fashion and it does get pretty repetitive despite the incredible animations and crazy qte finishes it's all style and no substance which is a shame considering it makes up such a big proportion of the gameplay that same inability to really nail satisfying combat also spoils the big Colossus fights these moments are clearly influenced by Shadow of the Colossus and just like in that game you scale the creatures while they try to shake you off and hit glowing weak points that are located all over their bodies yet again it's an idea that sounds great on paper but just isn't quite right in its execution in team Aiko's Masterpiece there was generally some sort of puzzle element that governed how you got onto the beast but once you were there it became all about managing your stamina bar and taking down whatever weak points you could get to Wanda's frantic battle to keep his grip is literally represented by these mechanics and that's what makes the encounters so exciting where Lords of Shadow really messes this up is that climbing isn't free form and there's no stamina bar which makes each sequence extremely linear you just climb up the glowing Parts hold the right trigger whenever the prompt appears and there really is no way to fail if you know what you're doing the problem is that it's not always clear where you're supposed to move to and some sections are really particular about how they want you to act also thanks to how linear they are if you fail a move and fall off you have to restart the whole process from the beginning and as some of them can be really long it's just an exercise in frustration rather than excitement it's here that the Clone accusation Rings most true and frankly when you're endlessly falling off the flying undead dragon you can't help but feel like you've been served up a pretty pallid imitation of the real thing luckily any thoughts about this game's status as a clone or its validity as a Castlevania Game are all completely sidelined by its notorious ending it's so massively surprising and unconventional that even to this day it's still the main thing people talk about when discussing the merits of Lords of Shadow so after defeating the undead dragon deep within the lands of death Gabriel is joined once again by zobek and as the power of the final Lord of Shadow bleeds away the truth of Gabriel's journey is revealed turns out that zobek is a Lord of Shadow and he's been manipulating our Belmont all along pushing him towards destroying his Rivals and seeking to take their power for himself with the charade abandoned and zobek in possession of the god mask which represents the power of the Lords he reveals a final cruel twist it was not the forces of evil that took Marie's life but Gabriel himself manipulated by The Necromancer with his entire quest to bring her back driven by subconscious guilt for the terrible sin he committed with that zobek kills Gabriel and it seems that the day is lost until a voice Echoes out from the void all hail Sobek it seems that Gabriel wasn't the only one being manipulated before the sorcerer can realize what's happening he's burned to a cinder and the power of the god mask is taken by Satan himself who plans to use it to usurp the heavens with this Unholy threat openly challenging God himself Gabriel is brought back to life his body coursing with holy power and the tudu battle in the game's climactic moment is the Pinnacle of everything Lords of Shadow stands for Monumental spectacle over-the-top action and dramatic storytelling all wrapped up in a pretty burton-mashy fight that ends with a series of QuickTime events once the devil is defeated Gabriel is allowed once again to speak with Marie but it's a Bittersweet reunion while she forgives him for his actions and pleads with him to make the most of his second chance at life Gabriel only wants to be together again but as he was warned so many times there's no path back from the dead and even with the god mask Marie cannot return she's called back to the light and despite saving Humanity redeeming his own dark actions and making peace with his beloved Gabriel slumps to his knees anguish and grief overtaking him as the one thing he truly wanted Slips Away it's a captivating conclusion and one which would have left people discussing the philosophy of this game for years were it not for the post-credits scene Candlelight flickers in an ancient gothic church an a robed figure quietly moves between the pews behind a crumbling wall lies a secret chamber where monstrous gargoyles and demonic statues lie amongst the ruins at the peak of this Tower the figure reveals itself to be none other than zobek and sitting upon a throne skin withered and draped in Shadows since Gabriel Belmont who at the sound of his name hisses you sent dracul which is Romanian for I am Dracula the two briefly fight before Gabriel is thrown through the window and shockingly falls down into a busy Modern Day Street as in with cars and umbrellas and street lights Gabriel tells zobek that he cannot live and cannot die and in response his one-time Nemesis claims that he has a way to help him shed his immortality if he'll help him defeat Satan the vampire screams in pain before disappearing in a cloud of Shadows the camera pans up and Fades to Black leaving Lords of Shadow on what might be the most notorious Cliffhanger in modern video games this post-credits scene quite literally broke the internet with countless articles Forum posts and YouTube videos all trying to make sense of a sequence that feels like it comes completely out of nowhere how is zobek alive why is it taking place in the modern day and most importantly how exactly did Gabriel turn into one of the most iconic villains of all time the most popular theory was that when he was reincarnated as God's vessel to do battle with Satan a process similar to the Ascension of the founders of the Brotherhood took place Gabriel's Light Side now resides in heaven with Marie while his darker impulses were left behind on Earth it was the best that anyone could come up with and frankly I think it's a pretty great interpretation that really ties into the themes of Duality and consequence that are present all throughout the game it would have been a fine place for mercury steam to leave things but unfortunately the game's surprise financial success proved to be an unexpected curse with copies flying off the shelves Konami asked Cox and Alvarez to put together two DLC packages as fast as they physically could and in April and June of 2011 the reverie and Resurrection chapters were made available for download now interestingly David Cox has been extremely candid about these two releases calling them a big mistake in an interview with game ranks apparently there had originally been no plans for further story content and the Mad rushed to Cobble something together had led to something that he wished could have been done differently and after having played them I can't say I disagree they pick up the story of Gabriel Belmont after we left him in the Land of the Dead and both additional chapters attempt to better connect the main game to its controversial ending Gabriel is contacted by the young vampire Laura who reveals in defeating the Lords of Shadow he's inadvertently released an even greater Danger The Forgotten one and the two need to team up in order to avert an apocalyptic catastrophe it's really just a premise for more puzzle solving more platforming and more combat and Outsiders from sections where you control Laura there isn't really anything new it's a perfectly functional and fun addition if you're after a dose of more Lords of Shadow gameplay where it doesn't fare so well is in its narrative which Cox describes as his biggest regret at the end of reverie it turns out that the only way someone can fight the Forgotten one is to become a vampire and this leads to Laura forcing Gabriel to drink her blood so he can defeat the Demonic threat the second half of the DLC contains hardly any narrative whatsoever and really is just a two-part boss fight against the demon ending with Gabriel who's now a vampire Smashing his combat cross and seemingly giving in to the evil that now runs through his veins much like Cox I think these additions to the story are really quite pointless and actually detract from the tale that we got in the base game instead of the clever theory about Gabriel's light and dark side separating we're left with a very basic explanation that he became Dracula in order to defeat a big monster and the fact that this has almost nothing to do with any of the plot of Lords of Shadow really doesn't sit well with me as the DLC wasn't originally planned it makes it quite hard to accept that this was the actual intention behind that post-credit scene and seeing all the interesting discussion devolve into oh it's explained in a completely unrelated DLC story that was released six months after well that just sucks away some of the Mystique that it originally carried Lords of Shadow remains to this day a highly controversial title within the Castlevania Community but honestly I can't help but be sucked in by its cinematic maximalist charms it's a roller coaster of Dark Fantasy visuals interesting puzzles and a real sense of adventure its gameplay might not be the most creative or Innovative take on the genre but I think Mercury steam did an amazing job of breathing new life into a dying franchise there was clearly a lot of care and effort poured into this reinterpretation and if you consider it a spiritual successor to akamatsu's very first game it more than lives up to its namesake as this video has extensively shown Castlevania has always been about far more than just Symphony of the Night and I think Lords of Shadow despite its lunatic ending is equally deserving of the place that the blood-drenched table foreign Lords of Shadows surprise success you might imagine that mercury steam immediately set to work on a console follow-up but that was actually not the case as konami's original expectations weren't all that high they'd only commissioned a single game and Mercury steam were facing an empty pipeline which was particularly bad news considering how large the studio had grown in the last few years obviously they would put together pitches for new projects but in order to keep money coming in and have enough work for all their new employees they asked Konami if they could produce a lower budget sequel for the Nintendo 3DS once Lords of Shadow had released thanks to the good relationship between the two Studios and some really positive feedback from an excited Nintendo of Europe the green light was given and Mercury steam fired ahead with this smaller scale follow-up now shortly after this Lords of Shadow released worldwide and Konami was suddenly very interested in getting another console game out which meant Mercury steam had to reorganize into two distinct teams and tried to work out how to create two different games at once while Dave Cox once again handled production and writing duties Direction was entrusted to Jose Luis Marquez a programmer who'd been with the studio since it formed and who relished the chance at a promotion as enrich Alvarez was busy with the pre-production of Lords of Shadow too when the game was first shown off for E3 2012 anticipation was once again very high as the media and fans were excited to see what looked like a return to the igarashi-style side-scrolling gameplay of the past awkwardly they were even asked a few times if eager was working with them which led to Cox and Marquez having to sheepishly say that no he was not involved things looked primed for yet another success but unfortunately this time around development was nowhere near as smooth and the inexperienced team really struggled to get the game into a playable State according to Cox development had been done for PC and then they ported everything backwards to the 3DS which led to a huge amount of issues and ultimately caused the game to have to be delayed by six months which was an unprecedented length of time for a handheld title when it finally did release in March of 2013 review scores were a little more mixed than laws of Shadow and infamously the game was absolutely torched by IGN with Colin Moriarty giving it a 4 out of 10. now the game certainly isn't bad but it does have some pretty big flaws which make that fractured and rushed development cycle quite hard to look past mirror Faye is set 50 years after the end of the Resurrection DLC with Gabriel now completely consumed by the personality of Dracula and waging a war of Vengeance against the Brotherhood who he blames for his lifetime of misery we play as Simon Belmont and later Alucard and Trevor Belmont as all three assault Gabriel's castle and try to defeat the vampire within there's a sort of memento non-linear narrative going on where different characters see the events of the game from different perspectives and actually the way that the game brings everything together into a singular story is one of its strong points before we get to that though we need to discuss the castle which represents the biggest change from Mercury steam's last outing instead of adventuring across a huge and varied land the game takes place entirely within the walls of Dracula's castle and the structure once again revolves around finding upgrades that allow you to progress deeper into the Citadel now that may be be music to the ears of those who didn't like Lords of Shadows more directed style but disappointed me the castle and the gameplay flow of mirror Faye is probably its worst element unlike in Symphony of the Night the castle is split into clear levels and there's a very strict order to the events of the game that you always have to follow for example as Simon you approach the ruined Castle Gates before heading down into the underground Caverns here you find the spirit of belnard's power which he used to find the spirit of Schneider power which eventually lets you into the castle and onto your confrontation with Dracula there's absolutely no scope for exploration and despite giving you the ability to backtrack to levels you've already beaten the game is clearly designed around forward momentum your map has a red marker which always points you in the correct direction and despite lots of locked doors and secret passages there's very little point in returning to them until the end of a chapter when the warp points unlock and you have every movement upgrade despite looking like a game that's hearkening back to a more traditional time it's actually just as linear as Lords of Shadow and wants you to move from directed set piece to directed set piece now I might be really disappointing and if you're Colin Moriarty that's enough for you to completely rake the game but just like in its console brother these moments of scripted gameplay can be really quite fun and mirror of Fate away from the comparisons to its portable ancestors is a perfectly playable game the combat for one is a huge improvement over Lords of Shadows mashy Dodge Focus mess a mirror does a much better job of blending flashy animations with actual mechanics apparently Cox and Marquez were heavily influenced by 2D Fighters while designing the game and the combat often plays out like a PVE Samurai Showdown it's all based around parries and Dodges and you have to learn the Tells for even basic enemies which works very well from the new side on perspective it's particularly good during boss fights where that traditional Castlevania pattern recognition makes its return and it's blended with the upgrades in a way that's very reminiscent of how Nintendo designed Zelda bosses you'll find an item or skill that you have to use to reach the end of the level and then that same mechanic becomes part of the climactic fight it's classic adventure game design and it works really well in Mirror effect along with the combat set pieces we also get a Spate of puzzle and platforming sections and it's in these areas that mirror fate feels its strongest when you're racing down a collapsing structure away from a falling Bell or operating mechanical claws to solve a puzzle it truly does feel like a handheld sequel to Lords of Shadow and in a way it's a shame that the team wasted so much effort on the Bland Castle setting instead of delivering another varied fantasy adventure of course that single location structure is all in service of the non-linear storyline which surprisingly I think actually works quite well and more than warrants the three character perspective initially we're playing as Simon Belmont who's seeking revenge against Dracula for the murder of his parents and it all seems very traditional Castlevania Simon's not really a big talker and unlike Lords of Shadow there's no narration or World building to sink your teeth into just a Burly Ginger dude looking to kill a vampire anyway while he ascends the castle he gets himself into a few pickles which usually result in him being saved by a mysterious gray-haired figure once we're finally in the throne room Dracula reveals that this is none other than Alucard and then the game starts over with us playing as the son of Darkness we see the same events from alucard's perspective entering the castle from a different direction and solving puzzles and fighting bosses in a way that ties in with the actions we took as Simon once the storyline catches up to the throne room we see the conclusion of the game Alucard filled with anger being turned into an Unholy vampire help Simon battle the cow and after a long fight the two emerge Victorious as Simon plunges his cross into Gabriel's heart all that's left is for Alucard to reveal why he's been helping Simon and this leads to the third chapter Trevor Belmont Trevor is Gabriel's son Although our Fallen Hero has no idea idea he exists as he was taken from Marie while Gabriel was away fighting and she was sworn to secrecy apparently this was done because the Brotherhood had used the titular mirror of Fate to see the future and knew that only the bloodline of the Belmonts could defeat Dracula eventually the now adult and fully trained Trevor discovers that the vampire is his father and killed his mother which prompts him to leave his wife and his little baby Simon in order to seek revenge we get yet another route into the castle although this time it's in a much more opulent version and Trevor's battles with the monsters on Route are what's responsible for a lot of the structural damage which Simon and Alucard have to navigate around another confrontation with Dracula in the throne room which Trevor promptly loses with his dying breath he asks his father to look into the mirror of Fate which reveals to Gabriel that he has just killed his son having just waged an infernal War to get over his last familial murder Gabriel decides to try and avert this happening once again and drain some of his blood into Trevor's mouth he lays his son to rest in a crypt hoping that one day the magic will bring him back to life the camera slowly Zooms in on the coffin inscribed with the name Alucard now I'm not gonna lie to you this story does have some serious issues we're still really lacking a good reason for Gabriel to have turned from angsty hero into the ultimate Evil and now there's the question of his death as the game doesn't actually explain how he comes back to life in time to meet zobek in the modern day post-credits scene also I'm going to say the idea that Gabriel had a son that he didn't know about is pretty contrived I think the idea is that even Marie is manipulating him but given their interactions in Lords of Shadow that doesn't really fit all that well and it makes mirror of Fate feel a little disconnected from the game it supposedly concluding that being said I still do like it and I think Marquez and Cox deserve a lot of credit but at the very least trying to tell a Castlevania story in a creative way we've seen the series so often just fall back into good guys versus bad guys but this story of familial betrayal and doomed Destiny ends up feeling really fresh even if the execution is all over the place now obviously a lot of the wonky design and weird storytelling is thanks to the game's difficult development but the delay actually had a far more terminal effect than anything found in the game mirror of Fate initially did not sell well and really to all outside observers this wasn't surprising in the slightest the game had a well-publicized delay due to Quality concerns released a quite muted reviews and most importantly was coming out two and a half years after Lords of Shadow on a completely different console 3DS owners simply weren't interested in a sequel to a game they'd never played and the team frantically scrambled to get a HD version together in order to correct this mistake later that year mirror fate released on PS3 360 and PC finally getting it into the hands of the people who'd actually played Lords of Shadow while fans were more positive about this version it wasn't enough to turn around the critics and Incredibly just despite running at a higher FPS and having widescreen visuals mirror of Fate HD somehow reviewed worse than its 3D counterpart it must have been so frustrating for the Mercury steam leadership they'd only decided to go ahead with this title because they thought Lords of Shadow wouldn't sell and then found themselves locked into a project that broadly speaking went terribly and then damaged their reputation luckily for our Spanish developers their fortunes would eventually turn around in a big way and surprisingly mirror of Fate would actually be the key to that happening but before we get to that things we're about to get a whole load worse so let's rewind a few years and pick up with the other half of mercury steam who under the leadership of enrich Alvarez were hard at work on that console follower to Lords of Shadow now Lords of Shadow 2 is a complicated game to talk about because its reputation is really all over the place some fans consider it to be a totally misguided mess While others think of it as a misunderstood gem that wasn't given a fair chance by overly harsh critics the reality is that both camps are right and Lords of Shadow 2 might be the best worst game that I've ever played in an interview with Eurogamer after the game's release Dave Cox talked about how Lords of Shadow 2 was seen as a marquee title in konami's 2014 calendar and this led to a lot more Hands-On involvement from their Japanese Partners who are very keen to make sure that their money was being well spent despite both Cox and Alvarez claiming that the working relationship was productive it's hard to believe this atmosphere of heightened expectation didn't contribute to some of the strange decisions that were taken during the game's development cycle instead of building on the strengths of Lords of Shadow 1 the team decided to instead directly address its faults and in interviews at E3 2012 Mercury steam wowed journalists with Tales of redesigned combat a non-linear game world and a story that would redefine how people thought of Dracula between a new player-controlled camera and a fresh engine that removed the need for loading screens it sounded unbelievably ambitious and once again fans and journalists couldn't contain their excitement this was only compounded by the release of another incredible CGI trailer this time showing our now vampiric Gabriel single-handedly defeating an invading Army before hinting another confrontation with Alucard internet hype exploded and when a demo released just a few months later which allowed us to play through this section it really seemed like Mercury steam had done it again magazines and websites were braced for another Castlevania reboot success story but when it finally released in February 2014 it made headlines for all the wrong reasons the reviews were absolutely Dreadful with the PlayStation version netting a measly 63 out of 100 and respected Publications like Edge joystick and Eurogamer all awarding it some of their lowest scores of the year it was an unmitigated disaster for mercury steam whose aspirations of becoming the next naughty dog lay in tatters amidst the tauren of criticism and negativity so what happened in between the release of the demo and the full game to change opinions so dramatically well the simple answer is that people just got to play the rest of the game despite the demo promising an experience that hearken back to everything that the original game did well Lords of Shadow 2 instead plays out like a Frankenstein's monster of ideas stitching together incoherent sequences into an experience that feels like three different games mashed together it often plays out like a fever dream of a video game and nowhere is this more evident than in its opening hour things begin with another run through of the demo section which given its quality I can understand we're starting things off with a bang and it's the perfect slice of grandiose action gameplay to welcome us back into the Dark World of Gabriel Belmont once the armies have been defeated and Alucard steps out of the Mist the camera pulls back and instead of continuing into the father-son confrontation we're thrust into a sequence of flashbacks that re-establish the plot of mirror of Fate and the post-credits scene from Lords of Shadow one and we finally regain control we're playing as Gabriel in the far future withered and weakened as he steps out into the rain-soaked streets of the city to see sustenance instead he finds a demonic Beast that almost kills him before salvation arrives in the form of an armor-clad Dark Knight the screen once again Fades to Black and when Gabriel comes too we're in first person and have to drink the blood of an innocent family while they plead for Mercy turns out the family was a gift from zobek and the night is his Lieutenant who was sent to collect Gabriel in order to make good on the deal that they made in the post-credits scene essentially Satan is returning to Earth and in exchange for helping the stylish Necromancer defeat him Gabriel will be granted true death and finally be allowed into the Afterlife this deal is the main thrust of the game as zobek uses his magic and connections to locate the acolytes of Satan and then we control Gabriel as he heads off to kill them before they can complete their nefarious work so Gabriel heads off to a heavily guarded pharmaceutical company where the first acolyte is located but instead of this throwing us back into the action platforming of the demo the game lurches into a strange stealth sequence it involves turning into a rat and taking possession of the hulking guards as weird as this is things get even stranger as we then meet a young Trevor Belmont who's inexplicably alive and beckons us into a portal which takes us back in time to Gabriel's Castle this is an entirely different section of gameplay where we're exploring and finding upgrades fighting against bosses and the story seems to revolve around a malevolent blood that's turning the subjects of Dracula's domain against him when we finally step out of another portal and back into the real world it's straight back into those stealth sections and back to the quest to capture the acolyte this is what I mean when I say that Lords of Shadow 2 feels like a fever dream that's just so much going on and so little of it actually feels coherent While most games use their introductory sequence to establish their core gameplay and present The Narrative when none the wiser after playing the game for an entire hour is this a cinematic stealth game or a highly directed character action game in the castles it feels like a fast-paced exploratory RPG and then out in the modern city it can look more like The Last of Us gear now let's get something out of the way before we look at the rest of the game and that's those stealth sections which have become notorious thanks to the emphasis that the negative reviews placed on them honestly they aren't gray and the mechanics feel incredibly Half Baked there are some parts where you're meant to possess enemies or transform into a rat but none of it feels particularly natural and unlike series like Splinter Cell or metal gear which treats self like a Sandbox Lords of Shadow 2 sequences are more like a puzzle but you simply have to work out exactly what the game wants you to do thankfully they're all pretty damn easy and never stick around long enough for any frustration to truly set in but that isn't to say they don't hurt the game during those early sections where Gabriel is still recovering his power it makes sense for him to have to stick to the Shadows but the problem is that we keep getting these sequences even though our power returns this is supposed to be the Prince of Darkness a being who can openly challenge Satan and being forced to run around as a rat rather than use our weapons creates an absolutely hilarious level of dissonance between the narrative and the gameplay despite that the stealth sections aren't actually the game's biggest synth which for my money is the absolutely terrible open world structure laws of Shadow 2 is split between two locations the modern city where we hunt the acolytes of Satan and the ancient castle where we protect Marie and Trevor from the malevolent Blood The Narrative frequently takes us between the two and you're constantly finding upgrades in one that then enable forward progress in the other now if you're following the yellow marker on your map and heading from story quest to story Quest the game can feel pretty linear but unlike in the last game we're free to step off the path and head back to any area we've previously visited it sounds interesting on paper but in practice it's implemented so damn badly that I virtually never returned to a single location during my entire playthrough if you want to head into the other reality you have to physically walk to a specific location which then activates a cutscene where a white wolf howls and the portal opens although then you need to physically walk into the portal and then through a little animation which eventually spits you out on the other side what makes this even worse is that's also how the Fast Travel works and accessing other areas when you're in a world requires you to walk to a map room watch an animation pick a location and then watch another animation before you finally arrive it just utterly kills any desire to step off the intended path and engage with any of the exploratory mechanics when you find an upgrade in one world there's absolutely no motivation to take it into the other and certain mechanics like the shop and Arena which are only in the castle will end up being completely ignored because they're just too damn hard to get to now the weirdest thing is that if you do decide to just religiously stick to the yellow marker and ignore all of the game's side content Lords of Shadow 2 can actually be a pretty fun experience the combat for one is dramatically more engaging and really in my opinion lives up to comparisons with other Titans in the action adventure genre instead of the entirely whip-based combat from the previous title Gabriel now fights with three pretty different weapons which you can switch between at any point your primary attacks are done with a Whip made of Gabriel's living blood and instead of the light and dark medallions we have the void Sword and the chaos gauntlets while the sword takes the place of the healing light magic the gauntlets add a new Dynamic which is that certain enemies have to be guard broken and thanks to this you're constantly switching between all three on the Fly they all have unique move sets and Combos and along with a reworked Dodge system that's much more deliberate the mechanics really do hold up for the entire game Lords of Shadow 2 is at its best when it's focusing on the things that mercury steam does well which is huge spectacle and highly directed linear set pieces when you're battling and platforming across a runaway train or doing battle with a monstrous Gorgon deep within the castle everything just clicks it honestly baffles me that Alvarez and his team wasted so much time creating all these drab Hub World areas when they clearly should have just stuck to the formula from Lords of Shadow 1 which they clearly could execute to a far higher level while you can ignore the exploratory ideas and create your teeth through the stealth sections what you can't get away from is Lords of Shadow 2's story which in my opinion leaves the tale of Gabriel Belmont on a profoundly unsatisfying note it's eventually revealed that everything that's happened to Gabriel since mirror of Fate the Thousand Years of sleep the mind-bending journeys between City and castle and the hunt for Satan's acolytes have all played out according to a plan hatched by The Dark Knight who is none other than Alucard now even after hours of trying to unpick this plot I'm still not entirely sure how this plan is supposed to work but from what I understand the two vampires are trying to trick zobek and Satan into coming out into the open so they can defeat them both once and for all and to do this they needed to make them think that Gabriel had become weak hence the long sleep and his withered stay at the start of the game all of the strange Journeys into the castle the battles with the malevolent blood and the conversations with long Dead characters well that was just all a process of Gabriel's broken mind repairing itself and when Alucard unveils the truth Dracula's full power comes flooding back and the trap can be sprung obviously zobek isn't best pleased by this Revelation and we're immediately thrust into a boss fight against The Necromancer which of course ends with Gabriel smashing him to pieces and reclaiming his Vampire killer whip next up is Satan and the now reconciled Father and Son battle the way across the city just in time to see the summoning ritual complete and the betrayer emerge into this world he's obviously pretty ticked off that he's been tricked and declares that if he doesn't get to rule the Earth he'll just destroy it instead obviously this requires the aid of a massive flying demon worm and the final sequence of the game involves scaling its body and doing battle with monsters all while it's soaring through the sky eyes firing off Planet busting laser beams eventually Our Heroes destroy the Beast and defeat Satan which culminates in them all falling to Earth and Gabriel stabbing his Nemesis through the harp with the reclaimed Vampire killer with alucard's life saved and Humanity finally free from the last of the Lords of Shadow our anti-hero smashes the mirror of Fate and chooses to live the camera pans up and the credits roll it's a fittingly grandiose ending for a series that's always been dominated by spectacle and over-the-top action but it's frankly impossible to ignore the many plot holes and unanswered questions that this narrative throws up the biggest issue is easily the lack of any real explanation for the game's events we never discover why Gabriel's memories are trying to kill him in the castle we don't get any reason for alucard's change of heart and worst of all there is a zero explanation for zobek Satan and Gabriel all returning from the dead I think the implication is maybe that these are Immortal beings who can never truly pass away but then the Vampire killer is randomly introduced as a tool that can defeat them which again makes very little sense as it was literally used on Gabriel by Simon Belmont and didn't kill him if you were hoping for more answers in Lords of Shadow 2's DLC you're going to be disappointed it's just a short hour-long Journey Through the castle where we play as Alucard while he places the void sword and Chaos gauntlets into protection to await Dracula's return as it doesn't have any of the terrible stealth sections or pointless exploration you'd imagine it to be a slice of everything that Lords of Shadow 2 did right but amazingly it somehow manages to be considerably worse combat now works like it did in Lords of Shadow 1 with light and dark magic rather than the alternative weapons and the story is just boring despite it literally being called the revelations DLC Alucard hardly says a word and things wrap up with us even less clear about how the story of Lords of Shadow 2 is supposed to work as I was under the impression the castle was in Gabriel's mind and here we are exploring it like it's a real location I think there is a good game somewhere inside of Lords of Shadow too and when its core ideas click together it can be really enjoyable the environments are as beautiful as ever and the redesigned camera and combat are a huge step forward from Gabriel's first Adventure but it's just that you have to sift through so much incoherent nonsense to get to these sections in an interview with Eurogamer after the game's release Cox and Alvarez both talked openly about how the game's negative reception caught them really off guard as mercury Steam and Konami had genuinely believed that they were working on something special given those passionate interviews at E3 and how high the production values are throughout the entire game I do believe them and think that they were honestly trying to create the ultimate 3D Castlevania game it's just that they were caught in a Maelstrom of publisher pressure developer ambition and fan expectation and simply couldn't meet all of these demands now this might seem like a tragic end to our story but cast your mind back to mirror of Fate as despite the game's mediocre performance it had planted the seeds of mercury steam salvation while working on the 3DS version they'd established a good working relationship with Nintendo of Europe who despite the negativity surrounding the studio agreed to see a pitch for a new Metroid game series producer yoshio Sakamoto was impressed by Jose marquez's ideas and a partnership was struck up between the Spanish studio and Nintendo epd despite a lot of skepticism around Mercury steam's involvement with the franchise this Union produced Metroid Samus returns which sold and reviewed surprisingly well and then was followed up with the Blockbuster success of Metroid dread as of this video they're back to being a beloved studio for Reviving a cult classic 2D series but sadly it's not for their work on Castlevania as I love you now and so our story concludes in 2019 with the release of the last game in this fated franchise Castlevania grimoire of souls a last terrible whimper in this once Titan of the industry in 2015 Hideki hayakawa was made konawi president with a mandate to completely change the company's focus and bring in some serious cash the HD era hadn't been kind to our Japanese developer in the slightest and during the 2010s almost every single one of their once prosperous franchises started to deliver disappointing numbers both financially and critically Pro Evo had been totally eclipsed by FIFA Yu-Gi-Oh and Bomberman had waned in popularity and there hadn't been a successful Contra Sweden or Silent Hill game for well over a decade despite its issues and modest sales the Lords of Shadow games had actually been one of their better performing releases and this wasn't a trajectory that a huge international company like Konami could maintain hayakawa had made his name in the mobile industry producing the ludicrously profitable Dragon collector games and when he was made CEO his loan goal was to Pivot the entire company to this new form of video games that seem to endlessly print money traditional big budget games were out the window and in their place was gacha Pachinko and microtransactions famously this led to the acrimonious split with hideo Kojima which caused the cancellation of Silent Hills and the release of Metal Gear Solid 5 in an unfinished State hire Carol was absolutely brutal in his pursuit of this direction and within just a few years konami's reputation as one of the biggest video game producers in the world was utterly destroyed unsurprisingly Castlevania wasn't exempt from these changes and in 2018 a mobile game called grimoire of souls was announced with Konami cynically advertising it as not only a return to the igarashi storyline but a conclusion to that entire Saga now this in of itself isn't anything surprising as the franchise had seen a few different mobile games released over the years during the Java era Konami had put out a single original title order of Shadows although it didn't make any great impact and the series of ports and demakes that followed it were really just exercises in monetizing the franchise their own interesting effort in this space was Castlevania puzzle Encore of the night which released in 2010 on iOS it took a lot of influence from super puzzle fighter with gameplay based around one-on-one fights but also implemented a lot of RPG mechanics that encouraged you to customize your own version of Alucard with skills and upgrades despite it actually being an interesting flesh out game it sold absolutely terribly and was discounted to less than a dollar quickly after release before being removed from the store entirely given this track record and the Press coming out of the cone Army leadership there wasn't a huge amount of faith in grimoire of Souls and this profound lack of Interest led to a very strange launch on September 20th 2019 grimmar of Souls released exclusively in Canada where it stayed for an entire year before Konami pulled the plug and removed it from the IOS and Android store they bafflingly cited poor sales as the reason for doing this which begs the question why not actually release the game worldwide if you want people to buy it it seemed that the series was doomed to fade into the background but incredibly grimoire of souls actually returned in the September of the following year was Konami putting out a trailer for its re-release on the Apple arcade in 2020 this version actually caught people's attention as Konami confirmed it would have no microtransactions or additional paid content and you know was actually releasing worldwide sadly any excitement about a potential new entry in the series quickly evaporated when people got their hands on the game which felt like a poor quality mobile port instead of a full title the gameplay is supposed to function a bit like Harmony of Despair allowing you to control and customize different characters from the series history as they tackle levels based on previous games it's an intriguing concept much like it was 10 years earlier but it's just executed so lazily and grimoire feels quite horrible to actually play through almost nothing from its mobile Incarnation has been reworked which means slow and plodding movement that was obviously originally designed to be controlled with a touch screen animations and models are really low quality and lack the snap and responsiveness of Castlevania games made decades earlier its most egregious sin is that all of the gacha and micro transaction mechanics are still in the game and are now just funded via in-game currency there are still login bonuses and content Gates along with a structure that's literally designed around you running levels over and over in order to build funds to get past insane gear checks it's just not fun to play in the slightest and the few professional organizations who actually covered it were not kind in their reviews what makes this even harder to swallow is that there's actually some interesting ideas in grimoire which could have seen their potential realize in a proper video game the premise is that Alucard is contacted by an organization called eligos who manages the magical grimoires that record all of human history just like in harmony of Despair and just like in that game the dark power within them is starting to spill out and the whole game is structured around alucard's journey into these books to team up with the heroes inside and defeat The Evil Within scenes where different characters from different areas interact are actually quite well implemented and unlike in harmony ayami Kojima was contracted to produce a host of new artwork which means we actually get what feels like an All-Star cast there are levels based on almost every single major release and seeing Soma Cruz shanoa Albus and Simon Belmont all conversing and fighting alongside one another is something that deserved to be realized in a better game the same goes for the story which is nowhere near as bad as you'd imagine Alucard eventually discovers that eligos and the grimoirs were created by death to try and reverse Dracula's ultimate defeat in 1999 and we even get another lecard ritual in order to bring the memory of Trevor Belmont out from The Vampire killer it all climaxes with a ritual that finally destroys the castle within the solar eclipse and while it doesn't exactly definitively end The Saga of Castlevania the final moments of reconciliation between Dracula and his son feel like a Fitting Place to leave a story that spans three decades ultimately grimoire of souls is a terrible and cynical game that just shouldn't exist it was designed to turn fans of the series into gambling addicts and then when that failed it was repurposed into a lazy and unenjoyable subscription game that barely qualifies as a full Castle venue release I really toyed with the idea of simply not including it but I think it's an important final stop on our journey as it represents how far Konami had fallen and how much they were willing to plunder their once great franchises in the pursuit of easy money it could have so easily been a sequel to Harmony of Despair blending those interesting multiplayer RPG mechanics with a proper story and fresh artwork by Kojima DLC style multiplayer games had only exploded in popularity since Harmony's release and the only reason to not follow in this direction is if you think your fans are fools well Castlevania fans might be hard to please and might be fickle about their loyalties but they are not stupid and with grimoire's failure as both a mobile and arcade title the franchise finally slipped out of existence are once influential and mighty series laid to Eternal rest the quandary that sparked this entire retrospective was the strange disconnect between castlevania's current popularity and its complete absence from the modern world of video games how can it be that the runaway success of the Castlevania animation hasn't prompted the release of another 2D action platformer or exploratory side scroller the obvious answer is that ever since konami's pivot towards mobile games and gambling machines they haven't really done anything with any of their franchises and castlevania's Peril is similarly shared by once Blockbuster series like Silent Hill a metal gear solid if we're being extremely generous to them they've seen firsthand how expensive creating video games can be and with a new completely risk-averse leadership there's just no appetite to give fans what they want rather than what sells now you might think that's case closed but I think there's more to castlevania's absence than the current state of Konami in October 2022 A Silent Hill 2 remake was announced along with a Spate of other smaller titles so clearly they aren't opposed to a series Resurrection if they think there is Market appetite the big problem is that while a series like Silent Hill fits easily into modern remake culture Castlevania couldn't be a worse fit almost all of its best-selling and critically acclaimed titles are older 2D entries which took konami's credit are already available on Modern Hardware as part of the Fantastic M2 developed Castlevania Collections and Castlevania Requiem thanks to the series issues transitioning into 3D there simply isn't an obvious candidate for an outsourced HD remake and I think this is the true reason for the radio silence any fresh entry would have to be a completely new game and the Konami of the 2020s just aren't interested in spending the money that ambitious designers and talented artists would require to make this a reality but that doesn't mean Castlevania is dead as in many ways the franchise lives on despite its body lying still in the metaphorical ground the games of akamatsu hagihara and igarashi would prove to be so influential that you can see the imprint of their ideas in almost every corner of the modern industry series like Devil May Cry Bayonetta and God of War owe everything to the tightly designed action-platforming of the Belmonts and every gory and terror-filled horror title can thank akamatsu for being the first to push video game imagery in that direction the most obvious lasting influence has been its contribution to the metroidvania genre which takes its namesake from the creations of kojig Rashi there's simply no way that beloved games like Hollow Knight or in the blind forest or dead cells would exist without Symphony of the Night and its spiritual successes and the Very fact that an entire genre Bears the series name is a testament to quite how alive Castlevania really is it's not just through these loose connections as for many people Castlevania is still with us in a very literal sense in 2014 after having left Konami in a fit of frustration at the New Direction Koji garashi set up a Kickstarter for a spiritual sequel to Symphony of the Night called blood-stained ritual of the night and it was far more successful than he could have ever dreamed bloodstained quickly morphed into its own franchise and the amount of interest in the project ended up also spawning a retro Castlevania throwback curse of the Moon which would prove to be so popular that it eventually got its own sequel just a few years later ritual was similarly a big hit getting rave reviews and ports to almost every single modern system and as of this video the team are currently working on a sequel and the franchise looks like it's here to stay so in spite of the absence of this once ever-present series Castlevania does live on not just in the form of an animation and not of the whim of the company that owns it but in the games that take influence from its history and in the creators who meld its ideas into New Life like the count who inspired its creation it is not so easily killed and while there are still people talking about its incredible highs and lows praising its achievements and mourning its passing like the Dark Castle on the horizon Castlevania is never truly gone thanks for watching this video comes with an extra special thanks to my patrons for supporting me during the ludicrous process that was the creation of this video thank you so much to everyone who's contributed sent a supportive message or even checked back on the channel it's no exaggeration to say that your support genuinely does motivate me when times get hard so I'm thankful from the bottom of my heart if you enjoyed the video and also want to back the channel there's a link down below and every penny goes back into producing more and better retrospectives so a huge thank you to anyone who decides to do that thanks very much and I'll see you next time

Channel: I Finished A Video Game

Views: 1,610,198

Keywords: castlevania, konami, igarashi, metroidvania, metroid, alucard, netflix, belmont, dracula, vampire, video game review, retrospective gaming, video essay, long form review, video game critique, video game retrospective, metal gear, yugioh, playstation, nintendo 64, super nintendo, nintendo, sega, sony, mercurysteam, lords of shadow, symphony of the night, aria of sorrow, circle of the moon, lords of shadow 2, gabriel belmont, soma cruz, trevor belmont, castlevania timeline

Id: peVgerhXJlU

Length: 440min 35sec (26435 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022