Now Playing — Castlevania
Where I played — NES
Of my top ten favorite games, at least a few of them were created by legendary developer Hideki Kamiya ; games like Bayonetta, The Wonderful 101 and Okami are his children, and that’s not including genre defining classics like Devil May Cry and Resident Evil 2.
Kamiya is known for his appreciation of older retro games from obscure publishers like Hamster — Things like Terra Cresta, or Gradius from Konami. When asked what his favorite action game is, he frequently cites the original Castlevania, and it’s easy to draw a through-line from that classic title to many of his games.
Castlevania is a beautiful early action title. The control is tight and responsive ; every little move and enemy placement is extremely well thought out and meticulously crafted. I’ve often written that game design is a continuous conversation between the designer and the player, and greatness is defined by how clear that conversation becomes without ever having to stop and give a formal tutorial. Nothing in Castlevania is placed by mistake or through laziness…every little platform and sub-weapon has it’s purpose and it’s place.
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The one thing I would point to as a weakness is that the holy water is over-powered. I’ve only ever been able to finish this game by acquiring the holy water early, and keeping it until the very end of the game. It can be used to lock the Grim Reaper in place and cheese the boss fight, and it can be used to burn down Dracula’s second form pretty quickly as well. It feels great to get this item, but almost a little too good. It makes all the other sub-weapons irrelevant, and even makes your whip seem a little weak. I think in a slightly more perfect game, every boss would have a different strategy that’s recognized as, “The best”, but in Castlevania really the formula becomes, “Get the holy water and don’t lose it”. If you can do that, you can beat this game. The unwavering sign that this weapon is overpowered is that if you’re holding it, and accidentally pick-up another item, you are instantly filled with a hot rage. I’ve reset the game many times upon making this mistake, as it’s faster than progressing with the knife, getting destroyed, and having to just start over anyway.
Castlevania is tough as nails, but it’s completely fair in how it deals out its difficulty. Enemies don’t hit you for a lot of damage, usually like 20% of your overall health…but there’s a lot of stuff that kills you in one-shot. Namely getting crunched by the downward force of a ceiling platform, or falling down a pit. When you’re hit in this game, your character flies back a few feet — usually leading to you falling down a nearby pit and dying immediately. Many of the toughest sections of this game involve dodging enemies with unpredictable movement patterns right next to lots of pitfalls. The medusa heads are infamous for this reason — they move in a zigzag pattern and paired with a horiztonally scrolling game screen, they can be sort of tough to get a sense of where they are going to be.
Another thing that makes this game tough is how Simon Belmont controls, and I mean this in the best way possible. The game doesn’t have bad controls at all, it has quirks that make it different from other action titles of the time. Super Mario has a lot of mid-air control over his jump, almost enough that you can fully backtrack on bad jumps and try to correct yourself out of bad situations — Simon is a heavy, medieval knight character that has no such magical agility. You jump and you are committed to that jump. No mid-air control whatsoever, so you better be damn sure that you are going to land in the right place. I think it lends to a sense of “I need to stop and think about what I’m doing”, which fits the horror theming of the game well.
Simon’s whip also has a strong delay on it — you press the button and a split second later the whip animation starts. It’s not immediate like Mario’s jump or Link’s sword slash. It adds a sense of weight and gravity to the game world that just isn’t in most NES titles. It feels gritty and realistic, almost like how Gears of War feels compared to something like Halo. Again it has the effect of making you stop and think about your next move. Many of the most difficult sections involve jumping and whipping in perfectly synchronized sequences, and with the quirks of both actions, it lead to a super fun and challenging gameplay experience.
Another aspect of this game that I think solidifies it has a “Challenging but fair” experience is how the lives/continues work. If you die, you go back to the newest screen you started at, and can immediately try again. If you run out of lives completely, you start at the beginning of the stage you’re on. It never sends you all the way back to the title screen. It’s never more than a few minutes to get back to where you are going in the original Castlevania. We think of this as one of the hardest NES games but consider how even something more casual like Super Mario Bros will send you all the way back to 1–1 if you completely run out of lives…it’s fucking brutal. Castlevania is hard but it has the common decency to at least let you keep trying against the most challenging sections of the game and not totally wipe your progress if things go belly-up. This is a game that encourages you to get to the end, they want you to see it through. It’s tough but the developers are with you the entire way. IMO it’s the perfect kind of difficult game.
The set dressing in Castlevania is a lot of the fun. It’s a horror themed game sort of modeled after the old Hammer movies from Universal in the 1920s…think Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein…all the classic monsters are here. It takes place in and around this awesome gothic castle with tons of visual detail in the environment — I love the dungeon where the skeletons are locked up to the walls, or the bridge to the castle where you can see Dracula’s tower in the background silhouetted by the moon. This is one of the most visually creative and interesting NES games in my opinion. On the audio side, I think the soundtrack is really great. Castlevania to me has always been the game series with the best music, outside of pretty much everything done by Square Enix and Nobuo Uematsu.
Overall Castlevania remains one of my favorite games of all-time based purely on the fairness and balance of it’s superb difficulty. It has a pitch-perfect feeling of balance and challenge. It has superb set-dressing and music for an NES game, and a sense of progression of stakes that is uncommon for the era from which it was released in.
