Schlocktober '23: I never liked the original Castlevania much and I still don't. I will turn in my gamer card.

SCHLOCKTOBER ’23:This month I am playing some games with horror elements and blogging about them to determine whether they’re nasty tricks or delectable treats.

Oh boy, I’m going to get staked through the heart for this one.

Growing up I was never a Castlevania kid. I didn’t like horror much to begin with, and while I had an NES as a child I was primarily a PC gamer. I did have a copy of Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and I had the same experience with that game as anyone else who didn’t have a guide, which is that it looked great, sounded great, and was fun to play except for the stupid invisible trap bullshit, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of where to go after awhile. This was an NES game where NPCs actually lied to you and the obscure and stupid stuff you had to do to advance seems specifically made to be undiscoverable to a seven-year-old and his dad who was helping him play. Simon’s Quest enchanted me with its looks, music, and ideas and then frustrated me beyond comprehension. I also had one of the Castlevania Game Boy games, I think the first one, and that was okay for a Game Boy game, but I was never a fan of the little pea soup screened handheld and I don’t remember much about that game except the very basics.

I did play Castlevania 1 and 3 at friends houses or as rentals at the time too. Castlevania 1 didn’t leave much of an impression on me. After the splendors of Simon’s Quest it just seemed kind of outdated and very cheap and difficult. Castlevania 3 also felt cheap and difficult but it is such a spectacular audio visual achievement (and more refined in its controls) that I always liked it anyway.

We’re not talking about Castlevania 3 here though, we’re talking about the first one. The OG. And even rampantly cheating via save states (I was playing on the Xbox version of the Castlevania Anniversay Collection Konami put out digitally in 2019, and unlike the Castlevania Advance Collection they put out in 2021 the earlier collection only has one save slot per game and no rewind, which is annoying) I found it unsatisfying and frustrating.

The basic outline of Castlevania should be familiar to all gamers now. It’s an action adventure platformer where you take Simon Belmont through Dracula’s castle, jumping, whipping, and dagger/holy water/cross/axing your way to take on the big guy himself. It is one of the first iconic horror games, featuring zombies, skeletons, and mummies instead of Goombas and Koopas. Its controls were famously stiff and deliberate compared to other games of the time.

Castlevania 1 deserves a lot of credit for being incredibly well designed for an early NES game. Originally a Famicom Disk System game it has an astonishing soundtrack, atmospheric and varied graphics as you progress through the castle, classic horror movie bosses, and a cohesion and sense of place that was very rare in games back then. As great as something like Super Mario Bros. is it just feels like a series of (very well designed) levels. Castlevania uses changes in music, tile set, and level design , combined with a map that pops up as you defeat bosses showing your progress through the castle, to really make it feel like an epic quest to clear a haunted castle and defeat the vampire king himself. To think that this came out just 1 generation after Adventure, with its maze of lines and duck-like dragons really shows the incredible evolution of gaming during the 1980s. By the end of the decade we’d have the Genesis.

But while I did play this game in the 1980s it is not the 1980s now, and there are literally hundreds of games that have been influenced by this game and built upon its legacy, including dozens of direct sequels. Taken on its own merits Castlevania is clunky and frustrating. The stiffness of Castlevania’s controls is legendary. Comparison is often made to Mega Man with his tight responsiveness and, importantly, air control. Simon Belmont, by comparison, is much more deliberate. He’s slower, he has to commit to his jumps (and his stair climbing, since he cannot jump off a staircase) and his whip has a few frames of windup, which can make timing strikes against some of the faster enemies or projectiles pretty tricky. It is worth noting that defending yourself by whipping enemy projectiles was not entirely new, but pretty unusual at that point and that kind of complexity represented part of a real evolution in game design.

The slower, stiffer, controls would be fine if not for the combination of these fast enemies and a lot of bottomless pits. Castlevania’s medusa heads and flea men are infamous because their vertical movement make them hard to target and for the flea men they move so quickly that you really only get one chance to hit them before they get to you. And when they do score a hit not only do you lose some health, but you get knocked back, often into a pit, at least in later levels. This is where Castlevania earns its reputation for frustration. You can play very well, carefully navigating past the various obstacles and taking the tougher enemies out without getting hit, and then an eagle will fly by and drop a hunchback on you sending you into a pit and back to the beginning of the stage. Fantastic.

Honestly by early NES standards it’s not particularly punishing. There’s a continue feature, full health restore after every boss, and the infamous wall chicken that lets you refill some health mid stage. This is a game that I could probably learn to beat legitimately if I put in the time, though some of the bosses are pretty brutal in their own right. Castlevania is not a game that hates you (Simon’s whip gets downgraded when he dies but you’ll get the two upgrades back within like a minute, making the whole feature kind of silly) but it’s a game that demands a lot of precision and a fair amount of luck. For the mid 1980s it’s a masterpiece, but it feels like something of a first draft of the games that were to come, especially Castlevania III (and then the various 16-bit Castlevanias.)

My personal experience with the Castlevania franchise really took off with the release of Symphony of the Night, which I bought on the strength of its incredible reviews and loved (though I have never finished the inverted castle.) I also played some of the Gameboy Advance and DS games, as well as the Lords of Shadow series. I always felt that never finishing the NES Castlevanias was a bit of a blindspot in my gaming history, though I’ve seen plenty of footage through Vinnyvania and other sources. I’m glad that I’ve sort of experienced the first game now (I did play a little bit without save scumming too) and it wasn’t an awful experience but it also wasn’t as enjoyable as Mega Man 1 and 2, which I also played this year. And I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as Circle of the Moon, which I finished in April.

Castlevania was a revolutionary game in its time and it’s not fair to call it bad. If nothing else the music still holds up, and has been remixed so many times it is embedded into the fabric not just of the series but gaming itself. But as someone who can still enjoy NES games I just didn’t find this one very satisfying, and I didn’t really like it as a kid either. I will just always prefer SOTN style Castlevania to the classic style, and I’m okay with that. I’m still impressed with how well designed the game is though. Simon had to walk so Alucard could backdash.

Schlocktober Rating:Expired Schlock

Castlevania is like an old timey gourmet chocolate bar that has gone stale and expired in the drawer. It was once a top shelf treat but at this point it's all chalky and flavorless. It won't kill you to eat it but you won't get much enjoyment either.

Great writeup. SOTN is one of my favorite games but I don't really care for the original. And of course I rented Simon's Quest a few times and had no idea what to do.

I do really like Bloodstained Circle of the Moon 1 and 2 which are done in a similar style to the old Castlevanias.

It's funny as I'm reading this, Vinny is playing Castlevania 1 on GB Infinite in the background. I would much rather watch Vinny play the early Castlevanias then ever play them myself again :)

There's nothing wrong with not liking games. No game is liked by everyone. Have you watched any speed runs? Because those are kind of nuts.

There is quality to those early Konami NES/SNES games that I can't quite find the right phrase for. Castlevania and Contra had it.

It has to do with the games being hard but levels being short and the games overall being short. It lead to a style of progression where the game had to be considered as a whole.

At first certain levels or portions of levels would seem impossible. After enough attempts the player would figure out how to proceed. They would then become stuck on the next difficult obstacle. But due to there being limited lives and continues the player then had to repeatedly play the game up to the portion they were currently stuck on.

This leads to a kind of magic where as memorization and skill mastery develop the earlier levels of the game that the player had once found difficult became a breeze.

To me it feels like a phenomenon born from game designers finally moving on from arcade game style design that was meant to maximize the number of quarters spent coupled with the lack of saves or codes found in other NES games.

It’s a style of design not found much anymore and given how much the zeitgeist has changed and attention spans shortened I’m not sure if there is much appetite for it.

However, to me it is not surprising that the game feels unsatisfying when playing with save states as almost all of the satisfaction is hidden behind gradual mastery and progression earned through repeated playthroughs.

@symbyosys: Thanks for the read. I also would rather watch Vinny play these old games, and have!

@ginormous76: You say that there's no game that's universally acclaimed but then again Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg exists so...agree to disagree. I haven't watched speed runs, can you point to any particularly good ones?

@paulwgraham: That's certainly a perspective but I think it's something of a retcon. For one thing I played the game as a kid and disliked it then, with no save states (though I have never had any patience for games based around stage memorization, which has always bored me.) For another, you cite Contra as another example but Contra's 30 lives code is legendary and the way that many people chose to play that game, showing that even back then it wasn't necessarily something people wanted.

I think that my issue with Castlevania has always been the stiff controls, and the randomness of some of the areas. You talk about memorization and building skills, and it's certainly true that you can get good enough to reliably beat the game without taking a hit, but until you reach that level (which most people never do) you have to deal with a lot of randomness, like the erratic movement of the hunchbacks, which is not consistent on playthrough to playthrough. There are other issues like enemies sometimes dropping subweapons you don't want onto you, and unlike in later games you don't get a window to recollect the boomerang if someone drops a watch onto you.

All that makes the game much more frustrating than something like Contra, or Gradius (which was an arcade game but also has short but difficult stages you can memorize.) In Contra it's not that hard to get good enough to breeze through predictable levels, and in Castlevania you can do that in some areas, but in others there's just a lot of randomness and it's very easy to get knocked into a pit or end up losing your boomerang.

It really doesn't have much to do with save states. It's the game design, including the stiff controls and those erratic elements. Now some people obviously still loved the game and it's a classic for a reason, but I never did, and that was the case way before save states were even a thing.

@bigsocrates:

Castlevania is an all time series for me. I replay RoB and SOTN once a year. I'm just eternally mired in the nostalgia-bait of 2D action platformers because of this series, and I think hope is lost.

Having said that, I think you're too hard on yourself even in jest, regarding your gamer card. Those games are beloved, but as someone who plays them more than the average "average gamer", I can fully recognize that it's the nostalgia that keeps me coming back. And if we were to dig even deeper, it would truly be the music that is driving it. I'd go so far as to call Castlevania 1 a pretty bad game by today's standards.

Now, having said THAT, this blog has ALSO inspired me to replay the Castlevania games again.

Unrelated, but broadly related to the site, the new season of the Netflix show is just okay, in my opinion, but it has an amazing GB Easter egg that I actually saw, took a pic of, and threw up on Reddit on Nextlanders sub, but I don't know if it ever made its way to the man himself).

@sethmode: I'm pretty sure the Barkerville reference made it to Brad as it made the rounds and a bunch of people likely let him know. I know GB crew was talking about it in a recent video (forget which one)

@symbyosys: Nice! I'm glad. I felt weird going to him directly since a) I don't know him; and b) I didn't make the thing, but what a cool fucking Easter Egg!

@sethmode: A lot of people really love the Castlevania series. At least Konami has released some pretty good collections, though of course they seem to have no interest in actually making a new game because they're Konami. They're still doing Contra and Bomberman sporadically so maybe they're hope. On the other hand Bloodstained has also somewhat filled the niche, with three very well regarded games (though I think the Metroidvania was a bit wackier than Castlevania ever got, though I enjoyed it quite a bit.)

I thank you for absolving me for my sins. Even as a kid I was self-conscious about not being great at games and not loving hard games. I love video games but I'm very mediocre at them.

I hope you enjoy your replay of Castlevania. I'm going to continue my picking away at the series myself because I both feel like I should know it better and I genuinely enjoy some of the later games. As I said, Symphony of the Night is spectacular.

And the music has been great from the first, though it may be nostalgia talking but I think Simon's Quest was a massive jump in quality from very good to truly spectacular. And there's no need to start on SOTN. One of the greatest soundtracks ever.

The thing about Castlevania 1 is that it's a puzzle game. Unlike pretty much any other platformer (including later Castlevania games), the first game is all about planning your moves and not putting yourself in bad situations. Of course this is easier said than done.

The one thing that gave it away for me is the freezing of bosses with the holy water. You may think that this is a cheap tactic, but they give you the holy water right before the Medusa fight so you have to think that it's the intended way of beating the otherwise very difficult boss.

Then you get to level 5 (with Death as the boss) where Vinny had a lot of problems. There is only one holy water in that level and it's right at the beginning. You have to transport that holy water to the boss with one life, without dying (because a checkpoint makes it impossible to go back to get it), and without accidentally picking up another weapon which just goes against all gamer instincts. You can get to the boss with minimal health because if you freeze it properly it won't even get to attack. It feels like cheesing the boss but I believe that it's actually the intended way of beating it.

The holy water is also very useful, though not absolutely required, on the final boss. The timing on the fireball jumps is something that once you get it, you can do it almost every time if you're just patient enough. I think Vinny fell into a hole where he didn't get the forward-jump-and-whip mechanic down so he stopped trying it and refused to go back to it even when everybody was telling him to do it, instead opting for a much more difficult strategy of upward-jump-land-and-jump-and-whip.

Once you have the game figured out you can rather easily beat it in about 10 minutes. I think any serious gamer should at least play the first level of Castlevania, it's that instrumental to the genre.

edit: Let's call it 20 or so minutes since I just checked that the world record is 10:45 minutes, and it doesn't look all that easy. But my point being that it's short enough that I play through it every now and then since it's a small time commitment.

@apewins: You're not describing a puzzle game you're just describing a game with an overpowered item, which is pretty common. And it's generally thought that the boomerang is the best for Dracula because of its ability to hit him multiple times in the face while still maintaining the distance to deal with his attacks.

But the game actively fights you in some of this, especially in keeping the holy water because there are enemies who drop subweapons (something that I believe never happened in again in the series, probably for precisely this reason.) Of course you can still avoid them if you don't kill anything while it's right above you, but in later levels with the eagles and hunchbacks that can make defending yourself very difficult unless you've memorized the levels and really trained with the game's clunky skillset.

It's not super tough by NES standards but it's in no way a puzzle game. It's just more memorization based with some optimal strategy, which is extremely common in NES games.

Most Castlevania games are great IMO, but I can see why some people wouldn't like them. The difficulty can be brutal in some games, and the knock back when being hit, which at times can cause the character to fall into a pit can be frustrating. Floating Medusa heads, worst enemy in any Castlevania game. Therefore, I'm not going to demand you turn in your gaming card as I get it. But Castlevania 1-3, Super Castlevania 4, Symphony of the Night, and Bloodlines are genuine classics. Not to mention many of the quality ones on handheld that is based off the SOTN gameplay, which itself is based off the Simon's Quest gameplay. The graphics, the environments, the music, and yes even the gameplay... good times.

Castlevania was the first Souls-Like.

Seriously, though, this was the first NES game I owned (along with Duck Hunt, Gyromite, and Gumshoe). It has a special place in my heart, though I never did beat it without save states. The music is absolutely top notch, and the graphics really pop. But fuck those pits, and fuck the Reaper.

@av_gamer: I think a lot of the later games are excellent but I really think the first one was excellent for its time but is more important historically than great to play at this point.

I also vastly prefer Medusa heads to hunchbacks. The medusas are at least predictable so you can plan around them. They can still get you but it usually feels fair.

@redwing42: Castlevania music will always be top tier. And yeah, death with his homing scythes is a real bastard. Dracula himself is much less stressful.

Yeah, there is no question as far as the Castlevania enemy annoyance tiers are concerned:

1. Hunchbacks

2. Birds

3. Medusa heads

The thing about Medusa heads are that they themselves really aren't that bad. They're on fixed tracks, which helps. It's that the levels themselves are designed to get you knocked back and killed. But as an adult, they're SO much easier to deal with than the spastic movements of ALL the hunchbacks (maybe some of the worst enemies in ANY game) and some of the more erratic birds (although I admittedly run together which enemies appear in which games).

I never understood the veneration and puritanism when it comes to the OG games and the distaste of the genre shift that Symphony of the Night introduced. They always felt way too clunky, outdated and simple to me, whereas the amount of customization and exploration that the modern Metroivania provides seems much more appealing.