Alright, Castlevania! One of the best 8-bit platf- wait…dang it.
1997′s Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is, without question, one of the greatest video games of all time. Konami’s first console follow up to it doesn’t have the same reputation and, since this blog if powered by horrifying randomness, that’s the one we’re talking about today. The game, just called Castlevania like the original (I hate it when franchises do this), is an attempt to mix the action platforming the series is known for with elements from the burgeoning 3D action genre, including Ocarina of Time and Resident Evil. On an unrelated note, it appears someone combined those series once:
Just like Resident Evil, in Castlevania you’re given a choice between female and male playable characters – the former is Carrie Fernandez, and the latter is Reinhardt Schneider, who looks like if Duke Nukem was a European metrosexual:
As is the case with a lot of 3D games of the era, the camera system is rough – if you played a lot of games in the mid-late 90s, this’ll seem rather familiar. While there are a handful of different camera ‘modes’ that give you different views for different situations, you can’t ever manually adjust it when it might be useful to do so (which is often). There are also some situations where you can’t change it at all, such as in ‘Boss Mode’ where you’re forced to look at the boss, no matter what else might be around.
This giant boss fight happens less than 5 minutes into the game – that’s a heck of a way to start the experience! This part felt ever so slightly Dark Souls-y, though I encourage you to not read too far into that. By the way, this guy eventually gets mad and jumps off a cliff.
If you want to play this game, I should heavily stress that you should do so with some sort of memory card – the game has no internal battery or storage, so the game’s frequent save point gems are completely unusable without one. I learned about this the hard way this week – for all the random video game crap I own, I don’t have an N64 memory card. Oof. This, coupled with a limited amount of time this week, I didn’t get to see as much of this game as I would’ve liked. It’s a decent sized game, apparently, so it appears there’s a lot that I missed (though I imagine the gameplay remains pretty similar throughout). I have failed you, faithful readers.
What I did get to play, though, was more enjoyable than I would’ve expected, given the game’s unheralded reputation. A lot of the Castlevania mainstays are still present – item upgrades, special items like knives and holy water, and loads of skeletons and other cool enemies to dispatch. Rest assured, you’ll still be flinging a whip everywhere, all the time. The surrounding environments I saw look fairly rough in the same way other games like this do (looking at you, Turok), but the more animated pieces – characters, enemies, and so on, all look and move pretty well. It’s not hard to see what’s going on (assuming the camera lets you do so).
This version of Castlevania gets a bit of a bad rap, as it didn’t age especially well and it doesn’t while it just can’t compare to the best in the series, and it suffers from the a lot of the typical “early 3D game” issues, it’s not terrible. This isn’t a good introduction to the series, or even a top 3D game in it (the more recent Lords of Shadow series does it better), but it has merit as bit of a historical oddity. If you dig the series, you’ll likely still enjoy it.
I feel like it’s been a while since we had an NES game in Retro Roulette, but that’s where we’ll be next week. This one is a hard-to-find sequel to a game you probably had as a kid. See you then!