CASTLEVANIA
As a kid, I rented this game once, and hated
it. It was just too hard. I could make it to the second
level and that was about it. However, when I purchased this game
in 2005, I took a new liking to an old game. Although impossibly
hard in the later stages, this game is one of my most played; theres
just something fun about it, and maybe its that fun factor that keeps
me coming back for more.
The plot of the game is simple. You play as
Simon Belmont, and your goal is to fight your way through several
levels of sheer torture to reach Count Dracula's castle, and then slay
him. Along the way, there are a plentiful supply of bottomless
pits, bats, zombies, shooting skeleton statues, annoying flying medussa
heads, gremlins, birds who drop said gremlins, knights, and much
more. There are six levels to Castlevania, which are broken into
3 subsections each. The game displays each of these sections as
its own level in the upper right hand corner of the screen , so the
last fight with Dracula is actually level 18. There are unlimited
continues, which will let you start back at the beginning of each main
level you progress to, but don't let that fool you into thinking this
is an easy game. Oh no sir. That couldn't be farther from the
truth.
You start the game in a short section outside of a
large mansion. Here there are several candles which when struck,
drop powerups. There are many of these throughout the game.
Most of them contain hearts, which determine the maximum number of
times you can use your current secondary weapon. These candles
also drop the secondary weapons themselves, which can be used by
holding up on the D-pad and pressing the attack button. Also, at
the beginning of the game, as well as every time you start a new life,
the first few candles you strike will drop whip upgrades, which
increase the maximum reach of your primary weapon. Inside the mansion
there are flying bats, pouncing cheetahs,
and zombies, but this is by far the easiest level in the game, as it
should be. The only semi-dangerous part is in section two, where
you must go
into the sewers and cross a series of pits while avoiding several
fish-men that have a nasty habit of popping up in front of you and
knocking you off the ledges. By the way, every time you are hit
in Castlevania, you bounce backwards, which makes for some very precise
timing to jump pits while avoiding attacking enemies. The first
level ends with a battle against a giant bat. It is pretty easy,
as long as you use the axe weapon repeatedly on him when he comes down
to attack, and within two or three cycles of up and down he dies,
leaving you with the magic orb, which lets you move on to the next
level when touched.
Level two has you working your way
first upwards, then westward inside a tower. At first, this level
is easy, but shortly after proceeding west you are attacked by flying
medussa heads which move in large sine wave patterns as they come at
you. They are relentless and ever spawning, and require careful
timing to avoid. Once you reach the west most point of the tower,
you go up a flight of stairs and have to make your way back to the east
across some awfully placed jumps, while simultaneously dodging yet
more medussa heads. I lost countless lives trying to get these
jumps down. After reaching the east wall, you climb up another
flight of stairs and head back west again (much easier this time )
until you reach the second boss. This stage introduces you to the
stationary skeleton totems which are fairly easy to kill if you are
patient enough to watch their firing pattern and either jump over or
whip their shots. Before reaching Medussa, the easiest boss in
the game, I always make
sure to hit the candle right outside the entrance to her layer to
collect the stopwatch item it contains. Without it, the giant
Medussa head flies around and shoots snakes at you, which can be
aggravating, but when the watch is used, she will freeze completely
letting you whip the crap out of her. Every time she comes back
to
life you simply freeze her again and whip away. I love beating
this boss, as the later ones are not at all fazed by this trinket,
rendering it useless.
Next, after taking out Medussa, you work your way
upwards and eastwards through a level that I guess could be described
as a bridge of some sort. Here, you are introduced to my most
hated enemy in the game. The gremlin is extremely hard to whip,
as it moves quite randomly
and with great haste. It bounces a little back and forth and then does
a high
jump every now and then, hitting you over and over in a heartbeat if
you aren't careful. Also, this gremlin is by far the most intelligent
enemy
in the game, being able to get to you no matter how well you think you
are out of harms way. Whereas the other enemies in Castlevania
either aimlessly move in a preset pattern east to west, west to east ,
or back and forth on one particular platform, these devious gremlins
actively seek you out. If you are on one side, up high on the
screen
and a gremlin on the other, towards the bottom, it will hop from one
platform to the next, dodging the pits, until it gets to you. Now
imagine not just one gremlin, but two or (heaven forbid) three or more
of these horrible things on the screen at one time, bouncing you around
like a punching bag until you either fall
into a hole (this level and level six) or you're beaten to death in
numbers ( i.e. level four ). Towards the end of this
stage, you face the flying medussa heads again, several dangerous pits,
bone-throwing skeletons, and more skele-totems. The bosses here
are
very easy as long as you have holy water as your secondary
weapon. There are two mummies in the lower area that meander back
and forth shooting wraps here and there. It is actually pretty hard
trying to fight them with the other weapons. However, with the
holy water, you simply need to stand on the platform
above them ( in complete safety ) and just wait until they come close
and bomb them until they
are dead.
( bombs away! too easy :) )
After completing the third level, Simon drops down
an insanely deep 100 foot pit to the rocky sewers below ( surprisingly
no broken bones , although falling in water is instant death. Go figure
). In the first part of this level you move east through the
sewers dodging fish men and riding on moving platforms that cross the
deadly waters below. Careful
timing is definitely required here. Once you get to the east most
section you travel up a flight of stairs to the surface above, which is
a nice change of scenery at first. At least there are no more
pits in this level. Instead you are treated to these enormous
eagles who
now fly over you carrying those nasty gremlins (oh joy!), and drop them
when they are over your head. Anyway, you have to keep moving east as
quickly as possible to avoid as many gremlin bombs as you can.
You have to make every effort to whip them dead as soon as they are
dropped from the birds. Once they make landfall they begin the
hellacious bouncing of death, so taking them out in mid drop-off is the
best way to go. Once you reach the east wall, you fight a mini-boss,
which is a skeleton dragon head which spits fire at you. This
enemy is
easily destroyed with the axe. Once dead, you move on to a
short dungeon where you fight a couple more skele-dragons, and then the
first
of the infamous, impossible Castlevania bosses. You come to
a large room with a few platforms and the boss, Frankenstein, comes
after you with
hands out. Hmm, he looks slow enough. This should be
easy. But wait. What is that on his back??? Oh no!
the Gremlin King.( aka Igor , I guess, it looks like the other ones to
me- only it can't be killed!! ) Frankenstein moves blindly east
and west
and you are forced to try and get as many whippings in on him as you
can
while his gremlin guardian pummels you with fireballs and bounces
around the room, hitting you constantly. You can momentarily stun
the gremlin with a well-timed whip, but chances are you will be hit
once or twice while trying to pull off such a short lived attack on
it. This is as far as I can go on the actual NES. I have
not beat him legit yet. From here on out I had to use an emulator
to explore the rest of the game for the sake of this review.
Somehow, you have to keep on whipping Franky while being a complete ace
and perfectly dodging all the fireballs and bouncing gremlin
attacks. One thing you pretty much are required to have on you to
beat this guy, as well as the next level's boss on the real NES is the
holy cross and the II and III power ups which let you rapid fire your
secondary weapons ( two
or three crosses at a time-respectively), which I could never manage to
pull off. I could usually get the cross, but would end up either
dying and losing it or accidentally getting a different weapon.
Also , I'm still not sure what makes the multi-shot power ups appear,
so
that doesn't make things any easier to figure out.
(oh
no. Not the gremlins! )
(
beware the leaping menace)
After that extremely difficult bought with the
gremlin and its bitch Frankenstein, you enter a fortress where you
battle an army of bone tossing skeletons and some really difficult
axe-throwing knights. The bone chuckers are usually placed in
such a way that you have to climb from floors one to three to proceed,
with chuckers on floors two and three, meaning you have to try and
ascend the stairways with a ton of bones coming at you from
above. The
knights here are pretty tough because they have to be whipped about ten
times
to be taken out, and they throw axes at you not only at head level, but
at
knee level as well (forcing you to jump or duck-whip ). Whats
worse than that? Well, as you advance on them they backpedal away from
you , leading
you into more oncoming enemies. This is definitely the case in
the last section, where you ascend a flight of stairs into a new room
where you have one knight to your left. As you attack him he
moves backwards throwing axes at you all the while, making it hard to
hit him. As this is going on, you are led into a trap of constant
flying medussa heads, and if you don't kill him quick enough, he leads
you into the other deadly knight as well. Shortly after you have
to face the
hardest boss I have EVER fought in a video game. I mean it.
You fight the Grim Reaper ( aka Death ). As was the case with the
previous Frankenstein battle, if
Death were by himself, this would be a joke, as all he does is fire a
couple of fireballs , and slowly move in a semicircular arc from one
side of the screen to the other, pausing momentarily before
repeating. What makes this boss fight a living hell,
as with Frankenstein, is the help he gets. At all times there are
four
large sickles spinning around and looking for you, and at this point in
the game, each hit takes away 4 bars of life. As you destroy the
sickles, more appear instantly to take their places, often right next
to you. Even with the
emulator, for awhile I had this one pegged as unbeatable. I set a
save state
right before the boss so I could, with the press of a button, restart
instantly at the same point after dying. I think I died maybe one
hundred times or so with the
closest to winning being Death having two bars of life left. Then
I let myself
die and started back at the beginning of the stage holding on to the
holy cross which drops from a candle nearby, and I carefully made
it back to
Death and save stated again. This time, I was getting a lot more
hits in on Death, as the useless stopwatch I had before left me using
just the whip on him. Since it acts like a boomerang and travels
the screen both ways before being used up, I was able to get in two
hits for the price of one. Coupled with this, I noticed that
taking out a number of the sickles while attacking Death made a II
power up drop which let me fire two crosses at a time instead of the
one, making
for four bars of damage each attack instead of my original one.
Sadly, It took
about 50 tries even with this help to finally kill Death, BUT, after he
died, and the magical orb appeared, his sickles were still lingering
around and came down and killed me before I could get to it! This
is no lie, I ended up killing Death FIVE times and I myself DIED from
those damn lingering blades each time before I could get to that effin
orb to finish the level. Thats just ridiculous. The last time I
killed him I think the game messed up because I somehow pinned Death in
a
corner and was able to fire away at will while not being hit once by
his minions. I had never been so happy to beat a game boss before.
(first
death trying to get orb)
(fifth death trying to get orb-how
cheap is this?!)
The last level is actually rather short, although
there are still numerous hazards in the first two sections. The
first has you moving to the west while jumping a ton of pits.
There are many bats here to deal with, but they are actually copies of
the boss from the first level, not the easy tiny bats. They will
knock you off the platforms in a snap, usually as you are landing from
a jump, and a couple of them require perfect timing to avoid. The
second section is inside of a tower of sorts, with lots of skeleton
bone-throwers, as well as those eagle/gremlin bombardiers. Of
course there are plenty of holes to avoid as well.
( owch! guess what happens
next... )
The final section of the game has no enemies to deal
with other than the boss, and it gives a slightly creepy feeling as you
navigate up a long flight of stairs with the moon and clouds in the
background, along with a cool, cryptic musical track. You enter a
room with an open coffin and a mask rises from the ground and Dracula
appears. His attack pattern is very simple. He will appear,
open his cape, fire three shots, stand there a second, disappear, then
reappear in a different spot. This sounds easy, but there is a
catch, of course. Dracula can only be harmed by being hit
directly in the head, which , because he is around eight feet tall,
means you have to jump and whip him. Whipping or avoiding his
flame shots is the hardest part of this battle. You only have a
small window of time, maybe two seconds or so, to avoid his fire and
land a hit before running around awaiting his next appearance.
After finally dropping his health meter to zero, his head pops off (
Yeah! woo hoo ) and Dracula then transforms into a blue werewolf ( at
least I think thats what its supposed to be ) with a fresh full health
meter. Actually, the second form is really easy to kill, as all
you have to do is stay close enough to him that he wont shoot fireballs
at you, whip him in the head as before, run under him when he does a
high jump, and repeat. What makes it hard, however, is that he
does a number of little tiny jumps as well, and if you attempt to run
under one of those you'll take a hit, and by the time you make it to
this second form ( if you have as much trouble as I did with the first
), you're health will be very low and when you die, you must fight both
forms all over again. Joy!
( these shots spread out, making them
hard
( off with his head. woot! )
as hell to avoid without being hit )
After killing Dracula, you pick up the last magical
orb, and you are then treated to a craptacular typical NES ending,
hardly worthy of the extreme effort put into beating this game.
In a far away zoomed out scene, the silhouette of Dracula's castle
crumbles and falls and then the credits roll, followed by the
message: YOU PLAYED THE GREATEST ROLE IN THIS STORY. THANK
YOU FOR PLAYING. Pressing enter starts you back at level one
which from what I can tell is a lot like the after-ending from Super
Mario Brothers, whereas the enemies are harder and more numerous.
However, I didn't play much into it the second time around to find out.
(wow, nice ending...yeah, ok )
Castlevania has one of the best soundtracks of any
game I've ever played, as is the case with all three NES games of this
series. The graphics are pretty good and the layout of the levels
is not repetitive and monotonous. The challenge is way too high,
however, and I usually give up at the Frankenstein battle.
The jumping controls are a bit quirky too. For example, unlike
the SMB games, once you jump forward, there is no turning to face left
or right in midair. This means precision jumping for most of the
game. For the sake of this review I made it to the end by
saving/loading at boss battles repeatedly with an emulator, and even
with that assistance it took forever. I firmly believe I would
NEVER be able to finish this game on the actual NES. However, the
game is still addictive and fun to play, and even though I know I
probably won't ever beat it without emulator/ game genie assistance, I
still enjoy trying to see if I can just get a little bit farther than
the last time. Overall Castlevania is a great, challenging game
that paved the way for many sequels across various gaming platforms.
PROS: fun to play
great
replay value
awesome
soundtrack
infinite
continues
creepy
atmosphere
CONS: difficulty is too hard from levels four to six
jumping controls could have been better
cheap, sorry
ending
no password
feature, which would have been nice
DIFFICULTY
VERY HARD / BORDERLINE
IMPOSSIBLE
GRAPHICS
7
SOUND
9
CONTROLS 7
FUN
9
OVERALL
8
Great Classic NES Title
Back to Reviews
