Gosh this was such a frustrating and disappointing experience. Castlevania has one of the best aesthetics I've seen from the NES, especially the music which remains immensely catchy all these years later. The opening levels are generally pretty enjoyable; challenging but largely fair, and learning the layout and finally managing to clear your way through these early levels feels genuinely rewarding. The controls initially feel clunky, but I was quickly sold on them. Having to commit to an attack or a jump arc in quite this manner lends much of the early-game a similar feeling to what would much, much later be captured in the Souls games as you try to carefully plan out your moves in advance and try not to panic. The only things that really bothered me early on were the fact that your whip gets massively downgraded every time you die which can feel like it punishes you for doing badly by making the screen you died on even harder for you, and the way that flying enemies can knock you back into bottomless pits which never ceases to feel cheap, but for the most part I was having a lot of fun!

Then I reached the second half of the game and this all just fell apart... Look, I get it, NES games are hard, but there's a lot of moments in the late-game that feel actively unfair. Rooms like the one where gorgon heads fly at you whilst you have to deal with the axe-throwers simply don't feel like they're actually built with Simon's slow, intentional movement in mind. This is to say nothing of the late-game bosses. Frankenstein and Death both felt intensely rng-based to me, at least without using any sort of cheesing-strategy on them. Both felt extremely unsatisfying to beat because it felt like I'd just gotten lucky with how things lined up rather than because of learning patterns or understanding what to do. The Dracula fight is similarly immensely frustrating, and I'm confident I would have never beaten this game if not for starting to use save states increasingly aggressively in the final two levels.