It would be easy to get the impression that I enjoy games being challenging considering my adoration for games like Dark Souls, Celeste or Rain World. My actual stance on the matter is that there is nothing inherently good about a game being difficult, but instead that a game's difficulty should be designed purposefully in a way that compliments all the other elements of that game. If a game is going to be difficult (or indeed easy), it should be so for a reason.

The reason the US release of Castlevania III was made so nightmarishly challenging was one of business. Nintendo didn't want people to be able to beat Castlevania III in the course of a weekend because then they could just rent it instead of buying it, so when the game was brought across to the West its difficulty was ratcheted up a huge amount from what was seen in the original Japanese version. The end result is something that, in its later levels, starts to feel actively malicious, that genuinely doesn't want you to ever actually complete it.

It's so sad too because the game is contextually a minor technological marvel, it feels like Castlevania III is visually pushing the NES to breaking point and just generally aesthetically the game is one of a very small handful of NES games that actually holds up nowadays. It's also just an incredibly creative game, and whilst some of its gimmicks and experimentation really don't stick the landing (the falling block tower...) it's still just so exciting to see all the ideas Castlevania III wants to bring to the table. And yet the difficulty feels so arbitrarily egregious, tainted by business cutting out checkpoints and pushing all the numbers it can against you in the pursuit of more money, and the end result is something that is on some level quite literally trying to waste your time.