Castlevania has been kind of nothing but hits for me so far. I’ve found a lot to like in the popular series punching bags like Simon’s Quest, which has become probably a top ten video game for me, and The Adventure, which has become a game I will halfheartedly defend as actually fine when it comes up in casual conversation. Even popular games that I don’t get along with like Super IV and Symphony of the Night are obviously incredibly well done experiences, just ones that don’t rub me the right way. On average though I think Castlevania might have the highest hit rate of any series I’ve played this many entiries in bar like, Final Fantasy where (has not played 16 voice) I think literally every one is very good to great. So I came into Legends with a very open mind. Castlevania has basically never steered me wrong yet, I find myself more positive than average it seems, you get to play as a cool anime girl, and I’ve quite enjoyed the weird formal experiements that the limitations of the Gameboy hardware make necessary in these early portable entries. How could it POSSIBLY go wrong.

I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you.

It’s subtle because Legends might not be obviously unpleasant if you were to just watch somebody play it. It looks FINE. It feels FINE. It’s level of challenge is FINE. It has a some interesting ideas – replacing subweapons with equippable magical powers that you earn by killing bosses, giving you the super saiyan mode that this game is most famous for, multiple endings determined by how well you explored the stage (sort of, we’ll get to it) – and I think some of the charm of the earlier Gameboy titles is still here, like in the way that they still apparently just can’t crack the code on making stairs on the Gameboy so all vertical movement happens via climbing up and down ropes.

The problem with Legends is that it’s so SWAGLESS, dude. They forgot to season my Castlevania, they just cooked it as it came and like yeah it’s well made and sure I can eat it but it doesn’t TASTE like anything! Everything feels like it’s been dialed way back from Belmont’s Revenge. Enemies aren’t as weird or interesting to look at, and there are no level gimmicks at all, let alone cool ones. The mega man level structure is gone too, which is fine too, but it does call attention to the way that even when we’ve returned to a traditional Storming Castlevania level structure here everything feels REALLY indistinct. There are familiar motifs to fall back on for this sort of thing by this point in the series but it doesn’t feel like Legends even really does that. The clock tower, for example, has gears and stuff in it, but the stuff that you’re DOING and the way you’re moving around and the guys you’re hitting don’t feel very different from the way all these things feel in the keep or the graveyard.

And while I applaud any time we try to do a lot of new cool shit, I think the new cool shit in this game is also the stuff that works the least when it all comes together. The way you get the good ending is to fully explore each level until you find a hidden artifact at the end of its alternate path (the items are classic Castlevania subweapons which is very goofy I have legitimately no idea what this is supposed to be signaling about the mythic value of these objects given this game’s position as the Origin Of All Castlevania), but the levels aren’t really structured in a way that makes finding them actually interesting or challenging. Every time you’re just going to come to a point where you have to arbitrarily decide which direction to go down and at some point you’re either going to luck into your key item OR you’re eventually going to hit the boss screen and because Legends has actually pretty rigorous checkpointing you’ll have basically beefed your chance to get the item for that level unless you intentionally burn through all of your lives upon your realization and play through the level again on a fresh continue. This game carries the beautiful Castlevania tradition of giving you infinite continues and electing to use one will just start you at the top of a level rather than your most recent checkpoint, and if you were to do a perfect run with no mistakes and no deaths the game maybe has an hour or 90 minutes of content so it’s not exactly a huge ask but it’s the kind of thing where it’s like why am I the one doing this work and making these excuses, why is the game set up in this tedious way?

They’re all like this. Burning Mode, you’re super sick hyper powerful mega mode, is basically just the button you hit to win fights, and you get to pop it once per stage at any time. It doesn’t refresh after you use it but it DOES refresh if you die, so it’s incredibly easy to just pop it on every single boss in the game. I would say that for more than half of the dudes you fight here, including Dracula, I don’t even know their patterns because I just made Sonia an unstoppable monster and hit them nine times before they could do literally anything.

The power system that replaces subweapons is interesting in theory, and I especially like the idea that they’re meted out with intentionality over the course of your linear progression through the stages, but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of reason towards the order they’re given to you. You get the equivalent of the stopwatch first, and it’s mondo cheap to use, which makes it the most useful power in the game by far. The general ease of the game coupled with the lax punishments for failure make your twenty-heart-cost full heal basically worthless, and by the time you get the one that deals damage to every enemy on the screen at once you have precious few trap rooms that sic tons of enemies on you left, which are the most dangerous screens in the game where that would offer the most utility. Coupled with the fact that the whip powerup system returns from previous Gameboy entries and you really do feel arguably the most equipped to kill that I’ve ever felt in Castlevania, but it feels like a LOT when all the guys you fight are like, skeletons who don’t seem to be aware that you’re there and wiggly ghosts.

There’s at least one interesting encounter here, in both a callback to the Soleil fight in Belmont’s Revenge and presumably a bit of nice brand synergy with the contemporaneously released Symphony of the Night, Alucard pops in halfway through the fifth stage to tell you to be like “uhgghhh my beloved, you’re so cool but this is my fight alone please let me go fight dracula by myself you’re too pure and sexy to fight a mean vampire” and Sonia is like “wow Alucard that’s so true I am a stupid loser baby woman wait hang on a second what the fuck that’s dumb” and then HE’S like “oh okay well allow me to test your STRENGTH” and then you have to fight him it sucks bro. But finally at least towards the end of the game there’s a one on one duel with a guy with good AI and an interesting moveset and ha ha I’m just kidding dude I immediately activated burning mode and destroyed him in six seconds before he could literally move or act at all.

To get back to how Castlevania Legends absolutely could not pick up anybody at the bar on account of an utter lack of girlswag, I’d like to complain about how this game looks and sounds, which again, isn’t BAD. In fact the first level is scored to a pretty good remix of Bloody Tears (simon’s quest’s strongest soldier logging on), replacing the drum part with a driving baseline, changing the way the NES version has the melody constantly ascend going into the “chorus” with a neat little minor key dip, and adding that patented gameboy soundchip Crunch that I love so much. It’s great. But then alllll the way until the Dracula fight itself which is another remix of an existing Castlevania song, everything is entirely forgettable, the most absolutely generic stomping through a dungeon type shit you could possibly imagine, or not imagine as the case may be because I sure as shit can’t recall a single note of it. And I don’t mean this in a “it doesn’t Sound Like Castlevania” way because neither of the previous GB Castlevanias really did either but I think Belmont’s Revenge lowkey has some of the best music in the series in there, often eerie and weird and entirely fitting the bold art choices that game was making.

Maybe that’s also part of the problem: Legends LOOKS bland. Not bad! Fine! Okay! Medium! There isn’t anything wrong here. I hate to be that guy who’s like “well why isn’t it as good as the other one” but a lot of the ways that Legends feels bad to me is as this itch under my skin, this way that it feels like you’re wearing your shoes on the wrong feet – like yeah sure I can walk around fine but pretty soon my feet do hurt and I am going to have blisters at the end of it. It’s just an ugly kind of fine. The suggestions of environments that are boring, the gravestones and brick walls and clock tower gears and scary trees all the most basic and unexciting versions of themselves artistically. Coming off of Belmont’s Revenge which I think might actually be the best looking Gameboy game I’ve ever seen, whose greatest strength might actually be how good and subtle and creepy its art is, it’s hard not to look at Dracula’s shitty little throne and be like...that’s where Dracula sits? Do you remember the gigantic, looming, ethereal skeletons and wavering scythes dotting the background in the leadup to Dracula’s room in Belmont’s Revenge? Do you remember how the castle itself was portrayed as a bulbous, insectoid monstrosity, as vile as its own inhabitants, radiating life as much as it did cruelty in Castlevania The Adventure? Where’s the fucking SAUCE, Legends?

Playing Legends right off of Symphony of the Night makes for an interesting juxtaposition, especially considering their American releases were almost right on top of each other. I really don’t like almost any part of the act of playing Symphony, but there is such a passion behind every single element of that game, it’s so overdesigned and lovingly rendered and weird and pulsing with this almost unquantifiable desire to exist. Legends is the exact opposite, a game that feels functionally completely fine to play but otherwise very tired, and bored, and uninterested in being there, which can’t even be true because there are innovations here. There are mixups on the Castlevania formula, a lot of them, and not only ones necessitated by the hardware they made the game for. Looking up the division of Konami that made this game, their first ever project was VANDAL HEARTS and then after that they make almost exclusively ports, sports games, and mobile adaptations of existing Konami franchises, like this. But this was early, it was their second full game. I wonder if they achieved their vision, or if they had a strong vision, or if this studio existed from the beginning to squeeze pennies out of the portable market, make as much money as they thought they could get from easy marks like sports or affection for stuff they already knew people liked.

It’s a bummer, man. It feels wrong that I’m saying all this shit about the game where you fuck Alucard Symphonyofthenight without a condom. Can you believe that? That I can say “Once there was a canon Castlevania game that revealed that Alucard is straight (lmao no wonder they got rid of this one) and he fucked a girl who goes super saiyan like goku from Dragon Ball and it is DEFINITIVELY the worst one in the series.” It’s unbelievable. Sonia deserved better. Can’t believe they cancelled her Dreamcast game. 3D Castlevania girl game launch title for the Sega Dreamcast would have fucked harder than any other game maybe ever forever. Konami has been ruining franchises for decades longer than any of us even realized. It’s so fucked.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA 64

LAST TIME: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT

“It’s is very funny to me that your castlevania journey stalled hard on Symphony of the Night, one of the most beloved and influential games of all time.” These words by a close friend of mine have haunted me for months bro.

Classic Ina Followers may recall that last year I spent the month of November playing every Castlevania game in release order, a project that started when I bought that collection of most of the classic games on a whim and sort of just went to town once I realized how entirely my shit every single thing about the series is. Castlevania’s been something of a blindspot for me – as a kid I played AND QUITE LOVED Castlevania 64 and later Order of Ecclesia, and then specifically Lords of Shadow 2, and maybe a couple years ago I had a really great time with Aria of Sorrow but other than futzing around with the first couple of NES games in a false start at this project that was the full extent of my scattered Castlevania experience.

How much I love Aria really set me up for a surprise then because the reason I haven’t posted about Castlevania in a year is that I actually got through like 60 or 70% of this game right after I finished Bloodlines and I was so entirely turned off that I put it down and just didn’t come back for eleven months. I think if I wasn’t so committed to making this a “play every game in the series” kind of thing I may never have.

BUT I DID THIS WEEK and I ZOOMED THROUGH THIS MOTHER FUCKER and I’m SO TORN BRO. Well, not really, I think actually I mostly just don’t like it, but I hope I can adequately explain why.

Because obviously there is so much to love in Symphony, and so much stuff that’s specific to my personal taste too. Aesthetically, the game is a dream, holy SHIT. Everybody knows how good looking it is, experienced sprite artists taking advantage of the fancy new hardware to push what they’re capable of. You see it everywhere, from obvious stuff like Alucard’s butter-smooth animations to the absolutely METICULOUS details in nearly every background in the game, used to dial up a sense of place and atmosphere in as maximal a way as possible but with a slightly different flavor than we got even from powerhouse games like Bloodlines and Super IV. But I don’t just like how GOOD the game looks, I also like how a lot of the time the game looks kind of messy and bad? There are a TON of reused sprites from Bloodlines in this game and listen man I LOVE Bloodlines but it is a stiffer and more early 90s arcadey looking game. It’s that in a way that suits it but compared to the way original sprites look and move in Symphony things just kind of stand out when they’re contrasted. It’s not just that either – the most realistic visual fidelity the series has seen yet along with a much less strong sense of theming than any of its three mainline predecessors (necessitated, I’m sure, by how much exponentially bigger and more open Symphony is) means they really mash ALLLLL the inspirational shit for this series together in a big soup in a way that feels a lot more overt than ever before. You have grotesque horror imagery, fairy tale mystique, hollywood horror guys, and overt cartoon monsters all chilling in this same castle, and often on the same screens as each other, with no sense of visual cohesion tying them together in a way that just didn't come through as hard on, say the NES.

And I think that fucking rips ass dude. I’m sure I’ve spoken about this in these Castlevania writeups before but I think the fact that Symphony of the Night exists so permanently in the cultural memory as this titanic Important Game that people are still playing, especially with its legendary status in the ever-more-popular speedrun world, that it’s easy to forget that it was at one point a game that like, came out, in 1997, in a moment in history. One where 2D games were spoken of by pretty much everyone as if they were relics on their way out the door. That was surely on the minds of the Symphony of the Night team too, who had this game’s obnoxious 3D cutscenes foisted on them by their corporate managers, who were making a game for the Playstation, a console that’s so powerful but also famously kind of bad at running 2D games, who were surely working on this with the understanding that they may not get many more chances to make a game like this, if they got to make any more Castlevanias like this at all.

You can FEEL this energy vibrating through all of Symphony of the Night; it feels like a swan song, a chance to pay homage to everything everyone loved about every single previous iteration of the series and ALSO to cram in every idea they thought might have been cool in this format before the boss came in and started making people learn how to model skeletons riding motorcycles in 3D. SO there’s just all kinds of weird bullshit in here – yeah sure there’s an input based spell system, uhh puzzles will be tied to the game clock, hide a third of the game behind some really oblique bullshit I promise it will be worth it when they figure it out, oh hey what if the game was an RPG and it had the worst menus of all time. Feels like my man Hagihara simply did not say no to anything anyone asked him if they could put in the game and honestly god bless him.

The addition of Ayami Kojima as the key character artist coupled with a returning Michiru Yamane using the strengths of the Playstation's sound doohickeys (idk shit about that stuff man) to deliver something altogether moodier and synthier than we got from previous Castlevanias create the outrageously intense arch-goth style that people identify with this series for the first REAL time I think. There have always been shades of this, it’s a bit hard to avoid when you’re dealing with the subject matter Castlevania does, and the soundtracks have dipped into this vibe from time to time when they’re not fully rocking out but this is a very distinct artistic shift away from both the original 80s hollywood vibes and the more modern anime stylings the series had leaned on up til this point, and I think these aesthetics suit it really well. It looks and sounds like you made a Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream get drunk at the kind of nightclub where people still do ecstasy.

It’s so fucking boring though. This is the hardest part for me because ON PAPER Symphony is still theoretically doing the kinds of things that I like to see in exploration based games. The castle is huge but the game leads you directly through very little of it, and there are massive chunks of it that have nothing to do or see in them. So often you’ll work your way through some challenging puzzle room or gauntlet of enemies, maybe even fight a boss, and be rewarded with a swords that’s like fifty times shittier than the knife you’ve been rocking for two hours. That’s fine by me, I do like to get a little treat if it’s gonna be something cool or interesting, but I hate feeling like the only reason to explore in a game is to get to the treasure chest or Lore Nugget or whatever at the end of whatever I’m doing. I rarely feel like Symphony of the Night is doing that though, both because the rewards are genuinely terrible almost every single time (including the important ones! There are SO many upgrades and abilities in this game that are just like complete garbage lmao we are truly filling a list we made the castle so big oh piss oh fuck) but also because almost all of the areas in the game are so distinctly designed and full of personality; I WANT to poke around in them, even if I’m always only doing it to soak up the atmosphere and maybe see what kind of big freak I get to stab at the end.

The big problem for me then is that I think the actual act of moving around the castle feels like complete shit almost all of the time. Not the act of moving Alucard – that feels incredible – but the act of moving inside of the space of the castle. I think something was fumbled pretty badly in the transition from tightly designed levels to a big open world that’s intended to be crossed back and forth over many times. There are certainly a lot of cool rooms that offer neat layouts and challenges to overcome, but SO much of this castle is just big hallways with a few guys copy-pasted in them. It’s not like this didn’t ever happen in Castlevania before, but it was way less common, generally speaking, to see enemies just plopped somewhere without a feeling of intent to where and how they were placed, and I think that almost feels like the MAJORITY of enemies in Symphony of the Night. Space fillers. Overwhelming the player with numbers and leaving it up to me to figure out how to deal with it using his robust arsenal and moveset rather than filling the game with more considered encounters. And I understand how that sounds, for sure; by the sounds of things the game had a rushed development as it is, and I think the piece that we got is pretty astounding considering that, but it doesn’t change tedious it is to just get around. And when there IS a challenge that’s satisfying and tough or even just like difficult and a relief to clear, damn I am usually a lot less enamored with them the third or fourth time I have to truck through that area. The Clock Tower is my arch enemy in this game (I was bad at the switch puzzle).

My other big sticking point is that Castlevania is an RPG now but I think this sucks? I think this sucks dude. I so rarely feel like a proper balance is struck in how this plays out. There’s equipment everywhere and it’s all useless. I like finding the secret abilities, that’s cool, but I am not as crazy about filling my inventory up with fifty shirts that all suck ass. The main issue for me though is the way this affects interacting with enemies, where encounters often boil down to getting turbo stomped and dealing scratch damage based on my level or being able to kill guys by stepping on them – rarely does it feel like I’m properly tuned to stretch my resources from one save point to another.

All of this coalesced on my first playthrough when I got to the upside down castle and found that every enemy suddenly killed me in just a few hits and the nature of the designs of every room meant that while things were somewhat cleverly crafted insofar as the upside down layout accounts for all of your abilities, what that actually means is you have to spend a LOT of time as that awful bat or doing your super jump thing and I really just don’t like how any of the extra traversal stuff in this game feels at all! And that was enough for me to take a break that became a couple weeks that became a couple months that became me restarting the game almost exactly one year later. I did finish it this time, but I find that my feelings haven’t changed very much. I just don’t get along with the part of the game where you’re playing it. Which is, unfortunately, basically all of it.

And yet.

And yet there’s that room with the confessional where you can get the good nice guy who gives you the grape juice or the shitty twisted guy who stabs you, but also you can sit in his chair and a lady will show up and SHE might try to stab you and that is also really cool. You can sit in basically every chair in the game except the one you kill at the end and none of them even do anything, except make you look fucking cool. You can look in that telescope and see the guy in his little boat! If you get some peanuts you throw them into the air and you have to catch them in your mouth to get the health boost because I guess Alucard will only interact with peanuts via fun party tricks. If you have your bat buddy equipped and you turn into your bat form he gets really psyched and then when you turn back into a vampire he’s like damn that sucks. There are seemingly infinite little hidden details and skills and secrets tied to equipment and combinations of equipment and certain inputs and shit. Is that the fucking guy from Kid Dracula? I think it is the fucking guy from Kid Dracula. There are so many greebly little details stuffed into this game for seemingly no reason at all other than that it would be cool to have them in there, and it’s truly impossible not to be charmed by them.

I’m similarly charmed by the story, as scant as it is. I think the character sketches here are strong, and while Maria is pretty swagless here these are the coolest takes on Death and Dracula so far easily. I even think the localization is good, like sincerely I think this is a very fun script with a strong sense of character that matches the tone of the rest of the game. Some of the voice actors are certainly weak links but you’re not gonna catch me saying SHIT about the guy doing Dracula here he is fucking EATING. I think the only time I actually laughed because the game caught me on something silly was when Alucard hit us with that fake Edmund Burke quote in the ending; I guess whatever else he was up to in his exile, Alucard was making sure to keep up with 1700s British politics.

I hope that when I get some more distance from Symphony of the Night that’s the stuff that stands out to me. The verve and playfulness on display here; the expansive lineup of Guys, the beautiful background art. I worry that it will be the bad vibes, which I tried my best to resist. I wanted to like this game more than I did but at some point I had to give up the goat and admit to myself that this was the first time I had ever just really wished I wasn’t playing the game while I was in the middle of it. I know a lot of the big players on this team will go on the be involved in like fifty more games iterating on the foundation laid here, and I know for a fact that I really love at least one of them, so I do hope this one’s a fluke. But even if Symphony is a personal low point for me, that’s like, that’s pretty good right? I guess if this is how I’m feeling about one of the most beloved and influential games of all time then we’re in a pretty good spot, right? Only up from here I’m sure.

NEXT TIME: CASTLEVANIA LEGENDS

LAST TIME: BLOODLINES

"I'm going to fucking kill myself" were the words I found myself uttering over and over while I played this game.

Coming off of the third game you'd expect Devil May Cry 4 to be much better than it is. Enter NERO. Moody and arrogant, in essence he is HIM. You know I had a really funny joke regarding Nero but it's too funny and I'm absurdly proud of it so I'm going to save it for later and don't you fucking dare say that it probably wasn't gonna be funny it absolutely fucking is everyone I've told it to has laughed at it fuck you. Anyways this kind of thing is exactly what DMC4, it set ups tons of things which make you feel like this will be "peak peak goatly goat raw fire", you kill demons in the first level that banger of a soundtrack comes in and you are getting into the grove of playing as Nero and just when you've had enough of the foreplay the game rips your nuts apart by having dogshit level design and enemies which range from mediocre to annoying

Devil Bringer is really something I felt was missing in DMC3, a way to bridge the gap between you and the enemies outside of mashing Stinger. The game is smart with it as almost every enemy in the game feels like they're designed with Devil Bringer in mind, right down to the bosses. Speaking of which, how are they bosses? Well they start off all right and it all goes downhill when I got to Mission 6 and went "oh my god this is so dogshit". Agnus can SHOVE those fucking swords UP HIS ASSHOLE and fiddle them around like a fucking DILDO and I hope that he doesn't have a G-spot cause my god that fucking FUCK does not deserve any form of pleasure. Then in the last 8 missions they start fucking reusing bosses like crazy to the point where the second final/final boss (depending on who you ask) is just a fucking beefier version of a boss you've fought before and they made said boss even MORE dog shit fuck your fucking BUBBLES fuck YOU.

Right when you get the hang of Nero the game throws you a curve ball and gives you control of Dante and baby? This was the best Dante yet, gameplay wise. "YEEESSSS BRO YESS 😍🥰🥵" was my reaction once I remembered how to play Dante. I should add that I didn't buy this game myself to play it but got it from a friend, and I noticed that she had bought souls with real world money, so I had an abundance of souls at the beginning which I spent into upgrading myself. In hindsight I'm kind of grateful for it as it gave me the chance to get my bearings in the game without being overwhelmed but when I got to Dante's section I was running low on souls. Fuck you Angela could you have seriously not bought MORE??? WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO FOR THE LAST FUCKING HALF OF THE GAME?? PLAY IT NORMALLY? Fuck you it costs like 2 fucking pounds, are you really THAT broke???? And don't you dare act like you don't have 2 pounds, I am the poor broke boy from a third world country, NOT you. So please sell that fucking Nando's gift card already and give ME the fucking money you are fucking RUINING my gaming experience.

Remember how I said how each enemy was designed with Nero in mind? Well that comes back to bite this game in the ass when you play as Dante cause it's something that becomes really apparent especially when you start to fight old bosses again. Don't worry my DEAR reader, I didn't do a gamer rage moment and throw my controller. No, I'm a civilised man. I just beat the shit out of cardboard boxes like a REAL man cause this game is for REAL men like me and nobody should dare challenge me on that fucking front.

Level design and atmosphere is something that's also worse in this game. As bad as DMC2 is I will at least admit that due to the fact it reused a lot of shit from DMC1, it remained just as atmospheric. DMC3 was also really atmospheric! And I know DMC4 came out during the height of ugly brown Unreal Engine 3 games but goddamn does this game not hold up as well graphically as 1 and 3. I could really go on about how shit some of the puzzles in these levels are like holy fuck DICE WOO DICE it's fucking YAHTZEE ALL OVER AGAIN but I feel like I'd add nothing to the discussion except dry humping a limp corpse while I go "what's up my fellow Devil May Cry-ers I am also on the team".

Now we come to the story and there's really nothing much to be said. I don't CARE about old dude, I DON'T care about evil scientist, I don't CARE about the fact the girl who has 3 minutes of screentime. Nero aside, all new characters are a bust and even old characters take a hit. Still, I fucking laughed out loud when Dante used Royal Guard in his boss fight. Although, there is one new character I'd like to talk about...Gloria.

Let me start off by saying that, as you may have surmised, me and "sex" don't have the best of relations. I never had sex-ed in school, I didn't know what a "clit" was until I was 16, when a girl said that she'd make me her bitch I just replied with "woah cool", when a girl confessed to ME, I FUCKING RAN AWAY. So to have Gloria pop up and have my mind for the first time in a while go "Hmm while I usually don't find characters attractive this Gloria person is very pretty I hope she's good" is no easy feat. "Is this it?" I wondered. Like Nero, did I finally awaken a demon inside me, but instead of being a cool fucking arm that can grab things, the demon inside me is called "sex drive". Maybe I could finally give this sex thing a shot, maybe I don't have to be scared of anything sexual, even while alone, anymore. In that moment, I got Nero, I became him. I looked at my hand like it was Devil Bringer as I wondered if I should give this "jacking off thing" a go. Is this a new chapter for me, Quade Pad? Did Devil May Cry 4...change my life? As I slowly came to terms with this new side of me, it all came crashing down via the fucking costume select screen where I got spoiled on Gloria's true identity and oh my god jokes aside I laughed so fucking hard. Which made me realise a new truth.

"White women are mid"
Thank you Devil May Cry 4, for opening my eyes and changing my life.

The final mission pretty much cemented my view of the game. Truth be told I'm going through a rough patch in my life at the moment, and during these trying times where I've distanced myself as much as possible from everyone who loves me, I'm playing one of the worst boss fights I've ever seen in a video game. FUCK that boss FUCK you FUCK Dante FUCK old men FUCK statues FUCK everything FUCK me and Dante WILL WE FUCK AGAIN?

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to kill myself and this review is my last mark on this world. Also it's my birthday! Please say "Happy Birthday Quade!" in the replies. It'd really make me feel better! Cheers and god bless Devil May Cry. I will see you next time.

Before playing this game, I tried to get into MHWorld and failed despite nearly finishing the base game, so I wasn’t expecting to get much out of MHRise when I played it at the request of a friend who definitely wasn’t going to follow up on playing with me, but I was motivated primarily by a dearth of things to occupy me in the time between semesters. Turns out, this game is pretty nice.

The first two things that made a good impression on me were the better pacing and the movement. The game rushed through tutorial prompts to get me into playing the “real game” as soon as possible. The information overload isn’t for everybody but I preferred it to the unskippable cutscenes and tutorial missions of World. In general, most shitty inconveniences from previous MH have been filtered out of this game.

When first forced to do a gathering quest, I was surprised by the game’s map design and movement. The wirebug swinging and dog-riding made moving around the map, at worst, a fast and painless ordeal, with room for improving your efficiency at routing and tons of collectible resources hidden in vertical spaces encouraging you to swing and climb your way around the locale. Moving around the map was a tedious and boring necessity in older MH, but in Rise, it's comparable to and perhaps better than a game like BotW who’s entire appeal is exploration. Having nearly every surface be climbable at the cost of stamina reminded me of BotW, but unlike BotW, Rise’s movement is fast and arcadey, and wants you to get to the real star of the show (the combat) as soon as possible. That alone made dumping time into this game much more palpable, since I'm never dreading the dull moments that I had in MHW.

When it comes to combat, I should preface that I primarily played insect glaive, longsword, and greatsword. Everybody knows that MH’s gameplay structure is a standard rpg compulsion loop, but the secret sauce imo is that MH’s compulsion loop exists to give a natural incentive to mastering its deeper systems in a way that most action games don’t do. Usually, a scoring/ranking system grades your gameplay in order to incentivize you to play better even if you can complete the game by playing badly, but MH’s depth comes specifically from optimizing your use of the weapon’s moveset with knowledge of the monster’s quirks in order to kill it faster. Strong gear is gonna require a lot of materials, and there will usually be some material with a very low drop rate that you will need to grind for, making you fight the same monster over and over again. Naturally, you’re gonna want to learn how to kill that monster as efficiently as possible.


This is where MH’s monster and weapon design comes in. Monster attacks are generally easy to avoid if the only challenge were to be surviving, but dodging while also placing yourself in position for a rewarding punish is more difficult than it is in a game like Souls due to less i-frames on your standard dodge, slower movement with your weapon out, and the nature of enemy attacks. In order to get that meaty punish after avoiding an attack, you will need to take advantage of your weapon’s quirks, and all the ones I've tried are full of wonderful nuances to take advantage of, allowing your ability to kill monsters to effectively scale with your skill.

For a simple example, the Teostra (a late game boss) flame breath attack where they sweep the area in front of them from side to side with a highly damaging beam of fire. Running away from it works, but will leave me unable to get much damage after his recovery. With the Insect Glaive, taking advantage of this attack is easy, as that weapon allows me to leap above fire breath and hit their head with aerial attacks. It makes me pay attention to how monsters control vertical spaces and how to take advantage of that.

With the longsword, I want to counter the flames with a well timed and highly rewarding samurai slash that nullifies the flame’s damage, but that will require me to place myself in harm’s way in order to “parry” the attack. Since he begins his attack from the sides, I position myself in the center to make it easy for me to react regardless of which side he is coming from. Good timing and reflexes are heavily rewarded by the Longsword.

With the greatsword, I need time to charge up its highly damaging charge slash, which requires me to be safe from damage while I charge. So I want to get to the blindspot at the side of his head as soon as possible to do that, which made me pay very close attention to the tell for the flame attack. If I successfully recognize the tell, I can wirebug dash into the side from which he starts his attack, where the return stroke will miss and give me ample time to charge my counter attack. Gauging my punish windows and positioning carefully to see what kind of damage I can get away with is the main skill encouraged by Greatsword.

Different weapons emphasize different skills, can take advantage of different aspects of the monster’s moveset, and the same weapon can have multiple correct responses to the same attack, but give higher reward to more intelligent responses. This is where I found the appeal of MH’s combat.

The game’s lack of difficulty for most of its monsters is a noted criticism that I agree with. Hunts give you too much time and too many resources, which can make it pretty easy (and relatively unfun) to blow through every monster once, and consider yourself done with the game. This game really benefits from giving yourself a build goal and grinding for it. In most other combat focused games, this could be a deal breaker, but given what MH combat is about, I don't think traditional boss difficulty is required to enjoy mastering the game.

Speaking of which, I'm not a big RPG build-making guy, but I do like what MH allows for with its builds. For example: I went for a standard meta critical hit build. The premise of the build is to make a weapon with a high crit chance, and pair it with gear that increases your crit chance when hitting weakpoints and makes it so that your weapon doesn’t degrade in sharpness when hitting weakpoints. This makes your damage pathetic when hitting anything that isn’t a weakpoint, but highly rewards precise hits, making this a build tailored for higher skilled play, but punishing to other playstyles. There are other gear skills that allow you to break resistant parts easily and deal more damage to them, allowing for a less efficient but more flexible style. I see a lot of potential in how the builds can facilitate a nice variety of playstyles and allow the player to tailor the game to their preferred approach.

The biggest criticisms I have with the game come from the camera and the console. The default “target camera” type usually isn’t bad, and you can adjust it to be more zoomed out and turn more quickly (which I highly recommend), but some of the game’s later bosses, most notably the poster boy Magnamalo, are insanely mobile and attack in ways that are difficult to track with traditional target camera, feeling more designed for the lock-on camera mode. The issue is that MH’s implementation of lock-on is kinda shit.
The game requires you to be precise with hitting monster parts and the lock-on camera often gets in the way of that. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were allowed to toggle lock on with the tap of a button, but it can’t be turned off and instead switches the lock-on to other major monsters in the map. Bizarre fucking design that could be easily fixed, dunno how they let that one through. Just make tapping L1 toggle lock-on, that input currently does nothing in the Lock-On Camera type.

Also the Switch kinda sucks for playing the game, at least for my situation. On top of fps drops, it makes it very inconvenient to play the game with my circle of friends. It would be so much easier if it was a PC game where I could be in a discord call, but it being a switch game makes the process of communicating with friends while playing awkward as hell. Because of this I only got to play with pubs, and never experienced any real coordination to gauge what Monster Hunter gains from the co-op play that made it so popular in japan. Thankfully a PC release is planned, and I’d like to play the game with 60fps if I’m alive for it. If you’re on the fence with MHRise I recommend you wait for the PC release.

You made it this far? You read something this long? Weird. Here is some extra random thoughts:

I love the music, it's catchy.

The Nargacuga and Valstrax are easily the coolest looking monsters. The Valstrax’s attack animations are so fucking cool.

Zinogre looks kinda ugly and overdesigned to me, but still managed to be cool to me despite that because of his moveset and concept. Really fun monster to fight.

fuck the Tigrex. i hate that his name is “Tiger” and “Rex”. i hate that he has a jurassic park trex head pasted on a wyvern body. i hate that he has no consistent theme and all his abilities are random bullshit. He can throw rocks because he’s smart?? but he also bites walls like an idiot?? He glows red for no reason?? And worst of all most of his moveset is him spamming a charge attack where his entire body is a hitbox. even his music fucking sucks. fuck you you ugly sack of shit.

This game is fucked. What’s more fucked is that I really like it.

A lot of what this game does appeals to my ideal idea of a comfy game: A crazy amount of mechanical depth and variety comes paired with a behemoth amount of content that gives you adequate space to explore all that depth while also ticking off progression. You will get into a loop where you’re always being introduced to new encounters and new tools to play them with and once you’re in there this game is something special. Issue is uhhh….you won’t get there, not for 10 hours and not without the help of a dozen online resources.

idk where to begin with the new player experience because it's so fucked on so many levels. This game has some of the worst pacing I have ever experienced and is filled to the brim with awful elements surrounding the core gameplay. This is an unfortunate side effect of it being an anniversary title, as it spends a lot of its first hours homaging MH1/2’s quests and pacing, subjecting you to shitty gimmick monsters that were coded 16 years ago and forcing you through slow paced gathering quests with obfuscated objectives.
Remember in MH1 how you first encountered Rathalos when he interrupted an egg delivery quest? Well, you probably don’t because you didn’t play that shit, but this game is gonna make you do that four times for each of the flagship monsters of the game!


The experience from 1★ to 3★ Village is so painful that I think you have to either be an MH veteran, have friends egging you through it, or are a little crazy to go through that shit on your own. I’m probably in the “a little crazy” camp. Combine all the above with the fact that the player is subjected to the worst content in the game right at the start while they are still new and uncomfortable with every aspect regardless of how well designed it is, and this game’s starting hours are a fucking disaster.

What’s most tragic about many of the game’s issues is that it feels like the devs knew about them and included secret ways to fix them.
Sick of not knowing where the monster is and forgetting to paintball them? Psychoserums do that for you and you can get them for practically free.
Hate the idea of grinding for mega potions and whetstones? There is a quest here that lets you get an infinite amount from a trader, and there is also a free pack of essential items hidden in the most random menu option.
Hate the fact that the ore you want is a 3% drop chance? There is this random short quest here that gives you a 100% chance of getting a whole bunch of them, and there is also an item that lets you duplicate them if you already got some!
At first, I was in disbelief that anyone could get into this game, but after figuring out all this stuff, I can see how this game is playable by people who don’t devote their days entirely into Monster Hunter, but that still begs the question...Why? Why hide all the features that make this game not a pain in the ass? I will never know.

On top of that, if you played this game on your own, you will likely not even see the potential in the combat considering the game doesn’t tell you anything about the crazy movesets it provides you with, and without the use of community guides and resources you will probably play like a headless chicken and not get much out of it.

At the very least, in terms of community resources there is a lot of good stuff online that I think is necessary for playing the game. A well laid out spreadsheet of all important quests for progression, unlocks, e.t.c, and a highly informative set of guides for each weapon that lay out the differences between every style and the important skills and sets to look out for each. Most important of all is God’s Gift: Kiranico, a japanese-made resource where you can search up practically anything and get the info you want. What's this monster’s hitzones? Where do you get this item? What’s the upgrade path for this weapon? Which quest gives the best rewards for this resource? It's amazing how much effort was put into it.
But the fact this is all information is stuff you need to access outside the game is ridiculous and heavily discouraging to say the least.

Despite spending the last six paragraphs trashing the game, the unfortunate truth is...I really like it. Once you get past it all and get in the groove, it really is good, Trust Me Bro™.


On top of Monster Hunter’s classic diversity of weapons, this game provides Hunter Arts (supers that can be used after filling up a bar) and Styles (alternate weapon movesets). Very few of the styles feel ill-considered, and I found a good reason to want to try every one of them (though some are clearly above the rest in terms of immediate fun factor). The combinations you can create with styles, arts, and sets make the game feel like an immense playground of overwhelming possibilities where there is always a new thing you want to try. These elements enhance each other too, as the set building becomes much more interesting when you factor in how you can use it to optimize the specific style/art combination you are going for.


I want to illustrate a quick example in the writing but it's honestly hard for me to describe without presenting unintelligible word salad to anyone who hasn’t played the game, but the point is that as you get invested into one aspect you will probably find yourself getting pulled into others with how greatly all these systems synergize.
You pick a weapon/style combo you enjoy, discover a weird super that is meant to be made into a powerhouse with use of a specific set to play around it. Find another super and you will start connecting the dots with how a different style/set can make for a viable and completely different way of playing the weapon. It really puts the RPGshit in these games to the best use possible, combining them with its core combat mechanics to allow you to experiment with playstyles while also giving you incentive to grind out more content to make all the shit you want to test those ideas with.

It's also a great fit for the absurd amount of content in this game. The game contains monsters from games all across the series, designed by all sorts of people for different console gens and under different design philosophies. The diversity in encounters would easily turn into a negative if not for the fact that the player’s array of options that allow them to adapt wasn’t equally expansive. Having trouble with a flying monster shitting your day up? Maybe try Aerial Style. Finding this monster’s attacks too aggressive and difficult to avoid? Try Adept style to counter it and get insane evade windows and parries.. Just about every encounter in this game can be hard countered and it works well to make me try new things I haven’t considered before.

The grinding experience in this game ranges in quality, but I have more good memories than bad ones as targeting specific parts can change the experience of a fight dramatically. One highlight I had was trying to grind for Gore Magala horns which required me to intentionally get afflicted by his debuffs in order to activate his awakened state earlier to force him to reveal his horns (which are usually hidden), and play around traps to get the opportunity to break them before he gets knocked out of awakened state, the whole thing felt like a secret hard mode version of the fight. That shit probably sounds too fucked up for most people, and the drop rates for some stuff is unreasonably low, but I really enjoyed it when it was used to give a new spin on fights.

Finally, and this is just a me thing, I do quite enjoy the visuals of this game as old and varying in quality as they are. Despite the re-textures there is a lot of 6th-gen charm in the maps that appeals to me with a wide variety of vibes. The forest maps tend to make me think of MGS3 a lot, and shoutout to Verdant Hill’s awesome ambient sounds. The hodge-podge that this game is doesn’t make for a cohesive whole but I ultimately liked it.

Before I finish I do want to put it out there that aside from having a knowledgeable friend to ease you into the game, there is the option of playing this game on emulator instead. Playing on emulator gets you the ability to use a save transfer to skip much of the game’s shittier content, use a save editor to tailor the experience to yourself by skipping the fishing/mining, as well as the nice bonus of 60fps. If you use Ryujinx to emulate, it's relatively easy to run and comes with built-in online support so you can play with anybody else who uses the emulator (without having to go through hamachi or anything of the sort!). Having played on both, I think it's a far superior way of playing the game, and I’d probably play it on PC all the time if not for access to the wider playerbase on the Switch (since it's hard to find friends willing to download an emulator to play this garbage with me).

But yeah umm, Capcom does it to me again, a game that is fucking terrible in so many ways but also addicting in how well it succeeds at what it sets out to do. I probably won’t need another game for a while.

CASTLEVANIA MARATHON- 12/22

Bit of a letdown after Symphony, but it's only slightly less cheeks than 64.

Nathan walks really slowly and jumps surprisingly high, which gives a really weird feeling. The Belmonts all strutted everywhere but they didn't jump up like Nathan does. Alucard waks faster and jumps higher. Nathan walks like a Belmont but jumps like Alucard, which leads to a disorienting movement system, and double-tapping to run in a map like CotM's is more than a little annoying.

The card system is in theory very fun- mixing and matching an impressive amount of base effects with an equal amount of elemental alterations is actually a really cool system that I'd like to see in a later game, but the problem is that you have to grind out pretty badly for each card- and there are 24. Rough.

As well as this, the music fumbles for the first time in a while in Castlevania and the bosses aren't as memorable as earlier games. The final fight with Dracula is terrible and is one of the worst bosses in the series, rivalled by only Dracula X's final fight.

Circle of the Moon is a prime candidate for a remake, in my opinion. There are a lot of cool ideas that went to waste, and I would love to see a return to Nathan and Hugh's story in future.

Next- Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
Previous- Castlevania (1999)

I'm very impressed with MercurySteam for how they managed to still make a fresh Metroid game and much so after playing Samus Returns. An excellent step forward for the series and the most genius way to steer the Metroid series back on track.

The areas have no visual identity which wouldn't have been an issue if the soundtrack was up to standard but it misses the mark here as well but I'd say the EMMI zones do stand out more. Aside from those details the levels are still very well made as standard for one of my favorite series. I hope that concepts like the EMMIs stay with only Dread as I have come to really appreciate their existence on repeated playthroughs but still wouldn't want to see them again in future games.

The game controls amazingly smooth, the boss fights are a new high, and the direction is so well done it's really a dream come true.

This game is pretty important to me, for all of the wrong reasons. I remember finding out about this game the day it came out, and rushing to the store to buy it immediately. I was a huge Metroid fan, and was excited for a new 2D game. I got the game home, played it for about 40 minutes, and then never touched the game again.

Samus Returns was the first time I'd ever bought a game on launch, and it's probably the reason I can count on my fingers how many games I've bought at release. It was a huge moment for me in understanding that not every cool looking new release in a series I like will actually be good.

So what's wrong here? Well, a lot. Samus Returns is marred by a lot of mostly smaller issues that add up to ruin the experience. The biggest issue here comes down to the design philosophy. Almost all of Samus Returns' problems come down to it trying to reinvent the wheel; both for 2D Metroid, and for Metroid II itself.

Metroid II is in sort of an awkward place. It's a lot more refined than Metroid 1, and as a result in much less of a need of its own "Zero Mission", while at the same time, the game is still a bit too far from Super to stand up with the later 2D games.

M2's biggest issues are in its structure. The game functions by having the player travel to one area, kill all the Metroids there, and the travel to the next area and so on. This isn't a terrible issue, and M2 is still a good game, but it can definitely make the game feel somewhat stale at times.

The problem here is that solving this issue would require one to basically make an entirely new game, negating the point of remaking M2 in the first place. This is very prevalent in AM2R, the unofficial remake of M2. For as good as AM2R is, it never quite breaks free of M2's structural issues. Samus Returns on the other hand takes M2's issues... and makes them way worse.

One of M2's biggest strengths is in its gameplay's atmosphere. As the player proceeds in their mission of killing Metroids, the environment naturally opens itself up, as the lava recedes through a series of earthquakes (possibly the result of the Metroid Queen mourning her offspring). While the earthquakes occur conveniently after all the Metroids in an area have been killed, the lack of an indicator of how many Metroids are exactly needed for each earthquake helps create a sense of the player really feel like the planet is naturally opening up to them, allowing them to explore deeper and deeper.

Samus Returns takes this advantage of the structure and throws it out the window. Areas are no longer connected through sprawling caves, but rather the chozo elevators like every other game. Earthquakes no longer occur naturally, but the now purple liquid is drained through a contraption that requires Metroid DNA to activate. This last change really destroys a lot of Metroid II's soul. Metroid II is a game about killing Metroids, and making their DNA an overt requirement for progression makes them almost feel like keys the player needs to continue instead of the main mission they're supposed to be.

Samus Returns biggest mistake though is in the parry mechanic. This is one of those mechanics that just makes you ask "why?" 2D Metroid never needed a parry mechanic, and further more there is no way to sensibly use such a mechanic in a 2D Metroid game. So how does Samus Returns do it? Well that's simple! By giving almost every enemy in the game a parryable attack, ehich allows the player to make a counterattack that one-shots the enemy, and then making every other method of killing them unviable. Despite likely being added to diversify Samus' combat capabilities, but ironically ends up making every fight feel repetitive and stale.

One of the big things that makes Metroid upgrades feel rewarding and fun is that they give you a new way of dealing with ememies. As you go through the game, you go from having to stop and deal with enemies to being able to blast your way through them with ease. In Samus Returns, every time an upgrade would give you this feel, the next area replaces all the enemies with tankier identical copies of themselves, redesigned solely to prevent you from ussingthis new method of defeat. It's not until the Screw Attack is gotten in the endgame the player is truly given the option of tearing through enemies, and even this is undercut by the choice to make some enemies take two hits to kill with it (literally why??? That feels counter intuitive to both the mechanics and entire point of the screw attack). As a result, almost every enemy encounter for the first 80% of the game goes the same way: Stop, wait for the enemy to use their parryable attack, parry, and shoot. It really brings the gameplay to a halt, and feels super unsatisfying to pull off.

Another major issue with Samus Returns is the controls. Rather than be controlled on a dpad like any 2D platforming game should be, Samus Returns plays exclusively on the circle pad. This feels.... awful, and it's certainly not worth the reason it's done. Thanks to joystick, Samus can now aim in any direction! This of course, requires the player to press a button that brings movement to a complete stand still, and of course also means that enemies are thrown at awkward angles, require Samus to use said mechanic that screeches gameplay to a halt. It all just feels so counter intuitive to the entire series.

There is SOME good here, of course. The Aeon mecganic that lets you see the map and breakable blocks around you is a really strong mechanic, but gets muddled alongside mechanics that feel like unnecessary gimmicks for getting items. The boss fights are also really good, and are certainly the only place where the parry mechanic feels good, but even these have their issues. The Gamma Metroid fights get really stupid one they start running, requiring you to run between 2 or 3 obvious boss fight rooms for literally no reason ither than to pad out the fight. And don't even get me started on how stupid the choice to add a certain someone as the new final boss is.

This game could have easy been something good with just some minor fixes, but as it is, all the issues add up to make the game thoroughly unenjoyable for me. I was skeptical oof Metroid Dread when it was announced because of this game, and actually playing it through to the end certainly hasn't helped that, but hopefully MercurySteam will end up proving me wrong with that one.