Surprised by this one since I'd heard it was a bit middling. It's actually a ton of fun! Feels like it channeled a lot of the NES Castlevania energy, which I guess makes sense, since it's technically a remake. In actuality, it's a completely different experience after the first stage. So I guess it would be more of a reimagining? I don't know what the appropriate terminology here is but it's good shit regardless. Excellently crafted stages filled with unique enemies and combat encounters, satisfying sound effects with phenomenal arrangements of classic tracks, and a diverse set of ways to move through each of it's many challenges. It has the same problem as the older games do though, in that it's too fucking hard. You get a bit more leeway than some of these older titles, as the amount of dodging is lessened and there are more healing items scattered about, but it still doesn't change the fact that the game has some pretty ridiculous requirements for you. The clock tower stage ends with what is both the hardest room in the game, followed by the hardest boss in the game, and dying to the boss sends you back to the beginning of the hardest room in the game. This is dumb and also not fun and also annoying. Don't do this if you're reading this and also designing a video game right now. Some of this is remedied by difficulty options in the PlayStation version, but the easy mode feels like a hard mode in basically any other platformer. Regardless of the difficulty problem, I did power through with some help from my buddy, "pause and create a save state", but it didn't feel as abusive on the saving as I get sometimes. That's because repeating parts of this game was fun to do because, for the most part, it has pretty strong design. I might even like it better than the original Castlevania! 4/6