I’ll say this for Simon’s dad, Christopher Belmont and our star in The Adventure: he has a significantly less fucked time of it than his dad had or especially his son will have. I’ve played a handful of castlevanias from across the series timeline and it’s kind of a general blindspot for me – I just don’t care to read about stuff I don’t care about, and for most of my life I didn’t care about Castlevania. I didn’t KNOW that this game EXISTED until like a month ago and I didn’t realize it was REVILED until like last week when I saw a friend comment on Detchibe’s review which as a contrarian-by-circumstance I’m very excited to finally read. Having played it now it seems absurd to me that this thing is sitting at a 1.6 average rating? Damn guys.

I think this is a pretty smart adaptation of Castlevania to the constraints of first year gameboy development. Sure you move slow as molasses but it’s only a little different from how every other castlevania moves, only a little bit more extreme, and your enemies certainly slow down to accommodate you. There aren’t any subweapons but the bad guys you fight don’t necessitate them, and if you keep your whip powered up you get a sick fireball attack that shoots from it. You lose this if you get hit even once, and that just goes back to the central focus of the game. The thing it asks of you, again and again, is to master its movement. Get good at jumping, especially, and I think it’s a fair ask. The game is tuned around your stripped back abilities, an adaptation rather than an attempt to condense the full NES experience to the Gameboy. If there’s one black mark here that I never quite acclimated to it’s that Christopher’s hitbox is enormous, a giant invisible rectangle that occupies a lot of negative space around especially his head and shoulders, and this fucked me up primarily when I was trying to duck under projectiles. As if in answer to this, though, the game’s candles drop a pretty generous number of healing items, something unique to this entry in the 8-bit life of the series so far.

There’s a variety to the game that surprised me, too. Level 2’s cave maze admittedly sucks lol but level 3 being a really evil take on the ever-present gear theme in this series to first create a ceiling of crushing spikes that can only be stopped if you destroy the pillar gear that is bringing it down on you in time, followed by a really challenging (but imo not unfair) vertical platforming section as the instakill spikes rise from the bottom of the screen to greet you. Level 4 is similar but with horizontal scrolling and more gothic set dressing and I WILL say that the enemy difficulty is a little wild here but just like every other Castlevania game you get infinite continues, so to some degree it is a nonissue I think. Bosses are a similarly mixed bag; 1 and 3 are standard gameboy type guys who just sort of run or fly at you and do their attack while 2 and Dracula have patterns and interesting gimmicks to them.

ALSO the music is STILL GOOD and this is the sickest Castlevania design so far, a bulbous mass of lumps and protrusions, very cool looking, even if you only see it in silhouette.

So I dunno man, is this the least of the three NES games plus this one? Absolutely, for sure, no question. But I find a lot to like in it. I think in it being the least it’s easy to throw the kid dracula out with the evil bathwater but to do so overlooks that this game did try to creatively tackle the problems inherent to making one of these games as they existed then on this system and I think that for the MOST part they pulled it off well if you’re willing to practice it some. I think Christopher did a great job, but considering he’s got a sequel in two years, he is about on par with his son as a vampire hunter, because presumably Dracula is going to also not be really dead for him. Who said these guys are the best vampire hunters? They’re two for two family members who can’t seal the deal.

PREVIOUSLY: SIMON'S QUEST

NEXT TIME: DRACULA'S CURSE