Super Castlevania IV

Platform:  Super NES
Developer:  Konami
Released:  1991
Genre:  Platformer

The Game
Dracula has once again risen to plague the land.  Simon, a member of the Belmont clan and sworn to face and defeat the evil vampire, must take up the legendary whip Vampire Killer and meet his destiny in Dracula's castle.

Super Castlevania IV used to occupy a somewhat strange area in the Castlevania series.  It was built to be a remake of the original Castlevania and was considered so over in Japan.  When it was ported over to America, however, Konami's American branch presented it as a sequel to the previous games in the series.  It continued in this dual role for some time, but now it is universally considered to be a remake only.  Which is a good thing, really, because otherwise it would have made an already confusing timeline even more convoluted than necessary.

It still carries the moniker "Super Castlevania IV" here in the English speaking countries despite this clarification.

The Characters
Simon Belmont is our hero, purportedly one of the greatest if not the greatest member of his clan.  If nothing else, he seems to be the most highly revered.  But like most silent action game protagonists, he's got very little in the way of characterization.  About all we know about the guy is that he's plenty determined to plant the tip of his whip right in between Dracula's beady little eyes.

Dracula is Dracula.  You know the drill, surely . . . swanky nobleman type with mysterious powers and an unending streak of evil several miles wide.  He also drinks the blood of the living, leads an army of monstrous minions, and has some prime Gothic real estate.

The Writing
You are Simon.  You gotta kill Dracula.  Doesn't get much simpler than that.  Nor does it get any more complex.  But that's to be expected for this type of game.

The Gameplay
SCIV is notable for upgrading Simon's abilities from the original Castlevania with many of those abilities becoming staples of the series from that point forward.  Instead of just flicking his whip out in one way over and over again, Simon can now attack in almost any direction . . . though whipping downward in any way requires him to be up in the air.  He can also hold the whip out and flick it around lightly (while still able to cause damage) in whatever direction the player presses, one of the innovations that was carried over in several later titles in the series.  He can latch on to fixed points and swing Indy Jones style from platform to platform.  And so on and so forth.

Overall, I was half-impressed and half-disappointed in the gameplay.  Being able to whip in virtually any direction was a most definitely welcome addition, the whip flicking worked well both offensively and defensively, and Simon moves very well.

But!

You can jump onto stairs, you can jump down from them, but you can't jump up from them, causing a bit of frustration.  It doesn't matter how dire the situation is and how helpful it might be for you to jump up to a higher platform from the stairs to get away from congregating enemies, Simon is stubbornly stuck to those steps as if they were all made of glue.  This becomes especially annoying with the stairs that connect right to the edge of a platform.  Several times I found myself trying to jump from that platform to another one, but because I was just a single pixel to far to one side, I would end up flailing helplessly on the jump button while Simon stood there on the top step and looked at me all confused, saying "What?  What?!  I don't know what you're wanting me to do!"

Whenever Simon gets hit, he flies around like the victim of a 10,000 volt current.  I understand that this is supposed to be a hazard and is a common element of both a lot of platformers in general and Castlevania in particular, but in this game, it really does seem like he's been caught in a miniature explosion, throwing him several yards to one side.  The overblown nature of this effect is especially felt in areas where getting hit is both almost entirely unavoidable and invariably results in getting tossed down the nearest pit.  Simon really should have taken his anti-convulsants before going into Dracula's lair.

I was both impressed and disappointed right from the beginning by by dual layered fortress level (1-2).  Though a simple gimmick, I rather liked it and it gave some extra depth (Get it?  Two layers?  Depth?!) to the level, but sadly it was not repeated again in later levels.  I thought it was at one point and was all excited until I realized that there was just stuff hanging down on another, non-playable layer in front of me.  I find it kind of strange that they would not take further advantage of this game mechanic throughout the rest of the game.

Still, overall, it's not too horrible bad.  It all evens out to a pretty standard platform experience.

The Challenge
This game can't seem to make up its mind whether it's trying to be super-easy or super-hard.  The difficulty curve does indeed gradually curve upward overall, but in specific instances it will shoot up and down erratically at breakneck speed.

One of the parts where it seems to be easier than it really should is whenever you die and start the level over.  At the beginning of the game and every time he dies, Simon starts out with a basic leather version of his whip.  It's short and it's not very powerful, but pretty much without fail the very first candle you snuff out will provide you with a whip upgrade.  And then within the next five to ten candles, you get the second and final whip upgrade.  If they're just going to hand out these upgrades like it's Halloween and you're wearing your very best vampire hunter costume, then what's the point of having the upgrades at all?  I think I killed approximately seven monsters in all with anything less than the fully powered up whip.

One of the parts where it seems to be harder than it really should is whenever spikes are involved.  Fuck you, spikes!

End bosses seem to be a mixed bag.  One might be somewhat challenging, the next taken down with a mere flick of your whip in its general direction, and the one after that a nightmare from which you may never wake.

The Graphics
I gotta say, the graphics are pretty nice.  Each area is pretty creepy, the sprites are fairly lively, and there is some good use of the SNES' Mode 7 feature, including one stage that has the background constantly rolling in the background, making it look like you're moving through a massive funhouse tube.  The boss sprites are pretty imaginative and well made . . . I can see why a lot of them were reused in Symphony of the Night.

The Music
I wasn't really paying attention to the music for the most part (oops!), but what I recall of it was pretty good.

The Bottom Line
I'm gonna be up front here . . . the straight platformer Castlevania games aren't my favorite things in the world.  I'm one of those guys who much prefer the Metroidvania style entries that eventually took over the series.  Still, this wasn't half bad.  Good graphics, decent gameplay, and the addition of some of the things that I like about the later Metroidvania games all add up to a pretty good installment.  Points off for being just one of a few remakes of the original Castlevania, but still a pretty good game despite that.  Worth playing.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

Platform:  Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2003
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
During an eclipse in the year 2035, Soma Cruz and Mina Hark- er, Hakuba get sucked into Dracula's castle.  Finding themselves trapped, Mina stays by the entrance while Soma explores the building, trying to find a way out.  He meets several people tied to the mystery of the castle along the way, begins to display powers he never knew he had, and gets inexorably drawn into a dark destiny that's been waiting for him his whole life.

Aria of Sorrow is the second GBA Castlevania made by the folks who created Symphony of the Night, and it is the third and last Castlevania game made for the GBA overall.  It has a sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, which was made for the DS.

The Characters
Soma Cruz is our protagonist, ladies and gentlemen.  He's your typical white-haired Japanese pretty boy type, but he still manages to be a pretty interesting character for all that.  He's got the powers, the destiny, and the dark secret that even he doesn't know, which all gives him some pretty decent inner and outer conflicts.

Mina Harkne- dangit, did it again, I mean Mina Hakuba is his childhood friend (there seem to be a lot of those in Castlevania) and one of the keepers of the shrine from which the two of them get transported to the castle.  She spends most of her time giving hints (provided by one of the other characters) and healing Soma when he stops by to see her at the castle's entrance.  Basic two-dimensional support character.

Graham Jones is the primary antagonist for most of the game.  He tries to buddy up with Soma at first, but once he realizes that the younger man is absorbing the powers of the castle's monsters, he gets ticked.  Why?  Because he was born on the day that Dracula was last defeated (supposedly forever) back in 1999, and he intends to be the one to absorb all those powers, as well as the very essence of Dracula in the hopes of becoming Dracula himself.  He's kind of a jerk for the rest of the game, but even then he's pretty affable, since he believes his ascension is inevitable and that Soma is a minor speed bump at most on the path to his destiny.

Then there are a few minor characters wandering around . . .

Yoko Belnades is a member of the church who meets up with Soma a few times to encourage him and help keep him focused.  Genya Arikado is a dapper man in a suit who provides Soma with information about the castle, mostly by passing along hints through Mina.  He's also Alucard, Dracula's son.  I'm not really spoiling anything there . . . very early in the game, Yoko (I think it was Yoko, anyway) nearly calls him Alucard before correcting herself.  The shortly named J is an amnesiac wandering around the castle.  The only thing he's certain of is that he has some connection with what's going on, and he's right.

And then . . . there's Hammer.

Hammer is quite possibly one of the worst human beings in existence.  He's an American Army guy that was ordered to go to Mina's shrine, but once he gets trapped in Dracula's castle, he almost immediately abandons his ill-defined mission and decides to start selling crap that he's found to Soma for a profit.  So to start off with, he's a greedy wuss.  And he's also something of a stingy greedy wuss, since everything he sells is swords and spears and the like.  You're an army guy, dude!  Where's your machine gun?!  Your grenades?!  I'll buy 'em all!  Sure, I might need some sort of magic sword when I'm fighting Dracula Jones or whatever, but when I use the single Handgun in the game, it seems to perforate the regular monsters just fine!  Hell, the Zombie Soldiers throw grenades!  What, you couldn't find any extra grenades to sell me?!

And to cap off his being a useless greedy wuss, he's also got rape face.  I'm gonna show you a picture to prove it, but don't look too long or he might steal your soul . . .

There is absolutely nothing about that expression that doesn't say "YOU GOAN GET RAPED".  And yes, I know that might be profiling or whatever, but after Yoko gets injured and has to sit out the rest of the game unconscious at the main gate where Hammer's set up his shop, he asks Soma about her and says that she's his "type".  Yes, Hammer.  I'm quite sure that the unconscious woman who has a nasty knife wound is definitely your type, you sick fuck.

Sweet Jebus.

The Writing
Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and say the story is good.  Betrayal, dark destinies, good vs. evil, some enemies become friends and some friends become enemies, blah blah blah.  But it all seems to move so fast.  It might be a translation thing, I dunno and I'm quite willing to believe that's all there is to it, but a lot of the characters just seem to jump to certain (correct) conclusions pretty damn quick.  At one point, one of the characters asks Soma if he knows anything about "the predictions".  Exactly that.  Absolutely no clue as to exactly which predictions out of the millions or billions that have been made in the past, or even which of the lesser but still substantial numbers of very famous predictions made.  But Soma automatically divines that they mean the future insights of Nostradamus and is told "Exactly!".

And this sort of thing happens several times throughout the game, to the point where I started to believe that everyone in the castle had somehow gained either telepathic or precognitive powers.  A minor thing, but annoying nonetheless.

The Gameplay
Soma is sloooooooow, ohmigaw he is slow.  Not so slow that it's frustrating or annoying, really, but still slow enough that I noticed it almost constantly.  He doesn't get a proper dash maneuver until almost the very end of the game, so most of the time I was walking every damn where.  Fortunately, there are portals spaced somewhat evenly throughout the castle, allowing quick and easy transport from one area to another.  Also fortunately, his lack of speed doesn't adversely affect the combat for the most part.

I like the weapons system of Aria.  The Vampire Killer whip is cool, don't get me wrong.  But after playing around with nothing but that whip in Harmony of Dissonance, it felt good to get a nice variety of weapons to choose from.  Soma gets to choose from hammers (powerful but slow), spears (swung from underneath), and two kinds of swords (stabbing straight out and swinging down from above), as well as a nice selection of specialty weapons that work in various ways, such as the Whip Sword (acts like a whip, natch) and the Handgun (which shoots things from a distance, also natch).  The spears and hammers annoyed the hell out of me, so I stuck mostly to the swords which, thankfully, were the most plentiful weapon type in the game.

While I liked the weapons and most other aspects of the game's combat, I'm kind of on the fence about the soul system.  Much of Soma's abilities come from absorbing the randomly dropped souls of the monsters he kills.  There are three types, those being Red (one-shot attack abilities, activated like subweapons in other Castlevanias), Blue (sustained abilities, with a mixed bag of results covering attacks, defense, and movement), and Yellow (support abilities).  While I certainly like the depth of the system, allowing you to have a wide variety of power combination, I don't like that circumstances in the game often force you to change these abilities on the fly.  I don't know about anyone else, but I feel that if you end up spending as much or even more time in your menu screen switching out abilities as you do fighting monsters and, y'know, actually playing the game, there might be a small problem with the way the system is set up.

The Challenge
Aria of Sorrow sits right on the good side of frustratingly difficult for me.  There were a few times when I started to get truly annoyed at the cheap shit that kept getting thrown at me (the Disc Armors, green Medusa Heads, and most of the flying enemies were especially nasty about this), but overall I found the game to be decently challenging, especially after the slaughterously easy Harmony of Dissonance.  I found myself having to actually come up with different sets of tactics for each new monster I faced . . . hell, the fact that I had to come up with tactics to take any of the monsters out is in itself pretty cool, and points to good AI programming.  They weren't just buffing up monsters later in the game with more HP and MP, they were actually giving them unique abilities and behaviors that I had to take into account in order to get ahead.

So kudos on that!

The Graphics
It may be just me, but it looks like this game took a step back from Harmony in the graphics department, especially in the lighting effects of the lamps, candelabras, and the like.  There's also a few odd bits here and there that I noticed, such as the wavy fog cutting off oddly at walls.  As a trade-off, the character models - which was one of the few things I faulted Harmony on in the graphics department - have been much improved.  Soma isn't surrounded by a neon blue aura, his walk cycles make it look like he's moving with a goldurn purpose, and everyone actually appears like they belong in a Game Boy Advance game.  I really think-

GAH!  Jeez, okay, that's one graphic I definitely could have done without.

The Music
I decided to actually try and pay attention to the music for this game, and I found it very easy to do here, 'cause I like it!  If I was the type to buy soundtracks to things, I might possibly someday perhaps consider maybe buying the AoS soundtrack.

The Bottom Line
Yah, I complained about a few things, but they were mostly minor.  Overall I feel that this is a good and definitely very solid game.  Played once, would play again.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Platform:  Nintendo Game Boy Advance
Developer:  Konami
Released:  2002
Genre:  Metroidvania (Action Adventure)

The Game
Juste Belmont, grandson of Simon Belmont, is drawn into the fight against Dracula when his friend Maxim returns from a long journey having lost both a huge chunk of his memory and Lydie, his and Juste's childhood friend.  Together, the two men retrace Maxim's steps until they come across a strange castle filled with monstrous beasties.  Over the course of the game, Juste comes to find out that it is Dracula's castle (duh) and that the spirits within now threaten not only Juste and Lydie's life, but Maxim's very soul.

This is the second game created by the people who made the widely acclaimed Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, making it one of the earliest installments of the Castlevania series to help bring about the fan term "Metroidvania".  It also pulls some thematic inspiration from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, as you go around the castle collecting the same body parts of Dracula that Simon grabs up in that earlier game and they are intimately tied into the mystery behind the bond between Maxim and the castle.

The Characters
Though there is an interesting story to be had, like most Castlevanias, characterization is fairly sparse, the worst instance being Lydie, who doesn't really progress beyond being your typical damsel in distress.  Juste is more or less your standard hero type, his emotional range staying pretty well within the "angry-concerned-jovial" trilogy of action hero acting.  Maxim is the one who comes closest to approaching interesting, since he's the only one to have any real motivations and internal conflict, but he's only seen on a handful of occasions throughout the game.

Still, the lack of real characterization doesn't really detract from the game, as it's more or less just a basic framework upon which to hang the other elements of the game.

The Writing
As with the characterization, the story is a fairly basic tale of rivalry, betrayal, action, heroism, self-sacrifice, and good vs. evil.  Nothing to get too excited about, but it does its job adequately.

The Gameplay
The gameplay is where Harmony of Dissonance truly shines.  Juste moves extremely well, and gains several power ups that improve his maneuverability even more.  Considering the scale of the castle and that you'll be spending a massive amount of your time just moving from one section on one side of the map to another section all the way on the other side, this is a good thing.  Without the dash and slide abilities, I would most likely have given up after the third or fourth time having to walk through any given section.

Though Juste's primary attack (the whip, natch) stays more or less the same throughout the entire game, I like the depth they gave to the subweapon system.  You've got all your standard Castlevania mainstays such as the Dagger, Axe, and Holy Water, but you can also mix and match them with the five spellbooks you can find throughout the castle for varying effects.  The one I ended up using for the most part was the Wind Book + Cross combo, which caused a shield of flying crosses to whirl around Juste in a wide circle, damaging any creature hit by it.

The equipment system is pretty basic, but solid.  Most items are rare, but you rarely ever even use them, so it's not a big deal.

The Challenge
If there's one spot I can point to and definitely say "I'm not happy with this" without any qualifiers, it would have to be that Harmony of Dissonance is too damn easy.  I explored 200% of the castle (there's two castles, by the way, just like in Symphony of the Night), got all three endings, found almost every single findable item in the game, beat every mini-boss . . . and I died a total of two times.  And it wasn't even because the guys I was fighting were particularly difficult.  It was because I'd gotten so used to just flying through every obstacle that I stopped paying attention to my health meter most of the time.  Things jumped to being a little bit tougher in the second castle and I hadn't been prepared for just how much life each hit would take from me.  After these two deaths and after just a few minutes of collecting better gear, I was able to go right back to coasting through the entire rest of the game.  Even the end bosses ended up going down like little bitches.

Yawn.

The Graphics
Stellar.  The castle is beautifully atmospheric, looking just like Dracula's castle should in a Castlevania game.  The monsters, both the classic and the new, have wonderful designs and well-made sprites.

Unfortunately, this cannot be said of the human character sprites.  Juste, Maxim, and Lydie are all very muddy and ill-defined, looking more like they belong in the NES era than the SNES look that the GBA usually achieves.  Further, Juste is inexplicably surrounded by a blue aura that trails behind him as blue afterimages of himself.  Now, I know that Alucard had a similar shadowy effect on him in Symphony of the Night, but in SotN, it looked cool and wasn't very obtrusive.  In HoD, it's this terrible flat neon blue that looks horribly out of place and is, frankly, an eyesore.  An eyesore that follows you around the entire damn game because it's attached to the player character like some sort of super-resilient bioluminescent fungus.

The Music
I typically don't pay attention to game music unless it's particularly bad.  Since I didn't really pay that much attention to it here, I've just gotta assume that it wasn't bad enough to attract my notice.  The only points at which the music did catch my ear was during the file naming screen (a funky beat that I rather enjoyed) and in the save rooms (there didn't seem to be any music, and the sudden lack of audio output caught me off guard and annoyed me every single time).

The Bottom Line
The creators of Harmony of Dissonance, it seems, wanted to try and make lightning strike twice by crafting what would basically be a portable version of Symphony of the Night.  For the most part, I would say that they succeeded.  It's of a smaller scope and naturally limited by the platform that it was created for, but still a very entertaining play and, in my opinion, worth wasting a few hours on.  I just wish that it had been a little more difficult and that the hero wasn't lined with dayglo shoelaces.