The Video Game Revue

Castlevania 2

I don't intend to fret too much over what game "deserves to be first" or any crap like that; I just want to get this show on the road. So I've decided to write up Castlevania 2 first.

If you are a fan of any recent Castlevania games, like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, or any of the GameBoy Advance games in the Castlevania series, you owe a lot of your fandom to the 8-bit classic Castlevania 2. The original Castlevania was a fairly typical, although brilliantly executed, arcade-style platformer: as the vampire hunter Simon Belmont, you jump and bash your way through a linear sequence of levels to progress through Dracula's castle and end his reign of terror. For whatever reason, Castlevania 2 decided to take the series in a new direction with a decisively quest-game style approach. The basic "jump and bash" mechanics of the original Castlevania are still there, but now the levels were open-ended and allowed the player to move in different directions rather than simply forward. In order to reach the final stage, the player needs to talk to game characters, remember clues, and explore to find the sub-bosses. If it weren't for Castlevania 2, we would never have seen the likes of Symphony of the Night, in which the exploration element of the game is front and center. On top of all of that, Castlevania 2 has top notch artistic direction, with excellent quality artwork and music composition for a game of its era. This is yet another trend that Konami has carried forward to present day Castlevania titles, especially Symphony of the Night.

Influences on modern-day Castlevania games aside, Castlevania 2 exhibits a lot of the old-school NES game challenge factor that is lacking from many games these days. It's easy to get stuck in Castlevania 2, especially considering that games didn't commonly have strategy guides (not NES games, at any rate) and the internet hadn't spread into the everyday person's home yet. If you didn't have the right issues of Nintendo Power, or contact with a friend who had finished the game before, you were in for a rough ride. If you ask me, that was part of the fun of video games back then--they were brutally tough, and sometimes you had to spend hours and hours plugging away at them to figure out some little puzzle bit that you had overlooked.

If you are a Castlevania fan, you must play Castlevania 2. In many ways, it was an early turning point in the development of the series and it laid the foundation on which the Castlevania games that we enjoy today are built. You owe it hommage, to say the least.

posted by Parappa @ 9:55 AM