(Originally published to Glitchwave on 4/18/2022)
[Image from igdb.com]
Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Genre(s): 2D Platformer
Platforms: NES
Release Date: December 22, 1989
The Legend of Zelda is the video game franchise most notable for composing its entries in a non-linear, clusterfuck of a timeline. Still, surprisingly, Konami was one step forward in this regard. Castlevania III is a prequel that is set over 200 years before the events of the first game. Naturally, Simon Belmont is only a mere mortal man who cannot age past one century, much less two, and still vanquish the gothic terrors that lurk in the night. The player instead plays as Trevor Belmont, one of Simon’s distant ancestors who also had qualms with Dracula. Fighting Dracula and his spooky cohorts seems to be a hereditary drive in the Belmont clan, almost as much as the need to procreate. In Trevor’s time circa the tail end of the middle ages, Dracula unleashes a scourge of demonic monsters across Europe to eradicate the human race, a more vindictive sequel to the black plague. The Belmonts are not a well-respected clan, but the church sees no choice but to enlist their special vampire hunting tactics to dispose of the vampiric threat.
The Belmont family’s genetic material must be as durable as copper wire because even generations onward, Simon is an uncanny dead ringer for his great-great-grand(father?) Trevor. Besides looking exactly like the Belmont we’ve come to know from the first two games, the more important factor is that Trevor plays exactly like his direct descendant. Despite the experimental disruption Castlevania II presented, the main consistency across all three Castlevania games on the NES is the control scheme. Whether or not the player is controlling Simon or Trevor, the gruff Van Helsing Belmont figures will always have the same level of control in their movement. They each have a standard pace of walking, an awkwardly brisk single jump, and a wound-up whip swing restricted to the X-axis. Trevor also gets violently blown back by the slightest damage, leading me to believe that this is an unfortunate recessive gene in the Belmont family. Trevor also implements the same tactics Simon uses to conquer the legions of Dracula’s underlings. Each weapon from the first game returns without any tools introduced in Castlevania II, crossing over to its sequel. Trevor can lob an axe overhead, fling a straightaway dagger, and use the cross as a boomerang, just as we’ve come to know with Simon. Hearts return as ammunition instead of currency which means that the player can no longer use the holy water to their heart’s content (no pun intended). The player must once again use their resources sparingly. Health is restored by finding dusty hams in the cracks of Dracula’s walls once again instead of seeking the healing powers of a church. Everything is as it should be in the realm of Castlevania.
From all the familiar attributes listed, it sounds as if Castlevania III’s deviation from the previous game is to ape the first Castlevania. The gameplay is the most readily apparent return to form, but a much less obvious aspect that connects the third Castlevania to the first one is the visuals. Castlevania II captured the gothic atmosphere of the first game. Still, something that I hadn’t noticed about Castlevania II until I played the third game was how murky and dull the visuals were. Just because the atmosphere is intended to be austere doesn’t mean it should also look depleted. The first Castlevania managed to achieve the intended atmosphere along with having some of the most striking 8-bit graphics on the system. Both the foregrounds and backgrounds depict the intricate as ever castles and graveyards, but I never realized how lurid the color schemes of the first and third Castlevania are. Castlevania III, in particular, uses the same deep color palettes with striking contrasts, but a slightly noticeable brighter tint makes the graphics pop. Castlevania always carried an aura of grandeur and majesty, and the return of the bright, prominent graphics fully expresses this.
Castlevania III is not just a rerelease of the first Castlevania with a subtitle and a numerical amount in the title. While Castlevania III diverts back to many of the elements of the first game while completely omitting most elements of the second game, Castlevania III does make strides to expand on what made the first Castlevania so engaging. The biggest expansion to the first game is its length, something the first game desperately needed. Instead of the quasi-open world, Castlevania II presented, Castlevania III sticks with a tried-and-true linear course of levels with a beginning and an end. Castlevania III offers fifteen levels, a whopping number compared to the paltry six that the first game presented. Progression in the first Castlevania is a linear climb to the top of Dracula’s throne, and Castlevania III takes a more roundabout approach to the same trajectory. A Belmont still climbs up a meandering piece of towering gothic architecture to face Dracula, but the additional number of levels expands the runtime nicely. The player won’t even get to the castle until halfway into the game, with levels outside the castle like forests and marshes making up the scenery of the former half. It’s almost as if Konami took the initiative to incorporate various settings that Castlevania II established and translated them into the gameplay of the first Castlevania. To add an extra layer of elongation, the player can take a series of different paths that will offer a mix of levels before converging to Dracula’s castle. Tripling the number of levels from the first game is expansive enough. Still, offering branching paths guarantees that the player will not experience everything the game has to offer in one playthrough. Encouraging an extra playthrough by making the player explore more content is a common practice in today’s multifaceted gaming world, but it was a rare occurrence during the NES. It’s an ambitious way to expand the playtime of a Castlevania game, and it works wonderfully to supplement the short length of the first game.
The developers also give players an even better incentive to play the levels they missed on their first playthrough. Depending on which path the player takes, they will encounter at least one extra playable character Trevor will take with him on his journey. At first, these playable characters will serve as hostile boss fights that Trevor must defeat, and they’ll come to their senses and request to join Trevor. There are three additional characters in total, each with special attributes. Grant is a hunchback with the ability to climb on walls, Sypha, the magician, can use fire and ice magic, and Alucard, the interspecies son of Dracula, can transform into a bat. Playing as multiple characters have always been a point of intrigue for me with any video game, and the additional characters presented in Castlevania III are a nifty expansion. However, the execution is a tad faulty. For one, some characters are much better than others, a common flaw in games that provide this kind of thing. Grant’s wall climbing ability seems useful on paper, but I often found that it needed stringent accuracy to use effectively. I’d often hold down the button needed to stick to the wall, and Grant would collapse down a bottomless pit like a ton of bricks. Needless to say, I felt like dying was unwarranted here and was aggravated. Alucard’s transformation ability should allow him to bypass difficult sections in theory, but the parameters of the screen heavily restrict his movement. I suppose it’s keen on the part of the developers not to give the player an easy cop-out, but that is another inconsistency. While Sypha’s flame ability is no more useful than Trevor’s whip, her ice ability completely gives the player a breezy way to extinguish enemies with little to no strain. Another disappointing factor is that Trevor also can’t keep all of his imbalanced partners as a vampire-slaying posse. The game only allows a single partner at a time, most likely encouraging the player to start a second playthrough.
I wish the game allowed the player to keep all of Trevor’s partners because a central aspect of Castlevania III returning to true form is the intense level of difficulty. This notorious factor in Castlevania’s gameplay has also been amplified like many other elements presented in the first game. If you thought the first Castlevania was challenging, let me illustrate just how hard Castlevania III can be. The game is rife with religious symbolism used to deflect the legions of demonic foes, right? Well, the player will need a real-life cross and pray profusely to help them get through this game. Castlevania III has made one of the hardest games of the NES era even harder, an impressive feat that will cause dread in the hearts of many gamers. Enemies are more frequent and positioned in more inconvenient places, there are more bottomless pits, structures will corrode and crumble on the player, scrolling levels will put the player in a frenzied panic, and the increased number of towering staircases will leave the player even more vulnerable. On top of this, Castlevania III is a tad more stingy with its checkpoints. In the first game, the levels were shorter, so only offering a couple of checkpoints was appropriate. The accelerated number of levels in Castlevania III is also much more bloated. Each level becomes a painful endurance test, making the player withstand a litany of abuse in longer increments with little respite. The only way the player will plausibly withstand Castlevania III’s challenge is to put the ten-life cheat code, “help me,” at the beginning.
The lack of checkpoints probably wouldn't be so much of an issue if this also didn’t factor in the bosses. Similarly to the levels in the first game, a boss will be ready to duke it out with Mr. Belmont and company. Familiar faces like Frankenstein’s monster, mummies, and the Grim Reaper appear to solidify themselves even further into the canon of Castlevania’s movie monster bosses. Castlevania III also includes new formidable foes such as the cyclops, the bone dragon king, and even an evil doppelganger of Trevor and or his partners. Each of these bosses is just as brutal as the ones in the first game, and the dearth of checkpoints in this game just makes these encounters even harder. Some of the bosses are strictly endurance challenges in which the player has to fight up to three different bosses at once without a checkpoint before the fight. The worst case is definitely with Dracula, the obligatory final of any Castlevania game, who menacingly sits at his throne waiting for Trevor to face him. For those who have played the first Castlevania, Dracula’s second form is no longer a surprise as they prepare accordingly for a tough bout with the count. However, the developers caught on to the player’s anticipation and added another phase to Dracula’s fight. Dracula’s final phase in Castlevania III is a painstaking test of accuracy, quick dodging reflexes, and a meticulous effort not to fall into the pits. It is the most hectic, ruthless form of Dracula in the series, and Konami doesn’t offer a checkpoint before this fight if the player dies. Is mercy a virtue for the weak, Konami?
As often as Castlevania III punished me like the seven circles of hell, I suppose it is what I and several other Castlevania fans wished for. The vast majority of Castlevania fans were severely underwhelmed at the new direction Konami put forth when developing Castlevania II, even if deviating from the foundation of the first game of a series was popular at the time. Each third entry of every game that experienced a sophomore slump during the NES era threaded back to the first game of their respective franchises and expanded on the elements that made the first game an era-defining sensation. One of the defining components of Castlevania is the high level of difficulty, and the natural course of building upon a foundation is to augment everything to a point of refinement. Castlevania III magnifies all of the properties from the first game to the point where it seems like a bigger version of the first game. The significant number of levels and their length, along with the additional characters, add an incredible amount to satiate any fan of the first game. However, bigger isn’t always better because I am thoroughly convinced that the average player could not get through the game without putting in the “help me” life code to alleviate their agony. Being bigger isn’t always synonymous with being better, but Castlevania III might get away with surpassing the first game with this merit on an objective scale. For me, I might still prefer the simpler trek up to Dracula’s lair in the first game.
No comments:
Post a Comment