Game Review: Super Castlevania IV
2017-Oct-28, Saturday 09:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Super!
This is another game that I first heard about through Nintendo Power. I never played it, though I do remember Simon's eight-direction whip swinging so I must have seen it at someone's house somewhere. You can tell it made a strong impression on me.
Super Castlevania IV was originally intended to be in the style of the original Castlevania, and in Japanese it even has the exactly same title--悪魔城ドラキュラ (Akumajō Dorakyura). But it has expanded levels, even more bosses, more control of Simon on stairs and through whipping, the enhanced graphics and level design that the SNES was capable of, SNES-quality music, infinite continues, and other quality-of-life improvements.
I'm not that impressed in the end.
Diagonal whipping, the greatest superpower.
I don't need to talk about the plot, do I? You're a Belmont, there's a Dracula, Belmonts fight Draculas.
SNES Simon is super-powered compared to his NES incarnation. He can control the momentum of his jumps in mid-air, where NES Simon was stuck in a set arc as soon as he left the ground. What's more, whipping in eight directions and the infamous whip flail render a large portion of enemies a joke. No longer is precise timing needed to deal with skeletons in a platform above or below Simon, nor do you need to carefully plan when to descend stairs and time your steps to match the patterns of the flying bats and medusa heads. Platforms can often be cleared from below in complete safety as Simon whips through the floor into his unsuspecting foes.
But for all that Simon is easier to control, the game still feels floaty and imprecise to me. Coming from Dracula's Curse and Symphony of the Night, for me Super Castlevania fell into an unpleasant chasm between them. Simon doesn't have Trevor's deliberate movement and sense of consequence for his actions, and he doesn't have Alucard's sheer mobility and destructive power. Despite being able to control midair jumps, I never really got a good sense of Simon's jumping distance and occasionally fell just short of a jump I was sure I was going to make. Similarly, his enormous sprite came with an equally-enormous hitbox, and I had a hard time avoiding many enemy attacks. The extra control that Simon had over Trevor was enough to lull me into complacency, but not really enough to make the game more fun to play.
Onward and Upward.
Speaking of Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV feels like a step back from it despite its additional eight bits. Dracula's Curse had a world map with multiple options of where to go and additional characters who could accompany Trevor on his journey, along with however-minimal dialogue to accompany their appearance. Super Castlevania IV, like the original Castlevania, is a straight shot from beginning to end with the only choices being whether to pick up a new powerup or not. And if Simon has the cross, the answer to that is always "No." There are some situations where the axe or the holy water are better, but none of them are worth the opportunity cost of not having the cross when you need it.
It feels like a waste of the SNES's potential. Super Mario World had secret exits, the ability to save powerups for use later, and an explorable world map. In the face of that, Super Castlevania IV doesn't feel very super at all. Whipping in eight directions or swinging from rings is nice, but it's not revolutionary the way I had hoped.
Brown foreground, brown background, brown water, brown wall chicken, brown leather armor...
The graphics and sound aren't a waste of the SNES's potential, necessarily. I just don't like them.
The music starts off with a bang in the first level with the Theme of Simon, but that's the high point for the vast majority of the game until Bloody Tears and Vampire Killer kick in on the run up to Dracula. Most of the game's music wasn't particularly memorable to me, to the point where I had to go consult the soundtrack to see if there was anything I actually enjoyed, and the answer to that is no. The opening theme is discordant in a way I found actively unpleasant to listen to, and this is speaking as someone who enjoys Cryobiosis and Sjellos albums.
Similarly, I didn't like the graphics. There were some neat moments, like the room that rotates around Simon as he runs to the right while the floor collapses round him, but a lot of the graphical enhancements felt more like technical displays of the SNES's prowess than anything that really enhanced the gameplay. There's a rotating room where Simon has to hang from a ring as the level shifts slowly shifts around him, which is a good demonstration of Mode 7 but not all that fun to actually play through. The same with the swinging chandeliers. The SNES had several early games like Pilowings and F-Zero that were both games and graphical demonstrations, and I feel the same about much of Super Castlevania IV.
The color pallet is just muddy. Long before the '00s trend of realism is brown, Super Castlevania IV commits to that aesthetic. I sometimes had trouble telling where I should be jumping since everything was brown, grey, or dark green. This isn't a requirement of 16 bits, obviously--for all its other sins, Secret of Mana had beautiful, vibrant graphics. And even games that would have probably later fallen to the curse of Gears of War like Contra III: Alien Wars or Cybernator still had good contrast. Super Castlevania IV does not.
Eat the rich.
I said the whipping doesn't really feel revolutionary, but there is one circumstance where it drastically changes the gameplay--during boss fights. The ability to whip upward drastically changes the rhythm of the boss fights compared to what poor Trevor had to endure. He had to wait until bosses swooped down to meet him, dodging projectiles the entire time. Simon can just whip upward or diagonally repeatedly until the boss is dead.
Very occasionally, bosses are designed around this. The bat pictured above never descends to a level where Simon could hit it horizontally until almost the end of the fight, so whipping it while avoiding the coins it spews out in retaliation is part of beating the encounter. But most bosses seemed to me like they would fit into an NES-era Castlevania game without much trouble, except now Simon can whip them as he leaps over them. There's not much effort put into requiring Simon to whip in multiple directions, so it seems like a pure addition to his toolset with no attempt to account for it. Watch something like this video, especially the fight with Puwexil at 2:20. Simon just whips upward repeatedly, tearing the boss apart while also dealing with its counterattacks, and kills it in seconds with no risk whatsoever.
I'm not saying the bosses were too easy--I'm nowhere near as skilled as the person playing the video. But I feel like the design was a little lazy if something like that is possible.
Hang in there, Simon!
"A little lazy" is my impression of the whole game, in the end. A SNES game in the style of the NES original, but which loses much of the tight design and killer soundtrack that made the original so beloved in favor of showing off the SNES's design specs. Adding new colors doesn't matter if they're a variety of browns, and a richer sound palette seems like a waste to me when songs like this are the result.
I think the main thing I got out of playing Super Castlevania IV is that now I understand why Alucard fought Slogra and Gaibon simultaneously. It's a display of his unearthly prowess that while Simon had so much trouble with each boss individually, the dhampir Adrian Fahrenheit Ţepeş could defeat them together. This is one game to which I won't be returning.
This is another game that I first heard about through Nintendo Power. I never played it, though I do remember Simon's eight-direction whip swinging so I must have seen it at someone's house somewhere. You can tell it made a strong impression on me.
Super Castlevania IV was originally intended to be in the style of the original Castlevania, and in Japanese it even has the exactly same title--悪魔城ドラキュラ (Akumajō Dorakyura). But it has expanded levels, even more bosses, more control of Simon on stairs and through whipping, the enhanced graphics and level design that the SNES was capable of, SNES-quality music, infinite continues, and other quality-of-life improvements.
I'm not that impressed in the end.
Diagonal whipping, the greatest superpower.
I don't need to talk about the plot, do I? You're a Belmont, there's a Dracula, Belmonts fight Draculas.
SNES Simon is super-powered compared to his NES incarnation. He can control the momentum of his jumps in mid-air, where NES Simon was stuck in a set arc as soon as he left the ground. What's more, whipping in eight directions and the infamous whip flail render a large portion of enemies a joke. No longer is precise timing needed to deal with skeletons in a platform above or below Simon, nor do you need to carefully plan when to descend stairs and time your steps to match the patterns of the flying bats and medusa heads. Platforms can often be cleared from below in complete safety as Simon whips through the floor into his unsuspecting foes.
But for all that Simon is easier to control, the game still feels floaty and imprecise to me. Coming from Dracula's Curse and Symphony of the Night, for me Super Castlevania fell into an unpleasant chasm between them. Simon doesn't have Trevor's deliberate movement and sense of consequence for his actions, and he doesn't have Alucard's sheer mobility and destructive power. Despite being able to control midair jumps, I never really got a good sense of Simon's jumping distance and occasionally fell just short of a jump I was sure I was going to make. Similarly, his enormous sprite came with an equally-enormous hitbox, and I had a hard time avoiding many enemy attacks. The extra control that Simon had over Trevor was enough to lull me into complacency, but not really enough to make the game more fun to play.
Onward and Upward.
Speaking of Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV feels like a step back from it despite its additional eight bits. Dracula's Curse had a world map with multiple options of where to go and additional characters who could accompany Trevor on his journey, along with however-minimal dialogue to accompany their appearance. Super Castlevania IV, like the original Castlevania, is a straight shot from beginning to end with the only choices being whether to pick up a new powerup or not. And if Simon has the cross, the answer to that is always "No." There are some situations where the axe or the holy water are better, but none of them are worth the opportunity cost of not having the cross when you need it.
It feels like a waste of the SNES's potential. Super Mario World had secret exits, the ability to save powerups for use later, and an explorable world map. In the face of that, Super Castlevania IV doesn't feel very super at all. Whipping in eight directions or swinging from rings is nice, but it's not revolutionary the way I had hoped.
Brown foreground, brown background, brown water, brown wall chicken, brown leather armor...
The graphics and sound aren't a waste of the SNES's potential, necessarily. I just don't like them.
The music starts off with a bang in the first level with the Theme of Simon, but that's the high point for the vast majority of the game until Bloody Tears and Vampire Killer kick in on the run up to Dracula. Most of the game's music wasn't particularly memorable to me, to the point where I had to go consult the soundtrack to see if there was anything I actually enjoyed, and the answer to that is no. The opening theme is discordant in a way I found actively unpleasant to listen to, and this is speaking as someone who enjoys Cryobiosis and Sjellos albums.
Similarly, I didn't like the graphics. There were some neat moments, like the room that rotates around Simon as he runs to the right while the floor collapses round him, but a lot of the graphical enhancements felt more like technical displays of the SNES's prowess than anything that really enhanced the gameplay. There's a rotating room where Simon has to hang from a ring as the level shifts slowly shifts around him, which is a good demonstration of Mode 7 but not all that fun to actually play through. The same with the swinging chandeliers. The SNES had several early games like Pilowings and F-Zero that were both games and graphical demonstrations, and I feel the same about much of Super Castlevania IV.
The color pallet is just muddy. Long before the '00s trend of realism is brown, Super Castlevania IV commits to that aesthetic. I sometimes had trouble telling where I should be jumping since everything was brown, grey, or dark green. This isn't a requirement of 16 bits, obviously--for all its other sins, Secret of Mana had beautiful, vibrant graphics. And even games that would have probably later fallen to the curse of Gears of War like Contra III: Alien Wars or Cybernator still had good contrast. Super Castlevania IV does not.
Eat the rich.
I said the whipping doesn't really feel revolutionary, but there is one circumstance where it drastically changes the gameplay--during boss fights. The ability to whip upward drastically changes the rhythm of the boss fights compared to what poor Trevor had to endure. He had to wait until bosses swooped down to meet him, dodging projectiles the entire time. Simon can just whip upward or diagonally repeatedly until the boss is dead.
Very occasionally, bosses are designed around this. The bat pictured above never descends to a level where Simon could hit it horizontally until almost the end of the fight, so whipping it while avoiding the coins it spews out in retaliation is part of beating the encounter. But most bosses seemed to me like they would fit into an NES-era Castlevania game without much trouble, except now Simon can whip them as he leaps over them. There's not much effort put into requiring Simon to whip in multiple directions, so it seems like a pure addition to his toolset with no attempt to account for it. Watch something like this video, especially the fight with Puwexil at 2:20. Simon just whips upward repeatedly, tearing the boss apart while also dealing with its counterattacks, and kills it in seconds with no risk whatsoever.
I'm not saying the bosses were too easy--I'm nowhere near as skilled as the person playing the video. But I feel like the design was a little lazy if something like that is possible.
Hang in there, Simon!
"A little lazy" is my impression of the whole game, in the end. A SNES game in the style of the NES original, but which loses much of the tight design and killer soundtrack that made the original so beloved in favor of showing off the SNES's design specs. Adding new colors doesn't matter if they're a variety of browns, and a richer sound palette seems like a waste to me when songs like this are the result.
I think the main thing I got out of playing Super Castlevania IV is that now I understand why Alucard fought Slogra and Gaibon simultaneously. It's a display of his unearthly prowess that while Simon had so much trouble with each boss individually, the dhampir Adrian Fahrenheit Ţepeş could defeat them together. This is one game to which I won't be returning.
