A few years into the 5th generation of consoles Konami brought Castlevania back to consoles in a new way. Discarding the linear style of the previous games, they instead took inspiration from Super Metroid, recreating it with swords, magic, and RPG stats. The following is a review of the 2007 Xbox 360 port of the game that kicked off the Metroidvania genre:
Playing as Dracula’s son
If you didn’t notice already, Alucard, the name of main character of this game, is just Dracula spelled backwards. Luckily, Dracula’s son is nowhere near as strong as he is (in the beginning, at least), so getting through this castle is still a somewhat formidable task. The main things Alucard can do are walk, jump, swing his weapon, back dash, and use the heart-fueled abilities seen in previous Castlevania games. The platforming in this game is really light and difficult to mess up without an enemy getting your way, so the main challenge is fighting the enemies.
Overall the game is rather successful at giving you a lot of varied enemies to fight. The main unfortunate thing is that there is very little commitment when Alucard attacks, so you are incentivized to interact with enemies as little as possible. Perhaps this is a good thing since the enemies respawn when you return to areas, forcing you to deal with them every time. A better compromise could have been introducing a skill based way to quickly take care of enemies that first time players won’t immediately be able to do, though that is a bit out of the scope of a RPG style game like this. You can sometimes get more hits in between attack cycles using skill, but that isn’t really enough to offset the monotony of dealing with the same enemies so many times. It is a common theme in this game (and genre, really) that planning how you are going to get through a challenge ends up eliminating the need for almost any execution once you actually get to the challenge. This can still be good depending on how the planning is implemented, which unfortunately isn’t a high point of this game either.
Putting the castle in Castlevania
The real star of this game is the castle that you explore. It is the main thing that motivates you to keep playing the game. Even though every individual thing you do in this castle might be underwhelming on its own, when taken as a whole it provides a sense of adventure that a linear game couldn’t provide. The map works well, save points are placed well, the areas feel appropriately different from each other. It is almost never too cryptic to figure out what to do without a guide, which is an achievement for a game from this era. The castle is also decently well balanced for progression through the game, though this completely falls apart as you approach the final part of the game.
This game is horror themed, but it isn’t really scary at all. The most haunting thing about this castle is how they expect you to get around. Either you are going to walk everywhere, or you are going to realize that Alucard’s back dash actually moves faster than he can walk, and then that you can do this even faster by cancelling the animation by doing something like raising your shield temporarily. The walking is quite slow, so you are naturally going to gravitate to the faster option. The faster option is not particularly enjoyable to do constantly, though, since it requires spamming the back dash button while facing opposite the direction you want to go and intermittently cancelling it with another button. It is somewhat interesting to do this in the beginning, but after getting around the whole castle multiple times you will be left wondering why Konami subjected you to doing this instead of just raising Alucard’s pitifully slow walking speed. His walking speed is already faster than enemies can effectively get around, so it really should have just been increased to save everyone’s controllers and hands from thousands of unnecessary button presses.
How do Castlevania and Metroid mix?
Decently well. Exploring a huge castle rather than an alien planet is definitely an interesting take on the formula. The addition of RPG mechanics is questionable, though. At least in this iteration, it really isn’t clear why they bothered implementing this system. You can easily get through the whole game without even thinking about what level you are or what your character’s stats are. Leveling up seems like it might be fun when you first see that it is something that happens, but you will quickly realize after a few levels that you can’t really feel the difference at all. The only real effect of this system that you will probably notice is that different equipment is occasionally basically useless or extremely strong against different enemies.
One issue that the RPG mechanics introduce is poor balance. Since they needed to fill the game with a bunch of different equipment and strategies to make the RPG mechanics feel more substantial, it is no surprise that there would end up being some strategies that get overlooked and end up trivializing parts of the game. The strange thing is that wildly unbalanced possibilities sometimes barely require going off of the path of required parts of the game, which makes you wonder how they missed them, or if they intentionally wanted you to break the game so easily. Either way being able to so easily bypass the challenge of the game (which isn’t particularly difficult in the first place) doesn’t do the game any favors as far as making it more enjoyable overall is concerned.
It still feels like Castlevania
Although most of the gameplay appeal of the previous Castlevania games is gone, pretty much everything else is still intact. You don’t (mainly) play as a member of the Belmont family anymore, but the story does carry on from where Rondo of Blood left off, though it doesn’t go much farther beyond that point. This isn’t the type of game you would expect to play for the story, though. The music meets a high quality standard just like it did in the older games, though with a less exciting style since there is a lot more downtime in this game where music like that would not be appropriate. The voice acting in this game is entertaining the few times you hear it. Graphically it is definitely appealing to look at, though nothing will really impress you all that much for a PS1 game, which is probably a result of the developing an open-ended game like this.
Something that is lost from having a game in this style is one time set pieces that stand out from the rest of the game. Since they want you to be able to return to everywhere you have been, it doesn’t make sense to have a part where the castle is falling apart behind you as you go through it or something like that. Overall they were able to make a consistently interesting area to explore for the entirety of the game, but it pretty much all blends together in the end, with no areas getting noticeably special attention.
The Xbox 360 version
The Xbox 360 version doesn’t really mess up the game, but it doesn’t really enhance it either. The controls, graphics, and sound of the game all seem good, which is what really matters. The only glaring issue is that behind the game there is a background with art of Alucard and Dracula superimposed over a dark graveyard with scrolling clouds. If there was an option to turn that off this would have been a perfect port. It is at least not distracting while you play the game, which is a low bar.
If you are expecting to get some notable extra feature that is exclusive to this version, though, this is definitely not going to provide that. The only noticeable change over what you couldn’t get already in some other version of this game is that you can earn Xbox achievements in this version.
Should you play it?
For the price this will cost you to play it on Xbox (it works on any of them starting with the Xbox 360) it is definitely worth checking out, but it is far from an unmissable classic. There is a lot to enjoy here, but be prepared to feel underwhelmed in the end with how taking down Dracula actually plays out. If you liked the style of the games in the series that came out before this there is no guarantee you will like it. If you are a fan of the genre that this game helped popularize you can expect have a good time, though.
Overall the game is an 8.0 out of 10.
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