Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 410: Castlevania Ranking Hootenanny

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Show regular Nadia Oxford power-ups to co-host status to challenge Jeremy Parish and Kurt Kalata to a battle of wits (or at least opinions) about the Castlevania series: Which games are best, which are worst, and why are our rankings objectively correct? Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week on Retronauts, what a wonderful night to get caught up in Castlevania Discourse. Hello, everybody, and welcome to your retronauts. I'm your host for this week, Nadia Oxford, of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. Yeah, I will be hosting occasional episodes from now on. This means if you ever wanted to hear the voice of Canadian Satan pour forth from your speakers, you're in luck, especially if it's not in an RPG context. This is all, this is all Castlevania.

Because we are talking about Castlevania this week. It is fall. Farmers are, you know, bringing in their crops and birds are driven to migrate. And we are driven to rank the Castlevania games because we are all mad here. Joining me on this witch hunt is Retronaut's chief vampire, Jeremy Parrish. Say hello, Jeremy. Hi, you're supposed to let us come up with our own pithy names. Come on.

Oh, no. You've blown it right out of the gate. Fail. I'm Jeremy Nosegoblin Parrish. Thank you. I'm very sorry about that. please forgive me. Kurt. That's okay. I have been forgiven. And we also have Kurt Kattala. I was going to originally call you the

fire stoking imp of Hardcore Gaming 101 and the Castlevania Dungeon, but please feel free to brand yourself. I didn't really think of anything. I mean, I go by Disco Alacard online. So I'm named for like the past 20 years or so. Yeah, I still, I still think of Disco Alacard at times. I actually named this, this podcast, Panic at the Disco Alacard in Parish. or something like that. Okay, so like I said, we're going to be ranking the Castlevania Games, and gentlemen, I think we all have quite a bit of history with the Castlevania series, but I think we'll just go over very, very briefly, like how we got into the series

and what it means to us. Mr. Parrish, you go first, please. I mean, I thought the first game looked neat, so I hunted it down and bought it and played it and loved it, and then I kept buying them and playing them whenever they make a new one. I'm trying to think if there's any Castlevania games I have not played, aside from ones that maybe weren't released in the U.S. in some accessible format? Hmm. No, I think I've played everything except the erotic violence Pachinko game.

I've even played the two-person arcade shooter that came out in Japan like a decade ago. Really? It was not great, but if you've ever wanted to use a whip that is a light gun, which is a strange concept and doesn't really work that well. That was the way to do it. So I definitely have my favorite Castlevenias and my least favorite Castlevania's. I'm trying to imagine how a whip as a light gun works. It was like a stiff sort of piece of plastic and it was shaped like a rope. I don't understand how it even visualizes. I'm trying to remember. So it was it was kind of just like you had a light gun. And when you would aim at something, you'd have kind of like a whip slash across the

screen. And the second player played a woman who cast magic spells. So that was much simpler. It was just like, you know, you point and you would fire spell beams at something. But a strange idea for an arcade game. I don't know what they were thinking aside from, uh, these are desperate times and they call for desperate measures. I will say that, um, if that's where I had started, I would not be on this podcast today. But since I started with Castlevania on NES, I like it. Yeah, thank God you started there and not like at Whipland Arcade or erotic violence or any other weird stuff that Konami's doing with the series. How about you, Mr. Kurt? Let's see.

I played it when they were hot on the Nintendo. But I got a Nintendo a little bit late because I was a Sega kid. But I had rented them and my friends knew what they were. But the first one I got started on was Cassavina 3 just because Nintendo had piped me up. And it was super duper red. So I just kept on and off through the evening. years until emulation and the internet came about. I was like, oh, I feel like writing about video games.

Let me make a fan site for Castlevania. And here we are what. And you sure did. 23, four issue later, here I am. Do you still update, like, sorry, it's been a while since I visited, but do you still update the dungeon? No, it hasn't been updated since Lords of Shadow came out, and I keep meaning to do it and just never do.

I understand. I totally understand that feel. You've missed out on so many new games. I know, man. Like Lorch of Shadow 2 in that one 3DS one. There was also the mobile game that's coming to Apple Arcade soon. Oh. Grimwar of Souls, is that it?

Yeah. Grimwar of Souls. They stealthly release it in Canada, then took it away before it could have a chance to try it. I played that at E3, or no, sorry, Tokyo Game Show the last time people from other countries were allowed to go to one of those. And it was okay. But the main takeaway that I got was a jump rope that is the vampire killer whip. That works a lot better than a light gun that is the vampire killer whip. You can jump rope with the vampire killer.

It's pretty rad. That actually sounds very healthy. That's Konami for you. I guess they get you off your ass once in. You got to work out the calories of all that wall meat. What is wall meat? The world may never know. Just think Edgar Allan Poe, think Amontiato.

The question is not what, but whom. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Well, at least he goes good with wine. We can be sure of that much. Or grape juice in Nintendo era. That's right. As for myself, I actually started with Castlevania 2. I was out of friends' sleepover. And as with many of the sleepovers, I was invited to. I was more interested

in the NES and playing whatever NES games they had. And my friend's brother happened to be playing Castlevania 2. And I was just really fascinated with how open it was and how much there was to explore. And I kind of built off from there. I got Castlevania 3. And I was like, okay, this is very different. What's going on? I didn't play. I hadn't played one. So I had no idea that three was based off one in a way. So I was just like, okay, cool, this is still really great. It's a great looking game, great sounding game. And it went from there. I haven't played every single game. I'm not like up to your par parish, but I have played a really, really great deal of them. And one of my saddest life moments is that I took Castlevania 3 over to, like,

in my aunt's house, and my mom made me leave it there for my cousins, and I'm still really salty about that to this day. Like, why would you do that? Okay, so the question we have to ask ourselves now is, why would we even bother ranking the Castlevania games? And I was trying to struggle with an answer for myself here. And the only thing I could come up with is because humans can't leave well enough alone. We are obsessed with lists. We are obsessed with numbers. And on that front, I'm actually going to say that this particular list, I am, I'm ranking things by tiers.

That is, D tier, C tier, B tier, A tier, and S tier. And the reason— Hey, hang on, I'm confused here. So this is just you telling us your opinions, not opening the floor for people to discuss. Yeah, what we're going to do is you're going to sit there and listen and I'm going to talk the whole time. You're allowed to give me like mild applause once in a while, but everyone has to shut up. No, this is definitely— This is an interesting new approach.

This is definitely not set in stone. We are here to fight very politely amongst ourselves about the ranking of this list. So on that note, let's start with the games I put into the D tier. And obviously, you are, you gents are very much welcome to move games around, put them into whatever tiers you want. If you put a D tier game into the A tier, I might question what is going on in your brain, but otherwise I'll let you justify yourself. So let's start with the D tier. I don't think we want to fight too much about this, though, aka the rabid bat tier, as I have named it. First and worst, if you want to call it that, Castlevania Adventure, 1989.

I'm assuming we've all tried to play this. Yes, played it all the way through. Oh, you've played it all the way through? Oh, yeah. I'm impressed. Did you play it all the way through on original hardware? You probably did. I've seen you play Accomajo Dracula for X-68,000, and you are an exceptional

Castlevania player. It's a large. No, not in the original Game Boy. I don't think ever made it past the second level, because it's, It requires so many pixel-perfect jumps that are just impossible to see, even if you're playing on hardware, you can actually see it. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of screen blurring in this game, wasn't there?

Well, there was a lot of screen blurring on the original Game Boy, period. Yes. The thing about Castlevania at the Adventure is, like Kurt says, it does require absolutely perfect pixel jumps, pixel-perfect jumps. And Christopher Beaumont is a slow-ass dude. He moves really sluggishly. And weirdly enough, that makes it, in my opinion, harder to nail pixel-perfect jumps with precision. Like, I feel like, you know, with a zippy kind of Belmont, like, you know, Simon on N.S or something, he's relatively a speedy guy.

And I feel like, you know, I can hit those jumps just right in the original Castlevania. But in this game, it's really rough because he moves so slowly. I feel like there's a lot of lag on the jump. Maybe that's what it is. But you, like, hit the jump button. And it's like Christopher says, okay there's like this

you know there's a bit of deliberation Christopher got all the recessive Valmont genes he's the liquid liquid Belmont that's why he's so awful

I mean I don't think there's going to be too much argument about whether this is the worst Castlevania game keeping in mind

and I should have clarified this earlier we're kind of sticking to the mainline Castlevania games 2D in particular that means no 3D no like spinoffs

no Kid Dracula so if if you're talking about the main line continuity. I mean, I feel like this is just really, really down there. So I don't think anyone's going to bump this up to the age here, right? This is the worst one. Yeah. It is probably my least favorite 2D Castlevania game. Yeah. I mean, if you want to get into the mobile stuff, there was that one mobile game like a decade ago that seemed kind of iffy because you had to

play it with like the number pad on a flip phone. Really? That's not good. No. No. But yeah, I can't think of, you know, if we're disqualifying a haunted castle from the arcade, which, in my opinion, we shouldn't. If we've got Super Castlevania Four in there, then I feel like all remakes the original Castle should be on the table. Oh, I see where you're coming from. But, but, yeah, Castlevania the adventure and haunted castle are both just like bottom, bottom rung. At least haunted castle has some, actually they both got good music, but haunted castle has like some, some genuine weirdness and some really bizarre misplaced. effort. Like they put a lot of effort into it in the wrong places. It's just strange. But yeah, Castle Avenue of the Adventure was Konami getting their hands on Game Boy hardware and saying, let's do the games we normally do. And then at the end of the project saying, wow, we didn't do that very well. And it's wild because some of the talent on this game went on to form treasure

who are just, you know, like they're revered for their technical prowess. But this game is such a technological mess. I think Konami just, I think the team wasn't quite ready for the compromises to design and, you know, the optimizations that had to be made to effectively make a Castlevania game, or, you know, like an NES caliber game on Game Boy. Right. And the best of those early Game Boy games that kind of followed in the footsteps of NES games were like Super Mario land, where Mario's tiny and Batman, we're Batman's tiny. And they should have have made like teeny tiny Belmont, but instead they were like, let's make a normal Belmont and everything will move like crap. I mean, this is a game, this is a game where they know

that the design is bad. And so you regularly come across health refill and invincibility items, which, you know, in normal Castlevania games, those are kind of out of the way. And invincibility is often placed in a way that's completely useless. Like, in the original Castlevania, think about the invincibility jugs that are, you know, standard drops. And they're, they're in really stupid places where it's just like, oh, this is a thing that exists, but I don't need it. Whereas here, like, you are given repeatedly invincibility objects, like power-ups. I think the crosses on the, like, the critical path. And it's because they know the controls and the design are so crappy that you are going to take damage. So they're just like, oh, well, you know, okay, sorry about

that. Here, here's a little bit of a gimme. Like, that's, to me, that is the tell. Like, they went back after they had kind of put this game together at the last minute, hastily said, all right, this is brutal and not fun. So let's give players a little bit of a, you know, let's give them a gentle little hug to make them feel better. That's actually funny. And ever even thought of that being the reason why there's so many, like, life refills and whatnot around that game. That's, because yeah, usually Castlevini games are extremely stingy with life refills. And you have to think very strategically when you're playing an old school Casavina game. Okay, where can I stop and refill my health? Where's a guaranteed

power up? Meanwhile, in adventure, it's just like, oh, here you go. Thanks for coming. Here's a loot bag. It has a meat inside of it. There's also all those spots we are chased by spikes, but since the game runs so slowly, like it just robs it of any drama. It's just really, really annoying. You just have to leisurely walk away from the spikes. But because you're so slow, it's like everything is moving through some sort of thick syrup. It's like the corn syrup, you know, high fructose corn syrup version of Castlevania. And so when you have to, you know, break those walls away that have the like the rotating spikes on them, it's agonizing. And it's really hard to do it in enough time before you, you know, get crushed.

Just because everything runs at like half the speed of an NES game. It's, anyway, yes, I agree. This game is poop. It is pat poop. What's funny about what you said, Parrish, um, about how Konami was kind of getting used to the GB hardware. Castlevania Legends, the other game on this D-tier, came out in 1987. It was also for the GamePoy, and it was also quite bad. And it had a lot of the same problems Castlevania the Adventure did, as to say, it was just slow and not very fun. So it's funny that, you know, this was in the Game Boy Renaissance when Pokemon was out, at least in Japan, and, like, the system was getting, like, a real breath of fresh air. And here comes Castlevania Legends, which is just, I just remember being really strong.

slow, really boring, and as much as I love bloody tears, I don't want to be the only song in the game. Yeah, Kurt, have you ever come across an explanation of why this game shat the bed so badly? I have no idea. I don't think it was outsource. It just was, you know... No, it's Nagoya, I think. Isn't it the Nagoya studio? Yeah, they just, I don't know, must have shoveled something out real quick. Yeah, it's a real mystery to me. It had a cool idea because, you know, at this point they were sort of trying to take the lore of Catholician seriously. So like here, here's the mother of all the Belmonts. And, you know,

it tied it into Alicard with Symphony of the Night. But they just didn't make an interesting game out of it. No, it's just, it wasn't, you're right, because it had like the lore. And it was very Symph in the Night in terms of his writing and that particular lore. But it wasn't fun to play. It was just, like I said, it really played like a Game Boy game from 1987, not 1997. It was mystifying to me. And of course, it doesn't matter either way, because Igarashi made it an ungame. Yeah, you know, this game was put together by the same team at Konami, the Nagoya team, whose only other Castlevania project was the extraordinarily incomprehensibly poor Saturn version of Symphony of the Night. Like, you know, the Sega Saturn was a 2D powerhouse.

It should have been able to just take Symphony the Night and demolish the PlayStation version. But it runs, it runs like garbage. I don't know. There's something just funny about the Saturn. Like, everybody thinks that the Saturn is more ideal for 2D games than it mostly was. But the Saturn doesn't support the resolution that's something that ran out in the PlayStation. So it has... The reason it looks like garbage is because it's stretched out everything horizontally. So there's all sorts of uneven pixels, and it just looks ugly.

The bigger problem is that it runs like trash. Yeah, yeah, that also... But it does have Maria, who's a really cool playable. character. It's just that she's stuck, you know, in a really bad version of the game. And there's all the weird stuff like, you know, the Wizard of Oz trees and the underground garden and stuff. They turned a glitch into an actual section of the game. Like, I feel like this team tried. They added the magic system to legends, which is kind of interesting. But it's just like, they just, I guess, didn't have the technical chops. I don't know. It's really, it's really

inexplicable why their Castlevania games were so bad. But Legends is especially baffling because, I mean, they had examples of how to do Castlevania well on portable hardware by that point. You had Belmont's revenge, which was pretty good. And they were just like, but what if instead of making it pretty good, we just make it bad again. So Castlevania came full circle on Game Boy. Circle of the dunes. Circle of the awful moon. Actually, I kind of contradicting myself here by saying I'm only including Canon games, but I found Castlevania legend so fascinating that

I just had to talk about it because the inclusion of Sonia, the implication that Alikar is a father of Trevor, the completely baffingly bad gameplay, I just had to mention it. I couldn't help myself. I would say this is, I would put it above the Castlevania Adventure just because the Castlevania Adventure is

barely playable, and this one is this one you could get to the end through, end of, but it's not like particularly good. And I know we talked about Haunted Castle briefly, and I would also put that very slightly above Castlevania Adventure just because you can see it to the end if you credit feed. And this is, again, not painful, but not good. Yeah, it's, you know, at least some games are entertaining with how bad they are. This isn't even that. This is just what?

Yeah, it doesn't even have the good music to it. That's always even the bad Castlevania, saving grace. You're right, yeah. You have the one thing that can save you, Castlevania, and Legends did not have it. So I don't think we're going to have any major fallout over the D tier. I think that's what it is. But I was going to move on to the C tier, which is I call the mudman tier, because I don't know, I find mudmen like the most boring enemies in the game. They're just like, except for maybe zombies.

They just, I don't know, dribble. Zombies, at least, were justified by the sisters mode in Portrait of the Ruin, a portrait of ruin, where you could use the stylus to, like, smack their heads for distance. Oh, yeah. That was actually really great. That justified zombies. Actually, you know what, the bloody zombies are pretty great, too, the way they gargle on their own blood. That was pretty badass. So when you're a Nintendo kid, you're going to that, it's like, whoa, this is awesome.

So, starting with the C tier here, I put down for beginners Dracula X on the S&S, 1995. And I said, Take Everything is Revolutionary and Remarkable about Rondo of Blood and throw it out the window and you've got Dracula X. That's pretty much it. Have you just played this game? Yeah, I remember, like, I was out of console gaming at the time, but the video game magazines I still read just completely shredded it. I mean, anybody who read Electronic Gaming Monthly or Game Fan in the early 90s, they were hyping up. the PC engine, Dracula X. It just looked like the most incredible, unattainable, except for the rich kids sort of thing.

Probably game fan. Game fan never shut up about the PC engine. Yeah, so everybody's like, yeah, Super Nintendo, we're finally going to get it here in America. And then nobody liked it. I don't think they knew at the time that it was a completely different game by a completely different team. I mean, it's made a little bit clear in Japan where it has a different title. The art style is completely different. So it's...

Yeah, I love the box art style in Japan. It's so good. It's like, you know, French expressionist almost. Yeah, it's really awesome. Art Nouveau. And so, like, as an alternative, Dracula X, it kind of made sense, even though it's still not particularly good. But here, it had the same box art as the PC engine one, and it's, again, like you said, it's everything that was Rondo Bloody, just strip out everything that made it interesting. And then also make some bad design decisions that really took it down.

Yeah, this was pretty heavy on the really old-fashioned, you know, Belmont gets knocked five miles back into a pit school of design. And the disappointing thing about that is, I think most of us who did have Rondo Blood in the backs of our mind as we played this, we realized, well, in Rondo of Blood, if you fall down a pit, you're discovering a whole new area. In this game, you're dead. Yeah, the alternate levels is one of the coolest things about Tracul X, but the way they did in the Super Nintendo one, it's more like a punishment. like because one of the branching levels is you go on a like a series of columns with I think there's Medusa heads there and if you make it you go to one branch but if you fall you go to the other whereas like there was a real sense of exploration and when you play Dracula X and the PCNG you're like oh which way do I want to go this run where they more force it on you

that too branching like Rondo Blood of course has the branching levels the branching bosses and Dracula X was so much more simplistic and yeah you're right I remember the game magazine's just shredding it back in the day. Nobody liked it. Yeah, I was really confused about that because I was not aware of Rondo of Blood for PC Engine. And so I, you know, I was like, oh, Castlevania is back. Finally, it took four years for a follow-up from Super Castlevania 4. But then I played a demo at a video shop or something. I'm trying to remember. And I was really disappointed because I was like, oh, this feels like, you know, a step back, not from Rondo of Blood, but from Super Castlevania 4. It's just like NES-style Castlevania.

It looks pretty, but I don't know. I don't know that I'm really into this. So, you know, it was kind of a letdown from that perspective. It was the first Castlevania game I did not buy. Yeah. Well, aside from Bloodlines, because they didn't have a Genesis. So that didn't exist as far as my reality, you know, recognized it. So, yeah, it just, I mean, even compared to Bloodlines, it feels like a step backward.

It's not a bad game, but, you know, kind of knowing where it, came from. It does feel pretty disappointing. I will say, though, that, yeah, like, the magazine that's probably guiltiest of shredding it was game fan. And they did that a lot with import games, and then, you know, the U.S. version or equivalent would come out, and they'd be like, ah, that's crap. And someone has pointed out the fact that they did have a strong association with an importing business. So while they were gushing over Final Fantasy 7 and Final Fantasy 8 in the Japanese versions, then the American versions came out and they were like, it's stupid. So, you know, there was, there's a little bit of a question of like, what was the ulterior motive there? But in this case,

I think this was, this was really where the press being insiders into, you know, Japanese releases and importing a lot, whereas most people did not at that point. It was not really that common. there wasn't that much transparency into the Japanese side of the industry, aside from little snippets that were reported, reported in magazines. Right. I don't think most people have the context to really say, oh, wow, we got, we got robbed. That's not cool. I think it was, you know, that was much more, there was more anger in the press than among

players. And it was only later, after something that came out that people were like, oh, wait, this is based on something that's kind of that one game, but also not. Oh, weird. Yeah, that made things more confusing, but we can get into a whole episode about Castlevania, Symphony Night's localization, and how confusing that, those first opening moments are Holy crap. And this was the first game that really tried to build off what Symphony Knight did. And I think the Game Boy Advance was an interesting platform to try that on, especially since you could not see anything in this game. It is probably what's most infamous for.

The original GBA did not have a backlight. This was a launch game for the GBA. Even Iger Aschie looks back on this and says, oh, no, what did we do? Yeah, it's not the most beloved game in the Castle Vinga series. I have to admit, even though I have not been able to stand it for very long. How about either of you? I bought a Game Boy Advance for it. Oh, dear.

I mean, I was happy with it at the time. Okay. Yeah, the lighting was terrible, but, you know, previous to that, like, you know, Game Boy Color games always look really bad. And here's something that kind of look like a Super Nintendo game. So I thought it was really impressive. And sound-wise, again, you know, nowadays, everything sounds really fuzzy. But to hear that sounds coming out of such a little system was pretty cool.

It has, like, a decent soundtrack, too. Yeah, it's all the best hits of other Castlevania games. I mean, it's decent enough. But, yeah, going back to it, it just doesn't play particularly well. The card system that he uses relies too much on randomization. The only thing that I kind of like about it is that the Dracula battle is really hard. Not necessarily in a great way. It sucks.

It's bad. Yeah, it's a terrible battle. I thought it was neat because, like, so many of the other Castlevania games, you just kind of stroll up to the last boss. And this is the same issue with a lot of Metroid games, too, is that, the final battle is kind of frivolous, so, you know, like the late game where you're exploring and finding all the extra health power up and stuff, like, Circle of the Moon makes you do that. And I thought that was, like, that's a good design thing. It also makes you farm, it also makes you farm health pickups, like refills and stuff, which

you can't buy, you have to get them as random drops, which is not a lot of fun. Yeah, I hate the final battle in this game because it's, it really, it doesn't play well on the small screen. The screen proportions are very tiny. And Dracula tends to appear off-screen a lot. And you have to kind of predict how he's going to attack you, even though you can't see him. And he has, like, this weird demon hot rod that flies through the air. It's, I don't know.

I don't think it's a good, I don't think it's a good final battle. But there's, it kind of gets to the weird issue with how Nathan Graves moves. You know, this is a game for a system that had widescreen visuals. And it was kind of like the super NES, but with a lot of the top and bottom pixels shaved off. So they created a Castlevania game and said, all right, here is a screen. It's very horizontally oriented. Let's make our hero move really naturally vertically with great jump abilities, but really terrible horizontally. Like Nathan's moves, like his natural ability to get around, is kind of.

contrary to the nature of the hardware. And, you know, you eventually, pretty early on, actually, get the ability to do a dash, but you have to double tap in a single direction to do that. So you spend the entire game double tapping anytime you want to move. And it gets really tedious really quickly. And I just feel like the control issues, the view perspective, the dim, grim graphics,

they just, they really make this game not fun to play. and then you have to grind so much for power-ups and things like that. You don't get health refills after you beat a boss. So if you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth and then die after, you know, running back to a save point, well, that's a shame. Got to do it again. I don't know. There's just a lot of really frustrating design flaws that add up in this game and make me say this absolutely belongs in the C-tier. I agree.

Like, it's not particularly great. It's easy is the worst of the Metroid-Vanias. Although, like, all EGM at the time, they were really high on this game. Like, both this and Harmony of Dissanance, like, the best 200 games of all time they put out probably in, like, 2000, 2001, included both that and Harmony of Dissinence, which nowadays, those games do not hold up. But I think it just showed how hard up we were for these types of games, because they weren't really making them yet. Like, they hadn't brought back Metroid's yet. so yeah i mean i i flipped out for this game when it first came out and for like the first hour or two that i played it i thought it was the greatest thing but then you know i played it longer and was

just like i'm not i'm not having fun i never actually finished it on the original game boy and i didn't go back and actually complete it i want to say for like five years and finally i played it on a ds light because i was like wow this looks great it's bright and clean and there's no blur. And also I can use a game shark and hack in infinite potions, so I'm good. You're set. Yeah. Like, that's another thing is you mentioned, Kurt, the randomization of the card-based system, the DSS. And the biggest counter I ever see to that complaint is people say, well, you know, there's a way to cheat and hack yourself any card you want. I'm like, if your, if your defense of the game is you can actually, you know, take it of a programming bug that wasn't intended by the designers and cheat yourself anything

you want. That's not really a point, a mark in the game's favor. No. No, it really isn't. I think this was another one that Agarashi made an ungame, but again, I kind of had to mention it because it was once part of the canon and it has an interesting past. I just think that the fact that it was a showcase piece, a launch piece for the GBA, just, I don't know, it could have done a little better, but the, I know Igarashi was quite disappointed in the dim visuals and the bad controls, and that's why he strived to do better with harmony of dissonance, and strove to do better for that. And as we'll see in a few, he mostly succeeded because we are getting on to the, oh, I'm sorry, no, we're not done with the C tier, because I have one more in

the C tier, and that is Castlevania 2, Belmont Revenge, 1921 for the Game Boy. Way better than adventure, but still not exactly the most epic Castlevania of all time. but not something you'd hate to get as a gift from like an ant or something. Yeah, I think this is probably the right place for Castlevania 2, Belmont's Revenge. It's a game that people point to a lot and say, you know, this is actually one of the best Castlevania games of all time. And I actually sat down to play it, I don't know, like five or six years ago. And I wasn't really that impressed.

Like, it still plays a lot like Castlevania the Adventure. It's cool that it's got a Mega Man, like, level select, but the levels drag on a little long. It's a little slow. So it's definitely better than Castlevania the Adventure, but still has that Game Boy problem. And I don't think there was really a good portable Castlevania game until Aria of Sorrow. That was, you know, 2003. That's a long-ass-time. I do like that someone typoed on the notes that says Caressylvania.

That's the sexiest entry in the series. Dracula Triple X. That's a sequel to erotic vampire or whatever is called. That is a pretty awesome typo. I commend myself on that one. Oh, actually, I'm sorry. You know what just happened when you were saying? When you were talking, the cat jumped on the keyboard and typed that.

Thanks, Toothless. You've given us all the laugh tonight. Yeah, so that's it for the C tier. Again, I don't think there's any sort of major fighting to be done unless Kurt you want to defend the case of Belmont Revenge. I would give it a C plus B minus because, again, it's just because I don't hate Castlevania Legends, I think it's better than that. But yeah, it's pretty middle of the line. Yeah, so as you might expect from the C tier, very little. drama. The B tier might have some more interesting discussion because now we're at the tier

where, quote, it is like the chill zombie who's falling apart but not too badly. So there we are. Another chalkup for zombies, I suppose, over mudmen. So for the first game I put in this tier, I actually put Simon's Quest because, you know, it's the quote unquote bad Castlevania game that launched a career of a thousand angry YouTube men. Nothing against the nerd. I think he's pretty cool. But it was like I said earlier, it was my first Castlevania game and the one that fascinated me because it was so kind of aimless and invited you to go anywhere. And if you died, which you would, like it would start you right where you were, which was great for someone for like me who was, you know, still pretty young and not very good at playing video games.

I just didn't want to worry too much about death. I just wanted to see it was around the corner. Oh, cool. It's another cool monster. I really like Simon's Quest. I'll sit here and defend it forever. I will say, though, that I talked to Igarashi at some packs or another, and I asked him if he liked it. And he said, without Simon's Quest, there would be no symphony of the night. because Simon's Quest is what convinced Konami, okay, maybe Calislevina can work in an adventurous context, which is what he wanted for S-Fing the night. So, hooray for Simon Belmont. So I would say, in my brain, I know that you're correct in placing this here in the middle, the B-tier, but in my heart, it's S-tier. I have so many fond memories of this game, and I had such a great, like, you know, if you put yourself in context of 1988,

when video games are still kind of new, video games that drop you into a world and say, go have an adventure, figure everything out. That was exciting and different. And of course, you know, I had Nintendo Power. So the really bad sticking points I was able to get through pretty easily because they were like, yeah, listen, kids, we know this doesn't make any damn sense.

Here's the answer. And those like five or six clues they provided, you know, don't actually hit yourself your head against Deborah Cliff. You will not make a hole. You will just be taken to the hospital. They, you know, they provided just enough of a sort of basis of understanding that it kept me from getting lost. And I don't know how many times I played this game through just going after the shortest time possible and trying to explore different ways and trying to like find different things and so on and so forth. It was just, it was very, it was very entrancing to have a game that,

you know, just consisted of this open, interconnected countryside where I could, you know, go wherever I wanted and kind of forge my own path. And there's definitely, there's definitely an optimal path. And there's definitely, it's definitely a game that rewards you for exploiting the time system and grinding for levels inside of mansions where the, the time freezes and doesn't count against your ending. And, you know, there's also something to be said for a game where the endings are all scrambled and the best ending isn't. Yes. But it was just, it was just so interesting.

And, you know, I wanted this as a game for myself and asked for it, I think, for like Christmas or my birthday or something. And I know my parents got it for me. And then a friend lent it to me. And I beat it over a weekend. And my parents were horrified. They were like, ah, we got this for you as a gift. And you've already beaten it.

Now you've wasted this gift that we got you. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, I'm going to play this one again. And I did. Of course. Yeah. But I also realized that it's, you know, a pretty big mess. And for all its ambition, it does a lot of things wrong or poorly.

And, yeah, it belongs in the B tier. But, you know, that's the disconnect between objective reality. And I was there with my feet on the ground at the time. And there wasn't really anything like this in gaming aside from, you know, Zelda. And this was a different, this was a different. sort of paradigm of gaming than Zalda. Yeah, definitely. I know exactly where I come from Parish,

because it's definitely an S-tier in my heart. I would even say that this was one of the first video games to really do visual storytelling exceptionally well. Like the way that the landscape becomes more and more drained of color as you get closer to Dracula's castle, and you see more and more graves and just horrifying monsters. I think that was just a really, really nice touch. And not to mention the town that's totally devoid of people,

other than that one creepy woman who tells you to live here with her. I do think, like, it is extremely difficult to play without a guide, but guides were everywhere when this game came out. Like, I could go to school and get a guide for Castlevania, too, because it was, like, I mean, it wasn't a great guy. Yeah, I think they had him at the nurse's office. Like, you know, through scholastic book fairs and stuff, there was always this, like, every time I go to the books are the Jeff Rovan guides. And, I mean, I was a kid. I wasn't exactly going to waste my allowance on a little guidebook. But I would go there every time I went to the mall and be like, oh, how do I get past this part?

So, yeah, Castlevania, too, is extremely hard to be on its own, but the resources were there even when it came out. Although, I do think they were, it was kind of made for it, because the last time I played through the game, I used a Japanese guide to sort of help out. And just the fact that they had maps and also labeled where every location was called helped a lot. Right. Because within the game, there are signs that tell you what other locations are, but not the location that you're in most of the time. So getting a grasp on where to go is a little hard. And there is a sense of place in the map, but when you map it out on 2D blocks, like, if you're actually drawing it, it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. No, no, it really doesn't.

It kind of just jumped from one area to the next. And I have seen, like, Western versions of those maps, and they're just jumbles of pictures because they have no idea with the drawing either. Great music, though. Like, I mean, I didn't own this game when I was a kid, but I did rent it and borrow it. And I do remember when one of my friends rented it, I called them up, I demanded to listen to the music over the phone because that was the only way I could hear until, like, I had a little handheld, like, sound recorder that my mom had used for school and I recorded all sorts of video game music on it. The way we did things in the olden days, eh, those were the times. I'll tell you that much. I remember a friend of mine telling me, hey, I was, I was at home and flipping through stations, and I flipped past this Mexican soap opera. And the background music was from Simon. quest. And I believe it. I believe it. Oh, totally. I can just imagine it now. The town theme. I bet more than

anything, it was the town theme. No, I think it was the nighttime music. Not a, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That one. Yeah, that one. Really? What was going on in that soap opera? Holy crap. I don't know. That sounds like just devastating. I'd watch a spooky Mexican soap opera. Are you kidding me? But Bloody Tears, the original version, that's my, that's my ringtone. Because it's just such a perfect piece of game music if you ask me. It is pretty damn good. So that automatically bumps Simon's Quest up to the A tier. Sorry.

Oh, you're right. That should be a good rule right there because Bloody Tears is the best piece of Castlevania game music, bar none. So, yeah, we are all very much in love with Simon's Quest. We acknowledge its flaws, but man, just what an interesting game. I'd love to have another one in that style, or you're just not necessarily Metroidvania, maybe just a more adventure-based thing where you're, you know, just less spulunking, more exploring sprawling areas and mansions and whatnot. But at this rate, who knows what the hell's going to happen with Castlevania?

So on to our next game, which is another might be controversial one, Portrait of Ruin for the DS, 2006. See, this was like came out late in the age of the Metroidvania and everyone was starting to do one, everyone in their mom. And Portrait of Ruin was kind of yet another Castlevania game in that style. I still think it's a very solid Metroidvania overall, a little unremarkable one maybe. I actually really like the fact that takes place during the First World War, even if that's severely underutilized. and I do like the fact that you get to play as like the families from Bloodlines, like Eric Lecard and what's his face,

the Morris guy. Jonathan. Johnny Morris? That's it. Thank you. The dude with the hair. And Charlotte as well. Charlotte's cool.

I like her. I like that this game has a lot of fun with itself. Well, that sounds dirty. I like this game, the fact that this game doesn't take itself too seriously and isn't afraid to have fun. I mean, even though it does have like some real emo drama about the characters,

And all of this like war stuff happening and there's vampires, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's still, like, there's still a lot of goofiness in this game, even besides, you know, just the sort of anime goofiness that you expect. But you have the ability to power up your special weapons. And there's so many special weapons, including really dumb, weird stuff. It kind of takes the soul's element of Dawn of Sorrow and makes it more focused on sub-weapons for Jonathan especially. And so you can like throw cream pies and paper airplanes and you can power those up and throw like giant cream pies and enormous paper airplanes. It's stupid and ridiculous and it's great. But it also has that great dual system.

And I love the way that's realized in the final battle where Dracula and death are like, all right, we're going to take you on, you know, we're going on even terms. So they like, they tag in with each other. And that just rules. It's great. That was a good battle. I did enjoy that battle very much. That was very intense.

I think this is my favorite of all the portable Castlevania's. A lot of that has to do with my affection for bloodlines, which looks like you said, its connection is a little underutilized because Eric Larkard is in there, but you don't get to play as them. Yeah. I like the world traveling themes. Like, any time you put Vampire Slayers. in Egypt. Like, I am there just immediately. That's fair. It's just like such a cool idea.

I like the music a lot. Sorry, I was just going to, you just reminded me by talking about Egypt. I love the way that it takes advantage of the dual character system by certain enemies behaving differently or having different exploits or powers against specific characters. Like Astarte has the ability to just take over Jonathan and charm him. So you have to fight her basically as Charlotte, while both Astarday and Jonathan are trying to attack you. And there's the enemy who will, like the gentleman with the rose who will attack Jonathan,

but he'll kind of bow and throw a rose to Charlotte, even as you're killing him. There's just a lot of really great details like that. The back half of the game is a little, that's where it usually gets shellacked by fans. And the back half the game is pretty boring. But I don't know. I will always go to back for this game, especially because Don of Saro, I was never that impressed by that game. So this was kind of the upside for that. And I also

like this game better than Ecclesia, but we'll get to that eventually. Oh, really? Because I really loved Ecclesia. I just felt like maybe I'm not being fair to Porto of Ruin because I really did enjoy it. I just felt like maybe it was done by the time I got to it, so I wasn't quite as enthralled with it. But I did love

the fact that the Bloodline's cast was back. I actually asked Igarashi straight out why can, you know, why can LeCard, Eric Lecard, use the Alacard sphere? Are they related? And he said yes, but the he wouldn't tell me how or what. And he said it's up to Konami to finally reveal. And it's like, well, I'll never know. Going to go to my grave. Alas. Yeah, I'd stick portrait of ruin in the tier, I think. And this is another one that I have a lot of fond feelings for. It was one of those that

I got to play it before I came out. I was headed back from Tokyo Game Show. And as I got on the plane, Shane Bettenhausen was like, here you go. And he gave me a review ROM. And so I like played that all the way back to the U.S. and instead of sleeping, it was pretty rad. That's actually a good game to have on the way back, because I've done that haul back from Japan, and holy crap, I never want to do that again. But I do, because I want to go back to Japan.

But better than what I did, I was so bored, I started watching Njago. So, yeah, I will concede, I will say I'm not being extremely fair to Portrait of Ruin. I would bump it up to the A tier if someone held a gun to my head or even if they didn't. I'll give you guys that

one. Next up is, is now I feel bad because, you know, I'm mentioning all these remakes, and I should have struck them out of the canon, but here we are anyway. Castlevania, the Adventure Rebirth on the Wii on Wiiare 2009. And it's basically, I said it's a good remake of a bad game by the very talented M2. It's not very long, not very spectacular, but extremely solid. I think it's a good example of small, like, quote, unquote, indie games finally starting to make a breakthrough on digital marketplaces. This was a game everyone seemed really excited for and people seemed to like.

It's okay. It's, like, the MTV made three rebirth games. There's this, Gradius, and Contra. And I thought that Contra was excellent. Gradius was decent, and this was fine, but not really the best. The visuals seem a little, like, cobbled together. Level designs go in a little long. It's ostensibly a remake of the Castlevania Adventure, but not really.

Like, it takes the rolling eyeballs. One of the best things about this whole series was they got Manabunamiki, the Jet sound composer to rearrange the soundtracks and the style of like the late 80s, early 90s arcade games. Right. And they all sound really cool. But in the game, they didn't even have the theme music from the first Castle of Indian Adventure, which is the strangest choice.

It's on like the soundtrack album, but it's not the game. It's so weird. But yeah, otherwise it's, I do notice that in a lot of retro indie games, the levels are not paced very well. They kind of drag. Right. That's kind of the issue some of the more recent Mega Man games, too. And that kind of drags this one down for me.

Like, it's not something I'm really hankering to play again. Would you knock it down to the C tier, maybe? I would say, yeah, I would knock it down to the C tier. Okay. How about you, Parrish? I feel like you stuck it in the proper tier here. It's very middle of the road. I like what they tried to do, but it is kind of uneven.

It kind of, like, there's something about the style that reminds me a bit of the X-68,000 game. but it's not that good. It's just, I don't know. It's there. It would be nice if they would, you know, republish it in some form so people could actually play it in the here and now. But nothing about this game makes me want to run out and play it immediately. Yeah, that's fair.

Like I said, I think it's extremely fascinating because of its role as like kind of an indie breakout game, but that's something else entirely. But yeah, I would say B minus, like somewhere between the void between the B and the C tier. So we'll more or less leave it alone and move on to, our next game, Harmony of Disacistinence. And that's 2002 for the Game Boy. I said it's definitely an improvement over Circle of the Moon, but still not quite there, if you know what I mean. It was a good base for area of sorrow, though, which we're going to get to. I think it's an improvement over Circle, but not drastic. It feels and looks better. But

design-wise, it just drags and drags and drags. Yeah, it's definitely not the best of the Metroidvania, Castlevania, which is redundant, I suppose. But I thought I just kind of put it here to give it a home. What do you think, Parrish? Yeah, I enjoyed this at the time because it was better than Circle of the Moon and was easier to see and, you know, had some interesting ideas. I like the magic skill combo system. I thought that was kind of like the DSS, but better and felt more in keeping with Castlevania. But it's kind of hard to go back to the way the two castles are fused together feels very confusing and it is really difficult to navigate the game as a result. But, you know, I still did enjoy it. But I would say B tier is proper. It's

middle of the road. Yeah, so more, we'll just kind of keep it where it is, let it keep sleeping, because we're moving on to the A-tier, aka the sexy vampire who bathes in blood tier, which is a name I'm quite proud of. And it's quite apropos because we're starting with Castlevania Bloodlines, 1994 for the Genesis. I was a very, very much a latecomer to this game. How about you, gentlemen? I rented it, and I beat it.

I enjoyed it a lot. You were a Sega kit and the Castlevania Dungeon guy and you only rented bloodlines. I feel like everything I know is a lie. Yeah. I did grow up rich. I did buy everything. You got to make it count, though. Yeah.

Fair enough. That's true. Yeah, I came into this one late myself, but really, really like it. I've never finished it. I need to. But it's got some really cool ideas. The characters are interesting because they're actually pretty similar in terms of handling compared to like Richter and Maria or something.

Yeah. Or Charlotte and Jonathan. But there's still some significant differences. And, you know, it does affect how you play. Eric plays really cool. Jonathan always, or John always handled strangely in this game. Maybe the fact that he was left-handed or just his animations always felt a little off. Are you speaking crap about lefties now, Kurt?

Are I going to have to, like, take you off the show? They're so sinister. He had his stuff from Ned Flanders, Vampire Hunting Store. He can make a lot of money if he did that. Welcome to the Latorium. Oh, yeah, I love the globe-trotting theme of this game. Just because, you know, the castle setting just kind of, you know, grows out after a while. So the fact that it was, you know, set in France and in Germany and it took place in the early 20th century, you know, Elizabeth Bartley was a really cool.

antagonist, even though Dracula shows up the end anyway. Of course. Soundtrack was fantastic. I don't think is Machia Gianni's first soundtrack overall, but it was for first one for Castlevania. And it's brilliant. I think it feels better than Super Castlevania 4. The only knock against it is a little short.

It's only six levels. And they're kind of long levels, but compared to, especially Dracula X, it's over a little too quickly. But no, otherwise, I love this game. I think one of the things that, oh, sorry, Peres, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say, I feel like every level counts and there's enough of a, you know, of a difference in how the characters handle and how you get around the stages to justify playing it twice. So that works for me. I like the fact that it's just so different from any other Castlevania series or, sorry, any other Castlevania game in this list.

It has very much its own look, its own feel, its own movement, its own soundtrack, because, yeah, even though. hear a lot of familiar tunes in that soundtrack. They're all remixed in a way that sounds very genesis, very 90s attitude energy. And it's just, it's a very hard game. I'd say some people might even say it's unfair at points, which I don't really have, don't really know enough to get to the mechanics and argue every little detail of them. But I will say that I love how Eric Lecard like kind of previews what was coming for the Castlevania series in the way of you don't have to be stuck with a whip.

You can choose whip or sword or gun or whatever down the line. I think it was really cool breakaway for the series. And if I'm not mistaken, can't Eric like freaking pogo off his spear? Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty freaking amazing. Oh, and that was really advertised as being bloody too, because there's, you know, the cool, the pool of blood on the title screen when you, you zap a zombie there, the torso falls off. And when you, when Eric dies, the spear flies dramatically there and stabs them. I was about to say he has the most hardcore death animation of any character in 16-bit history.

Oh, the prototype for that game, which was shown on eBay, like 20 years ago, someone finally dumped the little last number of vision of it. And you know how John dies in this game? He just kind of fades away. Yeah. In that version, he actually turns into bones like Arthur from Gouls and Ghosts. Oh, that's wicked. I guess they must have figured that maybe a little bit too hardcore. That's really funny

Because the whole The title screen Like you said It's literally a pool of blood Yeah Too much for Europe though Yeah I was going to say Too intense for the prim and proper UK

Oh right There was that whole thing going on Because they had like a title screen With water or something That made no sense It was Elizabeth Bathery's original bath She dumped out in favor of blood Or she was really filthy that one day

And just got to the bath afterwards And said oh boy What did I leave behind So yeah Great game death scene ever. I'm just laughing that they didn't leave in the skeleton, but they left in the fact that the spear

never fails to go way, way up, and never fails to land right on Eric Lechard as if God hates him specifically. It's so perfect. It's so tragic. It's like, this is what God thinks that you're hunting vampires, Eric Lechard. This is why you're supposed to use a whip.

There you go. No one's ever impaled themselves on a whip. That's the Belmont ancestors just telling Eric LeCard if they think of him. And Kurt's not going to agree with the next game. And Kurt's not going to agree with the next game because I put down as Castlevania Don of Sorrow, which was for the DS in 2005, I think that while Area of Saro touched up a lot of what was wrong with Symphony of the Night, which wasn't much, but

was significant. Don of Starro kind of touched up a lot of Area of Saro's problems. It's also a rare example of another Castlevania game following like absolutely directly off another one. I think maybe one thing that sticks out in my mind in terms of this game's flaws, though, is man, man, man, I hate those character, portrait, holy crap. let me offer a counterpoint who cares it's fine but coming off of symphony the night and all and and those portraits just it's a downgrade but you know it's it's fine i know which characters they are they're you know the story they're telling it's kind of appropriate to it it's it's very it's very anime yeah i i don't care like it's it's still plays great and

outside of the character portraits it looks really good It was just so astounding to see this on my DS because it was really like a high-end PlayStation 1 2D game or Saturn 2D game playing on DS. And at the time, you know, D.S was still kind of, it was 2005, so it was only a year old and people were like, why do I own this system? I don't have Mario Kart or Nintendo dogs yet.

And Don of Sara was there to say, this fools, this is why you own it. It was very, very satisfying, very impressive, and very playable, very replayable, because it just has multiple layers of replayability. Yeah, I remember being really impressed by certain touches that really made me realize, okay, this is a different class of visuals. Like, I remember jumping on the snow-covered car in the first level, and the snow would fall off, like, in sheets.

I thought that was a really, really nice touch, and the game was kind of full of those little graphical touches. I will say, though, that whole, that glyph drawing system, which Nintendo kind of forced on everyone, so that everyone was using the stylus. It was just so stupid. I got hung off by it so many times. Every single console that I bought, at least when I was younger, I would only get when a new Castlevania game came out.

So I bought this one. I forget, it was like a year or two. I can't remember. But visually, yeah, it was an improvement over area. But sound, I didn't like most of the music at all. At this point, it was kind of like basically just area of sorrow. But again, I didn't feel like they were enough new interesting areas or anything. The art, again, not great, but we did get an anime intro out of it, so that was pretty cool.

The post game with all the Castlevania characters, though, that was, I think, the saving grace of this game. That's right. We didn't get a grand analog. We still got Alucard back, and we got to play as Yoko Belnades, so that was pretty cool. Yeah, they didn't give us hammer. They were supposed to give us hammer, but even so, I still love it. And the ending where you take on Soma, and he does the Dracula thing, That was awesome.

Holy crap. Yeah, that's cool. That was me yelling at the screen. Is this also the one where you fight Abadden? Because I love that boss fight. And ironically, I can't remember which game it was from area or this one. I think it is this one because the end game area was pretty cool. I remember being impressed by it more than most of the rest of the game.

Yeah. It's very weird. Yeah, it was a very strange area. I just remember the background for that fight, was just that kind of tree, that single tree, like kind of in a permanent frozen stance like it's blowing in the wind it would just creep me out and that was a great boss fight I love that so much the one thing one last thing I would say though is I do wish this game was more accessible because holy crap you can if you don't have a DS you're not playing it it's also as infamous for that uh it's one of the only ones I've seen with that

canami classics line where it's like the frame version of the box art oh that was so awful why did that happen oh my that was almost as bad as the old master system games with a guy holding the card. Yeah, when you say bad you mean great. Okay, you're right. That was an achievement of artistry right there. But yeah, Don of Sorrow, Kurt, if you want to change it out here with Portrait of Ruin, I won't hold it against you.

I totally understand where you're coming from. Because I do remember this was the first game where I started to realize, okay, are we doing this again? When I entered an area that was obviously the underground, and they called it like underground hell or something really stupid like that. And it's like, oh, underground hell, as opposed to sky hell, I suppose. Thanks for clearing that up, Tommy. Yeah, yeah, that's basically what I'd do. Just swap the two. Okay, that's fair enough.

Next game was harder for me to place because it was Castlevania, NES, 1996. I call it the boss vampire. It pretty much is. This is the game that started at all. And even playing it now, as Parrish has covered many times in his wonderful series, like NES works and whatnot, even though it's old, it still plays really well. And the only reason I wouldn't rank it higher is because I still think, say, Castlevania 3 improves upon it. And it might be the more fun game to play.

But it is absolutely a game you should like to sit down and play anytime if you're a retro fan. I would put this in the same category as a handful of other games like Ms. Pac-Man, Gallagher, Tetris. That is just like this game is perfect for the level of technology. it has for the time that it came out and for what it sets out to do. Like, this, you know, sets out to be a six-stage action game, kind of in the ghost and goblin's vein with a sort of uki-spooky horror movie kind of referentialism to it. And it does all of those things perfectly.

It's not the best Castlevania game. It's not the deepest Castlevania game for sure. But, you know, within the sort of limited. boundaries of what its creators wanted to do to create. I can't really see this game doing that any better. So you can add to this game, you can

give it new mechanics, you can make it adventurousome, whatever, but if you just want this tightly crafted, perfectly controlling, thoughtfully balanced, challenging but not impossible, little compact action game,

this is it, this is the one. Yeah, and while researching this piece, like I was kind of an oldcomer, latecomer to the NES, so I played Castlevania very late in the NES' lifespan, looking back and saying and remembering, wow, this was 1986. This was a game from 1986. The Famicom was barely a blip. Like, it was just incredible that they put this together with what they had. It's aged exceedingly well, yeah. Like everything parishes is said is, I could agree with completely. Yeah, compare this to some of its 1986 Famicom contemporaries, and you might see games with more ambition, but do they play this well? Like, you know, Wing of Madola or Nazo, sorry, Atlantis No Nazo or Challenger or things like that, like, they're pretty rough, whereas this is just like, it's right there. It's so spot on. And even Konami's other stuff from this era, like, Russian. attack just didn't have this level of craftsmanship and perfection. It's a really, it's a singular work. It's very impressive. And I don't say this out of nostalgia. I mean, I definitely have played this game a lot. But it's one that I can go back to and view objectively and just say, like, they really nailed it. And there are older Castlevania games that I loved at the time that I can

go back to and say, well, they didn't get this quite right. Like Castlevania Four, I don't think is actually that great. Yes. Whereas, whereas this game, like, it just nails everything that it sets out to do perfectly.

And later games would build on this and improve. But, you know, again, if you take this in the context of the era and the kind of the design spec, this does exactly what it's supposed to do. It's really, really good.

If I propose a small divergence, how do you think it compares to the X-68,000 game? Because that's basically an expanded remake. I think this is better. I think the X-68,000 game is pretty awesome, but it's also full of some really cheap bullshit. Like that raft ride with the Merman and the raft was just exploding into tiny pieces.

It really is a memorization fest in a way that this isn't. Like this game has a rhythm to it. That's what really impresses me about Castlevania. It has a rhythm that you get from a very few. like a very limited handful of classic games. Like this has it. Ninja Guideon on NES has it, even though that has some real BS too.

It's, it just, it has this flow to it and everything fits together really well. And the X68,000 game does not quite have that. But it does add some really cool stuff. Like I love, I love the tactical choice of, do I carry the laurel around and have, you know, the opportunity for healing? or do I give up on the laurel and go with a sub weapon

and hope that I can deal more damage that way than I absorb in return? Like there's some really cool trade-offs and, you know, obviously stuff like the Werewolf Battle where it's ripping pieces of mortar and even the hands off a clock tower and throwing them at you as projectiles is so, so cool. Like set pieces, it just can't be topped. I even like the way it redeems elements of haunted castle. Like you're in the courtyard and you have the trees that kind of like a thing pops out at you and goes all googly, googly at you.

Like it has elements that clearly came from haunted castle, but they don't suck. So, you know, I think I think that's that the X68,000 game is a great game. I just don't think it captures this, you know, Simon Belmont's journey through Castlevania quite as well as the original Castlevania. It's just not as pure and lean, but, you know, still a great game. Yeah, this is mostly my opinion on that, too, just because, like, how much I love certain Castlevania games is based off of, you know, battles that I think goes over my difficulty threshold, and that Werewolf Battle was, was one of them. Yeah, it's really cool, but it's also really unfair.

Like, it's designed, see, that's, that's the thing. Castlevania, the original, is designed around Simon Belmont's skill set and his, his mechanics. Whereas that werewolf battle, like, as cool as it is, it also is really unfair. Like the speed of it, the variability of it, the angles from which the werewolf can attack, it's extremely unfair. It just, you know, that version of Simon can't take it on. That would be a great aloe card battle. But it's kind of sucks for that, Simon. But that said, it's so cool.

I don't know if we've ever seen it. I'll have to look this up when we're done here. You can still get it on the PS3. It's easily accessible, the PlayStation version, so it's still out there. I think you can side load it onto PSP and Vita also. Oh, hey, that's good to know. So that's my problem solved right there. Yeah, so original Castlevania, I guess, eight-tier, no real problems going on there.

Agreed. Yeah. This one, you're not going to agree with Curate. I already know. I put Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, which was for the DS in 2008. It was, I guess, was the end of Igarashivania as we knew it outside of bloodstained. In fact, I would say the heroine of Ecclesia. Shanoa basically became Miriam.

They look in Acta Light. The monster capture, the monster skill capture system from area also made it into Bloodstain. Like, we'll get into that. But I really liked Ecclesia. I like Shanoa. I think that Albus looks a lot like Win Butler from the Arcade Fire. And to this day, I don't know if that's done on purpose or not. You don't like it much, Kurt?

I don't hate it. I think it's actually better than Dawn of Sorrow. I just like portrait better. I thought the levels, again, like, Igarashi was always, like, trying his best to do what he can with the budget he had. And as a result, some of the levels ended up feeling really bloated. And that was a consistent problem. Like, Portrait had that same problem, but it was all backloaded.

Levels I thought were a little bit too big and too long. It's more difficult, which is good because a lot of the Metroid venues are too easy, but not always in great ways. The boss fights in particular were, I thought, a little rough by the end. I like the art, though. The art is much better than the last two entries. The music is really good also. I mean, it's just, I mean, again, yeah, I talked it down earlier a bit, but I wouldn't argue it too much down from here.

Like, maybe a B plus, they just because they like portrait better. But no, it's a solid game. Yeah, I think the one thing I really didn't like about it was there was a Shot of Colossus style boss somewhere in there. And everyone was doing Shadow the Colossus without really knowing how to do Shadow the Colosses. So we just basically had a lot of physics messes with bosses. that were too big. Parish, what do you think? This is the only Igarashi game I've never finished. I just, I always lose steam a few hours in. It's just, I find it really tedious. And I don't know. There's just something about this game

that I can't connect with. It doesn't, it doesn't do what I want Castlevania to do. And so, like, as much as I think the systems are interesting, I think it looks great. I like the story and how it really diverges from the usual, hey, guess what, Dracula's back, go kill him, let's go get him, Belmont's. Like, it tries, but I don't know, every time I play, and I've tried so many times to get through this, I just, I run out of steam. And so to me, this is B-tier. Hmm. I guess we can compromise and kind of banish it to the void between A and B, and I'd be happy enough with that. I just remember having really good feelings about Ecclesia

at the time, and if I had known that it was the last Degorashi, maybe I wouldn't have had those good feelings, I don't know. It is a complicated game, emotional-wise, but it's fun. If you have any of DS, go for it. You can't go wrong, really. As for the last one on the A-tier,

Castlevania 3, Dracula's Curse. This almost became an S-game, but this probably isn't fair of me. I, knocked it down a bit because of the westernization things that they did to warn people away from renting the game. And it just, it made it such a slog to play there again. You are absolutely correct. I mean, again, I love this game just because it was the first like Castlevaney game I really got into, into. And there were so many different characters

and so many different routes to go and it just felt like a really big epic adventure. But some of the levels are really miserable. Yeah. I think that when I replayed the game recently and I realized, crap. When you die to Dracula, you go all the way back to the start of level, not to the staircase. I just lost my mind. I said, how did I do this when I was a kid? I must have been insane. Oh, geez. Insanity counts for a lot. You probably used the one SOP they gave to American kids, which was, you know, they took out all the cool stuff, like the soundtrack, and Grant is a worthwhile character, but they didn't give us help me. Help me. That's right. We did get help me. And

you're absolutely right. That's the only way I could ever finish that game. And it's funny that you said Grant sucks. I mean, he does. But he was the one I think I ultimately used to finish the game, which is me to get the worst ending. But just in the fact that you have to look at Grant instead of Alicard or Saifa. That's just, that's the only thing. Oh, harsh. I'm going to get a lot. He made jumping a lot easier, though. And you could bypass so many areas just by climbing over them. Yeah, the Aquatuck area, that's basically just Grant's playground. Yeah. Or Seifas. You know, the water comes down. You freeze it. You walk on top. It's pretty awesome. Oh, that's right. She can do that. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of variability in how you approach the game based on the characters you use. It's surprising that Alucard is actually maybe the worst character to take along because he's very, very weak and he's very limited in how he can fly. But at the same time, his area, like his path really, really sucks. And like it is the bad part of the game, the falling block area. So you kind of need Alicard to get through that area and just say, like, Like, yeah, F this. I'm just, I'm out of here and just fly past. Like, if you go Alicard's route and then they're like, yeah, peace out Alicard, you can just sleep here in your coffin forever.

I'm going to hang out with Grant instead. Or Saifa. God, I can't imagine trying to get through the falling block areas with Saifa. That is, that is an exercise and self-abuse. Someone must be able to do it, but. Oh, I'm sure. There's probably someone who can do a blindfold for awesome games, but, you know, that's not me. I'm not that person. But I do think this is a, you know, despite, despite the, the Knox on especially Alicard's route. And as you say, the kind of the, not neutering, but definitely the, the weakening of the game for the American version, it's still amazing. Like, this is Castlevania's Super Mario Brothers 3. It's just like, that original concept, exploded, expanded, you know, developed into new and exciting ways. Like, three times.

times bigger as an adventure, but then, you know, with replayability, different paths to take, different characters to use, can you beat the game with just Trevor? Is that, you know, is that a thing you can do? And I was crazy enough as a kid that I did it. And I was like, oh, it's just the same ending, but with just Trevor. Okay, well, that's not interesting. He's wearing a cloak. He is wearing a clue. He, you know, there's like a music player on the title screen. And even though the soundtrack is different in the US version. It's not necessarily worse. It's just, you know, like standard NES chip tunes as opposed to like NES chip tunes plus awesome upgraded bonus sounds. It's a great game. The soundtrack is worthy of a mention on its own because I just remember being blown

away by, I think Rising is the tower theme or one of the tower themes where you're climbing the tower and it's kind of falling at the same time, not to be confused with the falling blocks level, but is one of my favorite pieces of Castlevania music. And it actually sounds better on the NES versus the Super Famicom, which is not to put down the Super Famicom soundtrack, because that also just that chip added so much of the soundtrack. No, it sounds amazing, but it is just the Famicom, not the Super Famicom. Oh, I'm sorry, is a Super Famicom. Okay, yeah, Famicom.

But, yeah, it does sound quite amazing. It is a super Famicom game. It is, there you go. Super Famicom game. How about you, Kurt? What do you think? Yeah, I definitely agree with this. I don't know.

If we were to rank Akamaju Densetsu, would we put this? that at S-tier? Because I kind of think that, but it also, like, the Alacard problem is the same thing even in that version of the game. It's just there a little tweak. Like, you know, at the last level, I'm sure if you played it over and over, you remember, the pendulum is swinging right before you get to

Dracula's room, and there's a bat there. There sure is. That bat is not there in the Japanese version, so that is very indicative in the sort of just annoying changes that they made to that game. Oh, my God. I think it was your site that I visited if I first realized. Wow, they really changed a lot in the English version of the game.

And the thing that you mentioned that I remember and I still don't get is the font for the stats. They were changed from this kind of gothic thing to this more blocky standardized text. And that's just such a weird thing to change. I think it looks cooler in the American version. But they did that for Super Casavini 4 too. It has a different font. It has a different like whip sound effect. I think just say it since they had more time to polish it, they're like, yeah, just makes this change.

Why not? So even if we were just, you know, going on the Japanese version, Akamajo Dinsets, I would still put this in the A tier, just because Rondo of Blood, Dracula X, is the realization of what this game wanted to be in a lot of ways. Yeah, that's true. And it does this game even better. But, you know, this is the absolute high point of 8-bit Castlevania. Like, no question, especially when the competition is Game Boy Games. That's true, yeah.

And the graphics were just incredible for, I still think to this day that Konami was the company that best knew how to use the NES color palette. They just were so incredible at making, like, just like say, for example, like a mossy wall out of like some gray and some splotches of green. It was just, they knew what they were doing. And it made for such like an interesting series, such an interesting kind of gothic haunting series for God, like just such a little humble system. They're really good at what they did. It's disappointing where things have gone. Thank you. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here?

Timmy's in a well. Sequelcast 2 and Friends is a podcast looking at movies in a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit. And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need to rescue Timmy. He likes the well. Well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father.

Lassie, I told you to play off this. Spoilers. Video Deathloop is a podcast where we watch a short video clip on Loop until we just can't take it anymore. Along the way, we'll try our best to make each other laugh and to hold out longer than the other guy. You can jump in on any episode, no need to worry about continuity. Check out Video Deathloop on the Greenlit Podcast Network with new episodes every Friday. Well, speaking of Rondo of Blood, that means we are getting into the final tier, the S-tier, and that is games that are as beautiful as the friendship between Dracula and death. So you know it's genuine, is loving, it's perfect.

First game I put on the S-tier, Area of S-Torro, 2003, GBA. this was the first GBA game that I think really got it like in terms of the Castlevania games and it really springboarded off Castlevania Symphony the Night in all the best ways and it still has some weaknesses of course like the graphics couldn't be as fancy

the game couldn't be as big and of course the soundtrack even though it couldn't be orchestrated it was still incredible for the Game Boy advance like the Hanging Gardens theme and still one of my favorite pieces of music in the whole series I would hesitate this to

put this on the S tier, just because it's going to be on the same rank as, this is a small spoiler, Symphony in the Night. I don't, I guess. How dare you. I mean, there's nowhere else to go. Come on. And I don't think it really matches up to that level. Design-wise, it is more polished.

Yes. But, I mean, the visuals and the sound are such an intrinsic part of why Symphony Night is so good. And even though, like, Ariad is way better than the other Game Boy Advance games, it just never quite reaches that level. It also had that futuristic setting, which I don't feel that they really took advantage of. But then again, back in when this game came out, 2035 seemed like so far away. And now it's just like, ah, it's another decade away. It's probably not a beautiful. We even live to see 2035.

Let's hope so. Yeah. And it was done for some good story reasons that they never quite followed up on because EGrosch just did other stuff, which is fine. I know, again, I would, you know, maybe just imagine if we had gotten the 1999 Castlevania Adventure instead of Nanobreaker. Yeah. Don't make me sad. This is my show. Don't make me sad on my show. I mean, I would put it as an A-tier just to make room for the others. But no, it's an excellent game. I'm going to disagree with Kurt and say it does belong here on the S-tier because context does matter.

And this game is as good as you could have gotten on GBA. You have to take technology into account. I strongly believe the Game Boy games could have been better. I've played some goddamn good Game Boy games. Why couldn't they have been like, you know, on the level of Wario Land or something? Like, it was possible. But this game, I can't think of a better looking, better playing, deeper, more mechanically satisfying GBA game. Like, this game has it all for that platform. We know the confines of 240 by 160 pixels and however tiny that ROM is and no built-in audio

system like all the things going against this game and yet it manages to provide a symphony the nice style experience it does an interesting twist on the hey there's some kind of thing that's going to be different toward the end of the game where you have to find the secret ending and uh you know it doesn't wear out its welcome the soul system is really cool yeah and deeply integrated into the storyline it's it's part of you know the plot twist the the huge plot twist about the character and everything kind of comes to a head and makes sense. It does interesting things. I think with the setting, you know, you're not like shooting laser.

Actually, yes, you actually. You can get a laser gun. You can. It's not taking place in like, you know, a skyscraper or something. It's still Dracula's castle. But you have basically like a televangelist who thinks that he is the reincarnation of Dracula and is running around fighting you, like this, you know, basically deranged Christian leader guy who's kind of starting his own cult around the fact that he's Dracula.

That's interesting. You know, there's like soldiers and stuff who have machine guns. They're zombies. They were killed by Dracula's forces during the big war that we never actually saw. There's, you know, the whole question of what happened to a Belmont? Also, why is there this guy running around in like a Victorian loungeware? Can you believe these things all come together toward the end? No, it's really good.

It's a really cool game, great secrets, just an awesome varied mechanic system that, you know, takes the versatility that was kind of, you know, introduced with the DSS system and encircle the moon and, you know, expanded on with portrait or harmony of dissonance, but then just takes it to like not just a whole other level, but like three levels above that. there's just so much you can do with this game, so many ways to play. I mean, you can build out Soma to be whoever you want. And, ah, yeah, like, it just, it has great hooks into Castlevania lore. Not that there's, you know, a whole lot of background for them to build on. And, you know, basically everything that could be accounted for is accounted for by the end of the story. Like, hey, it's, you know, we've seen elements from basically every storyline from Castlevania. But it just, It feels like this is where Igarashi finally said, ah, you know what?

Now I see what was good about Symphony, what people love, what was successful. And let's strip out all the crap from Harmony that didn't work. Let's just make a beautiful game that just has so many ways to play, so much depth, has a really cool story twist. I don't know. Like, it's really hard to beat this game. I would argue that it might be better than Symphony.

I don't know. Oh, no, no, that is. controversial right there. I said might. I'm hedging my bets. I'm a weenie. I can't make that kind of commitment. I understand, because I know exactly how you feel. I feel like Symphony, as much as I loved it, it had some really awkward things like the menu system and the inventory system. It was a little bit, you know, it needed a little bit more polishing. And Area took that little bit of extra polish and applied it. I replayed the game recently and I just really had a great time with it. Like, I got into it the way that I don't get into a lot of

Metroidvania's. Even though I knew it was coming, I just enjoyed myself from beating to end. I finished it. And I said, oh, my God, this Castlevania series never concluded with the storyline. And that makes me sad. You know, at some point in the past, I traded my Harmony of Dissonance and Aria of Sorrow away for the Castlevania double pack. And I don't know why I did that, because it's not like I ever play Harmony of Dissonance. I just want Aria of Sorrow. So that's the only one I play. I think that's a version I own. But I do have, like, some obnoxiously complete save files in my Castlevania double pack because I played through Ari of Sorrow so many times on the original cartridge and then just, like, scraped every bit of content out of it that I could for, you know, the double pack version.

And as soon as the analog pocket comes out, whenever that happens to happen, I will be absolutely sticking the Castlevania double pack in there again and playing more Aria of Sorrow. I think that's a good choice. I think that's a very good thing to do, Parish. Oh, I'm very happy with my life choices. Do you have anything to say additionally about Area of Sorrow, Kurt? Or are you just like, okay? Feel free to take me down a peg. I mean, I could only really take down Area of Sorrow by talking up Symphony of the Night, so...

Right. I mean, it's still an excellent game, so I can't really disparage it at all. Okay, so we'll move on to the one that you're both going to hate me for, which is Castlevania 4, 1991 for the S&ES. Now I have to defend myself here, Parrish, when you said it's a remake, I plumb forgot it's a remake because to me it's still Castlevania 4. and still that canon that was totally made up for this game. It's not a remake to me. And I know it is. And I know it should have realized that when I put this game in the rankings,

but it just bounced right off me. I completely forgot about that. Simon, trapped forever in a time loop. Yeah, pretty much. I've destroyed him. Now it's judgment that won't destroy him. It's my time loop, my made-up time loop. Judgment isn't on this list, by the way.

You probably surmised by now. That's not the triple S rank? Okay, you've exposed my secret, the triple S rank is a judgment. Yeah, I know you guys, well, I'm not sure about you, Kurt. Parrish, no, you're not a huge fan of four. I just love four. I would actually play it over the original any day of the week.

I love the soundtrack. I think the weird-ass wit mechanics are so much fun. I think the level design is a lot of fun. I love climbing up that stupid waterfall every single time, even though I recognize it is a little bit tedious. I don't care if something about it just brings me so much inner piece. What do you think, Kurt? I like the vibe of it, but it does have a lot of design growing paints from the 16-bit era.

Like, it was, this was one of the, like, the showcases of the Super Nintendo when it came out. And it does look really cool, and it sound really cool, but more on a technical level. And also artistic, but gameplay-wise, Simon is a little bit too big. His weapon never feels quite proportionally correct. A lot of the boss battle games are, like, look really cool, but they're not really all that well-designed. And they're just, like, they're difficult to avoid. You kind of just have to get in as much damage as possible before they take you down. The music, like, showed off what the Super Nintendo Soundship could do, but it didn't really

have that classic Canami sound to it. Like, outside of, like, the first level theme, there's not really much in the way of music that I would put in, like, the great Castlevania tier. Really? Oh, God, it has, like, to me, it has the best remix of Bloody Tears. Oh, I mean, like, like, some of those remixes are good, but it's like, the most imposing theme of that game is just where it's like drums pounding. What's like, you know, John Brown.

Yeah, the catl, those freaking kettle drums. I love them so much. I want to hug them. It sounds really cool, but it's not, you know, if I compare it to like a bloodline song, it's like it's not something I'm going to listen to in my car. I'm the opposite. I would put the entire, in fact, you know what? My parents and I share a Spotify account.

I'm going to go fill it up right now with Castlevania for me. He's like, so my dad will put it on, turn it on, look for the Eagles, and it'll be like, Castlevania. And he'd be like, what the hell is wrong? What's going on here? Nadia. Thank you for your this idea. I appreciate it.

It's good Halloween music. Like, you could pump it out in your yard and it'll sound cool, but it's not really, really wanted for a Castlevania soundtrack. I'm just so, the theme where you're walking up to Dracula's Castle is just so chilling. I never, ever, ever get tired of it. I play through the game just to hear that theme. But, yeah, it's also the difficulty level is it's not, you could stroll through most of it. And when it is hard, it doesn't feel like it's hard in good ways. Like the section right at the end where you're, you know, you're going on the stairs and the stairs are classy behind you and there's that little buzz saw or whatever that's climbing after you.

And then the floating platforms, like, I don't think that level is particularly well designed at all. That is kind of a weird. That is a bit of a weird level. Some of the jumps are really shady. Like, you can be off by like a few pixels and you won't even make it. I also have a little bit of that Sega of resentment because back at the time, like, like bloodlines, it got really disparaged for not looking as good like it's. characters were smaller, but I also think that's why bloodlines is better because it just feels better. I like the music better. I get, it's decent, but I would put this at like a

B tier. Goodness gracious me. No, I go to the room of four associates and every single time I feel she'll go down my back. Do you have anything additional to say, Parrish, in my defense, preferably? No, I can't defend you on this one. I will say that I strongly, strongly disagree with Kurt's opinion about the music, but my thoughts on the soundtrack are a matter of record that I don't need to litigate again. You don't want to hear it again. I just think it's a great soundtrack, but that's the only part of this game that I really, really love. Like, okay, I love the atmosphere, but, you know, some of what Kurtz had is spot on. You know, there are design flaws. Simon being way too big is a huge issue. Like, it's really cool that they made such a big sprite, kind of do that, like,

Marionette puppet thing. They gave him a whip that's so versatile and so capable of doing everything. But it kind of, it kind of breaks the game because there's only like maybe a quarter of the screen that Simon's whip can't reach. He's like ridiculously overpowered just with his basic weapon. And yeah, it basically moots the need for subweapons, except in some bosses where it's like, okay, yeah, I want to be able to move away while throwing axes. but the axes don't actually give you that much more diagonal range than just whipping diagonally. Likewise, the boomerangs don't have much more horizontal range than your whip. Like the advantage, I guess, is that sometimes they'll pass through enemies and then track back so you get two hits.

Or, you know, if it's a large enemy, multiple hits. If you got the triple trouble equipped or whatever they call it, like, it just demolishes everything. That's a sonic game. You're letting your other fandom leak through, Nadia. No, I mean, the multipliers help, but the thing is about multipliers is that you have to use weapons to get multipliers, and I don't want to use the weapons because they're not as good as the whip. Like, just give me the whip. Like, you know, there's just a lot of issues like that and then some weird, some weird level designs where there's not enough space around Simon to make things interesting. It kind of feels like, you know, I've complained about this on my game. Game Boy videos about how you'll, you'll see people take an NES game. Developers take an NES game and say, like, hey, let's just translate the sprites from NES to Game Boy, not taking into account the fact that, you know, Game Boy had like a third of the pixels of the NES, if that.

So even though, you know, like the pixel resolution of the NES and the super NES was the same, by making Simon Sprite bigger, it kind of takes on that Game Boy world, that Game Boy issue, like where the world is just too small around the character all of a sudden. So, yeah, like, this game has a lot of big issues. And, you know, taken as just kind of a friendly stroll through the annual Halloween spooky world, like, it's fine. But I don't think it stands up to the best Castlevania games just because it just doesn't play well enough.

That's where I stand. I do have to say, I think thematically, it does really, interesting thing where you start off at Dracula's gates and you kind of go through his whole grounds like you start with the stables and go through like his aqueduct and I think that was pretty neat. So don't worry Castlevania Four. I still love you. But I do want to kind of go off on this entry with a little bit of weird, interesting story. My mother had a head accident a couple of years ago, and she was in the hospital, right? And I'm visiting her. And she says to me, out of the blue, hey, do you remember that Castlevania thing where you could get the secret? And, you know, I'm talking about the staircase secret. And this was a game she never played. She might have kind of watched me, like, glancingly play it once, like, many, many, many years ago. I'm like, how the hell did you even know this lying here in a hospital bed, bringing this out of nowhere? And I'm very scared of the human brain is what I'm trying to get at.

Fear it. It's totally just a mystifying mystery. Does Schiffer watch GamePro TV? Because I remember they did a special on that way they showed. Like the secret of the right before you fight Dracula, right? Yeah, yeah. You jump off in the stuff drops from the sky. I never really watched a lot of GamePro TV.

Like it had like weird times in Canada. So we never really watched it. We watched Vita Arcade Top 10. Yay, Canada. but that was not something that entered into our family pop culture ever. Like, it was just such a weird random thing that happened. But speaking of things that aren't weird and random, is our next game, second to last game, Rondo of Blood, 1993, PC Engine.

And before I start, I just want to say, thank you to Parrish for the time he bought the game for full price, imported it, and the game immediately was localized afterwards. So that was a really nice thing you did. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. This began the legend of Jeremy Parrish spending too much money on games that then became much more affordable and easy to acquire, although that doesn't happen so much anymore, I guess just because these days I'm just buying games for my videos. And there's not really

much of a chance that Sega is going to reissue Zaxon or Dragon Wong for SG-1000 at any point. So we're all SOL. Sorry about that. But I mean, either way, though, like import or not, we got one of the most incredible Castlevania games ever made, although I will admit up front, nice. It's genius, but it's just not really my favorite Castlevania game. I think I prefer four over it. Hmm. Hmm. And do you see how it is? I always just found it a little bit too difficult for me, a little bit too random. I just, I know I'm probably barking up the wrong tree here, but I just never really caught into it. When I do play it, though, I always play as Maria, because she's a lot of fun to play. My walking uphill several miles through snow story is that I played

this game, you know, on an ambulator, because of course, like, couldn't afford a Turbo duo, even back in the late 90s using a CDR that, like, the guy who helped design the Castle Eden Dungeon, he burned it for me. I play that with like a fine level frame skip my 486 using entirely the keyboard. Oh, holy crap. What is wrong with you? I didn't have a game pad. Game pads were terrible back then. They were pretty bad. I had like that. You needed a gravis, man. I still, I mean, we had a computer, but I still didn't have a job, so. Oh, okay. Yeah. that's fair. We had the game pad where you screw in the little

stick to make it into a little arcade thing or something. That's the grattice game pad. It had a purple D pad, right? Yes, yes. I think I found ours, our old one, and I looked at it and had a parallel port thing, and I was like, holy crap. Eventually, I did get one because they released a port of Mega Man X for Doss, and it came with a six-button pad, which wasn't a good pad, but that was afterwards. No, I mean, it is hard, but I don't think it's too hard. Like, Maria definitely makes it a lot easier just because, like, she can attack with the birds that can usually get in two hits.

She could double jump. She doesn't take much damage, but she is basically the game's easy mode. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Like, I think this hits the difficulty balance better than, like, the X-68,000 game did. Yeah, for sure. The death battle at the top of the pirate ship is a little much. The only thing is the Dracula battle at the end was a little easy, which is something that they over-corrected for in the superintendent. to pour it. And one of the things I really appreciate about the PSB remake is that they added a third segment to that battle, which made it a lot more challenging. But there are so many great things you can see about this game. Like, it looks incredible. It has like the early 90s anime aesthetic. Oh, yeah. Oh, that was a once in a lifetime thing, especially the turbographic's anime aesthetic. Now, that was a real class of its own. Yeah. Such fluffy hair.

Such very fluffy hair. Yeah. I got to put together the E3. trailer for Limited Run Games announcement of Rondo of Blood for PC Engine this year. Oh, cool. And I had such a great time. Just like, I took two days out of my life, you know, out of my work days to

record footage and then splice it together and then, you know, it took like a month for Konami to say, hey, can you tweak this one little thing? Can you do? Oh, also we need this one little thing. Oh, one more little thing, but that's just, you know, that's, that's dealing with any kind of license. Yeah, it happens. But, yeah,

Yeah, it was just very, very satisfying to put together a promo trailer for this wonderful game. And I, you know, tried to really kind of capture both the excitement of it and the look of it and the sense of humor. Like, you know, everything about Maria is a little bit funny. Like, she's even got a theme that's like Samba, you know. That's true. And, yeah, she is kind of easy mode, but there's something incredibly satisfying about demolishing the armies of. the undead with a little girl in a pink dress who like powers up with ice cream and throws kittens at you like that's it's so good the only the only part of this game that i find like consistently

overwhelming is the one dash boss when you take the secret route in the first stage that serpent on the bridge yeah there's just something about the way it moves i i just cannot wrap my brain around it i've you know i've beaten it through persistence but it's one of those like i can never streamed that. I've tried it, and it's just embarrassing. It's like, you know, I play through the level. I'm cruising. I'm kicking ass. And then I get to the, the serpent, and it just wipes me out again and again. And I'm like, what is wrong with me? I just, like, I can't grasp its movements and the mechanics of that battle. But everything else, you know, I think is typically pretty challenging, but not impossibly so. I love, you know, the little flare that every enemy,

that every boss has where once you kill them they have some sort of show off death blow you know details like that are a lot of fun the way there are so many hidden passages and it's one of those games where you think

I wonder if I can do this like what happens if I try this thing and sometimes you just die but sometimes you don't and you know like if you get sloppy running away from the undead behemoth that chases you through the first stage of the original Castlevania and you

fall into a pit, you don't die. You fall into, like, catacombs with fishmen. You're like, oh, yeah, this is, this is the catacombs from, you know, the original Castlevania, stage one, two, or, you know, block two or whatever it is in the original game. But this time, instead of, you know, having an actual path down, then back up, you're just kind of in the catacombs and it's the alternate route you have to take. Yeah, there's just, there's tons of detail to the enemies. There's unexpected behaviors. Some, Some enemies have multiple behaviors. There's just cool set pieces.

The music is great. The bosses are interesting. Richter is basically like, I think, you know, Portrait of Rune called him basically, like, the greatest of the Belmonts. And this game really, this game really kind of does live up to that because he acts and attacks and moves and has the skills of like the 8-bit Belmonts, but he's faster. He's more versatile. He just, he can do more.

and is more responsive and reactive. And, yeah, it's just a very satisfying game to play. His movement is a good midpoint between the two Lucy Goosey Simon from Super Casavania 4 versus the old one because you can, he can't completely control his jumps, but if you're on a trajectory, you can hit back and it sort of slows him down. He can't attack upwards, but he can still do that neat little backflip that helps them get away from things.

Yeah, and he looks cool. He's like the best Belmont design easily. Did you guys play the remake, like basically our first exposure in the West to Rhonda of Blood? Like, did you play that when it came out? Oh, yeah. I like it. I always defend, like, the 2.5D games. Like, they're not really very popular among especially the fan base because you do lose, like, the pixel art, which is completely understandable.

But I don't think it's bad. They added a lot of neat background details that weren't in the original game. Like, there are spots that are just like flat tile textures that they really. crafted and modeled and they give it a better sense of place. They do make the visuals more consistent with how Symphony and the Night look, which again, it does lose, like, the bright PC engine thing, and that's totally reasonable criticism. But I still think it looks pretty cool. The only downgrades that all these games, they've run at a lower frame rate so they don't feel as smooth. And the collision doesn't quite feel right.

They changed Richter's backflip. But they also, like, tuned up some stuff that was never quite finished in the original game. Like I said before, they added the extra Dracula battle at the end. There was one level that is only accessible after you've beaten the game that's not like a real stage. I think it was just like cobbled together about stuff that they're working on when they were able to complete. But they created a whole new level for it. And I kind of wish that more developers would take the attitude towards remakes. Like, you know, when you think about Kroner Trigger, Kroner Trigger had, you know, stuff that was cut out.

like the singing mountain in that song that was so it would have been really cool if you know when they reported it somewhere they would have gone back to the original design documents like oh we have some more time let's implement this and when they add additional content like the atlas games they know it doesn't always work out very well but i do appreciate that it really is a completely separate experience right it doesn't replace the original game like you shouldn't play this over another like the pc engine one's still a little bit better but i think it's really good company, man. Yeah, and Rondo of Blood, it's an interesting segue because it ties into our number one game, which is not a surprise. It's Symphony of the Night. And I'm kind of just mentioning it casually because, number one, why the hell not? We all knew it was coming. Number two, Rhonda Blood, how confused were you when you first played Symphony the Night and saw what was going on in the quote-unquote Bloodline's introduction? Because I was just like, there are three different Castlevania games going on here, and I'm not familiar with at least two of them.

Since I had run the Castlevania Dungeon, I knew what it was supposed to be. Okay. So even though I knew that they translated it, it's not necessarily a wrong translation, but because it coincidentally had the name of a previous Genesis game, it did kind of cross the lines. Yeah, when I first played Symphony and I was like, Bloodlines, isn't that a Genesis game? Didn't that happen someone completely different from whoever who this jackhole is? I didn't know who Richter was. I knew Alicard from three, but he looked. completely different, of course, in Symphony. So it was a very confusing game narratively at

first, especially when, oh, no, Dracula's about to kill me. Who's his little girl? Why is she throwing dragons at me? It was an experience all right. And I was kind of thankful when it started with Alicard. I'm like, okay, this I understand. Drawbridge does I understand? Long hallways, I understand. Yeah, I had never beaten either Rondo of Blood or Bloodlines at that point. So I was like, hey, it's like some sort of Castlevania history that I don't know about, but I get it. I'm a Belmont dude and I'm kicking Dracula's ass at the beginning of the game. That's pretty neat. I also, this was the first game I ever imported.

And I did not know a whole lot of Japanese at that point. Not that I know a ton now, but I, you know, have some competency. Whereas at the time, I was like, uh, so I just kind of went along with it and was like, well, I think I'm equipping good stuff. the numbers are going up. That seems good. So I was just kind of along for the ride. And it looked great. It sounded amazing. It played really, really well. There was a huge castle for me to run around in and get lost. And then eventually I found the double jump pendant. And I was like, yeah, I can double jump. That's the best thing ever. So very satisfying video game. Yeah. It's hard to talk about symphony just because it's been phrased over and over and over again.

and we're probably all just rehashing territory, but I still loved to gush about certain things. Like, I remember being shocked the first time I played the game and entered the cathedral and saw how peaceful it was because you think, oh, you're going to a vampire cathedral is going to have like upside down stars and, you know, Jesus crucified upside down or whatever. It's going to be blood and fire. But no, it's just a very, one of my favorite levels. Just the music's fantastic. It's so peaceful.

It has that really, really creepy confessional where to this day, some people say, like, when you sit as the priest and one of the women comes up and cries. Some people say that as Alicard's mother. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I think this is a really awesome piece of lore to even think about. Yeah, just the game really redefined for me what Castlevania can be because I had been off the series for quite a while by the time I got to Symphony. And so I was familiar with, you know, gothic stone structures and blood and fire and everything. But no, the Dracula's Castle, despite being quote-unquote, a creature of chaos, has always been just so fascinating because it's so many things in such a little space. And if you had told me as a kid,

oh, here's a game in Dracula's Castle, I think, okay, well, you think of Castlevania 1. You think of Castlevania 3. Here's a hallway with some Axe Knights. But no, it's just really its own living thing. And then it flips upside down and you get to do it all over again. And then you do get the upside-down stars and the upside-down Jesus. So see, it works out. It's exactly what you expect. A lot of people criticize the upside down castle for being, like, too much of the same. But I actually adore the way that the, like, just what they do to make the labyrinth, like the lowest area of the game, like the catacomb star, and turn it into something completely creepy and different when it's up in, like, you know, in the sky of the upside down castle. Like the sort of bluish green lava instead of the red stuff, like, and the music that they use, just incredible.

Yeah, I mean, when people complain about Symphony the Knights inverted castle, Castle, like, that's a very ahistoric complaint. I mean, at the time, it was just unprecedented. There was, no, no game had done something like that. It was so audacious and surprising, like, oh, I beat the game, but the ending was kind of weird. I feel like something was off. And then you realize what you have to do. And, you know, all of a sudden, there's not quite twice as much game because it's much faster to work your way through the inverted castle. You have all your navigation. skills. Like, Alicard doesn't really power up in the inverted castle. It's just a matter of, like, finding your way around, getting, getting through like the laser skeletons, beating some of the really, really overwhelming bosses. Checking out the Easter eggs, you know, like the fact that the bosses you beat are, the key bosses you beat are the bosses from the original Castlevania, but you're collecting the parts of Dracula from Castlevania too. And you fight revenants that are pretending to be. the cast of Castlevania 3, who fought along Alacard hundreds of years ago.

Like, there's just, it's, it's such a loving take on Castlevania as a whole. Like, it really, you know, it's kind of hard to top this game just because it stopped and said, let's, you know, let's take inventory on 10 years of history and create a game that encompasses all of that, but with a new way of playing with, you know, these really impressive next generation graphics that they combine, you know, the best of what the PlayStation could do with 2D, plus adding a lot of polygonal elements that seem like 2D, like really kind of taking a page from what Nintendo did with Yoshi's Island and the Super Effects 2 chip and using 3D effects to fake really, really cool 2D, just, yeah, like they really put a lot of thought

into this and kind of created the ultimate summation of everything that is Castlevania while at the same time saying like, hey, here's a new direction for Castlevania. That's unusual. Like you don't see that happen very often with any property and it is a rare accomplishment. And to say, well, you know, it'd be neat if the massive amount of bonus content they gave us as a surprise twist, you know, if they had spent another year of development to make it even better. And, and gone way over budget. Like, how come they didn't do that?

Right. Like, you got to be realistic. Yeah, I mean, I can't be the only one who entered the upside-down castle and thought, okay, well, Dracula's going to be in the throne room right here. Oh, he's not there. Well, you know, I'll just keep on going, surely this can't be the whole castle. And it was the whole castle. I did have it spoiled for me because, like, I didn't import it because, again,

I couldn't afford to chip my PlayStation or get an import a copy of the game. So I knew it was going to happen, but I still was looking forward to it. Because, again, like, the game isn't very long. Like, you could beat the first castle in, like, a couple of hours. So just having, you know, that extension and, you know, it made it feel like it was more worthwhile. But, like, one of the reasons this game is so good, it is at the edges. Like, they just shoved so much weird, strange little stuff into it. And that there were other, like, technical issues also that, I almost say technical issues, but fairly early on, there were tools that you could extract the audio files.

for the game you can listen to all the voices and stuff and there was all this dialogue that Maria could turn evil and you would have to fight her and of course that was stuff that they probably had like an early version of the game design that didn't get implemented but we didn't know that at the time

so you know you think is there something secretly hidden is there something else you have to do because there was the you know to get the whole holy glasses to you know quote unquote beat Richter to get to the second part of the game and again if they did properly remake Pennsylvania, that would be something cool.

Like, I think that would be more interesting than the two version of Playbom Ria's we ended up getting. Okay, just because there is so much strange, weird stuff, I think is what over what makes it a little bit better than the DS and Gay Boy Vance games. Like, it didn't feel like they had that much time to put those a lot of, like, they're still there, but they're not as much of them. So even though, like, Sydney night's really messy as far as its design, it's, you could very, very easily steamroll. it, but that's also why it's so fun. Like, I don't think these games need to be balanced. Like, if you're talking about the, the classic Coyans, yeah, those are okay, but this isn't meant to be like that.

That's one of the reasons why it's like an RPG that you could just do all this, the weird stuff, like all the weird shield rod stuff where you could summon a cow and increase your defense or, uh, wasn't the, uh, the shield rod bug like where you combine the shield rod and he combines basically like an unstoppable force. wasn't that like from a bug testing thing that they forgot to take out? So it was basically the Konami code all over again. I don't know, but it certainly makes sense. It actually, I think I heard that on John Lernid's annotated history of Castlevania on YouTube, which is really, really excellent.

I recommend it wholly if you haven't listened to it yet. But yeah, something like that seemed to be the case. And it bit you're right, it had someone, it had a lot of weird stuff. Like you said, the cow would increase your defense by a couple of points. and I like the fact that you could go to the tower and sometimes there'd be a bird there building a nest and you could look through the telescope and sometimes there'd be the ferryman there,

sometimes there'd be a fish jumping out of the water. Just so many little loving details that I still catch things when I play the game. And I only just recently learned, for example, that in the tower, you can find a hidden pair of jewel knuckles and completely break the game from like hour one. Are there the boots that say

that they make you higher, but they actually just add an extra pixel. They add the secret boots. They make you, they discreetly increase your height, and that's exactly what they do. There's no gameplay advantage. It just makes AalCard look a little taller than anyone. The only good thing I have to say about the Saturn version is that they did add, like, some extra boots that make you run faster in the second part of the game. I wish that when they redid the PSP version, that was something I wish they carried forward.

Yeah, I agree with that. And speaking of the PSP version, which translation do you prefer? PSP or the original die monster. You're not, you don't belong in this world. Original, for sure. Like, like, it's just, yeah, the acting is bad. But it's a fun translation. Like, I was going and doing some comparisons to the original Japanese dialogue.

And it's very, just, like, standard. But it does give a very, like, goofy Shakespearean sort of stuff. And it's not like Castlevania is a super, super serious series. No. So, like, it works in its context. And the PSP version, they didn't have very much. really retranslated, they just rewrote the dialogue. Right,

to make it less awkward sounding. Yeah, and like the voice acting is I guess better and that it's not as love will be bad, but I don't think it has the personality. Yeah, I see you were coming from. And they also did retranslate some of the

monster names, if I'm not mistaken. To this day, I don't know why Legion it became Granfalon, but I think it's an amazing change. I think just because Jeremy Blastine really like Kervonigant. Okay, that would explain everything then he also really lord of the ring stings because there's a lot of tolkien references there yeah i think like half the blades are named after like token blades no it's a it's a very charming little localization i actually kind of know the guy who relocalized it

and he said like oh well we thought it was we thought the localization was pretty well written and it was i mean it absolutely was but you can't deny that die monster you don't belong in this world a thing And that's what they kind of did. They didn't give you an option to go back to the original. And it's like, Konami, he can't pull one over on this. We were there. We heard it all with our own God-Curt's ears. You can't run away from it.

I actually asked Igarashi, hey, are you kind of tired of the memes of Dymaster? And he's like, I think it's funny, but I think it's time to move on, basically. Good luck. Mr. Parrish, do you have anything additional to add about this wonderful, wonderful game? And do you both agree that it should be at the number one spot? Definitely. I don't know about number one spot, but it's, you know, definitely S-tier. It deserves to be up at the top.

It's one of the greats. But there are several one of the greats in Castlevania history. And, you know, if we take Super Castlevania 4 out of this S-tier, I don't know how it got there. But you're left with Aria of Sorrow, Rondo of Blood, and Symphony of the Night. And those are three absolutely tremendous games. Just it's really hard to top that combination of action, exploration. Yeah, just it really scratches a certain itch. And I would love for them to make more Castlevania games of that caliber or of any caliber, really,

but especially of that caliber at some point. But I guess until then we have bloodstained. Yeah, yeah, which is good. Like I like bloodstained. but I would absolutely love to have an experience like Castlevania Symphony Night again, which I guess it's hard to replicate because, of course, we all have the nostalgia for it, but it's, I go back and I play it all the time. It's still fantastic, despite a few flaws here and there. Like, I have no problem putting it. It was my number one. And I really, really thank you, gentlemen, for joining me on this ranking. We did not get down to teeth and nails as much as I thought we would, but I think we had some great discussions overall. Yeah, that's what happens when you curate the discussion to be only people who agree with you. That's true. That's actually very true. of being online.

There's got to be someone out there is really going to go to bat for Haunted Castle, but I don't know where to find them. There's always someone. Yeah, check your local, I don't know. I was going to say something mean, but I shouldn't.

I'm not going to be mean. Castlevania, why be mean about it? Just be happy. Such good games. I agree. There's a lot to be happy about here. And, of course, you can get the collections. They're available on Switch and whatnot.

They're pretty good. I actually have the PlayStation collection that's Rondo of Blood and Symphony the Night together. and that's certainly a game they released. And, yeah, Castlevania Requiem, that is coming from limited-run games, actually. Sometime in the future, I don't know exactly when, but we are publishing it for PS4, I believe. So not to, you know, promote that too heavily, but it will exist.

I was going to say, Parrish, this is a good time for you to promote what you want to promote. I mean, yeah, that's one of them. And you can go back to Limited Run's YouTube channel and watch the trailer that I put together for Rhonda of Blood because it's great. I love it. It's a very good trailer. But that's what I got to say. You know, I do other stuff like Retronauts and videos, but you know the drill. Yes, you did. And thank you for letting me borrow Retronauts for this episode.

And hopefully... Barrow, no, you're in for a penny in for a pound. So tell us how we can support Retronauts, Nadia. Well, you can support Retronauts at Patreon.com forward slash Retronauts. And that is the URL, right? I'm getting this right. Yes, that is correct. Hooray.

So if you support the Retronauts Patreon, you get a whole bunch of cool extra stuff. And you will also hear future episodes by myself. I can't say how often I'm coming back, but rest assured, I am coming back for you all. So sleep with one eye open, please. Kurt, please tell us where we can find you. So I run Hardcore Gaming 101 with that Hardcore Gaming 101. dot net on Twitter as HG underscore 101. We put out a whole bunch of video game related books, including one on Castlevania,

which is a little old by this point, but it's not like we've seen a whole lot of actual Castlevania news, so it's not that update. We also have a podcast called the Top 47,8,858 games of all time, which is sort of like this podcast, but for every game ever made. Awesome. So not really like this podcast. I mean, you know, we do get out about rankings, but we just, we talk about a specific game and then put it on an overall list. Well, you can find me over at Acts of the Blood God.

It's an RPG podcast. We cover RPG's all new, Eastern, Western. I also host the Charlene Dropouts Final Fantasy 14 podcast, which is part of the Blood God umbrella. So either way, if you want to support any of our stuff, just go to patreon.com forward slash bloodgod pod. Yeah, so we're coming up with the new episode of Charlene Dropouts quite soon, which is timely because Endwalk, the last expansion of, or the next expansion of Final Fantasy 14 is coming out. Currently, players are noticing a hole in the moon. So if you want to talk to us about that hole in the moon, please listen and please interact with us.

We will tell you all about the hole in the moon. But for now, this has been myself and Parrish and Kurt Katala, just talking about Castlevania and ranking this stuff and having a great time of it. I hope you had a great time of it. All right. Maybe I'll update the Castlevania Dungeon again when this comes out. This will be the seminal moment. So until next time or until we're going to Kurt Updase the Dungeon, thanks for listening.

You know, I'm going to be able to be. You know,