The Castlevania Adventure

The Castlevania Adventure is not a very good game. I'll defer to a happier nerd than I on this one, but to summarize: You move too slowly to avoid hazards and enemies, your whip can be downgraded by taking just one point of damage, there are no subweapons, and the platforming feats the game asks of you are ludicrous. It is a product of its time, a novelty of action platforming in the palm of your hand that was limited both by the grey rectangle it was created for and its design decisions. A miss from Konami, and not a game many people like.

Which makes it all the more astounding that I kind of grew fond of it.

Not in its original version, though. Not quite. I cheated here. I sought the darker side of alchemy, the neutral path. The Trickster Beast ROMHACK's domain of madness. Many come to its realm to improve their favorite games... or some evil clerics of the Nightmare come to turn the beloved classics of Pure Platforming into bloated hellscapes. Witness how they formed their own nation, the shadowland of Kaizo. We are not going there. Nestled deep within a faction, I found it. The Quick Fix. Once applied, some of The Castlevania Adventure's flaws melted away. Your Belmont walks at a faster clip. Direct damage does not downgrade your whip. This makes the game "playable" but it also defangs it. I just beat it this morning, and suffered a single death. You see, Adventure is designed for a certain speed and jumping style. Mucking with that breaks it, but this brings to light how the game is made; it has been designed on a foundation of obnoxiousness. The whip downgrading, for one. With a fully powered whip you are king of the mountain, but all it takes is one or two hits to give you a weak whip and hinder your offense. After thinking on it for a minute, I realize what this is; it's the Gradius Syndrome. Early Game Boy Platforming 1080. You are punished for your mistake and ordered to do it again, but with less advantage. It's madness. Without that, you just run ahead and whip things and kind of win.

The same thing happens with the platforming. Several of the daring leaps in this game are what I like to call "pixel jumps". Leaps with no leeway, where you must have the reaction time of a saint to walk to the absolute edge of a platform, and then leap in the half-second before you walk right off that edge. The Castlevania Adventure has a truly sadistic extreme of this in its third stage, where spikes chase you up a vertical shaft. You climb ropes and avoid worms to ascend... and then they throw these platforms at you. Pixel jumps in quick succession, under pressure, some of them on platforms that fall. With that slow move speed. The Quick Fix makes this trivial. The entire challenge of the game is the "wrong" kind of difficulty; the kind that deigns to piss you off instead of terrifying you. With it removed, The Castlevania Adventure has but one thing to terrify you; its atmosphere. Despite knowing that I could actually navigate these platforms, I was still a little spooked and thrilled at the danger of death!

Which of course leads us to Castlevania: The Adventure Rebirth. A 2009 Wiiware game that takes the name of this game and makes something completely different out of it. Polished graphics! Bombastic sound! No whip downgrading, perfect control, and lots of loving touches and nods to the Castlevania games of old! I adored it in 2009. A flawed game, finally improved. Last night I was part of a large Twitter discussion about the original Game Boy game. The nice fellow tweeting about it was not fond of Rebirth. Here is the wild daisy chain, but Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in his eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania... but it lacks the atmosphere. The Castlevania Adventure filled me with the "silent horror" even with the Quick Fix.

Rebirth is just a pretty game. This is all confusing. Play them both or something.