Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 16 (Doctor Who: State Of Decay)

What? Yes, vampires go extra on their eyeshadow like that.

I'm here way too early. There exists, somewhere in the fertile ground of my mental idea garden, a plan to do a project talking about every story of Season 18 of classic Doctor Who. I don't know if anything will ever come from it, but this story's from it. Consider this either a teaser for what's to come, or the only goddamned part of it that ever gets written. Time will tell. So, a little background for this set of four Doctor Who episodes, because the background's kind of interesting and actually mirrors what ended up on screen. (Yeah, ain't gonna stop talking about mirrors in Doctor Who any time soon.) Originally written for the mid-70's, smack dab around the Hinchcliffe Horror era (which we've covered once or twice before in Halloween marathons past, I do believe), it got shelved because it was a "Doctor Who does vampires" story at a time when the BBC was doing a Serious Dramatic Adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and didn't want Tom Baker taking the piss right alongside it. Or something. It remained on the back burner until 1980, when it was revived and retooled to fit an ongoing story arc. State Of Decay now was the middle chapter of the E-Space trilogy, so called because the Doctor and his Time Lady companion Romana were stuck in an alternate universe called Exo-Space and were trying to get back to their own reality. I really don't want to blow my wad for a potential Season 18 project, but I find the E-Space arc to be utterly fascinating. I'm kind of a sucker for other realities and all, so any story where the TARDIS slips sideways instead of back and forth makes me perk up. Why does this make the story mirror the background of its eventual filming? Because of the simple fact that it follows the old tropes of the Hinchcliffe Horror era; specifically, the touch of the main baddie being a menacing monster thought long dead but returned for one last grasp. The King Vampire of this story is the last of a race of super-vampires that the Time Lords had a great and massive war with (Hello, future!) who fled into E-Space and is now lost outside of normal time. So, too, is this story the last of its kind; the final grasp of the Hinchcliffe Horror era, warped out of time and space into the far reaches of 1980, when the program was on an eve of massive change. I love this crunchy stuff. How about the story itself? It's okay.


Let me set the scene for you here; it's been a hell of a day here, weather-wise. Gale force winds are blowing against the house and have been all day, and as I fired the DVD up the sun was setting. It was literally a dark and stormy night as I viewed State of Decay, and that just added to the atmosphere. The parts of it that are Gothic horror are dripping with it, particularly the main throne room of the three vampires. You've got a village full of peasants terrorized by them, and it all seems standard vampire stuff... but then you have the glimmers of space technology. The band of villagers who hide technology and try to learn from it to overthrow their Lords. The fact that the vampire's lair is actually a giant rocket ship, its fuel tanks used as blood storage for the Great Vampire which slumbers below the earth. It may be Gothic horror, but it's still Doctor Who, baby. What I really love is the one scene where the Doctor and Romana first meet two of the Lords, and just absolutely take the piss out of all of their statements that what they do is for the good of the peasants. (I'll just defer to the ever-wonderful Jack Graham for this bit.) That's peak Doctor Who for me, right there. I also really quite love the soundtrack, believe it or not. I used to be down on the whole synthy thing but this has grown on me. I particularly love the "twinkling" synth noises uses to represent bats. It's just so weird and uncanny that it actually makes things feel more alien in retrospect. It shouldn't work, but it does. What doesn't work? Adric, I suppose. I understand that he was tacked on. I understand he has a... reputation. I won't critique that, but I will say that he doesn't work here. He spends a lot of the story just wandering around, has a bit near the end where he pretends to be tempted by becoming a vampire, and then tries to betray them and fails. Doesn't accomplish much, but again... he wasn't supposed to be here.


Look, it works, okay? Maybe the Great Vampire effects could have been better, but I can't be a downer on a story with as metal of a fucking ending as "Doctor Who launches a rocketship into space to have it come down to earth and be used as a giant stake to kill a giant vampire". I mean, Jesus Christ. Is it my favorite E-Space story? Not really. I think I'd still give that one to the story following this, Warrior's Gate. It's all weird and dreamy and... neat. Sure, there's some sort of Dark Souls-y stuff going on with it but it's not really a spooky one. Not like this story, with vampires and blood and stakes and shit. I think I've done okay here. I've covered just enough for a Halloween marathon post, but left enough gonzo takes open that I won't be totally repeating myself if the Season 18 Project ever happens. Well done. Now. What the hell ELSE can I talk about...?

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 15 (Shin Godzilla)

You know it's powerful because it's purple.

Well, that's a bit of a relief. It's refreshing to not have to do all sorts of mental gymnastics in the form of redemptive readings. We've got a properly good Godzilla movie here, and from Toho even so there's none of this "it doesn't count" stuff going on under the hood. I have the opposite sort of problem now. There's so much goddamn stuff going on under the hood of this movie that I don't even know where to begin. I guess at the beginning would help, we can be all linear. I like how all the Godzilla films I've sat down with so far always begin with boats at sea. Even the 1998 one, after its credits, begins at sea. Then we waste no real time. There's something in the water and bad things are about to go down. It's here where we get the movie's main focus, of sorts: the outside world in the opening minutes is represented almost entirely by found footage-style shots of people filming things. The rest of it? Government meetings. Shin Godzilla's main focus is on how the government reacts to this crisis... but let's take a step back here. Past Godzilla movies have cast the creature as sort of a harbinger of man's nuclear folly. This one has that element in it, deeper under the hood... but there's a more pressing influence in our opening. 2011's devastating tsunami which hit Japan hard. This is Godzilla as a force of nature, a pure natural disaster which just sweeps in out of nowhere and wrecks Japan while its government desperately tries to figure out what to do about it all. It works! You really do feel the human cost in this one, and the destruction isn't entirely all spectacle. Of course, the movie can have its cake and eat it too. The Godzilla that rampages through the city in the opening isn't fully formed. It's a goofy looking thing with googly eyes crawling through the streets. This is the Godzilla that's a natural disaster... but then it evolves. A newer Godzilla, pulsating red and stampeding through town with its roars. That's the Godzilla we know.


God, is the Japanese PM's reluctance to use force against Godzilla refreshing after coming from the American one. Oh, we've got Americans in this movie too, but not until later. For now, we have a movie where not a single shot is fired upon the big monster until almost the halfway point. You get these great wide shots of everything with tiny flares of cannon fire and one big Godzilla. Of course, it all does nothing... and then America gets involved. They do wound Godzilla, but then comes the big spectacle shot of the movie. Atomic breath. My god, the visual flare of this sequence. Could Godzilla always shoot radiation lasers out of its dorsal fins? I don't know, but one laser light show is enough to set a good chunk of Tokyo ablaze. Lest you think this movie's abandoned the science angle, it's covered as well. In tandem with the government stuff, this is all under the same umbrella. There's some implications that a bitter old scientist saw this giant monster coming, or even made it, after his wife died of radiation. Sixty years on and the ghosts of nuclear bombs past haunt this country. Dr. Maki's final note left on his abandoned boat says "Do as you like"... and that's a major running theme. The US does what it likes and orders more nukes to blast the dormant Godzilla. Yes, nukes. Clearly a rational idea in a Godzilla movie, but nobody's trope aware here. The science team's scrambling to figure out a solution, and they do as they like in going over the UN's heads and putting their plan to cool Godzilla down, like you would a reactor, into action.


The finale is brilliant. Military might alone won't stop Godzilla, nor will science alone. Operation Yashinori uses them both, delivering bombs and strategic demolitions to stall out Godzilla long enough to pump a shitload of coolant down the monster's throat. It's a tense finale that makes you wonder if any of this will work... but it does. Standing tall, forever frozen, Godzilla's shell remains as a landmark to the destruction. I mean, wow. This movie's real good, y'all. I'll level with you. I had money and couldn't wait until October to grab a copy of this, so I got it a few months back and gave it a watch. I liked it then, but sitting down with it again with a slightly more analytical mind? It may be the most affecting Godzilla movie since the original. It's a serious-minded film with a lot to say; much more that I didn't even touch upon. I'm barely scratching the surface here, but this is one that anyone who's a fan of the big stompy lizard should fire up and check out. I haven't got much more to say than that. Well, other than the fact that I'm thankful I can move on from Godzilla stuff for the next phase of this marathon. We've made it to the halfway point. Goddamn. What will we do next? I dunno. Let's find out, together.

Doctor Who Series 11 First Impressions: Episode 2 (The Ghost Monument)

WE IN THAT NEW TARDIS, GIRLS

Ooh, this one was quite nice. What's really fun about this brave new world of the Chibnall era is trying to pin down the themes and influences on the fly while watching. Woman Who Fell To Earth, for me, did give me some clear vibes as to where Chibnall's heart lay. I'll preface this, of course, by saying that the man has wholly original ideas and it all isn't just a rehash. We'll get to that fun, believe me. This is more of an anchor: some simple Doctor Who equivalent to use as a comparison. Woman Who Fell To Earth felt like a Tennant-era episode with a dash of Peter Davison in the Doctor's portrayal, which makes a lot of sense when you consider how Tennant was a Davison fan growing up. Here, with episode 2, we get something altogether stranger: an episode that feels like early Davison era, or early Hartnell. Early Davison did sort of draw on Hartnell, with one companion thrust into adventure against their will and an emphasis on exploring a mysterious new setting. This was no doubt due to the show being old enough that it started gaining nostalgia for itself, and you can go on a whole tangent about what that did to the show. Lord knows Chibnall, who was on TV at 16 decrying Terror Of The Vervoids for being a stock "monsters and corridors" plot, knew a lot about it as he lived through it. What's he got for us 30 years later? The Ghost Monument.


What a refreshingly gonzo opening this one has. Stuck in space, picked up by travellers at just the right time, and dropped onto some desolate sandy rock with three suns. Even the Doctor doesn't know what's going on or where this is. She does get her clever moment with helping the spaceship she's on land, admittedly roughly, but any landing you can walk away from, you know? It doesn't take long to get to what's going on here, sort of. Paris-Dakar Rally in space. That's a neat concept for an entire episode, but here it's just like one of... four or five the episode does. This is a wild mix. Still, we know where we're at and we have a goal. Get to the Ghost Monument, which is cleverly the TARDIS. Survive the hellscape of the planet Desolation. All while going through it, the Doctor is wondering what the hell is up... and so is the audience. I quite like this, this sense of discovering things along with the Doctor and her companions. Make no mistake, Desolation is a rough place. Three suns, flesh-eating microbes in the water, killer robots, weird... sheets that taunt you and suffocate you. Okay, so that's a bit odd, but hell. Let's be inventive. What I really love is the refreshing lack of anything to be stopped. Watching this through, I expected the reason for Desolation's desertion to be something to do with the space race, and for the Doctor to then be outraged and do something to non-violently tear the whole system down so no other planets got destroyed for such a petty purpose. That never happens. We do have our little moment of making sure the prize money is split between the two survivors, but the Doctor only raises the idea. She doesn't pressure Art Malik's character into accepting it. The episode thus just becomes 60 minutes of exploring a fucked-up alien planet and trying to survive all of the death traps. I really like that! The Doctor just got herself and her friends into a bad spot by mistake, and all they have to do is survive. Again, it's quite a refreshing change of pace for this show.


The companions all work quite well, of course. I take it with Grace's absence we're going to have some slow growth between Graham and Ryan. Again, don't quite like that. Sure, I like character development, but I don't like that we had to kill Grace for it. This is basically a fridging now; killing the interesting woman to spur the boys to talk about their feelings and focus on their pain. You can miss me with that, but we've got a hell of a journey to go so we'll see how it goes, I guess. I do quite enjoy Yas, though! There's some other things I'm not too fond of, like the Stenza being the reason Desolation is the way it is. I really don't want them to be a major recurring force in this series. Tim Shaw was a great sort of "joke" villain for the new Doctor's first adventure: someone menacing who she could still take the piss out of. Making his race an actual threat diminishes that somewhat... and then you've got this Timeless Child stuff that the sheets tell the Doctor about. For god's sakes, even Moffat knew when to quit with the arc phrase nonsense. Besides, any reveal about the Doctor is... ill-advised. Keep her past as a vague mysterious thing, for the love of God. I know it sounds like I'm complaining, but those few things are all that I really found wrong with The Ghost Monument. Oh, how the rest of it shines! I suppose I should mention the new TARDIS while I'm at it. Coral/crystal? Okay. I'm not in love with it but I'm sure  it will grow on me. It looks a little dark and cramped on initial viewing, but time will tell on that front. Either way, I quite enjoyed this one, nitpicks aside! I don't like the Hartnell era all that much, but I must say that I enjoyed this sort of throwback to it... or the early Davison era, maybe. Chibnall would have been 12 years old when that aired. Just the right age for the oddities like Castrovalva and Four To Doomsday to really leave an impression on him. If that's where we're going  to go, going forward? I'm all for it.


Next time: Rosa Parks? You're going to make a white person review an episode about Rosa Parks? Oh god.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 14 (Godzilla: The Series)

I TOLD YOU! MY BUILDING! MINE! 

Yeah. So this was a thing that existed! We are full on in a deep dive here. I remain confident that I'm one of the few people to ever talk about this semi-seriously, but I do remember seeing it on TV back in the day and liking it. So, I gave it a revisit and watched the first four episodes for the blog. I suppose this proves that, if nothing else, Godzilla 1998 had enough good will to get an animated series greenlit. What do we make of it, then? It's... interesting, to say the least. Entertaining on some base level. What strikes me as odd, though, is how much it follows from the movie. Yes, the series is a sequel but it basically picks up right then and there from Godzilla getting killed, only bothering to retell part of the final chase sequence... and abridge and change it slightly, but that's besides the point. If you hadn't seen the movie going into this, you'd be mighty confused. I mean, not even an animated Cliff Notes or anything. Point is, here's our new status quo: One of the Godzilla eggs hatches and imprints on Nick Tatopoulis, and thus becomes "good" and determined to protect him a
nd his pals. Together with some other characters from the movie and some new folks, they go around the world investigating other weird mutated monsters. Godzilla follows them around to protect Nick and ends up having fights with the big monsters while Nick and his team do science to try and figure out how to stop the big monsters and save the day. Holy hell. It's a kaiju movie mixed with a Saturday morning cartoon "monster of the week" mode of operation. This is actually genius.


It does, like the movie, almost work. The creature design is real inventive, from what I saw; in three episodes (not counting the opener which was the origin of the new Godzilla), we had giant squids, a big Cloverfield-looking fucker which fed on the giant squids and got pissed off when they died, a giant worm, and (my favorite) petrolum-consuming nanomachines which went haywire and formed a giant blob monster that grew the more petroleum it ate. There's some real inventiveness there, and I remember shit got even more bizarre from back in the day; eventually aliens got involved or something really silly like that. It's almost thrilling to throw on an episode and wonder what fucked-up monster Godzilla will fight today... and here's something wild! Godzilla has atomic breath! She just breathed fire a few times in the movie, but here the new Godzilla is breathing green-ass atomic breath. They actually got MORE faithful to the source material. Goddamn. I really am impressed here. Maybe easily so, but still. This didn't feel like a total waste of my time.


What doesn't work? Uhh, well... the way it handles the women? Particularly Audrey, the reporter from the movie. She went through a whole arc in the movie and now she's sort of just jealous that Nick is hanging around scientists all the time. The women in this show are constantly jealous towards each other and it really rubs me the wrong way. Then there's Nigel, the robot. He's this show's K9, I guess, in that he does scans and gives information... but he's also this show's Kenny McCormick. Yes, I said that. They have Godzilla or the monster of the week manage to trash the robot in every single episode. What in the hell? Some of the humor doesn't land, but it is a kid's show and I'm a grown adult so let's just say that a lot of it is swinging for someone half my height and leave it at that. I don't have much more to say. This was a fine way to spend 80 minutes. I'd binge more, but... well, you know. I've got an actual Godzilla movie I bought to talk about on the blog. No American stuff, this one's made in Japan, the real deal... and it's going to be very interesting. Who made this?


Ah Christ, the Evangelion guy? Oh, I'm really in for it now.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 13 (Godzilla 1998)

THIS IS MY BUILDING NOW

You're goddamned right we're doing this. It'll even be a redemptive reading, to the best attempt possible. It would be hyperbolic to claim that nobody in history has ever taken this movie seriously and critiqued it beyond gatekeeping it out of Godzilla canon or whatever, but it feels like that at times. Maybe it's my unique perspective of seeing this as a teen plus only having seen two or three of the serious Toho Godzilla pictures, but... well, on paper I hardly see a difference. A difference, that is, between a big dumb lizard sometimes referred to as Godzilla smashing the shit out of New York in a 90's summer blockbuster and a big Japanese lizard named Godzilla fighting three-headed dragons, King Kong, and mechanized versions of itself. Maybe I'm wrong and even the goofy goddamn Toho Godzilla movies have more nuance and heart than this American version has in one tooth. Feel free to call me on it, but that's just how I feel sitting here. Does Godzilla 1998 work? It's... complicated. That is to say, it generally works and I don't feel like I sat through the worst goddamn movie ever. At the same time, this movie has a lot of problems behind it. It ain't perfect, but you know what? I revel in that shit. I can make something of it for a post. Let's roll.


The most interesting thing, for me, is the setting. New York. Now, this is about the furthest thing from the more dramatic Godzilla films we've covered... all two of them. Still, trying to run our thoroughline reading of Godzilla leads to something strange and almost prescient. Recall that the original was made due to anxiety over the wound of Japan getting nuclear bombs dropped on it, and the fresh memory of that devastation. Godzilla 1984 was made at a tense moment in the Cold War, and the US/Soviet relations on display in that movie reflect that. So, too, does the Godzilla in '84 become a living metaphor for nuclear destruction. Apply that to the American Godzilla, though, and you don't find an analog... until you use the knowledge of the future. Yeah. Three years after this one is when we had a specific anxiety over buildings in New York getting blown up and trashed. This, of course, does absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the movie. It's just strange in hindsight. Okay, what is the movie actually doing then? It's being transformative. It's taking a bunch of elements from other blockbusters and throwing them into the Godzilla blender. You have not just Godzilla in here, but other big American blockbusters. The early parts of the movie make me think of Jaws, and there is even a recreation of one specific shot from Jaws where the camera zooms but keeps in on an actor in frame. I'm not savvy in film language, but they pull it. Even wilder is the final act of this movie, which straight up appears to kill Godzilla and then become a goddamn melange of Aliens and Jurassic Park, with giant eggs that hatch out baby Godzillas which then run around not at all unlike the velociraptors... and then Godzilla comes BACK and we get a car chase with her! Yes. Her. We've got a giant lizard that lays eggs and is pissed off that her young were killed. I don't care that the movie keeps referring to Godzilla with male pronouns after this reveal. American Godzilla is female. Look, I don't care how much of a blatant attempt at following a trend it is; any movie which is malleable enough to swap out a kaiju plot and say "WE'RE DOING ALIENS/JURASSIC PARK NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS" is doing something under the hood to make me pay attention.


So what doesn't work? Oh, everything else. The effects don't hold up all that well. The characters? Ehhh. They're going for the drama and all that, but it doesn't land. Odder still are the frequent attempts at being funny. Absolutely one funny bit landed with me, and that's Matthew Broderick tipping over things of basketballs and gumball machines to make the baby Godzillas slip and fall so he can get away. Mashing Aliens and Jurassic Park together is one thing. All of a sudden whapping you with a slapstick joke? Good god. Oh, and the military kills this Godzilla at the end. Absolutely off base with the Toho Godzilla, but let's be real; did you expect an American blockbuster that's practically military porn already to show the military as completely ineffective against the big monster? I didn't. Hell, the inciting incident that creates this Godzilla is specifically French nuclear testing. Not, you know, AMERICAN ONES. They bother to pin the blame on the French, rather than take any accountability for this stuff in their movie... but, again, did you expect them to? Oh, and why the hell are Siskel and Ebert in this? It's not really them, but there's Mayor Ebert and his assistant Gene and they look as close to the men as is possible. Well, I looked it up. Turns out Siskel and Ebert gave the previous movies made by these creative minds bad reviews. Wow. How goddamn petty can you get? Christ. Let's bail out of this one. I think I've done enough. It almost kind of sort of works, this one. If you try. Most people don't ever get past "THAT'S NOT THE REAL GODZILLA" so I think I've done what I can here.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 12 (Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon)

Ohh baby. If yesterday's post was complaining about a very good game (and it was, if we're being honest), this one is going to be nothing but gushing about an incredible game. Let's set the scene, just a bit. A Kickstarter got itself funded a while back, for a little game called Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. It's an upcoming retro revival of the "Metroidvania" style made popular by Koji Igarashi with his multiple entries in the series, and it's got the man himself behind it. So, you know, fans of that must be through the roof. Certainly I'd be interested in trying it when it comes out, but my loyalties lie with vintage 'Vania. That made what was to come all the more surprising. A stretch goal for the Bloodstained Kickstarter was an 8-bit styled prequel game, and that got met as well. The result was Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon. (From here on, we'll just call it Bloodstained, as I doubt we'll be referencing the upcoming Ritual Of The Night any more.) My god, this game. It's in the running as one of the best I've played this year, and giving it a quick replay and change today only cemented that. The folks behind this get vintage Castlevania, but they've managed to go beyond. Replicating the atmosphere, aesthetic, and gameplay of an old Castlevania game would have been a feat of prowess. Bloodstained manages to go even farther. It draws upon advances and conveniences of games that have come since Castlevania 3's release, and applies them to a game that pays homage to it. The result is utterly incredible.


I think what I adore most about Bloodstained is its variety of choices. If you'll recall, Castlevania 3 had some of those as well, but in practice they amounted to "do you want the game to be hard, or do you want it to be REALLY hard?". Bloodstained  lets you tone things down, if you so choose. You've got a casual mode which gives you infinite lives and removes knockback, or a veteran mode which has lives and knockback. I went with Veteran, but it's nice that the option is there to not have your face rocked off. Lives are an interesting bugbear from the old days, but this game's real generous on that front too, if you let it. See, you can recruit characters in this one. Just like in Castlevania 3. Unlike that one, you get to take all of them with you. Also unlike that one, switching between them is instant as opposed to a five second teleport. It's the little things. Dying makes you lose the use of that character, but only losing all your characters takes a life away... and then they all come back. There's all sorts of shenanigans with the characters, though, as they draw from Castlevanias past. You have your whip user with a slide, and then you have characters which are Original Character Do Not Steal versions of Sypha and Alucard from 3. They're all good and useful, in their own way... but you could also kill them and gain super powers for your main hero! Or ignore them and try and beat the game with a basic jump and slash! The variety here is staggering, and I've not even gone into how it handles the stages. You don't choose which stage to go to this time, but the stages are massive with all sorts of branching paths and some hidden goodies. A lot of them you can only get with clever use of the other characters and their powers, so there's a reward for recruiting them. This works a lot better for me than choosing the stage because you never really get stuck on a hard path; it's either the intended path, or an easier shortcut. This game's just on point and I adore it.


Then you've got the extra modes, where you play as the other three characters in unison to beat the game again and earn a "better" ending, or a mode that unlocks the super powers for your main hero while also letting you use the others. I've played through this game a good five or six times and it's an absolute breeze. I keep putting down Castlevania 3 here, and I feel bad doing it... but my god. Here's a game which manages to take an absolute classic and improve on it in nearly every way. It's almost unfair to compare the two, given that Castlevania 3 doesn't have almost 30 years of game design and extra memory capacity to draw off of... but I can't help but do it anyway. I'll still go back to Castlevania 3, but Bloodstained has won me over. If I want to play a spooky platformer and get my ass kicked, I'll load up a Ghosts n Goblins game or Castlevania 3 or something. That's still my avenue of masochism, of course... but it's all about choice. If I want to play a spooky platformer and blast through it and have a relative challenge, choosing on the fly how tough I want to make it... I'll fire up Bloodstained. One wonders how the hell Ritual Of The Night will turn out now. Next year will tell, I suppose, and we could be writing it up if there's another one of these. In the meantime, I want to take on that Boss Rush... but first maybe I should check in on an old friend of the spooky marathons, hm? I bet you know this one. Big. Stompy. Yeah. That one.

Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 11 (Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse)

Consistency, then. Moving from something that's a muddled mess to an actual classic. Will I find ways to complain? Oh, absolutely, given that it's me. I could get more annoyed with what this represented for Castlevania, if I wanted. It happens so many times with these long-running franchises: the second game is the weird experimental one and the third goes back to the first and polishes it up, and then everyone loves that, and then that weird experimental one gets derided as a black sheep once 30 more of the "traditional" style of said series gets made. Zelda. Mario. Final Fantasy. And, yes, Castlevania. I can keep that anger in check, though, because the weird experiment was basically the groundwork for 1997. You know, when Castlevania just ripped off Super Metroid and created another massive shift that caused them to make 30 more of those types of game at the expense of the traditional ones. In the end, exploratory platforming won out. Even with all that gonzo exorcism aside, Castlevania 3 is sort of a mesh of the two. I say "sort of" because it still doesn't end up working out quite like that. This is a very good game, but it's not perfect. That may be sacrilege to some, but it's true. I did enjoy my replay of it, but there are things that need to be addressed. This is more of a quick dive than a full review, so dip your feet into the spooky pool here. It's Castlevania 3, the third one.


In theory, this game is a mesh between the traditional action platforming of the first game and the winding branching paths of the second. Not only does the game have more stages, but you have different branching paths you can select along the way which end up dictating your route to Castlevania. On those paths you've got the other wild new addition to the game, the  new characters. You can choose between three; there's Grant, who has a piddly knife with no range (unless you play the Japanese version where he has an infinite supply of throwing daggers) and can climb walls. Sypha, the mage, has a weak staff for her main attack but the most powerful subweapons in the whole game. Then there's Alucard, who shoots fireballs and can transform into a bat. Sypha is my favorite character, incidentally, because I enjoy tearing through the bosses with her magic... but for the playthrough I did in preparation of writing this I went with Grant. I ended up barely using him, save for abusing his wall climbing power to take some clever shortcuts through certain stages. These really are great new innovations, of course, and they help freshen up the game. It looks and sounds amazing (again, even better in the Japanese version, but I wanted to be comfy in my basement today so I played my NES cart and made do) and I do admire the aesthetic. I'd definitely put it in my top 5 of "classic" (i.e, pre-Symphony Of The Night) Castlevanias, somewhere around the middle. As I said, though, it's very good but not perfect... and the biggest thing is the difficulty.


That sounds just a little ridiculous coming from an individual who willingly beat Battletoads multiple times, but let me explain. I'm not deriding the general difficulty of the game. The path I played is on a level of difficulty that I can respect. Okay, so the penultimate level is a real mountain to overcome but it's placed at just the right point for it to be that massive challenge. Additionally, the removal of a checkpoint before Dracula in the NES release and the bump up in damage for late game stages make things more of a hassle... but, I can endure. No, what sinks things for me is the Alucard path. This is, from what I can gather, the "hard" path of the game. You have more levels, and they're utterly fiendish in difficulty from the get-go. The final level of this path is ludicrous, with a massively long stage with multiple boss fights and autoscrolling segments. It goes a step beyond. Even masochist hard game beater me doesn't ever want to touch it again, and that just sort of spoils the fun of having a branching path game, doesn't it? You made one of your two paths so ridiculous fuck hard that I don't ever want to go near it again. In the end, that just restricts things right back down. Still, complain as I may... I don't hate Castlevania 3. I quite enjoy it, since I bothered to buy a physical cart and everything. I just wished I enjoyed the other half of it as much as I do the easier half. Of course, masterpiece as it may be... things can always be improved upon. That's our lead-in for tomorrow. You may know what's coming. It'll be fun. See you then.