31 Days, 31 Screams: Day 6 (Castlevania)

Shit, I forgot the title screen was a film strip!
INVOCATION!!!

This isn't even where I came in. No, that honor goes to 1994's scouring of a flea market which led to a used copy of Castlevania 2. You know. The one everyone dislikes. That was my first one, and I can't help but love it now. I accept that parts of it don't hold up and are uncool. Most of my love for it comes from the fact that my sister got me an NES hint book that had tips for the game, so I was actually able to make some progress in it. The book had nothing about that infamous bit with the cliff, though. It was my brother who ended up first beating the game, which is notable because he didn't even play video games really. Now, something like Zelda 2 getting a lot of hate, on the other hand? Unacceptable to me. That game's a treasure and it's the Castlevania 2 concept done right. Enough about that, though. Let's talk about the original for a bit. What's striking is that we're not that far out from the release of Ghosts n Goblins, when you really look at it. The arcade game was out in September 1985, and Castlevania dropped onto the Famicom Disk System in late September the following year. Even the NES port of Ghosts n Goblins was only a few months old... and here's this game that's a strange measured response and half-inversion of it. It is, at its core, a six-stage action platformer with rigid jumping and a horror theme to it. Castlevania offers an interesting evolution to the Ghosts n Goblins formula though, one that's impressive given the one year difference between them.

For a start, the weapons. I'm cribbing from a 30th anniversary retrospective I read here, but it's incredible that I didn't realize it until now. In Castlevania, Simon Belmont has a handful of weapons he can obtain, a la Arthur, each with their own arcs and abilities. The knife shoots forward, axes and holy water arc, the cross boomerangs, the stopwatch freezes shit for a bit. Unlike Arthur, though, these are not your primary weapons; they're subweapons. Special items to collect to give you an edge. The real weapon is your whip, but there's still a bit of delay in pulling it out. The rigidness of Order strikes back, and all that. It's also interesting how the knife is the superior weapon in Ghosts n Goblins, and in Castlevania it's far and away the least effective subweapon of the lot. Things are also a lot less... erratic in Castlevania. Sure, you have some infamous things swooping in at you. Bats, birds, disembodied Medusa heads that sway in a sine wave. You know. The fun stuff. It is an element of randomness, but not especially in an edgeguarding OOPS sort of way where you just get rolled. Not especially, but it's there. On the monsters themselves? It's a revelry not unlike Stephen King and his shapeshifting clown. Skeletons, bats, fishmen, medusas, skeleton dragons, hunchbacks, mummies, Frankenstein monsters, THE LITERAL EMBODIMENT OF DEATH, THE GRIM REAPER, and of course the main antagonist Dracula. Like Rocky Horror, Castlevania is having fun with the iconography. You only need to look at the credits to see how silly they're being, with names like Belo Lugosi and Boris Karloffice. Portmanteauing the name of the guy who played Frankenstein's monster with an office isn't all that different from maa fucking hot dog, after all.
king Dr. Frankenstein an omnisexual transvestite alien named after

Oh yeah, and it's good. Like, really good. A classic on the NES good. The control's rigid but that's the point of it, and if you're clever you can use the damage knockback to sequence break. It's a legitimate good game, which is more than I can say for the NES port of Ghosts n Goblins; it's kind of bad. In fact, Ghosts n Goblins is my least favorite in that series. Whoops. Even if Castlevania is invoking it, it manages to be superior to it. Like that bit in the final stage where you run across a broken bridge while multiple copies of the first level boss fly at you. A hell of a better sequence than just putting the first level boss at the start of stage 6 of GnG "just because". Castlevania was also the horror series that got a billion sequels, and unlike GnG they changed radically over time! They evolved their action platforming up until about 1994 or so, and then took a new approach by copying Super Metroid. That one was also wildly successful and got a bunch of games similar to that! Then they copied God of War, and... well, Jim Sterling said it best. #FucKonami. Nevertheless, the original game is really good! You can play it any time of year, but its just plain fun nature (and the difficulty being just the tiniest bit spicier than "just right") manage to make it replayable and something you want to keep plugging at. Turn down those lights, get a pumpkin spice anything from anywhere, and fire the thing up and have a ball.

As for me, I'm firing up a movie and having a ball.