Simon's Quest etc are probably the least anime-y of any of the series (not just owing the graphics.) It's even more than the art style though, they're all much more of the grim European bent. Bloodlines on the Sega Genesis is where I remember the game starting to take on what I now consider your typical heavily japanese visual influence.
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Screw it, it's the weekend.
Castlevania 1 on the NES you can probably skip....but you should at least give it a try. It informs the platforming elements of all the games that come after it, and sets up the basic "Vampire Killer named Belmont vs. the ancient evil Dracula and all his evil goons" theme that underpins most of the series.
Vampire Killer. MSX2. I had not heard about this one until I looked for it. Apparently it was a bit like Simon's Quest's predecessor in terms of open ended design.
Castlevania II Simon's Quest on the NES is a more long form game, taking the basic gameplay elements of Castlevania I combined with recycling areas, going back and forth, completing quests, a sort of inventory system. While it doesn't have a super elaborate story, it starts setting up the characterization elements of the other games, where there's more to the world besides Simon, Dracula and some bats, skeletons and wolves. If you ever played Zelda 1, then played Zelda II and went "WTH is going on here?", Castlevania I --> II is the exact same way. The game is also
super cryptic about what you actually need to do. Like, the archetypal text adventure game where you need to infer what you're supposed to do from the barest of instructions. Not for the faint of heart.
Castlevania The Adventure is the first generation Gameboy offering. It's not pretty but it still keeps the same spirit as the other Nintendo games with the music and the platforming difficulty. This was one of the first gameboy games I ever had. I played it relentlessly but only finished it once or twice. You can skip it probably, although those 8 or 16 bit tunes are ingrained in my skull for all time and that alone makes it worth playing. It is a throwback to Castlevania I in terms of story and world setting.
Castlevania III Dracula's Curse on the NES is an interesting bird. Despite going back to the classic platforming of Castlevania I over II's eternal wandering and back tracking, it brings the idea of a branching storyline through multiple characters you play, being offered different level choices and endings depending on which levels you played. It also adds several different playable character spirits each with their own quirks and doodads. It's the first actual story the series gets, with notable characters and different personalities.
Castlevania 2 Belmont's Revenge. Gameboy. Effectively a sequel to Castlevania The Adventure. Didn't play this one myself.
Super Castlevania IV for the SNES is, in my opinion, the peak of what classical Castlevania achieved. The graphics and styling and music all come together for absolutely the prettiest, smoothest and most feature rich "basic platforming" Castlevania. It doesn't have the multiple characters or level choices of III, but it adds a lot of visual effects and gameplay gimmicks like rotating platforms and whip swing points and so on. It delivers even today. IV is where I learned to pay attention to and love the artistry with which those backgrounds were created. It is what I consider the last "Old School" Castlevania game in look, styling and story. IV doesn't have much of a story though compared to everything that comes after it. This is also also where, in my mind, the Castle itself starts to take on mythic proportions because it's been the icon of the series for years.
Castlevania Bloodlines was for the Sega, which I didn't own (got an SNES), and so only got to play it at my friend's house. I suppose if I'm honest, what I said about IV really applies to Bloodlines. While still being a basic platformer at heart, it did a lot of things the SNES didn't. It brought the Sega's nicer graphics, multiple playable characters, some of a branching storyline, multiple endings, what I think is the most detailed story of the series up to that point, and that vaguely anime-ish look that only gets stronger as time goes on.
Castlevania Rondo of Blood on the Gameboy. Never got a chance to play it.
Castlevania Symphony of the Night. PSX. This is where the barest of RPG elements in the rest of the games became a full focus, the Castle became a playground instead of just an obstacle course, and the story dramatically flourished its now pretty detailed and varied background. Exploration, leveling, farming broken gear, finding secrets. The game did it all. What stands out most though is the RPG elements and exploration of SotN. I remember a lot of great exploration RPGs coming out for Playstation right around this era. It seemed to be a theme with some designers. Anyways, best of everything that's ever been done from what I've played, IMO. The Castle as a thing of Chaos really comes into its own here, and justifies the series doing pretty much anything it wants from here on out, because everything that happens retains some kind of series continuity within the confines of the castle. It's hard to overstate how transformative this title was for the series. Pretty much impossible, actually.
Castlevania Legends is another Gameboy title that I didn't play. It basically looks about like the other two and wasn't super well received compared to the others. It was your basic platformer. You can take one look at the box art to see how far the visuals of the box art have come from the days of the SNES and NES games.
Castlevania 64 for the N64. This game....is an abomination. The first 3rd person fighting Castlevania ever made, and it was abysmal. Awkward, blocky, full of bad textures, frustrating to play. It was basically an object lesson in what Castlevania is like without the right visuals to back it up. Truly horrible. And yet I played the shit out of it. The truth is, this is the real place where the transition from awesome 2d exploration RPG to 3rd person beat 'em up games with light exploration and RPG mechanics began. Castlevania 64 was a weird half creature, of levels to explore that were linear, while not allowing you to back track. There was a day/night cycle giving you the impression it was a world while only barely filling out the promise of it. This is the start of Konami chasing the dragon that is a 3D Castlevania, that is still going on today.
Castlevania Legacy of Darkness is Castlevania 64, round two. It is much improved over CV64 in most places, although it still never manages to leave you feeling like rooms have any real depth. Everything is still a cube or a rectangle, nothing is antialised so you're forever feeling like the whole screen is shifting while you move. TBH I think I put a lot of time into that game but don't remember much about it.
Castlevania Circle of the Moon. GBA.The first in a long series of Castlevania games for "next gen" handheld devices. These games took up the torch of 2d Castlevania awesomeness that Konami didn't feel was warranted for the bigger systems. I've played some of Circle of the Moon but don't remember a lot about it. TBH I didn't play a lot of the GBA and NDS releases of Castlevania games, much to my unhappiness. It's something I plan to rectify one day.
Castlevania Chronicles for the PSX. Apparently it's a remastered version of the original Castlevania I, flashy 2d graphics, essentially the same gameplay and story as the original. (Man Meets Vampire Lord. Man Kills Vampire Lord.) Looking at the box art it's really familiar, I think I might have rented this once. You know. Back when video stores were a thing.
Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance & Aria of Sorrow. Two GBA Castlevanias. I played a decent amount of Aria of Sorrow. These two and Circle of the Moon kept Symphony of the Night fans going through the long years of other kinds of Castlevania getting top billing. They each had their own fairly crunchy RPG and exploration features.
Castlevania Lament of Innocence. PS2. Finally, Konami believed they had arrived at 3D Castlevania. With the textures of the PS2 the game finally didn't look or run like shit. Gameplay took the form of your now familiar 3rd person action fighting game, with cinematic fixed camera angles to make everything work. Kinda handles like a less restrictive Resident Evil game. It had the spirit of exploration but the level geometry sadly did not keep up, so while everything looked nice, there was no verticality to it, just what would work with a fixed camera. Most of the game is reeaaallllyyy long hallways filled with guys to kill, with the occasional forking path to make you wander. Combat was functional but felt pretty one note, adequate I suppose for the days of PS2. There's not much RPG to it, I vaguely recall some twist on the standard "Knife, Axe, Holy Water, etc..." trope some how interacting with your Super Finisher, and there being a couple of those to find or unlock somehow. Still has my favorite Castlevania boss, thematically, of all time though. (
Forgotten One.) While I enjoyed my time in it passably, I was still constantly thinking how it wasn't the equal of Symphony of the Night.
Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow. A Nintendo DS title I didn't play but for a brief attempt at emulating it. It continues the tradition of showing how 2D is about 5x as rad as any 3d Castlevania game because the art can go to the max and so can the gameplay design.
Castlevania Curse of Darkness. PS2. The 4th attempt by Konami to create an engaging 3d Castlevania the equal of Symphony of the Night. Arguably their best attempt to date. Like Lament of Innocence, the game is about the Combat Combo System first and foremost. Then the leveling of different familiars you acquire, which has a Pokemon gotta level them all quality to it, then the exploration. While the environments are an upgrade from Lament of Innocence, they're still pretty basic so they can offer lots of open, flat space to fight on. That said, it did a way better job on the RPG side of things, with lots of weapons and armor to craft and get. The unfortunate side effect is, between leveling familiars and grinding for rare materials and drops, you do a lot of farming. I guess not too different in the end from SotN, and, there was a satisfying sense of mastery learning all the different weapon styles that came with all the grinding. There's also a challenge tower to wile away the hours in. I would say it's the first and only 3D Castlevania to leave me satisfied while not completely blown away. I think I put 60 or 80 hours into it. If the levels had been more than hallways, tunnels and the occasional open area, the game would have possibly been stellar. I think Curse of Darkness is as close as they could get to a Castlevania that could meet people's expectations, but by that time they'd already made so many failed attempts at it and fans had gotten burned so many times on anything not 2D, it couldn't succeed even though maybe it really should have. Konami wouldn't get another 3d Castlevania out the door for 5 more years. The other black mark I have against CoD is it started the trend of having more and more gameplay be disconnected from the castle, the literal namesake and lynchpin of the whole series. The more I saw this happen, the more I started to think someone just didn't get it. Turns out, Igarashi was the scenario writer and producer on both Lament and CoD. Whether his hands were tied by tech or by Konami or whether he did the best he could with what he had, it just wasn't enough to really say it had met or beaten SotN. In fact, all the people mentioned in the Bloodstained campaign were the leads on these two games. So as I look on Bloodstained it's a little sobering to remember that the same people had ultimately failed to do better than they'd done 7 and 9 years ago. I don't fault Michiru Yamane or Ayami Kojima, I've always enjoyed their work immensely. But gameplay and level design I can't say the same about. On the other hand, he's the producer/writer for all the 2D games people still love.
Castlevania Portrait of Ruin. More 2D NDS Castlevania. By now the style is pretty much all over the place in terms of the art. Didn't play this one but it sounds kinda cool, in a spin off sort of way.
Castlevania Order of Shadows. A mobile phone game in the style of Symphony of the Night. One look at it though tells you how heavily cribbed the style is and how effectively it was done.
Castlevania The Dracula X Chronicles. PS Mobile. A remake of Rondo of Blood by all accounts.
Castlevania Order of Ecclesia. NDS. (Damn I think I need to buy one of these....) You've read about it above and it's well regarded by most who mention it.
Castlevania: Judgment. Wii motion-controlled fighting game? Clearly I didn't play or even know about this one. Moving on...
Castlevania the Arcade. Some arcade light-gun House of the Dead title. *shrug*
Castlevania the Adventure ReBirth. A Wii Castlevania. I know nothing about it.
Castlevania Puzzle, Encore of the Night. iOS. Another mobile Castlevania game that's a puzzle game. You can
probably skip this one.
Castlevania Harmony of Despair. X360, PS3. A 2d Castlevania I haven't gotten the chance to play so I can't give much of an opinion on, other than it basically is a big character reunion between half of a dozen of the series' protagonists.
Castlevania Lords of Shadow. PC/360/PS3. Now pretty confident that they had the measure of 3d Castlevania, and no more Igarashi, Konami proceeded to recast the series visually for a....more gritty, realistic? look. After years of Devil May Cry and GoW and Bayonetta and all the other 3rd person action fighting games that could easily look like Castlevania, not to mention Castlevania, I think Konami decided it was time to update the game stylistically. Characters now look like they're from a Final Fantasy cutscene. Areas are definitely more detailed than Curse of Darkness by an order of magnitude, although rather than this interwoven complex of a castle, they decided you'd spend half the game in forests and canyons and basically nowhere near the Castle. What I did see of the castle, after all this time waiting, was just further extension of the pedestrian design the rest of the game had shown. Each area ends up feeling like a little maze you get through, before you leave and never come back except for the ledges you can't access or w/e new abilities let you get to. Very standard stuff by now. The combat is good, probably because it's essentially the same combat model since Lament of Innocence, so they've had lots of practice. The game's big selling point was moving battles against gargantuan bosses, some of them basically Shadow of the Colossus style fights. The story, I dunno. Maybe it's the stylization but the story struck me as trying too hard from the outset, especially since it was pulling a reset on the world. Not the first time it's been done in Castlevania, but this was arguably the most dramatic change of style and tone the series had seen since the Nintendo days ended. I didn't feel the artistry in Lords of Shadow, so much as someone trying to lay the foundations for the franchise changing directions, and doing it as epically and dramatically as possible. Castlevania always had a slightly overwrought soap opera feel to it. Dark and macabre at times, there was still this delicateness to everything, this refinement and aesthetic and just a hint of the occasional silliness so that it never took itself too seriously. Lords of Shadow took itself entirely seriously, and in effect became like every other game out there: devoid of fun ideas and imagination beyond the monsters. In the end my biggest complaint is that instead of making really interesting levels that came together in an interesting way, they cordoned off the whole game into separate areas that you cleared and basically dismissed. Games like Devil May Cry managed to get much more mileage out of their game space than LoS.
Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 for PC/360/PS3. I haven't played it and I probably won't. Now REALLY confident that they had a winner on their hands, Konami let this one go full steam. And that's how you end up with:
Playing a Belmont who is really Dracula who runs around with no shirt and an overcoat on, brandishing his nipples at everyone who then trembles at his dark, slightly erotic aura. Oh, also it takes place in the modern day. Because THAT'S what I want of my Castlevania game: modernism. Also you fight Satan, because why not. But, and double spoiler, you fight Satan in LoS too.
Maybe I'm over doing it there. Anyways, this one, like Lords of Shadow 1, isn't so much a straight RPG as it is one of those casual RPGs where most of the attention has been lavished on combat. LoS 1 had a fairly ho-hum combat system that was functional if a bit boring because it was so familiar. LoS 2 goes on to add weapon charges that become what the core combat strategy revolves around, so you gotta charge your blood draining sword or your shadow whip, something something something. I dunno. By this point I've completely tuned out to what is officially Castlevania.
I can't believe I just typed all that. What can I say, I've loved me some Castlevania intensely in my time.
Maybe even obsessively.----
Also, is the whole anime thing really that big of a deal?
Well....go watch the Livestream of the final hours of the Kickstarter. About the last 10 minutes. The fans are voting on which of 4 familiars they want as sort of the official one for the game. Look at the art, and honestly, tell me that's not going a little kawaii even for Castlevania. I mean, Igarashi even said "I had 4 archetypes I wanted to cover. Funny, Cute, Scary and Cool."
Guess which one won the vote? The Cool looking knight emerging from the portal. The next biggest winner? A kawaii pixie girl with huge eyes and thigh high stockings. Igarashi was actually
disappointed she didn't win. (He'd also been drinking wine for 4 hours so he was kinda drunk.) The other two that didn't win were a sort of wraith that looked scary while just being on the edge of cute, and this goofy one-eyed Ahriman looking thing with a crown that was meant to look funny.
All this is starting to seem very far away even from SotN in terms of styling. Being that I didn't play hardly any of the NDS or GBA games, I'm less accustomed to the anime look the series has picked up over the years. To the people who have been knee deep in it, I'm sure this looks like nothing surprising.
I really wouldn't have a problem with it, if every implication didn't seem to point to the in-game visuals of characters and monsters (not their chatting portraits or w/e form they take) looking silly, cute or funny as an enduring theme for the game.The restraint in older games for those kinds of things is what made it charming to me, instead of overbearing saccharine sweetness. I can't say I'm a huge fan of "cute meets grim dark" culture either. I find it sort of ridiculous. Symphony of the Night set a narrower tone that allowed for a medieval look with a couple hints of cuteness and some over the top gore and evil looking stuff. This seems like it's broadened and intensified the visual theme so that, at least to me, everything starts to look over designed. And seriously, where's all the gore, the dead stuff, the
horror in Gothic Horror? That didn't get nearly as much play anywhere in the campaign versus the Doujin look. I don't really want to play a more gothic looking version of Skull Girls because I can't really relate to the theme.
I mean, I'm complaining but I went in for $100 eventually >.>. In the end I'm excited, but I really, really, really hope Igarashi gets the message from the fan base about what they'd prefer to see: cool, scary, funny or cute. That is my personal order of priority. He believes the vote coming out for "Cool" is because the western audience for this is large and "Westerners like cool." I don't really disagree with him. It doesn't need to be so edge your eyes bleed just by looking at it, nor so grimdark you think you're playing Dark Souls. But if everything is Big Eyes Small Mouth and cutesy "happy demons" floating around everywhere, I'm gonna have that much harder of a time getting into "it's not Castlevania but it really is." The styling has always been part of that equation.
If you want a prime example of what my eyes keep going back to, it's those stars in the picture in the OP. I imagine those are like little star demons or whatever. They look like they're out of a kid's light occult cartoon. That's kind of what this is visually starting to remind me of: Persona.
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Topic: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. Castlestalgia. You may now enter the castle. (Read 10397 times)