So, other than Mario and Link, the omnipresent faces of Nintendo who will still be around long after I’ve left this big blue rock, I haven’t had another game/series/character manage to break past two appearances on this list of nearly 50 (so far!) games I think everyone should try playing.
Until now, that is.
Welcome to the club, Castlevania!
Truly, it is a distinguished honor.
Your children’s children will be talking about this moment.
Okay, probably not, but we can still talk about “Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse” for a while if we want to, so let’s do that.
Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse at a glance:
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1990
Platform: NES
Nintendo Power’s ninth-best NES game
When I think back to the time period in which Castlevania III hit the U.S. market back in the fall of 1990, I recall an overwhelming sense of change and possibilities.
We had the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989. That may not seem like such a big deal now, but at the time, it signified that the Cold War was won, and the communists were defeated! (Granted, this is over-simplifying things a little bit, but what do you want, I was a tween and that surely seemed like a seminal event at the time.)
In 1990, Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson. I mean, Buster beat Tyson! What the hell, man. Tyson had, to that point, seemed unbeatable, an angry ball of constantly moving brick-like fists, designed to eradicate everything in his path (and he featured prominently in his own video game!). But as it turned out, neither the Iron Curtain nor Iron Mike were invincible any longer, because of Buster friggin’ Douglas.
I had bested Double Dragon at the arcades, not a thing to be sneezed at in my view, as it was a kind of lifting of the curtain moment for me.
This is a thing a person could do, defeat an arcade game?
Madness.
Hell, by 1990, I’d even defeated my own parents in convincing them to finally buy me a Nintendo Entertainment System.*
* That one had been a lengthy war, akin to the one depicted in that movie “8-Bit Christmas.” If you haven’t seen the movie, I don’t really want to spoil much. But the central conflict depicted was of a child wanting a Nintendo for Christmas, and his handy, D-I-Y dad very much not wanting to buy it for him. Madcap hijinks ensued. This movie resonated with me on a deeply personal level, as my own dad was similarly the type to try to build things from the ground up and fix the broken things around the house in his elite-as-hell workshop, and he was similarly reluctant to buy his kid a Nintendo. When I asked for an NES in 1989, he provided a fast “NO” without possibility of bargaining or reconsideration. Clearly my pestering had yet to truly have an effect. He asked me for a second option, so I told him I’d like a zip line like the one Batman had used in that summer’s big blockbuster. So intent was my dad that I not rot my mind, body, and spirituality into a lifetime of sedentary waste (or as my mom would call it, become a “bump on a log”), he ACTUALLY built me a zip line in the back yard (I think he took the request as a personal challenge vis-a-vis his handyman skills – his having remodeled our basement into livable space for myself and my brother clearly wasn’t enough already). After the zip line’s incredible debut that summer, my siblings, friends and I would ride that thing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, NEVER tiring of it. I even built obstacles for it out of old boxes and trash cans, decorated with the visages of the Joker and his minions, such that my friends and I could ride the zip line and kick our foes in the faces as we zipped past. Naturally, we blasted the Batman soundtrack on my boombox as we did this. I’m sure my dad was tremendously pleased that we were all outside, making noise far away from his ears, but also getting sunshine and exercise and getting good use out of a thing he had built. Alas, I still wouldn’t let the Nintendo thing go, and so one year later, I became the proud owner of both a zip line AND an NES. Yes, you’re jealous.
In short, at the time, anything seemed achievable. We all had a wealth of options available to us, and if we worked hard enough, we could acquire an NES, defeat Mike Tyson, or maybe even topple communism.
Within that framework, Konami introduced a game built around choice:
- Pick your characters.
- Pick your routes.
- Pick your subweapons.
- Spam the shit out of a legion of evil dead bosses (or simply choose not to do that).
- Do it all again and again.
How was that NOT going to resonate?
The original “Castlevania,” brought to the U.S. on the NES in 1987, remains really cool from a historical perspective, and it holds up brilliantly among platformers even today. The controls are as solid as granite, the visuals and sound are fabulous, and it established the general concept – “Kill a bunch of movie/literary monsters with your whip!” – as a truly viable and enjoyable one.
There’s honestly not a lot to complain about with that game.
“Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest,” released here in 1988, was conversely so gosh darn weird, and yet, it represents such an important step in the evolution of the property from a straightforward action platformer to more of an RPG-like adventure. You’re out there levelling up, collecting items, and wandering around through a non-linear landscape – I mean, you really don’t have to squint to see the beginning steps toward “Symphony of the Night” here at all. It’s historically super interesting in that respect, despite its well-documented flaws.*
* The flaws include some hilariously bad translation and some downright nonsensical puzzles to solve, often with those two elements working in concert with one another to make completion of the game essentially impossible. The workaround was the prevalence of gaming guides/magazines such as “Nintendo Power,” which in addition to providing people free copies of “Dragon Warrior,” also showed the path to victory in games like this. Indeed, for anyone revisiting the game today … PLEASE use a guide or walkthrough, for the love of Christ!!! Ahem. At least, that’s how we did it back in the day, and that’s really how it needs to be done today too. You’ll have a better time punching yourself in the gonads repeatedly than you will trying to defeat Simon’s Quest without a guide. (I also still love the game, damn it, leave me alone.)
Castlevania III had the good sense to lean into what made the first game more of an unqualified success (simple structure that doesn’t melt your brain!), and while it was in some respects a step backward for the series, it was its devotion to this idea of options and choices that kept it from being a total reversion … and it’s why the game is ultimately a tremendous success.
Whereas the first Castlevania was a completely linear affair, with your character moving sideways through level after level, never able to deviate from the one established path, and Simon’s Quest was the game where you got to explore somewhat aimlessly with no hope of ever finding anything, Dracula’s Curse had branching paths, wherein the player would arrive at a fork in the road and could choose a direction to take, and consequently, which levels to traverse.
Each choice would take you down a different path, and neither choice was technically “incorrect,” just different, so you didn’t have to obsess over making the wrong decision. (I would stare and stare at those branching paths anyway, trying to decide, because each choice offered potential rewards, and also, I can be a little indecisive at times.)
Providing more spice to this gumbo were a collection of colorful (weird) characters who could accompany you along your journey, allowing you to switch between your main character – another Belmont, this time Trevor – and your companion at will during the action. They each brought unique abilities and different controls to the proceedings, and they were well realized, with their own narratives to complete.
These archetypes were so strong, in fact, that the characters here were selected for inclusion in the “Castlevania” animated TV show that dropped a couple decades later in 2017. Of all the characters throughout all of Castlevania, they settled on these ones.
Pretty friggin’ cool, if you ask me.
The catch with the character swapping dynamic was that you could only have one of these awesome characters join you at any given time. So if you took a path that resulted in you meeting up with one of them and you already had a different one with you, you had to choose which one to bring forward into the rest of the adventure. Sophie’s choice, indeed!
The beauty in all of this was that every single playthrough became different. Perhaps during this gaming session, I’ll trudge through a swamp and lean on Sypha, the magician, as my partner in crime. Next go around, I’ll climb the clock tower to bring aboard Grant, the wall-climbing pirate. And if I change my mind later, that’s okay, because I can still get the bat-transforming, flight-worthy Alucard, Dracula’s son (should I pick the correct route, of course).
The possibilities weren’t endless, but they were certainly robust.
Beyond this instant hook of giving the player choices, I continue to adore the color palette in this game, which leaned into a slightly brighter visual styling than its predecessors had. Similarly, the soundtrack upped the ante too, and it’s downright incredible. The Japanese version of the game even had a special soundchip included in the cart to accommodate the musical ambitions of the composers, which sounds sort of insane nowadays, but this was the sort of the thing (i.e. including hardware within the cartridges to make the game feasible) you saw throughout the industry back then.
Those boosts in graphics and sound give Dracula’s Curse a great argument for being the best NES Castlevania on their own. Coupled with the character-swapping dynamic and the branching paths, and it becomes a runaway victory, at least for this writer.
This game is awesome, one of the very best you’ll find on the NES.
So what makes it worth playing today?
The problem with lists like a “Retro Gaming Essentials” is that it becomes super inadequate at including enough of everything, especially if I keep it to 100. And yeah, limiting the list to 100 is sensible and the only way I’m going to ever be able to move on to anything different in my writing (which is something I’d like to do), but it’s just not going to have everything it perhaps should.
To further illustrate …
My backlog is ridiculous.
Like most gamers, my backlog is way too long and looks insurmountable on the face of it.
There are 100 or so retro games that I own or have access to today, right now, that I want to play, and haven’t had time to get to. And that’s just the games I already have access to. Double that number for the retro games I want to play that I don’t have access to yet.
So that’s roughly 300 or so games I think I could potentially include on this list that I haven’t even played yet.
And without having even gotten to those 300, I’m already starting to feel annoyed/bad about games that have already been eliminated below the cut line.
The list of games I HAVE played that I think probably deserve consideration for a top 100 ranking is around 300 or so. So that’s 200 games, already, that could/should be included that are on the outs (to go along with the 300-ish games that still haven’t been played yet).
500 MORE games to squeeze into an existing list of 100. And oh yeah, we’re almost halfway through the 100 already.
So yeah, this is impossible.
When I first assembled this list and began playing a bunch of older games in earnest, two really awesome 16-bit Castlevania games, “Super Castlevania IV” and “Castlevania: Bloodlines,” were well above the cut line.
The other two 8-bit games in the original numbered series previously mentioned, Castlevania I & II, were also flirting with inclusion.
Spoiler alert: none of those games are gonna make it anymore.
I already covered the merits of the first two games. And Castlevania IV and Bloodlines are both friggin’ great as well, and I wouldn’t argue with anyone wanting to put any of the four in a Top 100 retro games list.
In regards to Castlevania IV, the directional whipping mechanics, baroque visuals, and general breeziness (easiness) of the Super Nintendo entry make for a distinct experience from basically every other Castlevania game out there.
Similarly, Bloodlines on the Genesis is its own brand of unique, featuring a globetrotting plotline set in an unusual timeline (the early 1900s), a couple of weirdo protagonists, and a brightly colorful (almost cartoonish) style that you won’t see in other Castlevanias.
I highly recommend both games.
But, we’re picking nits here in trying to get this thing down to a manageable 100 (for my own sanity, sure, but also for you, the reader, who may want to play some of these games yourself – at least at this stage of things, I don’t think I want to ask you to do more than 100 of these). And since we’re narrowing things down, I think it bears mentioning that those two games come from the same console generation as “Rondo of Blood,” which appeared all the way up at No. 10.
In other words, we’ve done 16-bit before.
Thusly, if I have to explain why Dracula’s Curse should be here above those other two, and further if I need to narrow it down to any one thing, I guess I just think it’s a little weird to have games from the 16-bit generation and PlayStation era (Symphony of the Night) on here without acknowledging the series’ 8-bit roots as well.
This game is so well regarded, some of the current and former “keepers of the brand,” such as the isteemable developer Koji Igarashi, consider it to be their favorite. Iharashi is so taken with the game, in fact, that he based two retro Castlevania-inspired platformers — “Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 1 & 2” — on its general look and character swapping dynamic.
III, IV, and Bloodlines all deserve to be here. That’s not the point. The point is that MY list HAS to have an 8-bit Castlevania represented, and therefore I will make special room for it.
But also – and this is important – Dracula’s Curse is the best of the three.
Four characters > two (or even one)
Branching paths > non-branching paths
Choice > lack of choice
That’s just how I see it. So there you go. Here’s your list of (what are in my view) THE must-play Castlevania games:
Play Dracula’s Curse for the best possible version of Castlevania’s roots with some fun customization options, play Rondo of Blood for the evolution into something even greater, and then play Symphony of the Night for the series’ best possible representation of “Metroidvania” exploration.
And then, if you want to play even more, you won’t hurt for options.
What a good time you’ll have.
Dave’s Score: 9/10
Check out the whole Retro Gaming Essentials list here!
How to play
- Original hardware (NES)
- Virtual console (Wii, WiiU, 3DS)
- Castlevania Anniversary Collection (Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One)