From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge - The Successful Rescue Effort
Christopher Belmont came out of retirement to salvage his good name, and my car trips were all the better for it.

"Absolutely not," I immediately thought to myself when I learned that Konami was bringing a second Castlevania game to the Game Boy. "There's no way in hell that I'm ever again going to go anywhere near a Game Boy game that has 'Castlevania' in its title!"

That's how badly Castlevania: The Adventure had scarred me. My experiences with it had left me so psychologically damaged that I recoiled in fear at even the thought of subjecting myself to a game that looked or played like it. They were that traumatizing.

At that point in time, I detested Castlevania: The Adventure. I saw it as a horribly trudging, slow-moving nightmare of a video game and comparable to the most punishing, hatefully designed games I'd ever played (Ninja Gaiden, Ghosts 'n Goblins and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles among them). I considered it to be a disgrace to the series it represented. "Its technical, mechanical and level-design qualities are disastrously awful," I thought, "and it has no business being part of a series that has produced high-quality, extremely-well-made greats like Castlevania and Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse!"

Playing Adventure was an exercise in extreme frustration, and there was only one reason why I kept doing so: I wanted to beat it. Castlevania was my favorite series, after all, and my belief was that I couldn't call myself a true fan of it unless I was able to beat every one of its entries.

So the fact was that I had an obligation to conquer Adventure.

The only problem was that I couldn't come close to accomplishing that goal. Even by the summer of 1991, which was months after I purchased the game, I still hadn't made it to Dracula or been given any indication that the place in which I kept failing (the Gobanz-filled room) was anywhere near his chamber. And after a while, I started to feel as though I simply didn't possess the skill or the patience necessary to advance to the final stage's endpoint. And eventually I reached a point in which I felt that attempting to beat the game was no longer worth the aggravation. So I gave up on the mission and moved on.

And because my experiences with the game were so miserable, I completely closed my mind to the idea of the Castlevania series having a significant presence on the Game Boy. "It just isn't possible for a platform as technologically deficient as the Game Boy to produce a worthy Castlevania game," I was convinced. "Any series game released on this platform will be innately inferior."

That's where my mind was when Nintendo Power formally announced that Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge was coming to the Game Boy. I didn't get it. "Why would Konami try this again?" I wondered. "Didn't it fail bad enough the first time?"

I instantly dismissed the game. I concluded, after seeing only a handful of screenshots, that the game would be junk and that I needed to stay far away from it. "No thank you!" I said.

Still, I cared enough to notice that the magazine's coverage of the game was somewhat muted. That seemed odd to me because Castlevania was a big-name franchise, and historically games from such franchises were given the royal treatment; they were provided outsized coverage and presented to readers in the most enthusiastic way possible. For whatever reason, though, the magazine didn't care to give Belmont's Revenge that type of special attention. It decided to treat the series' latest as just another game.

It was the same deal with all of the other gaming magazines: Their coverage of Belmont's Revenge was limited in scale, unexcited in tone, and sadly uninformed. Their investment in the game was so minimal, in fact, that the best commentary they could muster was an inaccurate, artificially exuberant declaration that "Simon Belmont is back!" Additionally they spoke of the game as if it were a simple reimagining of the original Castlevania, which was just wrong. This didn't surprise me, though, because it was par for the course with gaming magazines; they were always misrepresenting Castlevania games' plot details and suggesting that every new series entry was either a remake of or a direct sequel to the original Castlevania (because obviously they never bothered to read the press material that Konami was sending them).

Now, I could look past the previews' misleading text descriptions because I wasn't expecting them to be accurate, but I absolutely couldn't excuse what the accompanying imagery was showing me. The screenshots' pea-green depictions looked pretty bad, and seeing them instantly brought to mind all of the scarring mental images that Adventure had left me with. In those moments, all I could remember was how badly that game broke me. I could remember the pain and the torment.

And let me tell you: I had no plans of subjecting myself to that kind of horror a second time!

Well, you know how this story goes. I was, of course, too weak-willed to follow through on my threats.

The truth was that it wasn't possible for me to stay away from Belmont's Revenge. I was, like I said, a huge fan of the Castlevania series, and, also, I wasn't the type who could lie to myself. I couldn't deny that I had a strong interest in learning about two particular aspects of the game: (a) the storyline and its implications and (b) the enemy cast. I desired to know what both of those aspects entailed. I wanted to see how the Christopher-versus-Dracula arc played out, and I was, as always, interested in learning about all of the game's new monster types. Those were two of my obsessions.

So I decided that it wouldn't hurt to read through Nintendo Power Volume 29's feature coverage of the game. "It might contain some enticing details," I thought.

When I flipped over to the feature, I was immediately drawn to its opening page's admittedly-attractive-looking introductory art, which showed the hero, Christopher Belmont, standing near a wonderfully ominous castle entrance--whose darkened archway, I imagined, was hiding the type of evil ghouls that would no doubt disembowel unwelcome guests and then drop them off of the nearby mountain cliff--and preparing to unleash a nasty backhanded whip-strike on a sword-wielding horned knight (an enemy that appeared to be the "Iron Doll" that was depicted on one of the piece's later pages).

It was an impressively rendered, eye-catching image, and I had fun looking at and examining all of its separate elements--particularly the mysterious, majestic castles seen in the background. Their appearance did the most to arouse my curiosity.

And I as I read through the piece, I was honestly intrigued by what it was advertising. It spoke of a portable Castlevania game that was cognizant of its predecessor's shortcomings and eager to correct them. In fact, it mentioned, right there in the opening, that you could now "slide down ropes" and that the controls had been refined! And I took this to mean that Belmont's Revenge was more mechanically sound and much more playable than Adventure.

Furthermore, the game was said to boast a greater variety of content and specifically four uniquely themed castles and a Mega Man-like system that allowed you to tackle them in any order you so pleased! "Castlevania combined with Mega Man--my other favorite series?!" I thought to myself. "That's a match made in heaven!"

The piece also revealed that the series' classic sub-weapons would be returning (well, two of them, at least: the axe and the holy water), and I was happy about that because I felt that their presence, alone, would help to make the game's action feel much more authentic than Adventure's.

I was happy to hear, also, that the game would be introducing a password system. This was great news because it ensured that I wouldn't have to restart the game from scratch whenever I'd return to it after rage-quitting, which, I was sure, was something I'd be doing multiple times (my assumption was that Adventure's high level of difficulty would be one of the elements that was carrying over).

And I was fond of the new boss characters. I felt that those like the lightning-harnessing Darkside and the wall-embedded goat twins Kumulo and Nimbler were creative and interesting and really made the enemy cast stand out. I perceived the addition of such bosses to be a bold creative decision because, under the circumstances, it would have made the most sense for the designers to overcorrect for Adventure's failures by playing it safe with the characters and making an easier pitch by simply bringing back familiar cast members like the Phantom Bat, the Mummies, Medusa, Frankenstein and the Grim Reaper. But they didn't take that route. They chose, instead, to bravely eschew familiarity and commit to being daring. And I applauded them for doing so. It showed me that they had moxie.

(On an aside: I've always felt that Kumulo and Nimbler's appearing in Plant Castle is a design oversight. The etymology of their names suggests that they're cloud-type enemies, so logically they should instead be Cloud Castle's guardians. Right? The only thing I can think is that the localizers made an error and accidentally swapped the names of the Cloud and Plant Castle bosses, the former of which is also comprised of two separate entities.)

So yeah--I got nothing but good vibes from the magazine's descriptions of Belmont's Revenge. They spoke of a game that was highly improved and boldly creative, and consequently they captured my imagination. And at that point, I was actually able to envision a future in which I was interested in owning a sequel to Castlevania: The Adventure!

Apparently Belmont's Revenge had arrived in stores well before that issue of Nintendo Power reached my mailbox. It became available in the middle of September and approximately one month after my birthday. So it happened to be released at a time when I had a lot of money in my pocket!

Though, I balked at the notion of spending my unearned riches on a Game Boy game because I'd already decided that I was going to use them to buy a far more important item: the upcoming SNES. I was resistant to the idea, also, because I feared that there was a chance that Belmont's Revenge could still, regardless of how "improved" it was, turn out to be another Castlevania: The Adventure. For all I knew, Nintendo Power might have been exaggerating the game's level of improvement and covering for the fact that its controls and gameplay were only marginally better. "I mean, the magazine's entire purpose is to sell me on games," I considered.

Ultimately, I decided that the best solution was for me to include Belmont's Revenge on my Christmas list for that year. "Getting the game for free will prevent me from having to deliberate over a purchasing decision," I thought, "and it will also go a long way toward negating my fears."

And that's what I did. I put the game on my list and waited two months.

Then, during the Christmas season of 1991, I played it for the first time.

Within moments of starting, Belmont's Revenge already had one thing going for it: It had strikingly great tunes! I was instantly a fan of them.

For as much as I despised Adventure, I always felt that it excelled in the area of music, so I was happy to find that Belmont's Revenge was eager to match its efforts. I saw it as a great sign.

I liked, in particular, the intro theme, which imbued the scrolling plot description (Dracula survived his battle with Christopher, and more than a decade later, he recovered enough energy to transform Christopher's son, Soleiyu, into a terrible demon and thus turn him into a powerful ally) with an agonizing sadness and did an amazing job of communicating to me just how dire the situation was. It was a powerful piece, and in each play session, I always made sure to listen to it in full and let it absorb me and put me where I needed to be emotionally.

I was so fond of the tune, in fact, that I would frequently attempt to reproduce it on my Concertmate-1000 keyboard. I liked to do so, mostly, because it was a short and simple composition, and reproducing it was easy for someone like me, who possessed no actual piano-playing skill (I could play a mean Halloween theme, though).

I remember one instance in which I performed the tune for my visiting friends and received some interesting feedback from one of them: Young, our freshly naturalized South Korean classmate. He reacted to my performance with confused laughter and the single utterance of "What the hell?", and then he immediately walked away.

I didn't perform the tune for friends anymore after that.

From the start, I could tell, Christopher's latest game was as much about redemption as it was revenge. It was about proving that Adventure was an aberration and that Castlevania could, in fact, work very well on the Game Boy.

Its action was the first to make that point clear. It moved more briskly than Adventure's and didn't feel as technologically compromised. This was the case because the designers did a better job of balancing the game's graphical and technical aspects. Mainly, they refrained from overloading the Game Boy's processor with heavily detailed backgrounds and instead took the restrained approach of drawing simple backgrounds and peppering them with little visual touches that could easily stand out and provide some pronounced environmental conveyance.

The result were backgrounds that were contrastingly sparse, yes, but nevertheless still filled with a satisfying amount of wonderfully atmospheric details like stained-glass windows; distant temples; shining portals; strange hieroglyphs; feisty carnivorous plants; intimidating statues of horse-riding, spear-wielding warriors (whose helmets always looked more like frog hats to me); ominous kneeling skeletons; and, of course, imposing mountain clusters. (It's not my intention to condemn Adventure's graphical design with these comparisons, no. I'm just pointing out that the game's visual ambition is unfortunately too much for the Game Boy to handle.)

The level design was also noticeably improved. It was now fully comprehensible and thankfully bereft of obnoxious screen-wrapping mazes. Stages instead had nicely structured split paths and interesting, creative platforming challenges like having to advance by hopping across dangling spiders' web threads and climbing up and down active pulleys whose movement could reverse direction in a snap.

Rope-climbing still wasn't an ideal of traversal, no, but Christopher's new quick-descend maneuver, which allowed him to speedily slide down ropes, helped to make it much less of a nuisance. And some challenges invited clever use of the maneuver. The best of them was segment in which you had to tactically speed your way down a series of rooms and regularly hop off and duck into passages if you hoped to avoid being killed by the rooms' undulating spike-lined wall. It was an instantly memorable platforming challenge.

And the enemy cast was quite good, too. It contained a nice mix of returning Adventure foes and cool new enemy types like dagger-throwing lizards, rope-climbing skeletons, and dormant mollusks that would suddenly spring to life anytime the screen would go dark after you destroyed their habitats' light source--the nearby candelabras, which basically acted as bait.

So immediately the game's action was faster and its platforming challenges and enemy characters were more interesting, more creative, and more fun!

What continued to impress me most, though, was the game's soundtrack. It was outstanding!

I'm not saying that Adventure didn't fare well in this area. It absolutely did! Its music was great. But Belmont's Revenge's music took it to the next level. Its tunes were simply amazing! They were grand and complex in construction, they were wonderfully evocative, and they did a tremendous job of communication information--of describing castle environments and conveying mood and atmosphere.

Each tune told a unique story. Each was imbued with the type of emotion, depth and complexity that told you everything you needed to know about where you were, what you were fighting for, and how you were meant to feel about the challenges that you were currently facing.

And because the game's tunes possessed this quality, they captured my imagination and helped me to form powerful visualizations of the castles and their settings; and they inspired me to think and wonder about what it would be like to occupy such spaces and battle my way through them.

These were the kinds of tunes that were so stirring and so aurally pleasing that they would continue to play in my head long after I finished playing the game--basically for the rest of the day in following. And they'd always carry with them the spirit of Belmont's Revenge.

My favorite tune, by a wide margin, was Cloud Castle's (Praying Hands or "Background 2," as the English version's sound test called it). Its intro alone had the ability to captivate me. It was amazingly elaborate and incredibly rousing, and I'd become filled with goosebumps as I listened to it.

And each one of the tune's other sections was equally breathtaking. Its every sustained note, complex melody, and intertwining strain would enchant me and cause me to become filled with feelings of determination and righteous intensity. It would awaken my fighting instincts and inspire me to resolutely and energetically charge forward.

The tune was great accompaniment to a "Cloud Castle." It perfectly captured the spirit of the visualizations that would appear in my head anytime I'd think about what a castle of its type would look like if it were real. It gloriously augmented my mental image of a floating sky castle that was surrounded on all sides by towering mountains whose fortification ensured that none of the castle's undead occupants could escape my wrath.

I loved that tune. In each of my future play-throughs, I couldn't wait to hear it. I couldn't wait to reach to reach Cloud Castle (which I'd always visit last because I felt that its aural and visual qualities had a strong culminating energy to them) so that I could park the Game Boy at my side and spend several minutes listening to and absorbing the castle's invigorating, inspiring theme.

It was a special piece of music.

(What was great was that Belmont's Revenge had a hidden sound test. It was a great bonus feature, and I was happy about its inclusion because it allowed me to listen to the Cloud Castle theme without having to start the game and force poor Christopher to just stand there at the castle's entrance for about an hour! I made regular use of the sound test.)

Even the game's simplest tunes were excellent, I thought. I especially liked the subdued, jazzy pre-boss piece that would start to play whenever you entered into a castle or a stage's final section. It was quietly foreboding and portentous, and it would always do a great job of swiftly changing the mood and entering me into a cautious and alert state. "Something terrifying is waiting for you here," it told me, "so you better get ready!"

So Belmont's Revenge's soundtrack was a winner in every way. It contained nothing but brilliant tunes. I considered it to be one of the Castlevania series' best soundtracks and one of the greatest video-game soundtracks in general.

Belmont's Revenge was a musical feast from start to finish, and that's likely to remain the thing that I remember most about it.

And after I completed my first play-through of Belmont's Revenge, my feeling was that Konami had pulled off a remarkable feat: It had made a great Castlevania game for the Game Boy! It had proven to me that its failure with Adventure was purely anomalous. And I was happy to acknowledge and celebrate the company's strong reparative effort.

So yeah--Belmont's Revenge was a high-quality series entry, and I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it.

One of the obvious reasons why I enjoyed the game so much was that its difficulty was manageable, which is to say that it didn't contain infuriating challenges like jumping across endless series of toothpick-width platforms; outrunning spiked walls and floors while desperately trying to find ways to deal with the movement-hampering and input-eating slowdown issues and the camera's strict bounding; or any of the other nonsense that Adventure would regularly throw at you.

The platforming was easier to handle. The boss' patterns were more easily decipherable (in some cases, it was too easy to overwhelm bosses with sub-weapons, but I was fine with that because I didn't mind earning victories with cheap tactics). And the whip-regression mechanic was almost completely eliminated (the only time your whip would regress was when you made contact with a Punaguchi's rebounding projectile)!

The game wasn't easy, though (it was only easy compared to Adventure), and it took me a while to clear Castlevania's three stages. I had trouble, in particular, with the Soleiyu and Dracula battles, which were way tougher than any of the previous boss battles. I really struggled with them.

But never once did I grow angry or frustrated with the challenge. I wasn't able to generate any ill-feelings for the game because it didn't make sense for me to do so. I was having too much fun to be angry!

That first play-through and pretty much every subsequent play-through in were done in the backseat of my father's car. It was common for me, in fact, to spend entire car trips playing through Belmont's Revenge and learning and relearning the positioning necessary to avoid getting hit by Soleiyu's dagger storms and Dracula's spiraling orb attacks. It was all part of the fun of traveling!

It's not that I didn't want to play Belmont's Revenge at home, no. It was that it simply felt more appropriate to play a portable Castlevania game on a Long Island or New Jersey highway and specifically a location in which the dominant visual was endless woodland. The woodland's mysterious, haunting influence would permeate the car's leather interior and create what I considered to be the ideal atmosphere for a Dracula-slaying adventure.

For me, the place in which you played a game had an important effect on the experience.

In time, Belmont's Revenge became my ultimate "road game" and the main event in every one of my multi-game marathons (during which I played games like Tetris, Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins and Mega Man II in succession); and it retained that role right up until the end--right up until the year in which I finally retired my Game Boy (this happened in the mid-90s, at a point when I was no longer traveling with my parents as much).

Whenever I was faced with the prospect of having to endure a long 2- or 3-hour car trip, I was able to rest easy because I knew that Belmont's Revenge would be there to alleviate my boredom. I knew that it would be there to supply some fun, high-quality Castlevania action at a time when I needed it most.

And I would always be speaking genuinely when I said that Belmont's Revenge, a technologically limited Game Boy game, was one of my favorite entries in the Castlevania series.

That's how highly I thought of it.

So it should be said that Christopher Belmont, in his second effect, did more than just rescue his son from the clutches of the evil Count Dracula. He succeeded, also, in undoing the damage that Castlevania: The Adventure had done to the series' good name. He washed away a great stain and made the series' logo shine brightly again. And thus he heroically redeemed the portable Castlevania series and put it in a really good place.

And consequently he proved to me (and the entire gaming world) that Castlevania could indeed work extremely well on the Game Boy.

May time choose to remember him as a great redeemer and the forefather of a cherished series of portable Castlevania games.