As I was tepidly surveying the first two pages of Nintendo Power Volume 76's Castlevania: Dracula X coverage, I had to stop for a moment and think about why I was feeling so unenthusiastic about what I was seeing and reading.
It was a sad situation.
I mean, there I was getting my first look at a brand new Castlevania game--the first to appear on the SNES in almost four years--and I wasn't at all excited about it. My only response, rather, was to criticize what was being shown and focus on the perceived negatives.
"Why do the character sprites look so scaled down?" I wondered in a perplexed manner as I tried to make sense of the game's most inexplicable visual change. "And what the hell is 'Dracula X' supposed to be, anyway? Why not just call the game 'Castlevania V'? What's the point of making such dumb alterations?!"
I wasn't particularly pleased with the information that I was seeing the piece's sidebars (the developers were apparently nixing Super Castlevania IV's 8-directional whip controls and reverting back to up-plus-attack input for sub-weapons), either, but in truth, it wasn't really the undesirable changes that were making me feel so detached from what I was seeing, no. There was, rather, some other reason why I wasn't feeling enthusiastic about the idea of playing a new Castlevania game.
The only problem was that I couldn't pinpoint what, exactly, that reason was.
I had theories, of course: I considered that maybe I was reacting hostilely to news of Dracula X because I was still upset about missing out on Castlevania: Bloodlines, whose Genesis-exclusivity prevented me from being able to buy the game and keep up with the series. "Maybe I'm mad at Konami for moving the series to a different platform and limiting my access to it," I ruminated, "and this is my way of protesting that decision."
Or maybe, I thought, I was down on Dracula X because of how unfavorably it compared to the games with which I was currently obsessed: Mega Man X, Donkey Kong Country and Super Metroid. Those games had evolved their respective formulas in amazing and spectacular ways, whereas Dracula X, from what I was seeing, was inexplicably seeking to regress. It was aiming to undo all of Super Castlevania IV's advancements and return the series to a more primitive state.
Or, it depressed me to think, there was a possibility that I had simply fallen out of love with the Castlevania series. "Maybe I'm just tired of it," I had to consider. "Or perhaps my interest in the series has waned because it hasn't had an exciting new release in years, and consequently my heart now belongs to series that are actually exhibiting a desire to remain relevant."
Ultimately I wound up leaning toward the third explanation. "It has to be the case that I've lost interest in the series," I felt. "Because why else would I be seriously entertaining the idea of skipping a new entry entirely?"
And in the end, I couldn't even bring myself to read the rest of the piece. I couldn't find the energy to care about anything else that it had to say.
I was so unenthused about Dracula X in fact, that I didn't even bother to read any of the magazine's future coverage of it, either.
And besides: I was currently so deeply engrossed in amazing new SNES games like Doom, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island that I simply didn't care to devote any time to thinking about adding any other new games to my collection. I was already set.
So what I did instead was wait until February or March of 1996. After I finished clearing out my Christmas backlog and burning through other recent pickups like Final Fight 2 and Mega Man X3, I went out and finally bought myself a copy of Dracula X.
Now, the problem with buying and playing a game purely out of a sense of obligation is that doing so can cause you to have feelings of apathy and a tendency to be overly critical of the product. It can put you in a position in which you're unable to invest in the game and fairly assess what it's doing.
Also, when you don't really want to play a game, your experience with it can easily become a process of rushing through it as quickly as possible so that you can get back to playing the games that you actually care about.
And these are awful, soul-draining approaches to playing video games and great ways to become burned out on the medium.
And because I was in such a detached mental state at the time, I wound up approaching Castlevania: Dracula X in both of the aforementioned ways. I did two questionable things: I treated the game like a burdening item on a checklist--like a suspiciously dull-looking product that I wanted to finish as quickly as possible just so that I could be done with it--and I went into the experience with the intention of being extra nitpicky.
I decided that I wasn't going to give Dracula X the benefit of the doubt. I was going to use even the slightest imperfection as ammunition against it.
And the contemptuous attitude that I displayed during my first few sessions with the game was, unfortunately, what shaped my everlasting memories of the it.
"So what aspects of Dracula X made you dislike it so much?" you ask in a deeply inquisitive manner.
Well, dear reader, let me tell you about the many things that bothered me about the game.
To start, I was completely turned off by its manual, which was uncharacteristically filled with "cartoonish-looking" ("anime-styled," I'd say in the present) depictions of the game's characters, including Dracula, who now looked more like a mischievous purple-haired punker than the terror-inducing ruler of evil that he was supposed to be. I was especially disappointed by the manual's lack of a richly populated enemy listing; it displayed only four enemies, and two of them had names that were so silly-sounding that I couldn't even take them seriously.
"'Lypuston'?!" I questioned with a mystified energy. "What the hell kind of name is that for a werewolf?! And what's with the name 'Minotaurusu'? Were the character designers so lazy and uncreative that the only thing that they could think to do was simply take the monster's name and add a few random letters to its end?!"
I was displeased with the manual's content in general. I found it to be inadequate and poorly presented.
Also, the game took entirely too long to boot up. I didn't like having to wait through a credits screen, the Konami splash-logo screen (the only one that was skippable), and an opening animation before I could get to the title screen and finally make my starting choice.
Then there was that silly laughter that would trigger after I made a selection: It would eat up an additional five seconds seconds and thus further impede my effort to get things moving.
The other Castlevania games started up right away and allowed me to quickly jump into action, but this one, in contrast, was going out of its way to slow me down and waste my time! (I didn't forget that Super Castlevania IV's splash-logo screen also took a few seconds to load up, no, but I wasn't about to start criticizing one of my favorite games ever! Not on this day, at least!)
It was aggravating.
I didn't care for the prologue's presentation either. Its pastel-colored, washed-out visual style and optimistic-sounding music was, I felt, jarringly incompatible with what Castlevania games had always presented as the standard: dark and gloomy visuals and ominous-sounding music.
"Where's my haunting intro, man?" I wondered as I watched the prologue. "Where's my grimly toned film-reel-style opening scene and unease-inducing musical accompaniment?"
There wasn't one. What the game gave me, instead, was a scene comprised of a series of cheap- and cartoonish-looking still images and music that sounded more like something you'd hear in a generic fantasy-style RPG.
Also, I was unimpressed with the game's pre-stage scrolling map. It was nicely rendered, sure, but it had nothing on Super Castlevania IV's awesomely designed scaling miniaturization, which, impressively, gave you a zoomed-in view of the area you were set to traverse and even traced out the path you'd be taking!
Dracula X's, in comparison, was just a plain old map and thus simply boring.
When the action began, though, I perked up a bit because I was actually pretty impressed with what I was seeing.
I'd only advanced two screens in, but by then, I could already say that Dracula X was a visually striking game and that it easily had the series' most distinct-looking and uniquely engrossing art style.
I immediately loved the stage's fiery background animation. It stole all of my attention. I was mesmerized by the way in which its flames undulated, and I was fascinated with how the flames' sweltering emissions caused the burning town to billow as if it was being mercilessly engulfed by hellfire.
I dug the stage's rockin' musical theme, too. It was, in great contrast to the rather indistinct composition that I heard during the prologue, dynamic, lively, complex in structure, and quite invigorating. Its pronounced guitar strains synced up with my movements and consequently provided the action an energizing rhythm, and its sharply struck chords added a strong degree of viscerally pleasing impact to my snapping whip- and dagger-strikes.
And to the game's credit, it continued to be visually and aurally pleasing from beginning to end.
In terms of visuals, it continued to present the type of background work that could grab my attention and cause me to stop and entrancedly examine the imagery that was being exhibited and inspire me to think and wonder about its meaning.
I recall the many background visuals that captured me in that fashion: the tattered stone walls that stood at the town's limits; the main hall's eerily illuminated windows; the castle's impenetrable- and menacing-looking outer wall (I liked this one so much that I made it my Castlevania site's background image!); the inner hall's pillared corridors; the cave's stalactite- and stalagmite-filled depths; the caverns' prison cells, whose occupants' hands could be seen helplessly grasping at the bars; the courtyard's spooky evergreens; the clock tower's rusted inner-workings; and the final stage's enchanting depiction of Castlevania and its surrounding mountain range, the surfaces of which were being illuminated and tinted by the full moon that was hovering above them.
Observing and thinking about them and was one of the fun aspects of my experience.
What I liked most about the soundtrack was that it endeavored to be new and original and refrained from simply recycling classic series tunes. It was packed with unique tunes that were all brilliantly composed, wonderfully invigorating, and just plain fun to listen to. And even though the newly created works were unapologetically audacious in character, they were, I was delighted to say, still able to capture the series' spirit and a have a genuine Castlevania flavor to them.
There were a few familiar tunes (like Vampire Killer and Bloody Tears), yeah, but they, too, strove to differentiate themselves in unique ways. Their composers adapted them to Dracula X's energetic, inspirited musical style and remixed and rearranged them and consequently transformed them into boldly new and inspiringly vigorous compositions.
And all such tunes worked diligently to provide the game a distinctive personality and a uniquely alluring vibe.
They represented the game's most outstanding aspect and the best reason for playing it.
But then there was the game's biggest negative: its pesky "gameplay" aspect.
To put it bluntly: I wasn't buying what Konami was selling here.
The company, you see, claimed that Dracula X was supposed to be a "back-to-basics Castlevania experience," but that description was clearly a misnomer. I realized that as soon as I took control of the action, and consequently, I saw the game for what it truly was: an intentionally regressive product created by a company that lacked the will or the ambition to top its previous SNES work. It was a lesser game that was merely wearing the convenient cover of a "back-to-basics" game.
The game's designers, to my great displeasure, discarded all of Super Castlevania IV's advancements: the 8-directional whip control, the wild whip-brandishing, the intuitive one-button sub-weapon input, and the pinpoint character movement. And what was left was a game that exhibited the same aging values that the series thankfully abandoned four years prior.
Richter wasn't anywhere near as versatile as the 16-bit version Simon. He was, rather, more in line with the Belmonts from the 8-bit era: His movement felt stiff, his jumps were largely rigid, and his attempts to toss sub-weapons were routinely nullified by the old stairway-sub-weapon control conflict. And resultantly, he felt like a limited, less-capable hero.
"Why did they do this?!" I kept wondering, angrily, as I played around with the character and learned of his limitations. "Why did they remove all of Super Castlevania IV's cool new moves and abilities and make the action harder to control?! What reason could they possibly have for doing something so stupid?!"
That was when I had my aforementioned realization.
The game's only true advancement was its new stair-jump mechanic, which allowed Richter to jump onto and off of stairways. I considered it to be a great new addition, but even then, I didn't believe that its presence was enough to compensate for the loss of all of the previously mentioned moves and abilities. It still wasn't enough to make Richter as capable as he should have been.
Otherwise, Richter had two other new abilities. The first was the backflip, which I found to be largely useless. Because, as I learned, he could just as easily jump backwards.
And the other was the item-crash, which allowed him to use his sub-weapons to execute super-moves. I wasn't fond of this ability, either, because I considered it to be an inefficient use of my precious hearts--especially so when I was dealing with crashes like the dagger-flurry, which I was prone to mess up by activating it while I was facing the wrong and resultantly hitting absolutely nothing. And I didn't care to use the screen-wide crash attacks because (a) they weren't guaranteed to actually strike all onscreen enemies or even inflict large amounts of damage on them and (b) bosses were seemingly immune to them.
So I chose to ignore the item-crashes. If ever I used one of them, I likely did so by accident when I got the controller's buttons mixed up.
I couldn't stand stage segments like the one that you had to traverse at the start of Stage 2. It was an obnoxiously designed stage section in which you had to travel over a collapsing bridge while dealing with the constant assault of fishmen whose spawn points seemed to be specifically placed to cause unavoidable collisions, the majority of which would send me plummeting to my death. My sense was that segments like them were purposely designed to be cruel.
I especially hated playing through Stage 3's opening area, which tasked me with maneuvering the clunkily-controlling Richter up and around a large multiscreen room whose spaces were littered with rotating platforms and vertically moving spike contraptions and otherwise cluttered up by the Medusa heads that were spawning in endlessly. What frustrated me most wasn't the beating that I'd take on the way up, no, but rather the number of times I'd be knocked all the way down to the area's lowest level as a result of collisions with enemies and traps that I couldn't see coming.
That room and others like it conveyed to me that the level design was terribly haphazard in addition to being cruel.
And that vertical room in Stage 5 was the worst. It was comprised wholly of crumbling platforms, and it was packed with irritatingly aggressive ravens that would continue to knock me down to its bottom level and force me to have to reset its platforms by leaving the room and reentering it.
This room gave me fits. It beat me down physically and mentally. And thus it gave me plenty of justification for giving up on the game and moving on to another.
I had to resist the urge to do so.
I also felt that the level design was otherwise mundane. It was bog-standard in nature, and consequently it produced stages that were completely bereft of novel or exciting structuring. This resulted in a game that had none in the way of wonderfully large and elaborately constructed caverns or libraries, inventively designed dungeons or clock towers, or jaw-droppingly awesome twisting and turning towers. All that it had, rather, was a largely uninteresting collection of zigzagging corridors and purely linear passageways.
And all of it was just flat- and boring-looking.
Also, it greatly bothered me that so much of the level design was incoherent. Oftentimes, there was no logic to how section-to-section transitions worked and no consistent themes to the areas between which you were traveling. As I stated in my review of the game: "You leave the base of a cavern, and now you're in ... a clock tower? You exit a catacomb from the left and enter a new area from ... the left?"
None of it made any sense!
I didn't think that it was nitpicky to suggest that a game's level design should have a high degree of structural and visual congruence to it, no. I thought that it was a fair criticism (and I still do!).
So I couldn't help but feel that Dracula X had the appearance of a Franken-game that was stitched together using a collection of incompatible parts. (Oh, if only I'd known.)
Also, I wasn't particularly enamored with new cast members like the spear guard and the sword lord. They took way too many hits to kill, and they were always surprising and catching me with their difficult-to-evade stabs and swipes! So I'd always become filled with dread when I encountered them. (Though, I warmed up to both characters in the future, at the point in which I started associating them with superior games.)
Among my least-favorites enemies were the wereskeletons, whose bone-storm attacks were almost impossible to evade, and the mad-dashing red axe knights, which were always positioned in difficult spaces and thus apt to always score at least one cheap hit on me. I simply couldn't get by either of these enemies without taking damage!
Really, most of Dracula X's enemies were like that. They were annoyingly aggressive and capable of hounding me into submission if I was slow to react to their attacks. So engaging with them was never much fun.
And I wasn't a fan of the new bosses, either. My dislike of them derived mostly from my perception that Richter wasn't versatile enough to handle what they were throwing at him. At the time, it appeared to me that he simply didn't possess the speed or the agility necessary to reliably evade and counter their long-reaching, swiftly executed attacks. So during most boss battles, I spent most of my time trying to find room to safely maneuver around and avoid getting backed into a corner and destroyed by series of inevasible attacks. And I had to hope that the bosses would eventually back up and provide me the space that I needed to get in some attacks.
Also, I felt that the new bosses were offputtingly weird and largely incongruent with what the series had been offering up that point. They just didn't feel like Castlevania bosses to me. So before long, I started to miss the classic series bosses. I started to think that it would have benefitted the game to have a Medusa or a Frankenstein in its enemy cast. The inclusion of one or two classic bosses would, I felt, have helped to familiarize the experience and make the game feel closer in spirit to its predecessors. (The Grim Reaper was in the game, but for a certain reason, I didn't learn of his inclusion until few years later. I'll tell you what that reason was in a bit.)
Because the fact was that Dracula X was so stylistically and tonally different from the other games that it tended to feel somewhat disconnected from them. So having a few recognizable bosses, I thought, would have helped its cause.
In the end, though, it was Dracula X's aggravation-inducing brand of difficulty that drove me to abandon it. Its stages were rough, and they dragged on for too long; its platforming challenges were cruelly designed; its minor enemies were obnoxiously aggressive and hard to handle; and its boss fights were extremely punishing and pretty much the antithesis of fun.
And I just didn't want to deal with any of that stuff anymore. "Screw all of it," I thought.
And I was glad that the game measured in at only seven stages. Because, really, that was about all I could take of it.
But even though the game contained only a mere seven stages, it still felt somehow truncated to me, and I walked away from it feeling as though I'd missed something. "It's just really odd for a post-Dracula's Curse and Super Castlevania IV series game to have such a small number of stages," I thought. "Logically there has to be more content in there somewhere, right?"
In reality, there was. The game contained three other stages. It was just that I never got the chance to traverse them. Because, you see, it was normal for me to get knocked into one of the gaps in Stage 3's pillar room and forced onto the alternate path.
At the time, I didn't mind taking the alternate path because I hated trying to negotiate my way through the pillar room. I was happy to get knocked into a pit if it meant that I could bypass that entire section and skip to a later stage. I had no idea, however, what was really happening. I didn't know that taking the alternate path was causing me to miss three stages and thus miss out on the chance to rescue the second woman, Annet Renard, and earn the best ending.
Hell--I wasn't even aware that a character called "Annet" was even in the game!
That's why I was so shocked when I watched a play-through of Dracula X sometime in 1999 (back when videos were rendered almost exclusively in AVI format) and witnessed Annet being rescued in the Hidden Springs stage, which I also didn't know about. "How could I have been so oblivious?" I wondered.
By watching that video, I learned how the game's stage system actually worked, and I became aware of all of the content that I'd missed. Then I was able to go back and experience the game in a whole new way.
But I'm digressing here. Let me get back on track and finish telling you about my unpleasant first play-through of Dracula X.
So then there came the event that capped off my first play-through of Dracula X: the absolute nightmare of a boss battle with Count Dracula!
Once again, the level designers, being the silly schmucks that they were, decided to mess with a classic series element and add their special variety of "enhancement" to it. They decided to take the final battle with Dracula and set it in a two-screen-wide room whose ground was formed from pillars that were separated from each other by death pits. And this design decision created the potential for instant death at any time. (They did this, I guess, because they determined that the Dracula battles that took place on solid ground weren't quite grueling enough.)
And dying instantly was something that I did many, many times. Pretty much all of my deaths were the result of my being knocked into or my accidentally jumping into a pit.
Because of that single design feature, I wasn't able to win the battle. I couldn't do it that week or anytime that year. And after suffering numerous failures during attempts that were spread out over the course of a few months, I gave up trying. I shelved the game, and then I declared that I was never going to return to it.
"I don't need this game in my life," I thought to myself.
It wasn't until a few years later (probably during a period in which there was an N64 game-drought) that I decided that it was time for me to man up and do what I, as a series fan, needed to do: endure the hellish final stage (which was also hellishly designed) and finally defeat the pillar-hopping Dracula (specifically his second form, which was chiefly responsible for my dozens of plunging deaths)!
I'd like to tell you that I bravely and confidently struck down the evil Count Dracula with my mighty whip and then commemorated the event by engaging in a joyous celebration, but I can't do that, sadly, because I have no solid memory of the moment of triumph, which should tell you all that you need to know about how impactful it was. It's more likely that the only feeling I expressed was relief that the game was finally over.
All I know for certain is that I won the battle and thus wiped away the feeling of failure that had been weighing on me for years.
Had I not started up a Castlevania fan site, I might have left Dracula X behind forever. Creating the site put me in a position in which I had to return to it for the sake of doing research and capturing screenshots. Consequently I had no choice but to learn everything about the game and master it.
But no matter how intimately I got to know Dracula X, I didn't regard it any differently. I still felt that it was a game that I was never going to love or celebrate. I still considered it to be a big disappointment.
Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that it's a bad game, no. It's not. It's an above-average game, and it has a few redeeming qualities (most notably its uniquely entrancing visual style and its excellent soundtrack). But that's about it. That's the extent of its quality.
And because it's merely above average, it's not the kind of game that I'm ever going to desire to revisit on a frequent basis. Because, quite simply, the series has too many superior entries to enjoy (including Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, the game from which Castlevania: Dracula X spawned).
I don't want to settle for less.
I'm hard on Dracula X because I hold the Castlevania series to a high standard. I expect its entries to be top-tier action-platformers because games of that distinction are foundational to the series. They're what it most popularly produces.
Dracula X simply isn't in that class. It's only OK, which isn't what it needs to be.
The Castlevania series deserved a better game.
So did the SNES, for that matter. The console that famously produced the brilliant Super Castlevania IV deserved better than some quick-and-dirty "reimagining" (or "butchered version," more honestly) of one of the greatest 16-bit action games in history. After four years of nothing, it deserved a Castlevania sequel that was as legendarily amazing as the game that spawned it.
Instead, inexplicably, all it got was Castlevania: Dracula X.
And that's not how it should have been.
I don't point to Castlevania: Dracula X's existence as the reason why Rondo of Blood never came to North America in physical form, no. I understand that the game, itself, isn't to blame for that situation. Rather, Konami is. The company forgot where it's bread was buttered and pretty much abandoned its audience, which was formed almost entirely of gamers who were playing on Nintendo platforms. For four years, it deprived those customers of what they were demanding, and then, insultingly, it quietly dumped an afterthought of a series game onto them right as they were moving on to the next generation.
And that was a really dumb thing to do, I felt.
In one sense, I'm glad that Konami chose to branch out. Its doing so allowed it to produce games like Rondo of Blood, which, I happily admit, wouldn't have been as awesome as it was without the power of the PC Engine's CD technology. But otherwise, I'm still resentful of how the company's mid-90s-era software-distribution strategy entailed the neglecting of its cultivated audience. I can't forget how bad that practice made me feel: It sent me the message that I, as a loyal series fan, was no longer deserving of the company's attention.
Konami decided, instead, that a long-time customer like me was worthy only of a second-rate sequel like Castlevania: Dracula X. It told me, through its actions, that it now considered its best efforts to be wasted on someone like me. And that hurt me.
What was worse was that my poor experience with the game caused my interest in the series to wane even further. I went from playing Castlevania games once every few months to playing them once every few years.
It was only by happenstance that my passion for the series was reignited. The triggering event occurred in the summer of 1999, when I needed some test material for the new AOL site that I was about to start up. At the time, I happened to have a bunch of Castlevania enemy sprites in my "AOL download" folder (I took them all from The Castlevania Dungeon, which I thought was an official Konami site), so I used them, and consequently I stumbled upon the perfect theme for my new site!
Thus began the life of "The Castlevania Enemy Listing," which eventually evolved into "Mr. P's Castlevania Realm"!
Once again, I was a series super-fan.
And as a gaming enthusiast, I was in the best place that I could be.
So ultimately, I managed to get the best ending.
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