From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Castlevania: Bloodlines - Seeing the Light

How the passage of time and some truly unbiased examination helped me to recognize that Bloodlines was a top-tier series entry and one of the Genesis' best games.

To me, it was a matter of simple logic: If a game was released for a specific platform and found great success on it, then it only made sense for its planned sequel to be announced for that same platform. Because the audience that so lovingly embraced the original game was entitled to be the one that got first dibs on the follow-up.

I believed that to be true because it was the way that things had always worked. Since day one, third-party video-game companies had been rewarding the console- and computer-owners who faithfully bought their games by giving them first or exclusive access to sequels. It was how they were known to operate.

And it was exactly how Konami, one of my favorite game-developers, had reliably conducted its business in the 80s and early 90s. Whenever one of its games performed well on the NES, the Game Boy, or the SNES, it naturally focused on bringing the game's sequel to either said platform or another from the same family of platforms.

It always went where its series' biggest established fanbases were.

That's how it was, at least, until 1994, when its higher-ups inexplicably decided to break from tradition and basically tell Nintendo customers like me, who had always voraciously consumed Konami products, that we were no longer worth the company's time or attention!

Back then, that's where my mind was at. I couldn't understand why Konami was suddenly making the terrible decision to forsake Nintendo platforms, and I felt as though I was being betrayed by the company.

Let me tell you how it all started.

So one day I was working on my Masters of Evil card series--drawing up monsters and assigning them categorical rankings--while listening to the TV, and as I was doing so, a startling sequence of words suddenly caught my ear. In that moment, I was pretty certain that I'd just heard a voice say something along the lines of "It's Castlevania for the Sega Genesis!"

Immediately I looked up at the TV, in a horrified manner, and watched on as a series of rapid-fire scenes confirmed my fear. It showed a Belmont-style hero battling a long-tailed phantom bat atop a spinning tower, a spear-carrying dude stabbing a transforming gear creature, and Frankenstein's Monster flailing some sort of chain weapon.

I was watching a commercial for a new Castlevania series entry called "Castlevania: Bloodlines," and man was I pissed about it!

"What the hell is this?!" I questioned while in a state of disbelief. "What is a Castlevania game doing on that console?! Why is not coming to the SNES?!"

It didn't make any sense to me. I mean, the SNES was, after all, home to Super Castlevania IV--a wonderfully inventive, technologically-mind-blowing action-game masterpiece that was considered to be a part of the console's foundation! Their legacies were intertwined! They were woven together just as the NES' and the Game Boy's were, respectively, with Castlevania's and the The Adventure games'!

Castlevania was Nintendo, and Nintendo was Castlevania. And for that reason, it was unacceptable to me that the unmistakably Nintendo-associated Castlevania series was jumping over to Sega's console, where it had absolutely no history. And what was worse was that it was doing so at a time when Sega was engaging in a defamatory marketing campaign that I considered to be an affront to everything that I stood for as an enthusiast!

"There's no way that I'm going to reward Konami and Sega's behavior!" I thought to myself while in an angry state. "Buying a Genesis and Bloodlines is completely out of the question!"

Needless to say, I wasn't happy about the situation.

When that month's issue of Nintendo Power arrived, I anxiously turned to it with the hope that it was all a mistake. Immediately I flipped over to its Pak Watch section with the expectation of finding evidence that Bloodlines was a multiplatform game.

I found nothing of the sort.

So in desperation, I asked my friend Dominick, who owned a Genesis and was generally more informed about industry happenings, if he'd heard anything about Bloodlines coming to the SNES, but, to my surprise, he had no info to share. In fact, he was rather puzzled by my inquiry, and he told me that he'd never heard of the game (I don't recall him ever buying a copy of it, either).

I couldn't find information on the game anywhere else, either: Gaming magazines weren't talking about it. No one at school was aware of its existence. And I couldn't find advertisements or promotional material for it in any of the local stores.

It was as if Bloodlines' release was being completely ignored, which was insane to me. I mean, this was an entry in the Castlevania series, which was known to be a pillar of the industry! A new entry in this legendary series was supposed to be celebrated and hyped up, not treated as an afterthought!

"Why oh why isn't this game coming to SNES?" I continued to wonder in confusion. "The Sega audience obviously doesn't give a damn about Castlevania, so why is Konami doing this?"

After a while, though, I decided to let it go. I accepted that Konami had found itself a new best friend and was likely done with Nintendo's platforms. "And if that's the way it's going to be," I told myself, "then there's no reason for me to continue keeping up with the series."

And that's how it went: As the months fell off, I drifted farther and farther away from Castlevania until eventually I lost all interest in the series. (During that period, I couldn't even bring myself to play Super Castlevania IV or any of the 8-bit games! Well, not as much as I used to, at least.)

I came to my senses over time, of course. I matured and experienced emotional growth, and consequently I realized that my love of gaming transcended silly ideas like "console loyalty." Then I got back into the Castlevania series.

But we're talking about a process that took more than half a decade. That's how long it took me to get over Konami's "mishandling" of Bloodlines (and other things like the release of the inexplicably subpar Castlevania: Dracula X).

I didn't see Bloodlines' name again until I became an everyday Internet-surfer in late 1998, but by that point, I was long past the point of caring about the game or desiring to learn more about it.

"I don't need to concern myself with that game," I thought to myself.

But a year later, when I started up my Castlevania website, I suddenly found myself in a position in which I was obligated to play through all of the series games. I needed to do so, I knew, if I was going to create an exhaustive and truly representative fan site. And that meant that a play-through of Bloodlines was inevitable regardless of how I felt about it.

Starting the process wasn't going to be easy, I felt, because I didn't know where I was going to find the motivation to seek out and play a game that I perceived to be an afterthought. I remembered how the gaming media treated the game back in the day, and I'd always interpreted their silence as a sign that it was merely average or mediocre and thus not worthy of being talked about. "It's probably another Castlevania: Dracula X," I continued to think. So I wasn't in a rush to play to it.

Eventually, though, I arrived at a point in which I had no choice but to play it. I knew that if I failed to play it and provide it coverage, there would be a huge, obvious hole in my site and I'd come off looking like a petty console warrior. So I put aside my ill feelings and made plans to play it and finally find out what it was.

Since I no longer owned a Genesis, I had to turn to emulation. I felt a bit dirty for resorting to such means (not to mention that I was still skeptical of emulators' ability to correctly run games), yeah, but it was the only practical solution. The other option was to dump $50-100 for both the game and the console, but I didn't want to do that because I didn't see either of them having any long-term value (I was a complete fool, basically).

So I loaded up Bloodlines on Genecyst and finally got my first real look at a game that had, up until that point, only existed in my mind as a series of bitterly remembered images.

Honestly, I wasn't feeling the game. Nothing about it was immediately capturing me.

I mean, it was obviously a step up from Castlevania: Dracula X in that it allowed you to whip diagonally upward (and directly downward, which I discovered later) while jumping, latch onto ceilings and swing across gaps, and toss sub-weapons with a single button-press, but still it lacked one of Super Castlevania IV's most important aspects: modifiable aerial movement. Its main hero, rather, had a fixed jump, which was a step back.

I liked some of its early visual effects: how a large momentum-gaining scythe swung back and forth under the influence of the adjoined skeletons in the background; how some of the main hall's windows shattered whenever the hellhound boss angrily growled; and how the separate discs of the sloped dragon-spine bridge collapsed as I walked over them. But I didn't find any of them to be as impressive as Super Castlevania IV's wild whip-brandishing animations, plane-dividing fences, rushing waterways, and rotating rooms.

"None of this is really raising the bar," I felt.

Also, I had some problems with the game's visual and aural presentation: I didn't care for its character design because I felt that it was incompatible with the other series games' (it produced enemy characters that were cartoony- and comical-looking rather than rough and menacing). I was unmoved by its sound effects, which were garbled, squeaky, and generally primitive-sounding and otherwise had no punch to them. And I didn't like that the music had a tinny quality to it and resultantly a lack of resonance that eliminated the possibility for the types of haunting baselines and eerie ambiances that had come to define Castlevania music.

In these areas, Bloodlines not only failed to meet the standard set by Super Castlevania IV. It felt downright regressive!

And even though I thought it was cool that the game included a second playable character--Eric Lecarde, whose true connection to the Belmont clan was still a mystery to me--I wasn't particularly enamored with how he played. His movement felt even stiffer than John's, his super jump and twirling-spear maneuvers seemed to be useless, and he lacked any type of latch-and-swing equivalent, which, on its own, rendered him a poor substitute for John.

I didn't see the point in using him.

But no matter which character I used, I didn't have much fun. In each session, I had a lot of trouble traversing the second stage's rising- and lowering-water sections because of my inability to deal with the game's stiff controls and particularly its painfully restraining fixed-jumping range. I simply couldn't maneuver my way up stairways and across narrow platforms without bumping into them suddenly-spawning minotaurs and Medusa heads. (In the game's defense, I was, at the time, using a Gravis-brand controller whose d-pad was worn out and likely hampering my ability to control the action in the way that it was intended to be controlled.)

The frustration kept mounting, and I started to feel more and more sour about the experience. And because I was already predisposed to dislike the game, my tribulation in its early stages gave me the excuse that I needed to angrily shut the emulator down and put the "lame" and "unworthy" series entry on the back burner while I focused more on discovering lost titles like Akumajou Dracula (for the Sharp X68000) and Vampire Killer.

In the earliest period, that's how my relationship with Bloodlines continued to develop: I'd return to it after a month-long break, advance one stage farther, and then quickly abandon the game when none of the next stage's visual, aural or mechanical elements were able to grab me.

I just didn't feel as though Bloodlines was anything special. In my determination, it wasn't nearly as ambitious as Super Castlevania IV or even Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse, which was released four years earlier and made for vastly inferior hardware. Its scant six stages were formulaic and lacked variance (they were all equal in length, and each one had the same predictable structure: stage section, mid-boss, stage section, end boss). Its rotating and scaling effects were second-rate (though, the way in which the giant statues heads' broke off and fell to the side was pretty impressive). And shape-shifting bosses like the Golem and the Gear Steamer moved about and operated awkwardly and thus did little to remind me of Puwexil, Koranot and others who were both awe-inspiring and coherently functioning.

Also, I was completely baffled by some of the level design in the final stage. In one particular room, the screen suddenly split into three separately scrolling strips, and the camera in the upper and lower divisions swayed from left to right while the middle division's swayed in the opposite direction!

My first thought was that this was an emulator glitch and that Genecyst was, for whatever reason, incapable of replicating what was obviously some other intended effect. Because there was no way, I thought, that the game's creators would be crazy enough to design a "split-screen" section that asked you to tactically execute jumps and simultaneously try to estimate your landing position by imagining what the room would look like if all of its structures weren't all hideously distorted.

"Konami would ever do something that inexplicable!" I felt safe in thinking.

Likewise, I was sure, there was no way that I was supposed to be walking on the ceiling in the subsequent room. Because I was confident that a Castlevania would never introduce something as silly as a reverse-gravity gimmick!

"Genecyst is obviously misinterpreting the data," I figured. "There's no other explanation for any of this!"

But when the evidence started to suggest that these level-design decisions were indeed intentional, I had to take a step back and wonder about what type of hallucinogens the designers were being influenced by when they convinced themselves that it would be a good idea to split the screen and turn it upside-down.

"Are these broken screen displays supposed to be an answer to Super Castlevania IV's twisting and turning rooms?" I wondered. "If they are, then that's really sad, and you can consider me to be confused and underwhelmed!"

That's how I perceived everything that was going on in the final stage: It came off to me like a weak attempt to capture some of Super Castlevania IV's magic and make players believe that Bloodlines was just as adventurous as its forebears.

I wasn't buying the idea that Bloodlines was on their level creatively. "This game is derivative and safe, and its last-ditch effort to appear 'advanced' feels really desperate," I insisted.

But deep down, I knew that I was being unjustly harsh to Bloodlines. And in the moments when I was being completely honest with myself, I couldn't deny that the game actually had a lot going for it and that there were many aspects of it that I really liked: Its action was fast-paced and fun. Eric Lecarde's play-style was cool and added a lot to the game (and his inclusion made a lot more sense to me when I discovered that you could use his high-jumping ability to access alternate stage routes). It exhibited more than a few very impressive visual effects. And it contained some genuinely inventive level-design ideas like Italy's scrolling, swaying Leaning Tower of Pisa; Versailles Palace's rotating platforms, which cycled between the background and the sprite layer; and the Munitions Factory's bladed-gear room, in which you had to advance by tactically crouching within the blades' semicircular gaps.

And when I finally started to open my mind to the experience and give Bloodlines the chance to be its own thing, something beautiful happened: The game began to shine, and my enjoyment of it skyrocketed!

At that point, I even became a fan of the Atlantis Shrine stage! I came to appreciate all of its elements: its highly evocative sunset visual; its impressive undulating-water and reflection effects; its interesting, creative level design and unique auto-scrolling challenges; its amazingly atmospheric sunken-temple background; and its incredibly wistful, goosebumps-inducing music track: Sinking Old Sanctuary, which I considered to be one of the series' best tunes.

It was a great stage and the perfect representation of what Bloodlines truly was.

When I started paying closer attention to the rest of the game's music, I realized that it, too, was pretty outstanding.

In my original review of Bloodlines, I stated that the Genesis' sound hardware was "awful," which wasn't really true. Rather, it had the propensity to be awful when it wasn't properly utilized. The console's Yamaha YM2612 sound chip was essentially arcade hardware and thus wasn't really designed to create music that was deep and resonant and able to naturally convey strong emotions, so if you wanted to draw that type of energy from it, you had to put in an effort to specially tune instruments and use advanced techniques to modulate them and make their output sound haunting.

That's exactly what the game's composer, Michiru Yamane, did: She pushed the sound chip to its limits. She went above and beyond and created music that was so stirring and reverberant that it seemed to transcend what the chip was actually capable of producing. And consequently she put together a soundtrack whose complexly composed, emotive tunes did amazingly well to engross the player and create a Castlevania atmosphere that was as authentic as any other.

The more I listened to the game's music and observed how well it did to infuse Bloodlines' environments with emotion, character and atmosphere, the more I appreciated it. And in the end, I was happy to admit that Yamane had created not just a standout Castlevania soundtrack but also one of the best Genesis-game soundtracks of all time.

I also appreciated the clever way in which the story's planners incorporated the whole of Bram Stoker's Dracula into the Castlevania canon and used it as Bloodlines' foundation. I felt that their doing so allowed them to provide the Belmont clan its first truly intriguing character development. It inspired me to think about how it all connected. "How are the Belmonts and Morrises related, exactly?" I'd often wonder. "Did certain factions split from the family and evolve in different ways?" (I was so obsessed with the topic that I wrote about it on my site and dedicated an entire section to it!)

Otherwise, I liked how they successfully combined the series' version of Dracula with the one from the literary work (the one that inspired his creation). I felt that it helped to flesh out his character and give him a solid backstory and origin, which he didn't have before. And by extension, it gave him a clear motivation for wanting to return every 100 years.

(Of course, Koji Igarashi and friends eventually came along and irrevocably altered the character's history and consequently rendered it 1,000-times less interesting, but that's a story for another day.)

And before long, I completely came around on Bloodlines and recognized that it was a great series game and an excellent action game in general. Then I started playing it regularly.

During that period, I found myself loading it up in pretty much every time I had some time to kill. I simply couldn't stay away from it. And for a while, I considered it to be the go-to game when I was in the unfortunate situation of having to wait 20-30 minutes for my dinner to finish backing in the oven! In every such instance, its fun, fast-paced action kept me engaged and entertained and made the time go by in a snap.

And it probably would have retained the role of "go-to game" a whole lot longer had I not gotten burned out on the series. (I did so because new entries were being released so rapidly that I struggled to find the time and the energy to both play them all and provide them coverage on my site. Covering the series became an exhausting full-time job, and at one point I necessarily needed to take a break from doing it.)

But a couple of years later, when the games' release-rate slowed down and I finally had time to revisit the classics, Bloodlines came back into my life, and I started playing it regularly again.

I remember that period well because it was one in which I grew a lot emotionally, became more open-minded, and started viewing games in a much different light. Bloodlines helped me a lot in that regard. In fact, it was Bloodlines, more than any other game, that inspired me to abandon the idea of assigning numerical rankings to games. My experiences with it made me realize how wrongheaded it was to judge games strictly via comparisons and especially comparisons that were obviously skewed.

Engaging in that practice, I learned, was limiting and often prevented you from expressing how you really felt about the game that you were reviewing, and in extension, it did a disservice to the game, itself. So I stopped doing it. Thereafter I spent a few years reexamining my relationship with games, and resultantly I developed a more personal, more heartfelt game-reviewing style.

And it was all thanks to Bloodlines' influence.

These days, my relationship with Bloodlines is pretty much the same. I still play it regularly and turn to it whenever I'm hungering for some fast-paced, satisfying Castlevania action.

In the time that I've been spending with it, I've been able to see it for what it truly is: a top-tier series entry and one of the best action games of all time. It is, for certain, one of the best Genesis games (for me, it's topped only by Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master) and one of the best games of the 16-bit era.

I'll even say that it's objectively better than Super Castlevania IV. It has better level design, it does a much better job of balancing its sub-weapons, and its boss battles are superior because they're thoughtfully designed and actually force you to fight strategically. It's a more-well-rounded game.

Also, it does, in contrast to what most people think, contain a lot spectacular graphical effects: the aforementioned undulating, reflective water; large bosses that are comprised of several independently moving parts; the platforms that cycle around the Leaning Tower of Pisa in both the background and sprite layers; the clouds that wildly circle around you as you battle the Gargoyle Bat on top of the spinning tower; and a few other striking graphical scenes.

It absolutely holds its own visually.

None of this is a knock on Super Castlevania IV, no. It consider it, too, to be a top-tier series entry and one of the best action games of all time. It's just that I see it as being great in different ways. I see it as a game that has its own values and one that reigns in the areas on which it focuses (music, atmosphere, visual effects, and unrestrained, purely fun action).

Really, I adore both games and consider them to be two of the best around. I'll never stop playing either one.

In the end, my only regret is that I didn't own a copy of Bloodlines back when I owned a Genesis in the mid-90s (I got my copy a decade later, though I don't remember how, exactly, it came into my possession). As was too often the case, I missed out on the experience of playing a great video game during the era in which it was most relevant, and it's a shame that I did.

Because I know that Bloodlines is a game that I would have loved and one that I would have undoubtedly played over and over again. And I would have also enjoyed playing it with my friends during our hours-long gaming marathons; it would have absolutely earned its way into the group of core games that we made sure to play each time we got together.

By not being open-minded, I denied myself of those opportunities and robbed myself of what would have likely been very memorable gaming experiences.

How stupid.

And that, really, is the overarching theme with Bloodlines: tragic mistreatment. The fact is that it deserved more from all of the involved parties. It deserved more from Sega and Konami, both of which failed to properly promote it. It deserved more from the gaming populace, which was sadly too willing to ignore its existence. And, of course, it deserved a whole lot more from me--the passionate enthusiast who chose to overlook it for dumb reasons.

The gaming world, as a collective, lamentably failed one of the era's best games.

So here's to second chances. Here's to hoping that Bloodlines will one day be rediscovered on a mass scale and provided the opportunity to do for everyone else what it did for me.

Because that's what it truly deserves.