From the Memory Bank: My History with Video Games

Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo - Japan's Finest Export
Why it was worth paying a massive sum to experience the action of Richter Belmont's true origin story.

"These cats must be crazy," I'd conclude any time I was reading through a message-board post within which hardcore Castlevania fans were raving about a disturbingly-familiar-looking lost title and claiming that it was "amazing."

"Aren't these people painfully aware of how unrelentingly mediocre Castlevania: Dracula X was?" I'd silently object while gesticulating as if I was attempting to choke the computer monitor. "And if they are, then how in the world are they going to make me believe that the game on which it's based is anything other than equally middling? How can they say that the game that established Castlevania: Dracula X's regressive mold is 'great' or more ridiculously 'the best Castlevania ever'? Because any game that evokes memories of Castlevania: Dracula X can't possibly be anything other than second-rate!"

That was how disgustingly uncultured I was in 1999. I simply couldn't fathom the idea of Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (which the community's leaders were calling "Dracula X: Rondo of Blood") having any appeal to longtime series fans.

Because at the time, I couldn't make sense out of any of it. I failed to see, for instance, how a "Circle of Blood," which suggested some type of intricately weaved bloodline connection, had anything to do with Richter Belmont. "He's too undeveloped and vanilla to have any meaningful connection to past heroes," I thought. "What Konami should do is treat him as a standalone Belmont and avoid tarnishing interesting heroes like Trevor, Christopher and Simon by associating them with him!"

I was also puzzled by the popular sentiment that Rondo's story probably wasn't even canon (those who were considered authorities on the subject claimed that the "Dracula X"-titled games constituted a spin-off series). "If that's true," I thought, "then the subtitle's 'bloodline' implication is either contradictory or completely meaningless!"

And above all, I was still struggling to understand why Konami was so intent on marrying Castlevania games to obscure or largely unobtainable systems like the PC Engine CD-ROM² (the Japanese version of the TurboGrafx-CD)! "Why does the company keep doing this?" I wondered in an exasperated manner. "Why doesn't it want me to play its games?!"

But in truth, the confusion around Richter's ancestral ties and Konami's strange decision to refrain from porting Rondo to viable 16-bit systems weren't what bothered me most, no. They were just minor quibbles when compared to the weighty, irreconcilable issue of Rondo sharing its values with Castlevania: Dracula X, which was a game that I had come to regard as a huge step back for the series.

Rondo's appearing to have a lot in common with Castlevania: Dracula X was reason enough for me to believe that there was something amiss about the fan enthusiasm surrounding it, and I felt that what we had here was yet another case of the Internet telling me that a game was "superior" because it exhibited qualities that were popular only with a subset of "hardcore" enthusiasts. In reality, I theorized, they were probably telling me that Rondo was "great" because it boasted "glorious anime cut-scenes," a "spectacular combo-based fighting system," a "complex RPG leveling system," and a bunch of other stuff that I didn't care about and would never take into consideration when I was judging the worthiness of a Castlevania entry.

So whenever I read any coverage of Rondo of Blood, I did so with a skeptical eye. I put myself in a place in which I wasn't going to be easily convinced that (a) a game that played similarly to Castlevania: Dracula X could somehow top exemplars like Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or (b) Rondo was so mind-blowingly amazing that I needed to go to the extreme lengths necessary to hunt down a copy of it!

But you know how it goes: Circumstances change. Defensive postures born of ignorance succumb to reason. And rationality inevitably wins out.

What happened, really, was that I cracked over time as I continued to look into Rondo's history and conduct genuine research (mainly I began paying closer attention to the screenshots' contents and reading more than two sentences of the reviews, overviews, and such). While doing so, I learned that there was far more to the game than what I assumed there was after I first read about it. And eventually I started to believe that there was indeed a solid foundation for the great enthusiasm that had been expressed by those who were lucky enough to have gained access to Rondo.

And it wasn't long until I fully bought into the hype and developed a strong desire to play the game.

I also found plenty of other reasons to take the plunge: The biggest one was that I knew that if I wanted to claim that I was making a sincere effort to build an authentically comprehensive Castlevania fan site, I'd need to actually own a copy of Rondo. I'd need to gain access to the genuine article so that I could honestly assess its quality; provide accurate descriptions of its storyline, characters and gameplay elements; and, mostly importantly, capture its action with personalized screenshots and rip all of its hero and enemy sprites!

Otherwise, Rondo had a stage that faithfully recreated the Town of Jova from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest! That fact, alone, made me feel as though it was a must-own game!

Though, there were some very real hurdles to my getting a hold of and playing Rondo. The most deflating of them was the news that none of the current PC Engine emulators could run ripped CD rom-sets. This made scouring the Internet in search of such files seem pointless. I mean, sure: I could have located them and downloaded them in anticipation of future ISO-compatible emulators, but I didn't feel that doing so was worth the risk--not in 1999, when the Internet was still in its Wild West phase and its every corner was a potential hive for computer viruses and shady websites. At this point, I was still as green as could be, and consequently I didn't yet possess the confidence or the computing experience necessary to safely navigate my way across the 'net's troubled waters.

I knew that too much could have gone wrong.

So my only real option, then was to import Rondo, though I had no idea how I was going to do so. We were talking about a Japan-only game that was both rare and highly coveted, so importing it using conventional means (mainly by using the services of recently established online import stores, all of which were still lacking for a range of inventory) seemed to be an impossibility.

Honestly, my prospects looked pretty bleak.

But I had such a strong desire to own the game, which I now perceived as incredibly mystical, and I was willing to engage in a more risky practice if that was what it was going to take for me to get my hands on it!

Ultimately I decided that trying to obtain a copy of the game on one of those newfangled online-auction sites was my best bet. So I headed over to the still-fledgling eBay and made myself an account in advance of participating in my first online auction. All the while, though, I remained apprehensive about the entire process because I had read that rare games had been selling for ridiculous prices, and I didn't want to spend over $100 on the game; and I feared that I might be taken in by a foreign dealer and potentially cheated out of my money (and then I'd have to endure the exhausting reimbursement process?).

Also, there was another issue: I wasn't going to be able to play Rondo without a PC Engine, which was another exceptionally rare item that was, no doubt, going to cost me a pretty penny. And the PC Engine auction prices were so insanely high ($400-plus on average) that procuring one via that method was completely unrealistic. So even if I managed to win a copy of Rondo, I'd have no console on which to play it!

"So what, then, am I going to do?" I wondered in frustration.

However, as luck would have it, the TurboGrafx-16 emulator Magic Engine, I learned, just happened to add CD support sometime recently, and the functionality was said to be available even in the free version! I knew, of course, that there was no guarantee that Rondo would land on the emulator's compatibility list or that my computer had the capability necessary to execute such a function (you remember how old PCs used to be), but at least now I had hope!

But first I needed to obtain a copy of Rondo. So I logged into my eBay account and found a desirable target: an auction that was trending low and pulling in a limited amount of traffic. It was looking as though I'd able to swoop in and snag the game on the cheap and consequently avoid the anxiety that would likely result from engaging in an intense, costly bidding war. In the auction's latter days, however, the price continued to grow at a worrying rate, and before long, it swelled to around $180, which was a great deal more than what I intended to spend.

Yet I didn't care. I was all-in at that point. I wasn't going to back out and look elsewhere and thus undergo the entire stressful process all over again, no. That copy of Rondo, I resolved, was going to be mine--right then, no matter what it cost me.

At that point, I decided that my best strategy was to refrain from bidding and rely on the cheapest possible tactic: placing a higher bid at the last possible second and hoping that my adversaries wouldn't think to do the same! And it worked: My last-second bid was accepted, and I won the action! (I knew that I'd done so in an unsavory way, and I imagined that the other participants were pissed about losing in such a fashion.)

My winning bid totaled a little over $200.

Truthfully, I felt very uneasy about the fact that I was now going to have to dump two large bills on a single video game, but my ill feelings were somewhat negated by the excitement that came with being the proud new owner of Rondo of Blood, which I saw as a sacred treasure that I was lucky enough to secure. I was like Indiana Jones finding the Holy Grail!

About a week later, Rondo of Blood arrived in my mailbox (to my great relief, since its arrival marked the completion of a transaction that entailed my stupidly sending a cash-filled envelope to a vendor in Japan)!

It was finally mine!

And as I held its shiny blue CD case in my hands and pored over its flavorful Japanese text, my prevailing feeling was that I'd just gained possession of the forbidden fruit, and I wasn't really sure that my mortal eyes were meant to look upon such an item.

I was truly in awe of its glow! I couldn't stop looking and marveling at it!

But I knew that there was no time to be lost in the moment. Because after all: I had a new Castlevania game to play, baby! It was time for me to get started and initiate the gaming experience that I'd been dreaming of for almost a year!

I'm telling you: I couldn't wait to pop that CD into my PC's disk tray and find out what Rondo had in store for me!

Though, I couldn't deny that mine was something of a nervous anticipation. After all: It was only going to be a few moments before I'd find out if (a) Magic Engine could actually run the game, and (b) Rondo was truly as amazing as the forum-goers said that it was.

I had no idea what was going to happen when I clicked the Run button, as the PC Engine's boot screen instructed me to do.

My first fear was alleviated when the iconic Konami logo flashed across my monitor. Magic Engine, to my great excitement, was able to run the game!

Suddenly it all felt so surreal to me. I mean, here I was about to play a critically acclaimed PC Engine game on my 1998 Windows PC. I was about to play the Castlevania series' most coveted lost title and thus gain entry into one of gaming's most exclusive clubs.

This was the type of moment that I lived for as an enthusiast!

As for the game, itself: Well, it worked out to where my first experience with it was mostly about immersing myself in its world and enthusiastically and delightedly soaking in and absorbing its every uniquely conveyed vibe and emanation. I was too busy doing that to actually chronicle my interactions with it. So I don't remember what happened from moment to moment.

The only thing that I recall for certain is that I was absolutely blown away by Rondo's quality. I was extremely impressed with everything from its stirring intro scene (which, for whatever reason, featured strangely exotic-sounding German narration) to its brilliant level design to its stunningly-well-presented, visually striking "Castlevania" world.

I mean, I could attempt to make a list of individual moments that stood out to me, but then we'd need to build a second Internet to accommodate the 500,000-word piece that would result from my doing so!

I can summarize it all by saying that Rondo of Blood truly was the real deal. I considered it to be an instant classic. And the whole time, I was thrilled to be exploring the world that Konami originally envisioned for Richter Belmont and his pals.

Finally it all made sense to me.

The rest of that week was all about Rondo of Blood. I locked myself in our den, which was where I kept my computer, and spent hours meticulously exploring every inch of the game. I eagerly sought to uncover every split path, alternate route, and secret room and earn a 100% completion-rate.

All the while, I kept dreaming about the day when I could start covering the game on my Castlevania site and expressing, through the use of both mountains of text and an abundance of imagery, how much I adored it!

The only real downer was that the free version of Magic Engine didn't support music output for CD games, which left the sound effects (enemy wails, rumbly explosions, and squeaky-sounding whip-strikes) as the lone form of aural accompaniment. But I wasn't completely locked out from enjoying the soundtrack, no, because it so happened that Windows recognized Rondo's Redbook Audio CD as a music CD by default, which meant that I could listen to the game's music whenever I wanted to and not have to deal with the game's interruptions (mainly its pesky sound effects!).

And that's exactly what I did: As I browsed the web, updated my Castlevania site, and worked on my usual art projects, I listened to Rondo's awesome soundtrack and invited it to augment my activities with its jamming beats and invigorate and inspire me with its amazing energy.

I considered Rondo's soundtrack to be close rival to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's. It was that outstanding.

I'd heard these tunes before, of course (a large portion of them, at least) in Rondo's tragically underdeveloped SNES conversion, but never with instrumentation that was this spectacular, audio quality that was this high-level, and reverberance that was this powerful. And my conclusion was that the original versions of these tunes were clearly supreme works.

I continued to be awed by them.

I lamented the fact that I was, at the time, unable to gauge how these godly tunes worked to enhance Rondo's stellar gameplay, brilliant visuals, and wonderfully alluring settings, but I was content in knowing that I'd eventually get the opportunity to do so. "One day I'll get this music to play in-game," I believed.

And when I did, it was pure magic: Rondo's energetic-yet-perceptibly-haunting music combined with its pitch-perfect visuals to create what I felt was the quintessential "Castlevania" atmosphere. In terms of how it told a story, set a tone and mood, and stirred the imagination, it was strikingly similar to Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse's atmosphere and absolutely on par with it.

There was, I sensed, a definite spiritual connection between the two games.

Rondo of Blood quickly became one of my top-three series games, and it beat out Symphony of the Night to earn second place behind Dracula's Curse. As did the latter's, its separate parts came together to form an exemplary whole and constitute the perfect "Castlevania" experience.

It should tell you a lot when I say that Rondo was able to overtake games like the original Castlevania and Super Castlevania IV, both of which I held sacred.

That's how highly I regarded it.

What I loved most about Rondo was how it expanded upon Dracula's Curse's formula in terms of stage-progression. Its stages, more so than the latter's, were loaded with split paths and secret rooms, some of which served no real gameplay purpose but were worth visiting just for the sake of observing their mysterious activity (in one room, for instance, an unassailable cyclops takes boulders off of a pulley system and rolls them into the adjacent screen, and it does so simply to create an interesting visual).

And none of it ever felt superfluous. Every man-eating-plant-populated reservoir, fly-filled corridor, engine room, and Ferry Man-assisted boat ride played an essential role in building the game's world and helping to define it.

At all times, Rondo was keen to boast that it was it was a classically styled stage-based game that exhibited the values of an expansive action-adventure game. It was excited to display for you the many ways in which it expanded upon its inspiration's beloved formula.

In reality, Rondo was a bit more linear than Dracula's Curse. In comparison, it had only two routes to Dracula: upper and lower routes whose stages ran parallel to each other and predictably converged at the doorsteps of regular or alternate bosses.

Though, it was far richer in terms of explorability and the number of ways in which you could interact with the environment. It allowed you to do things like push tombstones and steel girders, strike bells and cause them to swing back and forth and ring, and use your weapons to manipulate assorted triggers and thus open the way to the chambers in which the kidnapped women were being held.

And even after thoroughly exploring every inch of the game, I continued to feel as though there was still more to find--that there were plenty of other secrets resting behind the stages' walls and below their surfaces. "If I keep looking," I felt, "I'll eventually start finding mind-blowingly cool hidden tunnels and endlessly mysterious secret areas like the ghost ship's mirror room!"

Only the best action games could make me feel that way.

It was also true that Rondo wasn't a match for Dracula's Curse in terms of the number of playable allies. Its selection was limited to one: Mario Renard, who became playable after you rescued her. Though, you couldn't switch to her on the fly. To play as her, rather, you had to reset the game or purposely Game Over and substitute her in on the menu screen.

So Rondo's wasn't a true "ally" system.

But still, Maria was fun to play as, and she had a lot of cool abilities. She could double-jump, rapidly crawl or roll along the ground, and execute a projection attack, and some of these moves helped her to access paths that Richter was unable to access. She commanded a number of uniquely functioning animal friends (which functioned as sub-weapons). And because she was speedy and had overpowered weapons, you could use her to quickly tear through the game and promptly destroy bosses and even the mightiest minor enemies (I'd do this whenever I was in a hopped-up mood or whenever I needed to travel far into a stage to snap a screenshot for my site and I was too impatient to do so with the contrastingly sluggish Richter).

In that regard, using Maria was akin to playing in "easy" mode.

The point is that Rondo was, despite having less in terms of alternate routes and playable characters, packed with great content and consistently made excellent use of the assets that it had. There were a large number of ways to engage with it and play through it, and for that reason, it was one of the series' most amazingly replayable games.

Rondo of Blood had it all: deeply engaging, highly satisfying gameplay; an amazing setting; an incredibly alluring atmosphere; a fantastic enemy cast; an ideal difficulty-level; and tense, excitingly tactical boss fights (most of which were observably identical in design to Castlevania: Dracula X's but contrastingly easier to handle because Rondo's version of Richter controlled more smoothly).

It was everything that I wanted a Castlevania game to be.

For certain, it succeeded wildly in capturing the spirit of its most storied predecessors. In fact, it was the first post-NES Castlevania game that felt like an NES Castlevania game! It possessed values that were very similar to theirs.

That was a big part of why I was so drawn to it.

Rondo was appealing to me, also, because I could enjoy it on different levels: I could play it as a fast-paced action game, or I could otherwise derive enjoyment from it by leisurely strolling through its stages and soaking in its entrancing atmosphere and taking the time to appreciate the love and care that went into making its world feel so authentic (it helped that there were no time limits).

I could engage with it in multiple ways and have a great time no matter how I chose to play it.

And if anything, Rondo showed me that the "Dracula X" control scheme, which I'd long viewed as a downgrade from Super Castlevania IV's, was actually very solid. The real problem with Castlevania: Dracula X, I now understood, was its lack of quality level design and specifically its haphazardly designed environments, which brought out the worst in the control scheme and made it seem limiting. It wasn't. It just didn't work well in a game in which platforms and enemies were very often inconveniently placed.

Here, in Rondo, the more-traditional controls made perfect sense.

So Rondo was certainly revelatory in this regard.

I returned to Rondo frequently for years in following. And in that time, I continued to strongly appreciate its every homage and every little touch.

I loved, for instance, that its opening stage replicated entire Town of Jova, from Simon's Quest, right down to the readable entrance sign. I was delighted that the penultimate room in the Main Hall stage was the room in which you fought the Phanton Bat in Castlevania and that you could obtain a big heart by destroying the rightmost block in the stairs' base, just as you could in the original. I thought it was cool that the composers brought back Castlevania's familiar boss-battle, death and victory themes, all of which felt right at home in Rondo. And I was thrilled that the development team paid tribute to the series' progenitor by having all of its bosses (sans Death, who was encountered elsewhere) comprise Shaft's boss gauntlet.

That was another great thing about Rondo: Like Symphony of the Night, it had a deep reverence for the series' foundational games, and it honored them by regularly making respectful references to them.

In doing so, it created some very important continuity (and I loved that it did because I'm a continuity hound).

For me, a huge part of the fun of playing Rondo was learning how it informed so much of Symphony of the Night's design.

I was astounded when I realized that a number of Symphony's environments were borrowed from this game. Among them were the Clock Tower stage, whose recreation was pretty faithful aside from the change in visual tone, and the Castle Keep secret room, which you could likewise access via a secret stairway. In many of my subsequent Rondo play-throughs, I had a lot of fun examining its original versions of these environments and comparing them to the ones that I knew from Symphony. I considered my doing so to being an essential part of the experience.

I was so obsessed with the two games' environmental similarities, in fact, that I created a dedicated "Castleography" section on my fan site just so I could talk about them at length! (And naturally I soon expanded the section to talk about just about every other environmental similarity between games.)

I was also fascinated to discover that many of Symphony's enemies, too, originated in this game. If you had told me this beforehand, I wouldn't have believed you. I would have scoffed at the idea that those like the Grave Keeper, the Skeleton Musket, the Flail Guard, the Blade Master and the Stone Rose had appeared in a pre-Symphony game. Because something about the way they looked and maneuvered told me that they were "advanced enemies" that could only exist in a 32-bit-powered action-adventure game.

It was wild to see them in a 16-bit game, looking and behaving just as they did in Symphony.

I was especially blown away when I came across an Armor Lord, which I considered to be the pinnacle of "advanced 32-bit minor enemies." It felt surreal to be encountering it and fighting it in a "technologically inferior," classic-style series game.

Seeing it made me stop and think, "Maybe this game and its host console are more advanced than they say."

That's what its appearance meant to Rondo: It helped to make the game feel next-level.

It makes sense that Rondo and Symphony's creators were so eager to make these connections and show such reverence for past Castlevania games because they, too, were big fans of the series.

Koji Igarashi, who was a member of Rondo's development team, has even stated on record that his favorite series game is Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse! So there was no way that Rondo was going to end up being anything other than a respectful tribute to it.

So my conclusion was that Dracula X: Rondo of Blood was indeed a masterwork. It was, like Symphony of the Night, not just a magnificent series entry but also one of the entire medium's all-time-greatest works. (In terms of directly related games, I feel, it and Symphony combine to form one of the greatest one-two punches in gaming history.)

Whenever I was playing it, my mind would begin to fill up with questions similar to those that would arise when I played Symphony. I'd begin to wonder such things as "How did they do so well to nail every aspect of this game?", "How did they hit all of the right notes in terms of tone and atmosphere?", "Did they know that the game they were working on was turning out to be something really special? And if so, when?" and "How did these people manage to pump out two incredible Castlevania games one after the other?!"

All I could do was guess as to how it all happened.

The only thing that I knew for sure was that I was a fool for ever doubting the game.

So here we are 26 years later (has it really been that long?!). Rondo and I, who were once separated by thousands of miles of ocean and a large field of ignorance, are now longtime acquaintances. I'm incredibly grateful that the winds of fate brought us together.

Honestly, I didn't play Rondo all that much in the 2005-2015 period, and my interactions with it were limited to play-throughs of the Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and Wii Virtual Console versions of it. Yet even then, it still continued to strongly resonate with me. I never forgot how special a game it was and how much I loved playing it.

Eventually I started longing to return to it. I couldn't do so, though, because I lost convenient access to it (I'd since packed up my Wii and my PSP, and I didn't want to play the game on modern PCs because I felt that their disk trays were cheaply made and I didn't want to risk damaging my game CD). So I had to turn to ROM sites to obtain an easily accessible copy of the game.

I didn't like having to resort to such a method, but doing so was worth it, I felt, because it allowed me to be reunited with one of my favorite series games and one of the best action games ever made.

I've been replaying and enjoying it ever since then.

My only regret is that I was away from it for so long. Because this game is too damn good to not be played on a frequent basis!

Staying away from it for a prolonged period is a mistake that I'll never make again.

And I hope that it becomes widely available at some point in the near future. At the moment, it's only available via Castlevania Requiem: Symphony of the Night & Rondo of Blood and the TurboGrafx-16 Mini, and to me, that's not nearly enough availability.

Rondo should be available on a plethora of digital services and storefronts. Because that's what it deserves.

People need to be playing this game. Because it's one of the medium's all-time-greatest creations, and it'll be a damn shame if it continues to go largely undiscovered and eventually winds up being lost to time.

It would be ideal, also, if Rondo reemerged in a big way and sparked interest in the PC Engine, which is truly an amazing little console. I'm sure that those who know only of its North American counterpart--the TurboGrafx-16--will be pleased to discover how versatile a machine it is and how great its library is.

Certainly I plan to continue exploring NEC's unassuming wonder-box and raving about its games on this site.

So look forward to more of that!

In the meantime, I'll continue to happily reminisce about the console's finest showpiece: Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo.

I'll forever fondly recall my history with the game: the long journey that I had to undertake to obtain a copy of it; my first experience with it and how surreal it felt to be playing it; how blown away I was by its presentation, art direction, visuals, music, level design, atmosphere, setting, references, and every other aspect of it; and the many ways in which it positively impacted my life.

It was, as they told me, one of the best games ever made.

So here's to Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo: a game that was worth every penny of its $200 import fee.

I will continue to, as I've been doing since 1999, hold it in the highest regard.