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Avg. Rating: 3
Castlevania
In order to like this game you have to have the love of Castlevania like me. I love Castlevania and even though this game is very slow and you can't do that much, it is Castlevania and I love it. There are only 4 stages and they are pretty straight forward, and Dracula is a big pain. If you grew up with Castlevania, like me, you will appriecate this game and all of Castlevania games because all the stories go together. But if you are just getting into Castlevania stick with the new ones on Playstation.
I can't believe I'm even giving it one star!
In 1989, Konami decided it might be a good idea to try putting their classic vampire hunting series, Castlevania, onto a portable console. And that same year The Castlevania Adventure was released for the classic Game Boy. Would this be a smart move, or one of the blunders of the series? Read on for my review.PROS:
-FOR AN OLD-SCHOOL GAME BOY GAME, THESE GRAPHICS AREN'T HALF BAD. Some of the enemies and the backgrounds, especially the exploding eyeball enemies, have a fair amount of detail.
-THE FIRST STAGE MUSIC IS ONE OF THE COOLEST SONGS IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY! This song is, without question, the best piece of music to ever emerge from the Castlevania series. CONS:
-YOUR CHARACTER IS RIDICULOUSLY SLOW! When it comes to both walking and climbing ropes (you climb ropes in this game, not stairs), your character takes his sweet time. You may be able to see the opposite part of the screen pretty well, but it's gonna take you a while to get there!
-THERE ARE NO SECONDARY WEAPONS! These were one of the best part of the Castlevania series - why in the hell would they not include them in this game!? That's got to be one of the biggest mistakes this series ever made.
-PLATFORM JUMPING IS HORRENDOUS. To successfully make a jump, you must be at the very edge of the platform, and jump at just the right moment. And wouldn't fate have it that you'll often find yourself doing a ton of jumps right in a row?
-NO WAY TO SAVE YOUR PROGRESS. Other Castlevania games usually offered the gamer a way to continue - usually a password, sometimes a battery - but that doesn't happen here! This hurts the replay value badly.
-YOU LOSE YOUR WHIP UPGRADES WHEN ENEMIES HIT YOU! In this game you start with a standard whip, but can upgrade to a chain whip, and finally to a whip that shoots fireballs. But if an enemy touches you, your whip degrades one level. This is just plain stupid.
-ENEMIES BLEND IN WITH THE SCENERY. Because the enemies can blend in with their environments, it is sometimes difficult to spot them - and they can often end up having the last laugh.
-IT'S THE WORST GAME IN THE ENTIRE CASTLEVANIA SERIES. I LOVE this series, as you can easily tell in my other reviews, but this game is garbage. OVERALL:
There are not enough bad things that can be said about this game. If you want a good portable Castlevania game, they're all good - with the exception of this lone blunder. Don't even bother with this one - it isn't worth your time or your hard-earned cash.
Great classic game!
I don't understand the negative reviews of this game; yes, it requires precise jumping and your whip gets downgraded if you get hit but whip upgrades are commonplace enough that you should be able to maintain your upgraded whip throughout the game, as long as you're not getting hit every 5 seconds. To rate a game poorly because it's a little difficult doesn't make sense to me. Overall it's a great game; fun and challenging.
Good, but slow and incredibly demanding early Game Boy game.
Early Castlevania games tended to be hit or miss affairs, and unfortunately this is . When I originally posted this review in 2003, I had made a concerted effort to create an honest review for the average player; I was (and still am) quite fond of the game. If I were to redo my rating scale, perhaps I'd score it slightly higher at three stars. All the same, I still feel that this game provides a low amount of fun given the intense challenge, and the rating is deserved given that overriding criteria.
Doesn't the classic GB logo give it away? This is not the fantastic GameBoy Advance title Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, nor is it Circle of the Moon or even Harmony of Dissonance.
What this is might well be described as one of the slowest sidescrollers ever made (and that's without slowdown affecting the game). Made in 1989, this is one of the first titles in Konami's Game Boy lineup and it shows. The level one music (Battle of the Holy) is excellent and a personal favorite, but the aural experience is unfortunately quite limited afterward. I personally like many of the background details (whenever they show up, that is) such as the trees and graves seen at the game's beginning. Much later on the ability to use exploding eyeballs as dynamite to open up a hidden area (no joke!) is a great concept well executed.
The whip Christopher uses in this game may be upgraded once for a chain whip, and once more for flinging fireballs...it's not quite an adequate replacement for the traditional Castlevania subweapons, but it does give you unlimited attacks at range.
Christopher's slowness in this title (and its sequel) makes Simon Belmont's hunched back and slow gait appear like a semi barrelling down the road, whereas Christopher is perhaps the man trying to push a tractor trailer down the road. Suffice to say that he's very slow - hyperbole aside, he seems to move at roughly half the speed of Simon.
The worst part of it would be the intensely difficult jumps found in large quantities. This is the textbook example of frustrating level design: Nearly every single jump must be done within an accuracy of a few pixels. While the most difficult jump in the game requires you time perfectly across two falling platforms-essentially three jumps-is thankfully optional (used to snag a 1-up extra life), since I can only manage it about once in twenty tries (an optimistic guess), the normal jumps are too close to this required accuracy for comfort. One long series of jumps has you going over about a dozen blocks in such a fashion; while there's solid ground below to fall down onto and the process of jumping may always be restarted it's easy to mess up here. A later and quite ugly level where you are chased by spikes for nearly the entire level (and one part consists of climbing upwards and jumping from rope to rope) has the same feel to it, as mistakes tend to get you killed quite often.
There's more. One level starts you off by bats which of course you can't hit right away because while a Castlevania Axe could take them all out, you have no axe, only your whip. Getting through this section unscathed is more a matter of luck than skill.
The end of the game, oddly enough, consists of the easiest Dracula fight since Castlevania 2 (where you could simply lay on the laurels for invincibility for the fight's duration). I won't give it away, but Dracula's second form is even more pathetic, in terms of an attack pattern, than the first (in either case, Dracula looks silly in this one). Given how hard this game is, though, it's probably not a bad thing to have some reprieve.
Are there any more problems? Oh yes, the killer: Getting hit downgrades your weapon one notch, so you essentially play the whole game with the basic short leather whip.
All that said, I do love this game, but it's not easily playable. It brings solid graphics to the GameBoy, but the gameplay...if it is solid, perhaps we would better say that you'll need a jackhammer to scratch the surface of this particular rock.
It gets the second star only because some people consider all terribly difficult games to be a challenge and they might enjoy it somewhat. As I noted, there are some nice points later in the game...unfortunately, just as with the previous year's (1988) Castlevania arcade game (Haunted Castle), most mortals will never see many of its neat details.
My recommendation is to pick up Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge instead. You have subweapons, less difficult jumps, a better soundtrack overall, and weapon downgrades have been checked significantly. Pick that one up if you're looking for classic GameBoy action!
What the...?
I usualy like Castlevania games so when I heard of their was one on Gameboy I bought right away. That was ... stupid. But I'll start with it's good qualities. It doesn't smell. That's something, right? Now the bad. You walk REALLY REALLY slow. You attack REALLY REALLY slow. Everything else goes either as fast or faster than you. When you jump accross platforms unless you jump at the very edge of you won't make it. The music is just 6 seconds of sound repeated over and over and over and over... Oh ya, and the graphics look like ....
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