Games of the Abstract: Castlevania - The Adventure / Castlevania II - Belmont's Revenge (1989/1991)

 

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

One Player

Nintendo Game Boy

 

With new hardware comes new possibilities alongside new challenges, something videogames have shown and explored in its existence. Perversely Nintendo, despite their lack of archiving and preserving enough of their legacy, have this wonderful side the opposite of this of experimentation which third party developers were happy to latch onto with their newest ideas, both good and bad ones. The Game Boy was one of the best, the original when released in 1989 a vast chasm from the LCD games from the likes of Tiger Electronics in the day, and even when handheld machines meant for travel threatened them with colour graphics and better visuals, like the Sega Game Gear, the original Game Boy (notwithstanding the Game Boy Pocket in 1996 and the Game Boy Colour in 1998) lasted until 2003. The challenges with this machine back in 1989 can just be seen with Castlevania: The Adventure, one of the first games to be released for the handheld by Konami, a spin-off for the franchise that was then mainly a Nintendo franchise with some exceptions. The limitations notwithstanding of developing games for the machine, not knowing how to push its limits, were contrasted by the clear sense the production team made mistakes.

This is not held as a good game at all, and covering its sequel within the same review, when others would separate them, makes more sense for me as they are siblings, the sequel like a remake which however nods to the original's slight narrative and both sharing their own idiosyncratic quirks within the franchise, least of all the obsession with climbing ropes. The issues thought with Adventure is that, fine tuned, it would be a slight game at four levels and with the struggle of the new hardware seen, but it would be a perfectly fun game in the franchise. All its notoriety and negativity is due to unfortunate problems and ill thought out ideas that could have been nixed even if superior games exist. It is meant to be a prequel to the whole franchise, back when Dracula, the main antagonist through the franchise, was not of the undead but a magician dabbling in black magic. Father to the future lineage, Christopher Belmont has to stop him, only with the struggles in his way being the game itself alongside the monsters and death traps along the way.

Considering Masato Maegawa, the founder of Treasure, the legendary developers, is among the production team, people were here early in their career who would show their talent, but you can see the team struggled. Christopher Belmont is not only plagued by bats, monsters and giant rolling eyeballs, but slow movement, the inability to leap far, the inability to leap without being a foot off the ledge as well to reach distances, rather than fall in pits, and this weird force field around him that absorbs damage rather than repeal it, i.e. a larger hit box than a character should have. It is confounded by the fact too that he loses power ups in merely one hit, and without these issues, this would have been a fun game in its own right, but with these factors, would have made it a nightmare back in the day if you were a child who got this game for their Game Boy. It is if you somehow accept this, or accept save states exist, as the game has been made available legally in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection (2019), its quirks and eccentricities are its own and are charming, but these handicaps and insanely precise leaps are a burden to this game it did not need. It was clear the game was fighting the tech - Level 3, which is an extended game of avoiding a giant spike trap moving for you, already was a challenging with an unfair flaw to it, in how quick you need to be to get ahead of it, but you can see as well the vertical spikes you move sideways from (even on the Castlevania Anniversary Collection) looks like clip art with a border around the illustration moving along, which shows there was a lot of struggle out of the producers' hands let alone mistakes of their own.

It is a game where soldering on, you see a distinct personality coming to this, set to good 8 bit chiptune music (from Shigeru Fukutake, Norio Hanzawa and Hidehiro Funauchi), and even at the beginning of this handheld's life showing that the Game Boy aesthetic was its own distinct one of interest. These two Castlevania games have their own goofy and interesting style which carried in-between them and won me over. Ropes are the obsession, instead of the requisite stairs to move up and down screen on, to scale up and down on with the sequel thankfully making it possible to whip enemies off one; were it not for unfair levels of perfect platform jumping, this world of obstacle courses causes even next to the other games to stand out. The strange gallery of enemies is a highlight too, those aforementioned giant eyes found numerous times, rolling hazards like boulders between the games, or the annoying but cool monster heads which belch fireballs that bounce off surfaces (and randomly) that look more like dandelion heads of death.

It is still possible to find fun with Castlevania: The Adventure, even if accepting save states are your necessary back-up, but it is absolutely the standard case we should point to for mechanics and design when done wrong undercutting the joy one has with a game. It did however clearly do well enough that a sequel was warranted, and thankfully, for Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge a lot was learnt over two years. Thankfully the prequel was not entirely dismissed as aspects are openly lifted and even improved upon, be it figures lifted from the previous game like the rolling eyeballs to the rope climbing, to using the level 3 spike traps as specific obstacles where you can either duck underneath them or even destroy their mechanism as you had to do previously to survive. A lot was improved to make this a proper Castlevania game, the platforming fairer, the damage not immediately taking away power ups after merely one hit, and special weapons from the series being finally introduced in the form of a throwing axe or holy water. It is clearly a sequel, as Dracula is definitely a vampire here, but it is a remake in mood.

This is in mind that, Adventure was fun when fair - aptly the bosses are more rewarding, considering Masato Maegawa's legacy with Treasure are games like Gunstar Heroes (1993) with great bosses - but Belmont's Revenge took this maligned blueprint and imbues it with further style and virtue. It can be hard in its own way, as Dracula this time is now a pain in terms of how to dodge him and only being able to whip him in the head, but it is now without badly implemented game mechanics. With this in mind, I do not want to separate the pair as they feel perfectly linked. Adventure is in truth a bad game, but as with Haunted Castle (1987), the maligned arcade entry, the problems are entirely due to design flaws and both exhibit personalities which can now be appreciated as modern re-releases get around their gameplay failures. The game clearly had something as it was able to blossom as Belmont's Revenge, which is a good game in the franchise. There would be a third game, Castlevania Legends (1997), which is fascinating as bringing forward a female protagonist, Sonia Belmont, and how it is late in the Game Boy's existence. It is considered non-canon, as the guiding hand of the franchise for a large portion of it, producer Koji Igarashi, considered that it conflicted with the narrative canon of the games¹, and it is sadly not readily available as with the likes of the Nintendo 64 productions. This is a shame as, for a full picture of the Game Boy run, Legends even if it could not follow in the footsteps of Belmont's Revenge is fascinating to consider with how this franchise would go on when developers figured out the original Game Boy. The franchise itself managed, with the later Nintendo handhelds, to really find a niche in terms of its 2D games, so as the first games with this run learnt to run, those later games managed to sprint.

 

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1) Tales from the Crypt: Castlevania's 20th Anniversary Blow-out, written by Kurt Kalata, and published by 1UP.com on 26th July 2006. Archived from the original on 14th September 2016.