Curmudgeon Gamer
11 November 2007
Castlevania on GBA
The Castlevania series, if Wikipedia is to be believed, has been plodding on now since September 26 1986, making it exactly one month younger than I am. In those twenty one long years, the only two times that it has decided to veer its metaphorical 4x4 off the motorway of mediocrity and into the forest of innovation is when it nicked the entire gameplay style of Super Metroid in 1997 with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and when it stiched its various components into the horrific third dimension and created a sparse variety of gruesome 3D action RPG abominations (starting with Castlevania 64) that felt similar to getting repeatedly poked in the eye by an inverted pincushion. Its the first deviation that's spearheaded the 'modern' Castlevania game, and the second one that's forced all the relatively decent Castlevania games onto handheld consoles because Konami reflect the idiot sensibility that the 'big' consoles are for 3D games only.
Which propels me nicely forward into the GBA Castlevania library, which I'm currently rocketing through. They are exactly like Metroid only they have levelling, which is nice, and the gothic art style means a load of slitty-wrist young teens can draw some disturbing fanart.
The ethical question that strikes you as you play through all these games is whether you're supposed to be a harsher critic when you realise that they're all the bloody same. Konami even spent a considerable amount of their development time recycling the same damn sprites and settings. Any potential comfort in repetition soon evaporates when you work out how much money you'll never see again because it's all gone on the same product three times. All Konami have to do is ctrl+c and ctrl+v, toss in a little gimmick and they're ready to go gold. But, then, this formula is the exact same one that alleged pioneers of scintillating innovation Nintendo have been using forever and ever now, and nobody ever seems to get angry at them for doing it because they're too busy falling hand over food in a desperate rush to obtain more official Wii peripherals.
Dracula is considered to generally be quite a bad dude, and serves as the omnipotent evil force that runs concurrently throughout the series. Konami have shamelessly plucked out one of Bram Stoker's creations and boiled away at it for all these years to really intensify all that concentrated evil; the only ways Konami have left to make this guy any worse is if they turn him into a nazi, put in FMV sequences of him forcing children to eat rat poison or reveal that he moonlights as a presenter for Fox News.
So, one handheld console, three gothic Metroid rip-offs where you exist to do nothing more than navigate a large maze and vanquish whatever remnant of Dracula that's kicking about at whatever particular moment. Harmony of Dissonance has thin, zig-zagging corridors and a heavy emphasis on combat. It's quite hard at first, until you realise that being good at combat means using the dash shoulder buttons to rocket yourself backwards and forwards. Thankfully being forced to dodge all your attacks helps you not think about how the audio sounds worse than a hundred different excrutiating reality TV show singing auditions all piped through the same tiny, NES-esque speaker. I'm sure there's a technical reason as to why it sounds the way it does (really bad) but I'm not here to talk about fixing the problem; I'm just going to point it out and then move on.
It's the most action packed GBA Castlevania, which means it's very different to Aria of Sorrow which is, comparatively speaking, a complete doddle and and has soul-collecting moments that almost remind you of playing a Pokemon title. Collecting stuff also features in Circle of the Moon, as you pair up two cards (which are dropped occasionally by fallen enemies. Collect them all!) to create spell effects and stuff. Aria of Sorrow, though, finally does away with the whip fetish and lets you wield an array of weapons, which is great until you learn that some weapons are good (the short sword) and some weapons are bad (every other weapon in the entire game apart from a big sword you get at the end of the game which makes killing the last boss a completely unexciting event) and it's also set in 2035 which was initially quite exciting because my mind got ahead of itself and imagined a whole bevy of exciting new monsters and the juxtaposition of the gothic landscape with awesome stuff like evil robots and cyborgs before it realised that Konami would never actually change anything about any of these games and I spent ten hours dealing with the enemies that I've seen in every Castlevania game since the beginning of time itself.
No matter what one you're playing you'll spend too much of your time walking too slowly and the biggest enemy in any of these games is the unresponsive controls, which exist basically to hate you for the entire game as if they were a stroppy teenager sitting in the back of a car being dragged to a family resort. Eventually you learn to pacify the fiddly brat but it's too late, because you're basically at the end of the game and you've levelled up so much that now nothing can pose any significant threat to you whatsoever and that nice collection of restorative items you've stocked up on means you can breeze through the final boss even if you put the Gameboy on a table, sat on your hands and started controlling the game with your nose.
The games like to introduce exemplary moral issues, usually giving you the choice of a 'good' or 'bad' ending. You get the good ending by looking up what insanely easy to overlook thing you're supposed to have equipped at one certain point in the game on GameFAQs and you get the bad ending if you think it's possible to play a Japanese game with a levelling feature and not resort to using internet guides.
Seriously though, what's the point? I don't know, and I can't tell you. They're all quite addictive, and I can't stop playing the little buggers.
Which propels me nicely forward into the GBA Castlevania library, which I'm currently rocketing through. They are exactly like Metroid only they have levelling, which is nice, and the gothic art style means a load of slitty-wrist young teens can draw some disturbing fanart.
The ethical question that strikes you as you play through all these games is whether you're supposed to be a harsher critic when you realise that they're all the bloody same. Konami even spent a considerable amount of their development time recycling the same damn sprites and settings. Any potential comfort in repetition soon evaporates when you work out how much money you'll never see again because it's all gone on the same product three times. All Konami have to do is ctrl+c and ctrl+v, toss in a little gimmick and they're ready to go gold. But, then, this formula is the exact same one that alleged pioneers of scintillating innovation Nintendo have been using forever and ever now, and nobody ever seems to get angry at them for doing it because they're too busy falling hand over food in a desperate rush to obtain more official Wii peripherals.
Dracula is considered to generally be quite a bad dude, and serves as the omnipotent evil force that runs concurrently throughout the series. Konami have shamelessly plucked out one of Bram Stoker's creations and boiled away at it for all these years to really intensify all that concentrated evil; the only ways Konami have left to make this guy any worse is if they turn him into a nazi, put in FMV sequences of him forcing children to eat rat poison or reveal that he moonlights as a presenter for Fox News.
So, one handheld console, three gothic Metroid rip-offs where you exist to do nothing more than navigate a large maze and vanquish whatever remnant of Dracula that's kicking about at whatever particular moment. Harmony of Dissonance has thin, zig-zagging corridors and a heavy emphasis on combat. It's quite hard at first, until you realise that being good at combat means using the dash shoulder buttons to rocket yourself backwards and forwards. Thankfully being forced to dodge all your attacks helps you not think about how the audio sounds worse than a hundred different excrutiating reality TV show singing auditions all piped through the same tiny, NES-esque speaker. I'm sure there's a technical reason as to why it sounds the way it does (really bad) but I'm not here to talk about fixing the problem; I'm just going to point it out and then move on.
It's the most action packed GBA Castlevania, which means it's very different to Aria of Sorrow which is, comparatively speaking, a complete doddle and and has soul-collecting moments that almost remind you of playing a Pokemon title. Collecting stuff also features in Circle of the Moon, as you pair up two cards (which are dropped occasionally by fallen enemies. Collect them all!) to create spell effects and stuff. Aria of Sorrow, though, finally does away with the whip fetish and lets you wield an array of weapons, which is great until you learn that some weapons are good (the short sword) and some weapons are bad (every other weapon in the entire game apart from a big sword you get at the end of the game which makes killing the last boss a completely unexciting event) and it's also set in 2035 which was initially quite exciting because my mind got ahead of itself and imagined a whole bevy of exciting new monsters and the juxtaposition of the gothic landscape with awesome stuff like evil robots and cyborgs before it realised that Konami would never actually change anything about any of these games and I spent ten hours dealing with the enemies that I've seen in every Castlevania game since the beginning of time itself.
No matter what one you're playing you'll spend too much of your time walking too slowly and the biggest enemy in any of these games is the unresponsive controls, which exist basically to hate you for the entire game as if they were a stroppy teenager sitting in the back of a car being dragged to a family resort. Eventually you learn to pacify the fiddly brat but it's too late, because you're basically at the end of the game and you've levelled up so much that now nothing can pose any significant threat to you whatsoever and that nice collection of restorative items you've stocked up on means you can breeze through the final boss even if you put the Gameboy on a table, sat on your hands and started controlling the game with your nose.
The games like to introduce exemplary moral issues, usually giving you the choice of a 'good' or 'bad' ending. You get the good ending by looking up what insanely easy to overlook thing you're supposed to have equipped at one certain point in the game on GameFAQs and you get the bad ending if you think it's possible to play a Japanese game with a levelling feature and not resort to using internet guides.
Seriously though, what's the point? I don't know, and I can't tell you. They're all quite addictive, and I can't stop playing the little buggers.
Labels: castlevania, gba, konami
--Martin at 06:12
Comment
[ 1 ]
25 October 2007
Konami hides its history too well
The new Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles should give today's PSP owners an easy means to experience some revitalized history. The game disc contains an exclusive remake of Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, an emulated original Rondo of Blood (PCE CD), and an emulated Symphony of the Night (PS1). I say it should give PSP owners this oportunity, but it doesn't, really. Konami has decided to lock the history away behind a wall of secrets.
Out of the box, only the first of those three games is available to play. How do you unlock the other two?
To play Symphony of the Night you have to get to take Richter into Stage 3', an alternate stage reached by finishing Stage 2 in a special way. Then you have to pick up an axe subweapon which is hidden in a secret room. Then you take the axe to a particular room and use it to cut down a platform held up by vines. Then you take a set of platforms several screens across and break a tombstone to reveal an icon which unlocks Symphony of the Night.
If you die on Stage 3' after you get the axe but before you unlock the secret, you lose the axe. Tough luck, buster. Yo gotta do it again.
How to unlock the original Rondo of Blood? Get to and break that same tombstone playing as Maria, not Richter. Wait, you don't have Maria as a selectable character yet? Oh my. You did pick up the special key subweapon on Stage 2 and then unlock the prison door down in the dungeon, right? Well, that's how you get Maria. Then head off to Stage 3' and get the Rondo of Blood icon in the tombstone. That's right -- an easter egg within an easter egg!
What a load of crap. Instead of making historic games accessible to players in their original forms, Konami has hidden them so well that I'd've never found them if it weren't for GameFAQs.
Out of the box, only the first of those three games is available to play. How do you unlock the other two?
To play Symphony of the Night you have to get to take Richter into Stage 3', an alternate stage reached by finishing Stage 2 in a special way. Then you have to pick up an axe subweapon which is hidden in a secret room. Then you take the axe to a particular room and use it to cut down a platform held up by vines. Then you take a set of platforms several screens across and break a tombstone to reveal an icon which unlocks Symphony of the Night.
If you die on Stage 3' after you get the axe but before you unlock the secret, you lose the axe. Tough luck, buster. Yo gotta do it again.
How to unlock the original Rondo of Blood? Get to and break that same tombstone playing as Maria, not Richter. Wait, you don't have Maria as a selectable character yet? Oh my. You did pick up the special key subweapon on Stage 2 and then unlock the prison door down in the dungeon, right? Well, that's how you get Maria. Then head off to Stage 3' and get the Rondo of Blood icon in the tombstone. That's right -- an easter egg within an easter egg!
What a load of crap. Instead of making historic games accessible to players in their original forms, Konami has hidden them so well that I'd've never found them if it weren't for GameFAQs.
Labels: castlevania, konami, psp, sony
--jvm at 21:38
Comment
[ 5 ]
24 October 2007
Preorder bonus? No! Preorder punishment!
I picked up Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles for the PSP over lunch. The shop only had two copies, and didn't have any preorders, so I got their little 8-bit Simon Belmont figure. Hideous, absolutely hideous.
Bad Konami!
Bad Konami!Labels: castlevania, game stores, psp, sony
--jvm at 13:48
Comment
[ 3 ]
01 February 2007
YES!
Finally, a Castlevania for PSP and on top of it, it's a remake of Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night. Sony's not completely asleep at the switch, it would appear. Video here.
A year ago, the PSP scene felt like a wasteland to me. It's not saturated with games I want to play, like the PlayStation 2, but it is very respectable.
A year ago, the PSP scene felt like a wasteland to me. It's not saturated with games I want to play, like the PlayStation 2, but it is very respectable.
Labels: castlevania, psp, sony
--jvm at 21:58
Comment
[ 10 ]
27 January 2007
Woohoo! PSP Castlevania!
Via NeoGAF I've found out that the February issue of Play magazine has this statement:
Heck, with a good year of PSP titles I might even be content enough to hold off on the PlayStation 3 until late 2007. After all it is my PS3-killer.
There's an epic PSP surprise in the offing too...can you say Dracula X meets Symphony of the NightIf true, the PSP will have moved up yet another notch in my estimation. And if it's a port, or an enhanced version of Rondo of Blood, then my question from last summer will have been answered in a way I never saw coming. Could this be evidence that Sony is finally making the moves it needs to secure the exclusive games to make its systems stand out? Probably not. Watch Rondo of Blood hit XBLA first, or something similar.
Heck, with a good year of PSP titles I might even be content enough to hold off on the PlayStation 3 until late 2007. After all it is my PS3-killer.
Labels: castlevania, psp, sony
--jvm at 19:02
Comment
[ 0 ]
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