​​Retro review roundup featuring Castlevania III

It’s time for another retro review as another game got crossed off the list.

Dracula’s Curse is lifted

While it is weird that I Let’s Played/streamed the four numbered Castlevania games out of order (II, IV, I, III), things finally came to a wrap with Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse yesterday.

Castlevania III is a mixed bag. There are several creative new ideas at work here that add incredible depth to the game. Additional characters who all play very differently than Trevor Belmont. Branching paths and alternate stages to explore. Much longer and more varied stages (even though several of the bosses get recycled). Heck, even that one level where you could move back and forth between a higher and lower route was refreshing, even though it was executed in an awkward way.

But also in that bag was a desire by the designers to make the game much more challenging than what came before. Many of the later stages just hit you with cruel screen after cruel screen. Enemy placements intended to kill rather than challenge. Committing to movement before you can see enemy placements or spawns. Occasionally violating their design rule of setting checkpoints at every door, most infamously at the final one. In short, Konami overdid it and broke the fairness that was present in the first Castlevania‘s difficulty.

So when the good parts are better and the worse parts are worse than the original Castlevania, where does my overall comparison lie? Truth be told, I have to give it to plain old Castlevania. While it doesn’t have the same level of content and ambition, it’s a more consistent package that I enjoyed more.

The eventual completion of Dracula’s Curse leaves only Super C, Punchout!! and Willow unbeaten in my collection of NES games. It also leaves only the Game Boy games, Castlevania Chronicles, the MSX2’s Vampire Killer, the arcade’s Haunted Castle, The SNES’s Dracula XX, both N64 games, Lament of Innocence and all the Lords of Shadow games to beat in the series. Rather a lot, really.

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Offline games

While I know that in my spare time I should be warming up to finish off Digimon World: Next Order, or perhaps even looking at the rest of the stories in Persona 4 Arena at my own pace and not providing voiceover, my off-stream gaming has taken an odd turn. What actually seized my attention were a couple of relatively recent additions to Nintendo Switch Online’s not-Virtual Console library.

Harvest Moon

I never got very deep into most farming games, but the genre always had my curiosity. I’m getting a proper start with that now with the genre-defining Harvest Moon on the SNES, which I’ve read about extensively but never played.

The years have not been kind to Harvest Moon, as often is the case for experimental games with slapdash translations. It’s awkward, poorly balanced, glitchy, grindy, and more or less requires exploits to advance in any reasonable amount of time to get a good rating at the end. But it was also wildly unique for its day; Had I owned a copy then, I probably would have gone through it multiple times to try doing it differently… and then be mystified at the final score being off each time due to buffer overflows I’d have no way of knowing about.

Despite the simplicity and rough edges, the experience has not diminished my interest. I think I’ll eventually dip my toe into the Friends of Mineral Town remake or Stardew Valley when I come back around to the genre, just to see if the farming is still my least-favorite part of a farming sim.

Pokemon: Trading Card Game

I have never played the Pokemon CCG. Seeing as it’s bigger than ever, I thought I would use the Game Boy game to at least gleam the basics as they were when it all began. It was the first of surprisingly few video game adaptations of the card game (even fewer of which ever left Japan). Between the young age of the CCG at the time and its home on the Game Boy, it was a pretty basic game.

There’s enough NPCs with decks to play against to emulate the process of going to eight gyms and the Elite Four that occurs in normal Pokemon games. But there’s not enough NPCs that you won’t be grinding the ones in the first gym you go to over and over and over to winn copies of the four in-game booster packs in order to boost your collection to something useable long-term. Suffice it to say, there’s not much game here but it was at least useful as a learning tool.

My general impression of the card game itself is that it seems to be the result of the minimum amount of simplification necessary to reduce a Pokemon battle to something that could be played as a CCG. …So long as you have a crap-ton of tokens to keep track of everything.