Castlevania II: The Seal of the Curse (Famicom) Playthrough [English]
304A playthrough of Konami's 1987 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Famicom, Dracula II: Noroi no Fuuin (ドラキュラⅡ呪いの封印, lit. "Dracula II: The Seal of the Curse").
Dracula II: Noroi no Fuuin, released in the fall of 1987 for the Famicom Disk System, is the original Japanese version of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest ( • Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (NES) Playth... ), which was localized and released for the NES in North America in 1988 and in PAL territories in 1990.
Simon's Quest is my favorite game in the Castlevania series, and I wanted to do something special with it for this Halloween season. I haven't tried any of the fan-made translation patches that are out there so I can't speak to their quality, but to give the game the royal treatment, I rolled up my sleeves and translated the entire thing myself. (Please note that this is not a game patch. All of the text was superimposed over the footage in a video editor.)
The official English version of the game regularly gets blasted for the quality of its translation, and while it does have its share of glaring errors and omissions, it's more faithful to the original script than people give it credit for. I think what hampers it is how terse and literal it is, and how that tends to obscure important information. With this translation, I did my best to address those issues while staying true to the Japanese text. I hope you find it as interesting to watch as I did to work on.
The soundtrack in this version is also pretty neat. The music is the same, but the FDS's wavetable channel gives it a very different character to what we heard on the NES. I prefer the NES versions of the tunes - the sampled drums give them a lot of oomph - but the FDS music is very good in its own right.
(The loading screens are a bit of a pain, though!)
In this playthrough, I finished the game in seven days for the best ending, but I also included the normal and bad endings at end of the video, starting from 1:45:06. The endings were already in "English," so I've left them untouched.
I hope you guys enjoy the translation, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how this version compares to the NES game!
(And if you like Castlevania music, perhaps you'd like to check out some of my arrangements done on original SNES hardware! You can find one of my SNES remixes of the town music at • ♫THE SILENCE OF DAYLIGHT #2 (Castlevania I... , and a compilation of several of my Castlevania SNES mixes at • ♫Castlevania SPC700 Collection: NintendoCo... )
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