Castlevania (NES) Playthrough
860A playthrough of Konami's 1987 action-platformer for the NES, Castlevania.
Happy October, everybody!
This video shows the first three loops through the game. The second begins at 28:21 and the third at 56:34.
Simon Belmont is on a holy quest to destroy the prince of darkness. Dracula, however, has laid a century in wait for the man who would wield the Vampire Killer, and he has prepared well for this moment. Over the course of eighteen stages, Simon will have to fight his way though the keep’s entry hall, a clock tower, the caves beneath the castle, and the morgue in order to make it to the belfry to challenge the grand master.
The first of a legendary series, Konami’s Castlevania was one of the earliest third-party NES efforts to rival the quality of Nintendo's own in-house works, and the game stands as a testament to the skill and passion of its creators.
The gameplay is excellent. The controls are responsive and reliable and the game provides clear, immediate feedback for everything that you do. The stiffness of Simon's movements might be a bit jarring at first, but once you've acclimated to the game's feel, you'll come to appreciate the consistency that stems from the rigidity. You always know exactly when and where your jumps and whip strikes will land, and the game's difficulty is balanced with this in mind.
It's a challenging game that's not afraid to punish you for screwing up, but there are few moments when it feels legitimately unfair. There's a clear way to maneuver through or around nearly any situation without a scratch, boss fights included. If I may offer some advice to anyone trying to improve on their game, it would be to not panic. I know that's easier said than done, but blindingly whipping at thin air is a sure-fire way to get yourself killed. The fleamen and medusa heads will make total mincemeat of you.
I can't say I'm much a fan of the game's glitchiness, though. Has anyone else ever noticed how prone Castlevania is to crashing? It happened to me three times as I was trying to record this video: once at Death, once at Dracula, and once in the final room of enemies before the staircase up to Dracula's tower. In each instance, the game hard crashed after I'd thrown three boomerangs that had hit candles. Given all the other moving elements in those scenes (the huge enemies, Drac's fireballs, and Death's scythes), it seems as though the game hits a hard sprite limit and chokes. After the third time it happened, I finally remembered that I had already learned this lesson many times as a kid: don't use the boomerang's multi-shot in busy areas. I have to wonder how the programmers never picked up on the problem.
Considering its 1987 release date, Castlevania‘s graphics and sound are first rate. The backdrops were a marked step up from the norm in their artistry - for all the hardware limitations, their ability to evoke a sense of something far grander than the NES could actually paint on the screen is pretty amazing. The music is the same. It's not loaded with arpeggiated chords, funky time signature changes, or drum samples, but it was one of the early examples of a third-party game with music that actually resembled real music. The themes were all memorable and echoed the character of their settings, and the instrumentation made for some nice, mellow listening. In an era where most games blasted you with ten-second loops of ear-piercingly shrill square wave noise, Castlevania's music stood out. It still does - just look at how many times these tracks have been officially remixed over the years!
Even taking into account its technical issues, it's not hard to see why the first Castlevania is still such a revered game. Technologies may age, sensibilities may evolve, but quality is timeless.
Also be sure to check out the arcade version, Vs. Castlevania, at https://youtu.be/Wm_wz6nGDNM
(In case anyone is wondering, I did have a video of this game up before, but it was seven years old and the video quality wasn't up to snuff. This is a brand new playthrough to replace the old one, and this one is much more thorough.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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