Castlevania Anniversary Collection

Collection is up and running smoothly! Controls are spot-on. Very, very satisfied. It's sort of surreal, actually. If SNES Dracula X was on this, it'd be perfect for me.

tav7623 I have played (but not beaten) Bloodlines. I like it a lot, and will be playing it the most for now. Really great to play it with a controller; it plays a lot faster and tighter than I remembered from my limited experiences with it in the past. I have also 100% cleared Portrait of Ruin, which I thought was entertaining and had a great concept with the dual characters, though was not a personal favorite of mine overall. (I thought the stand-alone painting levels should have played more like a Classicvania to represent its connection to Bloodlines.) I'm happy this collection includes the GB entries. I like them both a good deal, even with the sluggish control issues in The Adventure. They just have a lot of clever, unique ideas.

freddythemonkey I hear what you're saying. There's trade-offs, but you said former over the latter, so you're going with SCV4 even though you really like Bloodlines?

RichterB Good to hear you were able to pick up a copy and are thoroughly enjoying it. Also thanks for the detailed analysis of Adventure Rebirth. Hopefully Konami will re-release it, maybe on the next collection (fingers crossed), because it sounds like a very interesting game.

Managed to beat Bloodlines with both characters now and it's certainly a great game but I don't think it will ever dethrone SCV4 as my favorite Classicvania. To me the things that stand out most for Bloodlines are it's unique level design and enemy and boss character designs that are refreshing but one of the things I would have enjoyed gameplay wise would be more areas that require John Morris' whipslinging move. Eric Lecarde's spear jump by contrast is a lot more useful by comparison (and virtually turns the game into a cake walk if you decide to use it to its full potential). Also in retrospect some of the bosses are virtually perfect encounters like the gear boss in the munitions factory while other bosses and sub-bosses essentially only have a single attack.

Definitely a title I'll return to in the future. Once I've played the other games I'll give expert mode a try.

freddythemonkey Let me know if you find that wallmeat in the later stages. Was looking for it as well to no avail

I think he's referring to the move at the 1 min 5 second mark in this video 

tav7623 That is exactly the move I was talking about. I didn't realize you could spam it like that. Yikes. I didn't see it in the manual, though. As for whip-swinging in IGA's games, I think I saw he added it finally in Harmony of Despair...but not exactly the best place to use it, probably.

Anyway, hyugakojiro , I'm focusing mostly on John's quest right now, after sampling both characters. I noticed you can up the lives, and I almost did, but I stuck with 2, just because I guess the creators thought that was the default. It's extreme as you say. But in about an hour, in one playthrough, I got to the Palace of Versailles...where I got ambushed and crushed by a falling chandelier on my final continue. The Gear Golem ate up a lot of my lives before I realized its weak spot--. But you were right, the attack pattern on that one was genius. I also lost a lot of lives on the Gargoyle at the end of the (incredible) Tower of Pisa; kept getting knocked off. (That fight had shades of a certain Curse of the Moon fight, IIRC.) But I sailed up to that point pretty well without a continue. Reading the manual was super helpful.

The ebook is eye-opening, I thumbed through it, and there was originally a Grant/Sypha hybrid ninja character and viking character to go with John and Eric?! Also, it looks like Rondo's opening stage was originally for Super Castlevania IV, if I saw right.

I then jumped over to Simon's Quest for a little bit, and tried a theory of mine. Well, actually, I tested it on the original NES hardware and it worked about a half a year ago, but I never saw through my experiment to its logical conclusion. So, you know how you're forced right by the game at the start? Well, I have successfully gotten left with a combo technique of jumping and attacking in the poison swamp. It's not really game-breaking or glitching; it's just skill- and practice-based, trial-and-error. Now, when I tried it on the NES, I found that I couldn't do a lot of that side of the world without holy water and the right crystal. But I noticed the Morning Star whip could be acquired. So, for the first time ever, on this collection, I bought the Morning Star whip after escaping the swamp, and now I've returned to the starting point of the game with that upgrade, which makes a world of difference. I've never gotten the best ending on this game, but maybe this time I will. Either way, it's fun to find the quest can open up. I haven't experimented to see what other sequence breaks can be done once you have some crystals and holy water. I don't know that I've heard people try this much, but maybe it's common.

Lastly, I can confirm the sound glitch and freeze glitch in CV1. I got up to the screen right before the Dracula staircase climb, and it froze on me with too many harpies and fleamen around. Hopefully this will be patched when the Japanese DLC is added in the future.

I gotta say, as attractive as the 16-bit games are, and as absolutely amazing as Castlevania III is, I don't often give enough credit to the first two NES games these days. #1 has a great flow to its action, and Simon's Quest is just so atmospheric; it was the first Castlevania game to really capture my attention/imagination way back when. Bottom line, this collection is awesome, and I love how they chose Belmont's Revenge's select sound effect for the opening. That's next-level fandom. I second wanting a collection that finishes up the Classicvanias, though I wouldn't be averse to including SotN in there. To me, it's sort of a transition title, like Simon's Quest, before it actually became a set-in-stone formula for the franchise. Atmosphere-wise, it almost feels more connected to the 16-bit run than what follows. But I imagine if you split up any of the IGAvanias in such a collection, there'd be outrage.

freddythemonkey :

-I don't know where you stand on game experiences, but I would really encourage you to give Simon's Quest a good try without the guide. (Without quantifying it with a rank number, which is sometimes unfair, it's always been a cherished favorite of mine.) The villagers and hint books in the game will give you wild (sometimes false) gossip and non sequiturs alongside legitimate tips and information, but that creates a really organic world that wasn't typical for the time, and still isn't today even in stuff like Breath of the Wild. (Though the way the exploring rewards checking nooks and crannies is similar to Breath of the Wild.) I honestly believe there is maybe only two instances in the game where a guide might be needed--which I had spoiled for me as a kid--but it'd be a good experiment to see if you could figure them out without a guide, because the game actually does have clues, cryptic as they are, to solve those particular puzzles, I believe. Maybe only use the guide when you feel absolutely stumped. It's up to you, but the game is more engrossing when you're wandering and figuring it out--that's kind of the point of this one. The combat/platforming is secondary, and the bosses are...well, pushovers. It's basically an IGAvania, but the platforming is still more consequential than any IGAvania and the world design has a bigger sense of scope/interactivity. (I'm kind of irked IGA or someone else didn't build off this intriguing formula at Konami, whether in 2D or 3D. There are vestiges of its ideas in games, especially SotN and CV64 and LoD, but a full-fledged follow-up wouldn't have been a bad idea.) As I said above, I'm just discovering now some sequence-breaking techniques that add new wrinkles to the game, but the game's quest itself is very memorable. That said, you will at minimum likely need a booklet/manual to tell you about the game's systems--what items do and about the game's hearts being currency, experience points, and powering sub-weapons. Know that when you lose all your lives, your experience points and hearts are set back to zero, but you keep your current level of power. You can find the manual from Nintendo here: www.nintendo.co.jp/clv/manuals/en/index.html In my opinion, by the end of it, it's still one of the most creepy, unsettling entries in the Castlevania franchise, despite it being only 8-bits. Bottom line, while I understand the sentiment, and this no intended offense to anyone, I think this game has gotten an unfair reputation to a large extent and it's created jaded or overly concerned attitudes across the internet toward it that sort of miss the point of the ambitious things the game is trying to do. It's definitely flawed, but not broken, I'd say.

-I too am going the pure default route with Bloodlines. Haven't gotten many cracks at it yet, and am using the weaker John, but I've been pleased with my progress so far. Considering I trained enough to beat The Adventure Rebirth on Hard in one sitting, I think I can handle this, given time. I'm trying to decide if passwords you've earned can be used in beating this game. I think that's legit, because it's a part of the game and not technically a save state or change of the default settings you'd have on Genesis.

-For SCV4, I just always treat the platforming as I would an NES game, which means being prepared to get to the edge of platform before jumping. You're right, though, that many of these games have to be treated as their own thing, especially if you don't have a lot of experience jumping between them on their original hardware. For this set, I'm lucky enough that I've owned copies of these for a long time, with the exception of Bloodlines and Kid Dracula. I can only imagine how tricky it is to adjust to The Adventure GB's platforming when coming off another game, particularly any past the NES.

- I too have trained to be able to fly through CV1 when I used to think it was tough--though Frankenstein's monster and Dracula still trip me up more than I'd like. I've found that holy water is the best sub weapon overall for speed-running, despite the fame of the boomerangs.

-CV3 is partially as hard as you want it to be. I've beaten it with all combinations of characters over the years, and I find the North American NES version totally manageable, with the slight exception of the change in checkpoints for the last level, which I admit can be a serious pain, especially the first time through. (Though nowhere remotely near the shenanigans pulled by Ninja Gaiden 1 on NES with its last level, where if you die to the last boss, you get thrown back like two levels.) Here's two tricks to get into the game's groove:

1.) Pick the easiest and shortest path to Dracula by avoiding the lower route as much as possible. (The only reason to stay on the lower route is to meet Alucard and see some new, very memorable, but difficult stages.) There is one path that can reduce the game's length to roughly ten stages, and to get locked on that path, take the pirate ship over to the red tower, not the swamp route.


-After playing all these games, I must say I am left with no doubt that consequential platforming and Castlevania go hand in hand, and trying to move the series into 3D without acknowledging that, which more or less every 3D attempt after the N64 ones did, is just a losing proposition. I know gamers don't like "jumping" in games as much any more, but the evidence is just overwhelming for this franchise.