Castlevania: Classic Gaming (NES)


	Platform NES Genre Platformer Publisher Konami Developer Konami Released 1987
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“I’m sure I remember playing [Castlevania]! I remember I was so pissed because I couldn’t jump off the stairs!”

“Everyone felt that way, G------. It was very frustrating! According to statistical records, the teenage suicide rate increased dramatically in that year!”

--Anonymous Nostalgic Reminiscing

Many years ago I was discussing the virtues of the various games in the Zelda series with a friend, who learned that I had finished Zelda 2. He really made a big deal out of that, calling it “unbeatable”, and actually asked me to show him how. I didn’t mention that I thought the game was pretty easy up until the very end (maybe he thought I meant Zelda’s Second Quest). This is a handy comparison to start us off: not only did Link and Simon apparently learn to grunt together, but they also share the bad habit of leaping backwards into bottomless pits when struck (bunkmates, perhaps?). So on that anecdotal note, I believe the first thing I need to say about the perennial 1987 Castlevania is that I actually finished the game, once. By the end I was far too numb to feel any exhilaration, and I think the credits were over before the victory had even sunk in. I know there are many more difficult games out there than the first in the long-running Castlevania series (like Ghosts ‘n Goblins…), but I don’t think I need to know about them…and judging from that opening statement, I’m not the only one. However, I do think it’s a strange sentiment anyway (if it’s accurate); I know from personal experience that Castlevania helped invent the credo “Memorize the Level or Die!” (years later, I remember the horrifying placement of every monster), and I never felt the urge to leap off one of the many-thousand staircases – not even experimentally. Those glue-encrusted stairs saved my neck on more than one occasion from an out-of-control bald eagle.

Back in the 1980s there were a whole lot more “no-name” video stores scattered around than there are now, and although I wasn’t too interested in watching movies at the time, I sure loved looking at the video covers in the horror film section. Whether it was a rotted corpse grinning seductively in expectation of being picked off the shelf, an innocuous household object lit to look “sinister”, or just a boring pool of liquid red, I could stare at them for hours. This must have been a widespread social impulse that a perceptive individual at Konami caught on to, for Castlevania comes from the same tradition, and that’s how it first came to my attention, right next to Castle of Blood or the like in the horror section; I suspect some miserly parent took it away from their kid and thoughtfully decided to re-alphabetize it in the wrong section. The classical image of the famished-yet-recently-sated vampire strongly appealed to me (yes, a single drop of blood once appeared on Nintendo box-art!) – and since I had recently become obsessed with films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and King Kong vs. Godzilla, the concept of Indiana Jones vs. Count Dracula was a no-brainer. How could I refuse? Besides, little did I know Castlevania was a boarding house, with itinerant horror icons lazing shiftlessly about in their own private wings: Frankenstein’s monster, the mummy, Medusa, Death himself…

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Fortunately, the legendary difficulty didn’t kick in immediately. Castlevania has what I believe to be perhaps the quintessential “first level”, and I suspect it was deliberately designed to come across that way; hence, any conceivable “challenge” was funneled out to force you to pay attention to the level’s layout instead. In fact, Castlevania begins with something unheard of in

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any side-scroller up to that point in time: empty space. A peaceful stroll up the garden path, with no danger or threat, to the castle entrance; and then by aping the moment in the original Super Mario Bros. where the main character enters the forbidding end-level castle, Castlevania stakes its claim as the true successor, the next evolutionary step, in the grand “side-scrolling tradition”. And that preliminary level, once inside, isn’t even particularly interesting: basically straight ahead, left to right, a few unimportant staircases, slight detour. But virtually all the succeeding games in the Castlevania series paid some homage to this layout (History repeats itself: Symphony for the Night, aiming to present itself as “timeless”, explicitly copied Castlevania’s first level in detail.).

Ghosts ‘n Goblins beat Castlevania to the concept of the “malleable weapon system”, but I think Castlevania does it much better – even though many of its weapons seem to be lifted wholesale from the earlier game. Arthur could, somewhat randomly, periodically switch out his primary weapon; unfortunately, each new option generally proved to be useless in its own unique way. Simon’s best overall weapon, his whip, remains constant; instead, secondary weapons alternate, and each generally proves to be quite useful in different circumstances. Using a secondary weapon requires a secondary power supply of hearts, traditionally the item signifying restored health. Fortunately, there’s still an item to cover that area too; some of the walls of Castlevania contain a ready-to-serve pork chop when you break them open (well, since the resident spends so much time hibernating, I’m sure all that masonry helps keep the tender juices of the meat from spoiling). Hmmm, I hope that was pork chop.

Castlevania’s soundtrack is more of a mixed bag. Individually, the music tracks, besides being quite catchy, have a propulsive forward momentum; the music goes to such length to spur you on it actually saved my life a handful of times when I found myself having to spontaneously react to three or four threats at once. But despite that, most of the pieces are strangely forgettable, and worse, a few (such as the subterranean river) sound painfully derivative. It interests me that the two lone “iconic” moments of the game – the beginning and end – are the two moments that get the indelible, “iconic” music.

And I do often wonder at the game’s difficulty. Most of the enemies move and fire very slowly compared to you, and go down after only one or two lashes. And they also all have very predictable movements and patterns, and thus easily exploitable weaknesses. Nor is there any gap in the game that I would call a particularly hazardous leap; for the most part everything is easily negotiable and untrying. It’s true that you lose your weapon, your enhancers, and all your hearts when you die, but I rarely used the secondary weapons against anything other than the boss anyway and your other supplies can be replenished fairly quickly – and you get an unlimited number of continues. Yet Castlevania demands an intense concentration and harbors plenty of cheap shots. Like most of its contemporaries, when you finish Castlevania you can play through it again on a higher difficulty level – meaning…Medusa heads in every level? Thanks, but no thanks.

The platform layout itself may not be too exciting, but the backgrounds are absolutely fascinating. If you try to stop and take a serious, appreciative look at the background design, it looks horrid -- a random, jumbled mess of single pixels, varyingly colored, placed so that they overlap and clash horrifically. But this proves to be the most devious trick of Chateau Castlevania. I find that, through the process of not looking closely at the backdrops at all, the disorienting patterns snap sharply into focus, and the effect is astonishing. It’s not just that you can see the moss on the castle walls and the mortar between individual bricks; you can actually spot where the lichen is growing on top of even more lichen (with the wall still barely visible behind the growth) and where the lime is crumbling away. An awkward streak of white pixels transforms into the castle light reflecting off the protruding edge of a wall; objects far off in the distance suddenly have a relationship to the objects closer to the foreground. The sheer level of texture in Castlevania is absolutely unprecedented; very few games, I believe, even at the end of the 8-bit Nintendo’s life-span were a match for it.

Games like Zelda, Kid Icarus, and Metroid all came complete with manuals breathtakingly illustrated with gorgeous colors and full of circumstantial, almost unnecessary information; I think they’re worth almost as much as the actual game (and probably more now). Castlevania, as a series, has ultimately earned the same respect and longevity of these others, but I think its manual represents a major step backward. The sketched representations of the monsters here are particularly sad, looking like they were accidentally misplaced from the manual for Mickey Mousecapade.

Did anyone ever stop to wonder at the term Castlevania? I think it’s a fascinating turn-of-phrase: blending a manor/estate into a geographic landscape. The original Japanese title, Akumajo Dracula (something like “The Demonic Castle Dracula”), doesn’t have the same effect at all. So although I don’t believe the original Castlevania has aged particularly well, I still think it’s a very important piece of work for that reason, embedded in the title: I believe it was the very first game to impart a genuine grasp of architecture, a sense of constructed space, to the game world (a map in between levels helps reinforce the idea, though not as much as the levels themselves). In the very first image of the game, Simon struts assuredly up to the front gate, stops dead center, turning his back to the screen for the only time in the game, to regard the castle that represents the totality of the game world. It’s a very confident image, letting us know that, despite its intimidating construction, Simon will ultimately be its master. In an enormous break from both horror and video game conventions, there is no woman to be rescued, no feminine presence anywhere in the game (Medusa doesn’t count!); instead, the treasure being fought over here is the castle itself. When Dracula is destroyed, Simon, having assumed control of the castle, wills it to collapse. Although I don’t necessarily like the title of the game in Japan, I think the Japanese box art is revealing: it’s basically the exact same image, but Simon is instead framed on both sides by the rocky walls of a mountain pass, opening into a valley with Castlevania spread out before him, Simon Belmont’s own perverse Shangri-La. It couldn’t be clearer: more than just a place, Castlevania is a state of mind.

(And Blue Oyster Cult got it wrong. Fear, fear the Reaper with all your might.)

Brendan Lynch

(September 10, 2006)


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