You mean jumping on those platforms? I tried but it was very tricky to time my landing :S
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Castlevania Community Thread | What is a man?!
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Decided to beat the last 3 stages, but holy shit were the final 4 bosses a pain in the ass. Slogra was annoying, Death was annoying. These speedrunners make it look all to easy :V
All in all I loved the game and it is among my top 10 Castlevania games, of which I haven't actually played and finished 10 of so far :V
All in all I loved the game and it is among my top 10 Castlevania games, of which I haven't actually played and finished 10 of so far :V
Off the top of my head, Castlevania games that I haven't finished yet include
Castlevania 1-3
Dracula X (might skip it since I heard it wasn't very good)
Rondo of Blood PCE
SotN
The N64 games
Castlevania Chronicles
The PS2 games
Circle of the Moon and the first Aria game on GBA
Aria NDS and Eccelcia
The GB Castlevania game
The Castlevania Adventure remake that was released on the Wii
The fanmade ZX Spectrum Castlevania game
The Lecrade Castlevania games
The SEGA Castlevania game
Rondo of Blood PSP (I don't care what y'all think of it, it has Norio Wakamoto as Dracula, I'm playing that ish)
Norio Wakamoto was already in the JPN SoTN the VA of Dracula :P
Dracula X on SNES is inferior to Rondo of Blood, so yeah you can skip that.
You have the best games still ahead so enjoy :)
I love Castlevania i got into it as a kid by lending Circle of the Moon from a friend it was awesome.
My favorite is Order of Ecclesia.
That game mixes classic + modern Castlevania so well. Having open stages and finally the castle was awesome and Shanoa was a great character.
My favorite is Order of Ecclesia.
That game mixes classic + modern Castlevania so well. Having open stages and finally the castle was awesome and Shanoa was a great character.
Well the last boss fight against Dracula is not really fun with those pits, I only played it once though.
I agree on the Norio part :P
I spent a whole day trying to beat that Dracula. In the end, it was just personal.
Maybe my most useless acomplishment ever
Seems we agree here, not sure what Konami was thinking with that. I felt good after beating him though.
Can we all take this opportunity to appreciate Richter's OG design from the Rondo of Blood cover?
I mean this is shonen as hell.
We got Richter donning the blue European monster slaying martial arts gi raising his fists to the heavens as his deceleration of slaying Dracula by smashing the Vampire Killer into his stupid sexy bishi face while donning the WHITE PURE HACHIMAKI OF JUSTICE!
I mean this is shonen as hell.
We got Richter donning the blue European monster slaying martial arts gi raising his fists to the heavens as his deceleration of slaying Dracula by smashing the Vampire Killer into his stupid sexy bishi face while donning the WHITE PURE HACHIMAKI OF JUSTICE!
Rondo of Blood going full anime is oe of the beast and weirdest moves ever
That's honestly the only bad point of the game for me, but also i can't see how a more classic soundtrack would have worked with the game.
So, I had a terrible day yesterday (some shit's been happening in my personal life) came home to play the original Castlevania on the NES (mind you I've never beaten it yet).
Wow, just wow. I managed to beat it after 5 hours of intense and fun action. I just remember how nostalgic it was once night came by and I managed to reach Dracula's quarters. Never have I had that feeling in a video game, as I beat Dracula for the first time, it was just magnificent.
Well moral of the story is, if you ever feel down, pop in Castlevania and go vampire killing. Now I really got to play Simon's Quest.
Wow, just wow. I managed to beat it after 5 hours of intense and fun action. I just remember how nostalgic it was once night came by and I managed to reach Dracula's quarters. Never have I had that feeling in a video game, as I beat Dracula for the first time, it was just magnificent.
Well moral of the story is, if you ever feel down, pop in Castlevania and go vampire killing. Now I really got to play Simon's Quest.
I just got a 3.5 in an assignement (after a story of never getting anything lower than a 7) and i'm feeling pretty shitty right now. Maybe i'll do just that.
Glad to see Castlevania 64 love, it seems the reception of those games is growing over time (when people used to say they 'sucked' likely having not played them) in comparison to the PS2 games which were just forgettable.
Igarashi's finally gone, but unfortunately Konami basically has too. Maybe we'll get some Switch games after Bomberman did so well.
Igarashi's finally gone, but unfortunately Konami basically has too. Maybe we'll get some Switch games after Bomberman did so well.
High-goddamn-five.
I disagree, I prefer the original 64 slightly. LOD is slightly more polished, but doesn't really contain the whole of 64 (snippets of voice acting and sounds for the Reinhardt/Carre quests are gone) and some of the music has been remixed and is IMO worse. Might just be personal preference.
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I tried playing Harmony of Dissonance, but it just wasn't very fun. I'm not really sure why I disliked it, but something just felt off about it. Which is really weird, since I liked all the other IGAvanias I played a lot. Why was HoD so much worse than his other games?
Because instead of beign a full fledged Castlevania it was a mixture of tech demo and me too from Iga. Its my least liked castlevania, even over Adventure.
Judgement?
Adventure gets too much hate too. It's glitchy and unforgiving and has slowdown, but cool castle traps and killer music, and easily the best looking Game Boy game at its release. Maybe you had to be there.
I was there, actually. Even as a kid i noticed the constant slowdown and how off the game felt.
Also, judgement is one of those games i'll praise forever. One of muy favorite Wii purchases
Judgement is very well done for what it is. But what it is made absolutely no sense and was not what Wii owners or fans or the market wanted.
A Castlevania fighting game collecting all the classic characters... oh but they've all been redesigned sorry fans. Who greenlit such an insane idea.
What do you mean by this? Did he not really understand what to do because it was the first Castlevania game he was in charge of?
I think Harmony of D. was the very first Castlevania I played.
I liked it :P
They can have it be multiplat and sell more on a Ninty system for all I care, but spread that gaming goodness please.
I liked it :P
I'd rather the title not be exclusive to one system.
They can have it be multiplat and sell more on a Ninty system for all I care, but spread that gaming goodness please.
I don't even really mind, but Bomberman was a proven success on the platform so it seems the most likely avenue for them to go. Nintendo may even get involved as they likely did with Bomberman and Capcom's Street Fighter II:Minimum Effort edition.
Thing is, lots of third party games (hell, ever 1st party games) weren't what the market or the fans wanted, but some of them were pretty good, so in the end you learned to just accept them. The design thing something i always found dumb. I mean
Nobody asked for bishonen Simon Belmont
Or bishonen Alucard, for that matter
Or old, dignified Dracula
Or, well... i guess you see my point, don't you?
No, well... It was the first Castlevania he was fully in charge of, but what i mean is that both the timing and features of the game makes me feel that Harmony of Dissonance is looking at Circle of the Moon and saying "I can do better than those usurpers... Oh, and their games are apocriphe now"
I mean, in both Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance
- Your friend, with whom you starts the adventure, betrays you
- Your only weapon is a whip
- Magic items acts as modifiers for the main character's abilities
I don't know, i always saw Iga as an egoistical beign, claiming the Castlevania series as his and leaving out of the timeline every single post-Symphony of the Night game not developed by his crew.
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Harmony of Dissonance was pretty cool for what its worth actually. I mean yeah the graphics are lacking in some places, and the midi samples while piss poor produced some excellent tracks:
https://youtu.be/e3y7S6YmUFg
https://youtu.be/G9H_JJqjFWg
And the combat/magic were the simplest in any Igavania, and easily the best ones in the series. You eithet had a magic tip for the whip to deal extra damage based on weaknesses, or use the spells combined with your whip to dole out some magic. No familiars like in CoD, or the ridiculous soul grinding in the Sorrow games. Just spells and subweapons.
The castle has the most interesting layout of them all imo, and having a core which transports you to a mirror world was so fun. And you also have a bitching room to deck out in furniture for whatever reasons. Overall not the best GBA game, but I enjoyed it more then Circle of the Moon. If I had to rank both eras based on personal taste.
GBA
Aria of Sorrow
Harmony of Dissonance
Circle of the Moon
DS
Portrait of Ruin
Order of Ecclesia
Dawn of Sorrow
https://youtu.be/e3y7S6YmUFg
https://youtu.be/G9H_JJqjFWg
And the combat/magic were the simplest in any Igavania, and easily the best ones in the series. You eithet had a magic tip for the whip to deal extra damage based on weaknesses, or use the spells combined with your whip to dole out some magic. No familiars like in CoD, or the ridiculous soul grinding in the Sorrow games. Just spells and subweapons.
The castle has the most interesting layout of them all imo, and having a core which transports you to a mirror world was so fun. And you also have a bitching room to deck out in furniture for whatever reasons. Overall not the best GBA game, but I enjoyed it more then Circle of the Moon. If I had to rank both eras based on personal taste.
GBA
Aria of Sorrow
Harmony of Dissonance
Circle of the Moon
DS
Portrait of Ruin
Order of Ecclesia
Dawn of Sorrow
I guess Konami didn't care enough to have any established guidelines. I mean, i'm with you in the fact that some of the redesigns are laughable. Obata did completely misunderstood the features that made some characters unique.
I really enjoyed Shinigami Death, though.
That's... no exactly true. On the surface it is the simplest, but be it a bug or a feature, backdash and dash were able to cancel almost every Juste's attacks once the main attack animation ended, giving the combat an extra layer of depht... and also making it piss easy.
Fun fact: At the time HoD came out, i was getting myself into advanced techniques on fighting games (Guity Gear X, mostly) and dash cancel on HoD just came out as natural for me. I recall only dying once in the game.
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I meant in terms of weapon variety and what magic you can use. Like I said,. Aria and Dawn had ridiculous amounts of grinding to collect souls and power up your bonuses to even be useful, Portrait had a lot of things to juggle between to two characters, and Ecclesia having one glyph system for everything was a bit tedious when it came to juggling different sets. And I really loathe the tarot cards of Circle.
Not really, bishonen Simon Belmont is a semi-disgrace. He's always been depicted as a Conan-type character, right from the start, not a nancy-boy wearing furs and eyeliner. And it Certainly didn't match the game it was done for.
What I was getting at is that art style change, and making a fighting game - either would have been enough of a stretch from expectation as to be a good original move. If it had been an action game with that art style I think it had a chance at being well received and feeling fresh. Or even a fighting game with all the character's classic looks may have been taken better. Put them together and it was just completely alien to the series.
That's how I've always taken it. If he were serious about cleaning up the timeline, Vampire Killer/Bloodlines was by far the most problematic, trying to shove in Stoker's novel (a story about a sexual predator essentially, when Castlevania is about cheesy monster movie Dracula) was severely problematic and stupid, and it (pathetically) contradicts the novel in several ways too, rendering the concept moot anyway. The only explanation for dropping everything he personally wasn't involved in post-Symphony I can make sense of is insecurity and pettiness. He ended up making more bad games than good on his tenure too IMO, and they were all very derivative and all had fucking RPG stuff shoved into action games for no good reason except 'nocturne did it' (except the remake on PSP).
I loved the card system in Circle of the Moon. Lots of different combinations and some of them quite unique and fun to use too, though it was somewhat annoying that the game doesn't tell you what each combiation does until you figure out what triggers their effect, and some of them were not obvious. The spell books in Harmony felt like a more limited and heavily simplified version of the cards in Circle, and since the game was so easy they weren't particularly useful either. That said, I'm a bit biased towards CotM since it was the first Metroidvania game I ever played (and the first Castlevania since Dracula's Curse on NES) and it absolutely blew me away when it released. I can't even remember why I decided to buy it along with GBA, but I'm glad I did. While it's not my favorite among the IGA/Metroidvanias, I still love it since it has a very unique feel to it compared to all the IGA games.
Or, as IGA himself put it, the Kobe games simply were never intended to be canon entries to begin with. I haven't played the N64 games in ages so I can't remember their stories specifically (other than that according to them and Circle of the Moon Dracula apparently started resurrecting every ten years or so), but Circle very clearly goes out of it's way to ignore basic lore stuff by replacing Belmonts with Baldwins and Vampire Killer with "Hunter Whip." The game certainly isn't any better or worse whether or not it is part of the series main storyline or not. CV Legends got straight up removed though, but aside from that, I honestly don't think IGA really had anything particularly against the Kobe games (and he did include Cornell in Judgment), as much as he was just far more concerned with having a "consistent" story/timeline than any remotely sane person should be when it comes to Castlevania.D.Lo said:
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This reasonement is outrageous to me.
- First, Iga himself ignored the 100 year rule with Curse of Darkness and Portrait Ruin.
- Second, It was never established that the Belmonts were the only ones capable to oppose Dracula or that the Vampire Killer was the only whip capable to do so. In fact, Rinaldo getting out of Walter Bernhard's domains alive means that other alchemic whip could also be created. Broadeing the lore is not equal to ignore it.
- Third, in both Legacy of Darkness and Circle of the Moon Dracula is resurrected with a ritual and not by natural means, needing a sacrifice to get back his full power, wich means both are also under the exception that allows PoR and CoD to skip the 100 years rule.
I do, but not agaisnt Konami Kobe but agaisnt non KCET teams.
Also, Cornell is in Judgment because Iga wanted a Werewolf in the game, and as such Legacy of Darkness unnoficially returned to the canon, proving again that there weren't any reasons to keep the game out of the canon but because Iga said so.
If Order of Ecclesia didn't exist and Iga wanted a character whose weapon could shapeshift, Circle of the Moon would have become canon too.
It really doesn't broaden the lore at all, though. It just replaces one thing with another without even slightest attempt to address or explain it any further. I mean, there's nothing strictly contradicting Circle from being part of the canon, but then again it doesn't really connect to any of the past games in any meaningful way either (not even the other Kobe games as I recall) making it very easy for me to believe that the developers simply weren't all that concerned about whether or not their game was part of the series' ongoing lore. Of course it's entirely possible the developers might have had more plans for the these characters and ideas but were never able explore them further. Or that Ecclesia's story concept of other vampire hunters picking up the slack in the 1800s during Belmont's absence actually came from people who had worked on Circle of the Moon, as some of them did end up on IGA's team, but who knows. I just find it curious how Circle's status on series canon always seems to hit a nerve for some people, even though as things currently are, it makes very little difference to either the game itself or the series overall story.
And yeah, I do agree the 10 year resurrection gap point is kind of moot (and just to be clear, I'm not sure if IGA has ever said anything in regards to that), since Dracula does pop up more often than every hundred years in both past games as well as IGA's own. But it is pretty amusingeven if you consider the Kobe games to be just canon unto themselves, and still you would have Dracula appear in 1820s, 1830s, 1840s and 1850s and even more if you factor in Rondo and Symphony!
For what it's worth, I certainly do not intend to defend IGA's stories or the some of the choices he has made, but I also don't think he was acting out of spite towards other teams, either. By the time he was in a position to make changes to the timeline, the other teams had already been dissolved so it would seem odd if he was holding a grudge against them for some reason. By that logic he should have also gone after the older pre-SOTN games in the series.
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But... why should it? I mean, Bloodlines established the fact that Castlevania was not the story of the Belmont clan vs Dracula but the struggle of mankind agaisnt Dracula (Iga seemed obssesed with that idea) Until Portrait of Ruin it was never fully explained how the Vampire Killer ended in the Morris clan's possession, and in general, until the series' later years every game was basically self contained, with a few connection here and there. There was really no need to.
Fun fact about this is that Lament of Innocence and Order of Ecclesia both retroactively validate Circle of the Moon. Order of Ecclesia could be perfectly intentional as you say, but Lament of Innocence, wich released two years after CotM, surely establish a few facts
- The Vampire Killer is not some kind of special or holy weapon, as it was stated on Dracula's Curse, but an alchemic whip designed to fight the owner of the Crimsom stone. Given this fact, there's no chosen bloodline to weild one.
- The creator of the Vampire Killer survived, wich means that he could easily create more whips.
Today it makes not sense, but back then it was a hot topic. The creation of a timeline and established canon divided the fandom between those who don't care and those who treat every non canon etry as henious shit. It was also confusing for newcomers and, more than anything, it left out an excellent game just because some ponytailed developer said so. Then, you looked at the timeline ad there was no non-KCET Castlevania in sight after Symphony of the Nigh. It just felt wrong
This is just the consequence of limiting the series' settings to pre-1900's. No castlevania in the present era was an imposed self-limitation that felt pretty stupid once every century from XV got used.
Also, Rondo and Symphony took place in the 1700's (late 1700's, but still)
I kinda disagree with this a bit, as Bloodlines still is at it's core about Belmonts fighting Dracula with the Vampire Killer, even if it's a side-branch of their family tree. I do think connecting Castlevania to Stoker's novel was pretty silly and unnecessary, but at least the game still is connected to the series' established lore. Circle of the Moon on the other hand just comes out with two new families of vampire hunters who apparently have been fighting Dracula for at least couple of decades with a similar weapon as Belmonts, but does exactly nothing to explain where they came from and what happened to Belmont/Morris families and the Vampire Killer.
What you said about Rinaldo is probably true, but to say he just went on to create new whips for anyone who happened to need one just makes everything hilariously contrived. It's also funny think that immediately after allegedly removing games from the timeline IGA would start writing stories that would have actually validated their existence. :P
Yeah, I think I was initially pretty upset about it myself at the time, since like I said, CotM was and still is one of my favorites. But looking back at the game, especially in the context of where the series was at the time the game was made, I have no problem accepting that it probably was always intended to be sidestory/spinoff that didn't much care whether it was part of some grand storyline or not.
Also, anyone who measures Castlevania games and their quality based on their canonity is an idiot and deserves to be laughed at. ;)
In fairness, the series as a whole has a problem with that. After Richter, the Belmonts just kind of disappear until Julius shows up.
Yes, but if anything that's precisely why it should have been explained in Circle of the Moon to some extent at least, as at the time it was chronologically the first game to be set after Symphony of the Night. And for that matter, I don't think the Belmonts' disappearance was really a plot point until IGA brought it up years later.
It was surely involuntary, but he truly did it. Since an official timeline was not creatd until years later, the fact that the end of Lament of Innocence was so open in that regard makes the canonicity of Circle of the Moon possible, mostly by ommision (We know that Rinaldo leaves the place, and that's it.
I'm not saying that the ending was made to acommodate Circle of the Moon, and to be honest i don't really care, but the fact that the possibility exists because ommision of detail it's reaaaaally fun.
Dude... if we could go back in time you would be in for a good laught. Castlevania Dungeon forums became pure chaos, and spanish-speaking Castlevania communities entered in some kind of civil war. I was inside one of them, just publishing my fanfic and minding my own bussiness, but both webmasters and users went completely nuts.
It never was. It was used to retroactively explain Bloodlines, and as a set up for Portrait of Ruin and order of Ecclesia.
I figured it was a convenient excuse to have characters that used more than one kind of weapon.
Yes, I can imagine. :P We had a pretty nice Finnish Castlevania community going at the time, so I mostly stuck with that back then. It was obviously quite small, but everyone was pretty chill about that kind of stuff. The 2000 - 2010 era was a definitely a great time for me to become and be a Castlevania fan, regardless of how I might have felt about some of the games released during that period. :)
Juste might actually be my favorite character design from Kojima (at least for Belmonts), but he was such a boring character in terms of story and gameplay.
Actually funny how, as time goes by, I find myself disliking the game itself more while apreciating it's soundtrack more and more. Shame they never did any kind of arrange or "full sound" album for it. It really had some great tunes.
Actually funny how, as time goes by, I find myself disliking the game itself more while apreciating it's soundtrack more and more. Shame they never did any kind of arrange or "full sound" album for it. It really had some great tunes.
I find Juste boring, both design and personality wise, it always gave me the impression of beign an Alucard wannabe in an attemp to attract the SotN fandom.
As a design, Maxim would have worked way better as a Belmont.
The official soundtrack included two arrangements i recall.
As a design, Maxim would have worked way better as a Belmont.
The official soundtrack included two arrangements i recall.