Castlevania's "Iron Blue Intention" Covered by David Cuartas

I can't believe I actually got a video link in my YouTube inbox today that wasn't random spam! And not only that, it's a very cool electric guitar cover of a classic track from Castlevania: Bloodlines! Oh, Internet, sometimes you do care.  :-)

Castlevania Producer Koji Igarashi Leaves Konami

The future of Castlevania has never looked more uncertain.

The Five Best Things About Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (Part 2)

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is by no means a perfect game, or even a good one, but it does have some redeeming features that secure its place in the history of the franchise. I outlined a couple of reasons why in Part 1 of this feature, and today I'll be finishing things off with a few more. But enough talk, have at you!

A sequel that isn't just more of the same

One of the things I love most about the early 8-bit era was its approach to sequels. It wasn't just assumed, right off the bat, that a successful game's follow-up should play just like the first. As early as Donkey Kong Junior, we start to see a distinct lack of cynical assumptions about replicating the gameplay of the originator too rigidly. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link dumped a successful, overhead-view format for a controversial side-view approach. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game adopted a much more enjoyable side-scrolling beat-'em-up format after the first game's alienating platforming and clumsy controls. Final Fantasy II, though it saw no North American release at the time, completely abandoned the concept of player-chosen character classes in favour of a wide-open and dynamic skill system. And of course, there's the infamous case of the English Super Mario Bros 2 -- which, while it was technically an adaptation of the unrelated Doki Doki Panic, was nonetheless how Nintendo chose to frame the next iteration of its flagship brand overseas.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest takes to this attitude as well, playing not much like the first Castlevania title at all. It's still a side-scrolling adventure, but not the standard stage-by-stage progression of intricate platforming, punctuated with boss fights. In fact, there is a noticeable scarcity of platforming-heavy sections, and a precious few bosses in the entire game. While the first game is completely linear, challenging the player to complete as many levels in sequence as possible, Simon's Quest is a slow-cooked experience built on non-linear exploration. For the first time, there are clues to unravel, village folk to talk to, and shops to visit. Finding out the location of the mansion where the next piece of Dracula is kept is as much part of the experience as whipping a skeleton in the face or dodging a fish-man's fireball. You collect magical items that increase your power and unlock progress, in a way resembling The Battle of Olympus, Faxanadu, Zelda II, or any other basic action-RPG. Granted, Castlevania II is a particularly bad action-RPG dependent on broken mechanics, invisible gaps, and impossibly cruel pseudo-puzzles, but in those days the lines between good and bad game design were a little murkier. In today's age of quest logs, on-screen maps, story progress markers, and fast auto-travel, we expect to be spoon-fed every last detail regarding how to succeed in a game. If the player ever asks "What am I supposed to do?" it is considered a failure of game design. However, this wasn't always the case -- the onus used to be on the player to figure that out. Simon's Quest enforced that ideal far too zealously, guilty not of veering down the wrong road but of flooring the gas pedal after downing a six-pack.

I fully accept that Castlevania II is a fundamentally flawed experience beyond repair, but the raw ideas behind it were nothing if not daring. In this modern age, where we can have almost full knowledge of the nuts and bolts of a game before it's even released, and sequels are essentially expansion packs tacked onto their predecessors, it would be nice to have more surprises. In my mind, a good sequel is one that carries on the spirit and atmosphere of the original, but isn't content to merely copy its formula. Castlevania III returned to the straight-up, linear action game style, and it is a better game for it, but if we had three Castlevania games that all did the same old thing, each one would probably seem less special.

The dawn of the real-time day-and-night cycle

A dynamic passing of virtual hours, with environments transitioning from daylight to nighttime and back again, is still not overly common in games today. I think I see it most in RPGs, online or offline, but even then it's considered a cool novelty and not taken for granted. It can be an immersing device to make the world seem more alive -- literally, time is passing and things are happening, with or without your input. Usually, NPCs behave differently at certain times of day, shops might close for the evening, sneaking around is easier in the dark -- or, in the case of most MMORPGs, it could be just for show.

Castlevania II, as far as I'm aware, is one of the earliest examples of a real-time cycle of day and night in a video game. It wasn't a very complex system, but it was one of the game's more interesting features -- maybe even a good one! An unseen timer would tick away as you played, then suddenly a text box would pop up, alerting you that night time had arrived before fading to darkness.

At night, monsters out in the wild were stronger, and even the towns were overrun with ghouls, so townsfolk would stay indoors. The night also had its own music, spookier and more sinister than the daylight themes. One could never quite know exactly how close it was to nighttime, and being caught in the middle of nowhere when things grew dark really increased the tension and element of risk. There was nothing Simon could do but keep fighting, and hope that morning was soon coming. It was a simple gimmick, but a rare mechanic to see at the time -- especially in a side-scrolling, action-based title. There were even three different possible endings, dependent on how many in-game "days" it took you to finish!

There was, apparently, a sci-fi game on the ZX Spectrum in 1985 called Tau Ceti that implemented a day/night cycle. From what I gather, the position of the sun in the sky affected how shadows were displayed on buildings and ships, though it sounds like it had little impact on anything outside of visuals. Castlevania II still takes the prize for having a significant difference in game content between night and day.

A hazy glimpse into Castlevania's  future

After Simon's Quest, Castlevania games return to a more linear style for a long time. RPG-inspired boosts in character power are outright avoided, and although some iterations like Castlevania III and Rondo of Blood have optional routes through stages, hidden levels, and multiple ways to progress through the game, that progress is always in one direction: forward. It isn't until the wildly successful Symphony of the Night on the Playstation that things open up again, and a new trend overtakes Castlevania's format completely.

Guiding Dracula's son Alucard, players defeat enemies for experience and level up, collect weapons and armor, and gain skills and transformations that can uncover new areas at one's own pace. The entire game takes place within Dracula's immense, demon-haunted castle, necessitating the use of a helpful map that is very reminiscent of the one in Super Metroid on the SNES. Due to comparisons between the two series, people start to use the word "Metroidvania" to describe any non-linear platformer focusing on exploration-based gameplay. After SOTN, most Castlevania titles follow this non-linear, action-RPG style of design. However, as we know, this shift isn't a sudden tangent that comes out of the blue. Symphony of the Night and its successors take the bumbling experiments that Simon's Quest brought to the series, and finally makes them work. Grinding monster battles and building your character can happen, but it isn't forced. Progress milestones are hidden, but not so obtuse that one can't find them without a walkthrough. There are more direct nods to Simon's Quest, too, such as a creepy ferryman who takes you across a stretch of water to a new area, and even a late-game quest to retrieve the same divided pieces of Dracula's body that you searched for in Castlevania II.

Towns are gone, but each game hereafter has at least some manner of healing sanctuary room or method of finding/purchasing items. We don't see the night/day cycle return again, but Order of Ecclesia on Nintendo DS does include a central hub town full of villagers, and gets the hero out of the stuffy castle and treading various forests, plains, and the like. It feels the most like a spiritual successor to the ideas that Simon's Quest was trying to communicate, and at one point the heroine Shanoa makes a pretty amusing reference:

I'm not saying Castlevania II: Simon's Quest is solely responsible for the modern style of the series, but to deny it had any influence would be short-sighted. I would be very surprised if the team who put together Symphony of the Night didn't at least say something like "Hey, why don't we think about making a more open game, like Castlevania II was?" Even though the second game might be regarded as a failure, it's reasonable to consider the developers shelving the ideas they originally were shooting for until the series was ready for them and better tech was available.

The Five Best Things About Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (Part 1)

Castlevania is one of gaming's great classic series, originally debuting in 1986 and still going strong today. You don't get to hang around that long without having some ups and downs, some accolades and some embarrassments. In this case, one of those embarrassments -- and a favourite whipping boy of modern gamers -- was the second NES installment, Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. You don't have to look far on the internet to find scathing, detailed indictments of everything that is wrong with this game. It's full of typos and translation errors. Townspeople habitually lie to you or provide cryptic "hints" that defy even the most generous of interpretations. Combat and enemy behaviour is full of easily exploitable holes. Progress is artificially slowed by the need to farm enough hearts to buy special items. The list goes on and on.

Even so, I admit to being a Castlevania II apologist. Oh, don't get me wrong, the game is terrible -- but I can't help but have a soft spot for it. At times, it does do something right, or at least tries to. I respect Simon's Quest for its aspirations, if not its accomplishments. After all, there are plenty of bad games out there that fly well below the retro rage radar. Surely, the game must possess some special qualities, to invite such a degree of widespread ire.

Dracula becomes more than a one-hit wonder

The original Castlevania pits whip-wielding warrior Simon Belmont against a mish-mash of horror movie monsters and mythological beings: skeletons, ghosts, werewolves, mummies, dragons, Medusa, and even Frankenstein's monster and Igor. The head honcho of all these spooky fiends, decidedly, is Count Dracula. Yes, Bram Stoker's vampire character. Relatively speaking, his presence in the first game is trivial -- no more or less important than any other video game boss. However, with Castlevania II, we learn that Dracula -- despite having been killed by Simon in the first game -- retains a portion of his power and infects the land with a lingering curse. Famously, the count has always been one to blur the lines between life and death, but even in the original source material he doesn't come back from being ultimately destroyed. Already, we see that the video game version "Dracula" is playing by a different set of rules, taking on an un-life of his own.

In order to lift the curse, Simon must track down various pieces of Dracula's remains that have been divided and hidden by the count's devoted followers so as to preserve some measure of his power. Only by reassembling Dracula's body and destroying him properly will Simon attain true peace.

Of course, this is not the last time we see ol' Drac. He withstands even this second death, and goes on to star as the villain in almost every Castlevania game henceforth. Interestingly, a continuous chronology of events start to take form, more members of the Belmont family are introduced, and we learn that their bloodline is irrevocably tied to the repeated struggle against Dracula over centuries. Once Koji Igarashi takes the reins of the series as a producer and scenario writer, a greater emphasis is made on weaving together a coherent history that links the events of each game together. We're given snippets and hints of Dracula's past, and eventually an origin story depicting his human life, born Mathias Cronqvist. The narrative lifts completely out of the subject matter of Bram Stoker's novel, sharing little with the original book save a name and some vague imagery. The Castlevania Dracula has essentially become something else entirely. Criticisms of some hokey writing aside, a two decades long build of plot continuity across various installments isn't something one witnesses very often. Just imagine, if Castlevania II never introduced the notion of resurrecting Dracula to begin with, and instead opted to feature some alternate villain! Where would the series be, without him? It's almost impossible to even imagine it.

Bloody Tears makes its first appearance

Just about every Castlevania fan knows and loves Bloody Tears, even if they hate Simon's Quest. This music is original to the second game, playing when Simon is venturing in outdoor or forest areas during the daytime. I remember working out how to hen-peck that opening riff on the piano as a kid. That beat is really energizing, too, practically pushing Simon forward at all times. This may be a pretty short, simple track, but it's definitely one of my favourite pieces in the series. And that's saying something, because I really love Castlevania music in general.

Of course, half the fun of Bloody Tears is the huge collection of remixes and reinterpretations we've seen over the years. The games themselves have revisited the theme many times: I'm rather partial to the version in the third Gameboy title, Castlevania Legends, as well as the version in that awful Wii fighting game Castlevania: Judgment.

There are also tons of great fan tributes to be found. Here are some of my favourites:

Heavy metal version from the album Perfect Selection: Dracula Battle

Rey Tang's arrangement for piano

Electronic metal version by S.S.H. (Saitama Saisyu Heiki)

An a capella arrangement by Smooth McGroove

Edit: I just found out about Lara de Wit, who does a pretty great piano version as well!

As if this weren't enough to warrant Castlevania II some recognition as an influential part of the series, I have three more points to make next time. Check out Part 2 now!

Music Monday: Clockwork

Okay, let's make this short and sweet. This week, we've got a great track from Akumajou Dracula Tribute Vol. 1, a 2011 arrange album of music from throughout the Castlevania series.

Arrangements of Castlevania music really run the gamut from incredible to terrible, but perhaps that's only because there's such a wealth of it out there, and it's been done in just about every style one could hope for.

Anyway, this one's from the NES classic, Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse. Enjoy!

Title: Clockwork
Game: Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse (released in September 1990 for NES in North America)
Album: Akumajou Dracula Tribute, Vol. 1
Arranged by Aki Hata