RETRO REBOOT!! Castlevania III Dracula's Curse (NES)

The first Castlevania is highly revered to be one of the best examples of linear platforming gameplay on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Its difficulty, level design, and mechanics combine for an immersive experience that rewards paying attention to your surroundings and acting accordingly. Very much like the Contra series, the first game carries more nostalgia than its follow-ups. Simon's Quest developed a more mixed opinion after a period time and is probably considered infamous for its poor translations and repetitive play. Following those two was Dracula's Curse, released in 1990, and seemed to be the most forgotten of the three NES Vania games.

castlevania III is a prequel that follows Belmont descendant Trevor in his quest to destroy Dracula. The Netflix Castlevania series is based on this story arc (if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. The two seasons are very well done) 

Returning to the more linear style of gameplay and the familiar control scheme, Drac’s Curse introduces the ability to play as multiple characters, whom you can acquire depending on the path you take. This is a great idea to extend the game’s depth and each of the three, Alucard, Syfa, and Grant, have their own unique skills and their own reasons for aiding you in dracula's defeat. Syfa’s magic is good for paralyzing multiple enemies at one time, her physical attack is incredibly short. Fast, yes, but she has a dinky sword that gave me horrible Symphony of the Night flashbacks and you pretty much have to be right next to an enemy in order to hit them. Alucard can transform into a bat and fly, but his standard attack, a projectile that fires in three angles, is a little slower than Trevor's whip. Grant can control his mid-air trajectory and can scale walls.

Dracula’s Curse got really creative with color placement and adding depth to some of its levels. One of my favorites was from stage 3-03. At first I thought that you were traversing through mist, but it's actually a river in the background! The NES pulling off parallax scrolling? That's incredibly ambitious.

Castlevania has some of my favorite BGM tunes in all of video games. Drac’s Curse is no exception. Beginnings and Aquarius (Aquarius is awesome, I love using it as background music) are both incredible. The sound effects are solid, admittedly, I miss the whip sound effect from Simon’s Quest. Now, upon defeat, some of the bosses will emit a roar, which is kind of unsettling and visceral.

And a good portion of the praise and accolades I gave this game, which are all rightfully deserved, nearly gets thrown out of the window because this is, without question, the hardest game I have ever beaten in my entire life. I would like to go back and see the other endings, but during my last two plays, I rage-quit through Syfa’s stages. Drac’s Curse has all the Castlevania tropes that attributes to its difficulty; knock back damage, medusa heads, enemies with psychotic patterns, water hazards, STAIRS!!!! so it’s not so much anything new that keeps killing you, so much as it is all of those same challenges thrown together at the same time at various intervals. A great deal of this difficulty stems from a programming error for the North American release that causes the enemies to deal more damage than the Japanese version. So it's one of the rare occasions where us Yanks can't get made fun of for demanding our games be manufactured a little easier.

So, yeah, this is one hell of a way to cap off the series of games for the NES. It does feel like a game that tried to do more than it’s format and engine could maintain and shows what can bolster creativity with limited resources. Curse is a pretty damn good Castlevania, though the notorious difficulty makes it a little bit more frustrating than fun at times, I feel it's the best of the 8-bit Vampire slaying series. 

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