If you had one of these two games in your NES library in the late 80's, there was a good chance that you either stayed up in the waking hours of the night trying to beat them, or you gave up in a fit of frustration and went back to school after a nerve-racking weekend of being knocked into pit traps from Medusa Heads or desperately trying to evade Red Arremers. So if you're going to invest time in honing those skills and sharpening those reflexes, Retro Reboot VS wants to gauge the audience on which ultra tough NES platformer they prefer.

Capcom's Ghosts 'N Goblins will have its day here on Retro Reboot in due time. It was released in arcades in 1985 with many home ports across home computers like IBM, the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, the NES, and others. I'll prefereably be talking about the NES port, for the sake of brevity. 

You play as Arthur, a brave and daring knight on a quest to rescue his love, Princess Prin-Prin from the Demon King Astaroth. Arthur remains one of Capcom's more beloved characters and has appeared in their crossover fighters as an assist and eventually a main roster competitor in Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Infinite. Ghosts 'N Ghouls is a run-n-gun platform game with solid controls and some pretty stubborn enemy habits. Despite being only six stages long (with three minutes to beat each stage), it can be quite an ordeal to play through without memorizing enemy patterns or ways to glitch foes offscreen. And if you want to TRULY beat it, you have to do it twice!

Castlevania from Konami is a game I hold in very high regard of being one of the most complete platform games ever made. At least as far as making a super hard game, anyways. It was intentionally ridged and stiff in a lot of aspects so that the player would place an incentive on improving their reaction time and alternate weapon selection to progress. Simon Belmont's whip was seldom his best option for dispatching enemies, due to its slow start-up and recovery time. With tough boss fights and some of the most notorious enemies, Konami's venture to destroy Dracula and free the night of his reign of terror haunted plenty of children back on the NES. And with no signature "Up, Up, Down, Down" code to bail them out, there was little choice but to sharpen those skills. While the series has been dormant since 2014's Lords of Shadow 2 (a game that's honestly about as entertaining as running your chapped hand roughly across a piece of untreated wood until its full of splinters), Simon and Richter Belmont has become immortalized with his overdue appearance in Super Smash Brothers Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch.

VISUALS 

Both games have some pretty decent sprites and color pallets. Ghosts 'N Goblins is in tow with Capcom's brighter graphics, a signature trait for a lot of their games that I remember playing. The sprites are smaller than Castlevania's, but there's a charm to them. Ghosts 'N Goblins embraces a more tongue-in-cheek, comical aesthetic, rather than the more foreboding and serious Vampire Killer opposition. Arthur takes damage, bursts out of his armor, and spends the remainder of the play in his heart-bedecked boxers, only to turn into a skeleton when hit a second time for his death. Ghosts 'N Goblins has a lot of flickering and the screen often jitters like it's unstable. It's not that it performs bad, it's always struck me as a touch distracting.

Castlevania, however, almost goes full Hammer productions and adopts a dreary atmosphere that seems eager to welcome any player to their doom. Making the best of the NES' limited color scheme, Konami uses pretty appealing color choices for Castlevania. Simon is a brightly colored orange, while the backgrounds and environment are a touch muted. This leaves little to no ambiguity about where the player is relative to the hazards. Blue, black, and green are solid colors for backgrounds, while floors are varying degrees of orange. Whether the player knows it or not they're being educated to pick their spots accordingly as to where threats or pit traps are. Aesthetically, I like Castlevania more on the eyes. It has its share of graphical clipping and flickering, but not nearly as much as G'n'G. I assume the latter had matters to do with being an arcade port and deciding which liberties to take to accommodate the transition. ADVANTAGE: Castlevania

ENEMIES

Both games have some signature baddies designed to make your life a living hell with their obnoxious patterns that make you second guess the current decision you might be making. Yet there's a different meta to them. Ghosts 'N Gobs enemies either stand their ground in an incredibly stubborn manner or will aggressively target you as you approach. Since you only have two hits and your weapons vary depending on your situation, whether or not you have full health and/or a fast/strong enough attack (the strong, but very short ranged fireball is high skill, high risk, IMHO) to dispatch demons.

Red Arremers are the bane of my existence, they're seriously more frustrating to deal with than many of the bosses. There's points where you have to deal with two at once, fight one that is very close to another and praying you don't trigger it to come after you, and ones that are perfectly nestled near an ogre, giving you an extra hazard to deal with. When they fly towards you, it's a fast sweeping motion that only gives you a few shots.

In Castlevania, the enemy placement intentionally makes you stop and observe your surroundings before trying to progress. Vania is a tough game to plow through, by its build, you can't hammer your way through axe throwing knights and bats. These enemies are conveniently placed to make you steer towards a cliff or mistime your jump while on a moving platform.

And the Medusa Heads, absolutely notorious for giving you a bad time. When asked about the Medusa Heads and bats, veteran Castlevania developer Koji Igarashi stated that their wavy pattern is essential. It's a "part of the ebbs and flows of the game". Igarashi is a mastermind of making me smash my head into the corner of my bathtub. 

Ghosts 'N Goblins and Castlevania have infinite continues, so it turns into a case of acquiring skill and hoping the frustration doesn't eradicate the knowledge you've gained. Castlevania at least has the courtesy to give you a life bar, even if by the final three levels, most, if not all, enemies will do a fourth of your damage to you. But the monsters are obstacles, only Hunchbacks will frantically hop after you. The Knights toss axes and will retreat, aiming to stall you out and make you impatient. Ghosts 'N Goblins gives you TWO hit points, so even the weakest of monsters have to be treated like a major chip hazard. Enemies harass you overhead and will pursue you for more than screen and a half trying to bait you. Castlevania is very stingy, but I feel like the opposition taps more into the frustration and it can be tougher to thread needles against enemies that come from more angles. ADVANTAGE: Ghosts 'N Goblins

SIMON AND ARTHUR'S WEAPONS

So who has the better arsenal to get rid of their ridiculously obnoxious problems? I talk a lot about Simon's alt weapons, they're more integral to his survival than the signature vampire killer whip. Holy water, boomerang cross, the vertically aimed throwing axe, the stop watch, and the throwing knife (the latter, being the "if I have to" of long range weapons). Each serve a pretty important purpose and have the ability to be powered up, granting Simon the ability to throw up to three in succession. Save for the stopwatch, it can't be enhanced. I suppose if it added three more seconds per upgrade, it'd be completely busted. Once you become good with utilizing them, obstacles get so much easier, and they can greatly make up for the limitations of Simon's whip attack.

Arthur's power-ups are pretty varied, and are classed way different than in Castlevania. The starting Lance, Arthur's signature weapon, is very weak and has pretty average speed. The Torch, which does just look like a fireball he throws, has a very short range, only two can be fired at a time, and has a very lengthy recovery. The damage, again, is good, but this weapon is more a liability without fantastic output. The Dagger is a great weapon because of its great speed and fire rate. The Axe aims slightly upward, making it practically worthless for trying to hit demons near ground level. And the Shield, which you earn on the second playthrough of the game in order to get the true ending. It can absorb enemy projectiles, making it pretty powerful. Just be sure you never accidentally pick up another power-up. In Castlevania, it gets incredibly frustrating to inadvertently grab a throwing knife that drops from a lantern you've struck when you have a double powered Boomerang Cross, at least in Ghosts 'N Goblins you get opportunities to trigger item drops to get back your desired weapon. ADVANTAGE: Ghosts 'N Goblins

OVERALL CHALLENGE

While Castlevania has some pretty tough boss battles and mechanics that are a touch on the draconian side, I feel like it's a little friendlier to master. Ghosts 'N Goblins feels more brutal. The fact that you have three minutes to learn how to beat each stage AND going through it a second time give the learning curve a hairpin turn that leaves to teetering off a cliff. The lack of a health bar in G'n'G makes all your actions that much more important. That's not to take anything away from Castlevania's obvious pit traps that'll down you in one hit, with G'n'G, it's no quarter given.

Konami and Capcom's game bear some similarities in their gameplay, like the commitment to a jump arc. Arching weapons in Castlevania can be life savers, whereas G'n'G is more likely to tamper with that fight or flight response. The lack of hit points or a life bar, again, makes survival a chore. I don't recall a lot of armor power-ups in case you're running around in the undies. If there's one word I can summarize Ghosts 'N Goblins' difficulty, it's "brutish". This was vintage Capcom back in the day, and I believe this is much tougher. ADVANTAGE: Ghosts 'N Goblins

Of course, this is just one man's opinion. Which game did you find harder back in the day? Or even today? Drop your comments and share your thoughts.