A Look Back at Castlevania on the NES

Castlevania was one of the first horror themed games that I played. It was very different than any other game on the NES that I had played up to that point. Seeing ghouls, skeletons, and gorgon heads was a little crazy for me as a little kid.

This is one of the games that I’ve played several times over the years. It was one of the first games that I picked up when I started collecting games, and it is always fun to revisit it. One of the fun things about this game is the ROM hacks. I’m not sure why, but I’ve gotten quite a few of them over the years.

As I was looking for something to write about, I realized that I had written about Castlevania II before I wrote about the first game. There is a video review of the game on my YouTube channel, but nothing about it here. So, I’m going to write a bit about it.

TLDR: A fun action platformer that started an iconic series.

Narrative

There isn’t much of a story in this game. I wasn’t expecting much, but there is practically nothing about what happened or how things led to the events of the game. There is just a paragraph that has some creepy sounding stuff in it.

This comes across like a Halloween special you might’ve seen in the 1980s or 1990s. It is clear to me that whoever did the translation didn’t think kids wanted the story of why there is a curse. That is really the center of all this.

Count Dracula has put a curse on, let’s say, the country he’s living in, and it is up to Simon to break it. How does he do this? Well, he goes to Dracula’s castle to kill the vampire. But he doesn’t, he dismembers to vampire, and then goes on a quest to bring Dracula back to life. This is a weird series of games.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Castlevania isn’t too different from other action platformers. It has problems, but they aren’t anything that breaks the game. It is more challenging than anything else, and if you mess up, it isn’t necessarily the game’s fault.

The game throws quite a few power-ups and secondary weapons at you over the course of the game. It feels like the weapon upgrades are given to you right away, as long as you know that you’ll need to break candles.

This is also how you find sub-weapons. These are very important and can help you out quite a bit during the game. To use these, you’ll need to collect hears. I know, this is a little odd since hearts normally mean health pick-ups. Well, not in Castlevania.

Hearts are basically ammo for your sub-weapons, and the health items are pork chops. I didn’t know these were pork chops until I read the manual (Link). I just assumed there were random pieces of meat, which you find in walls. Video games can be weird sometimes.

The controls can be a little stiff at times. When I was jumping, it felt like I was constantly holding my breath and hoping that everything would work out. This would become a staple of the early Castlevania games. This would change as the series went on, but this first game felt like every jump was a leap of faith.

Overall, I like the gameplay in Castlevania. It has a few problems, but that adds to the challenge of the game. Nothing feels impossible, and when you die, it doesn’t always feel like you’ve been cheated. A lot of what I don’t like has more to do with how games have changed over the years, as opposed to the way this game was designed in the mid-1980s.

Visuals

This is the most memorable part of the game. It has a gothic atmosphere that feels like a black and white monster movie, or one of the Hammer films. You have all the classic Universal monsters in the game, and they all look great. A few of the creatures are also inspired by Greek Mythology, but they feel like they belong in the game.

The graphics are very good for an early NES game. Konami got a lot out of the console, and everything looks very good. It looks like you’re exploring the ruins of a castle. It feels like there is a layer of grime over everything that I really like.

Because this is an early NES game, the character sprites don’t look as detailed as other games. The bosses look very good. Their sprites are larger and look much better.

The scenery and backgrounds look nice. This is a dark game that is trying to be scary, or at least that is how I felt when I first played it. Castlevania was as close as I could get to watching a horror movie when I was five or six.

Overall, the graphics are very good. The enemies have patterns that you need to learn to get through the game. It isn’t difficult, and the graphics don’t make things harder for the player. I really like how this game looks when compared to the other games on the NES.

Reviews at the Time

The reviews for the NES version of the game didn’t change much. I used MobyGames for this since they normally do a good job of collecting reviews. You can also see how they’ve changed over time. The bad thing about doing this is that you see all of the versions of the game that have been released over the years.

Many of the reviews from the 80s and early 90s have been taken down over the years. What has been recorded suggests that the game received scores in the 8s and 9s. Most of the bad reviews are from the ports of the games.

Reviews for the other ports are odd at times. They often times sound positive, but the scores suggest something else. Several of them complain about how the game is too hard, or how it isn’t as good as the “modern versions” of the series.

Because this game is one of the early NES games, many of the first reviews aren’t on the internet, or are on some obscure sites that I couldn’t find. Maybe I’ll find some as I keep looking into these older games.

8/10. The graphics are very good, but the controls are a little stiff. This isn’t the Castlevania game I would suggest people start with. It is fun to play something like this to see how far the series has come since the mid-1980s.

Pros

• Challenging
• Fun Gameplay
• Creepy Graphics

Cons

• Stiff Controls
• Little to No Story

Conclusion

This isn’t my favorite game in the Castlevania series. I actually like the second game more than this one, but the third game is the best out of the three games on the NES. That doesn’t mean the first game is bad; it just isn’t my favorite.

The graphics and gameplay are all you have with this game, and it is all you really need. The later games in the series expand the story and explain what was going on in the first game. Some of the games would retcon what happened, but this game is largely unchanged.

Going back to play this game was a lot of fun. I also liked playing some of the ROM hacks of it, and I think the people who made them put some fun twists on the gameplay. It is still Castlevania, but they changed the story and altered the gameplay enough for them to feel a little unique.

If you liked this post, please check out my other posts on Castlevania games, such as Simon’s Quest and Infernax.