Castlevania is a franchise that is, and has always been, one of the most consistently good in the industry. That’s why it really pains me when a dud comes my way, and today is that day. Castlevania: The Adventure is pretty bad to be honest. Handheld gaming was still new and many developers didn’t know how to take advantage of the weaker hardware while keeping portable sensibilities in mind. Konami wanted to cash in on the early success of the Game Boy by making a brand new installment in the Castlevania series. There was a lot of potential, but this was mostly squandered. Instead of focusing on the strengths of the hardware they instead got lazy and created a watered down shadow of the games that came before it. Today I’m here to tell you why you should leave this one in the past. Let’s take a look.
Castlevania: The Adventure surprisingly does fit in the franchise’s canon. The story here begins in between the third installment and the first with a century padding on both sides. The lead role was given this time to Christopher Belmont who is an descendant of Trevor Belmont, and an ancestor to Simon. Dracula has once again risen from his grave, and it’s time to whip him back into the coffin. There’s not a lot of story here but that’s the least of the game’s problems to be honest. This is once again a side scrolling platform action game with a focus on horror themes. You can walk, jump, and throw out your whip to dispatch foes. On the surface gameplay sounds like that of any other installment in the franchise. While the fundamentals are the same Konami made quite a few changes to the gameplay with this one.
First of all hearts now recover your health. This seems like a no-brainer and the fact that this wasn’t the case in prior installments led to a fair amount of confusion. Previously these were depleted when using your secondary attacks. One might ask how you activate them here. The answer is simple. You don’t. There are no secondary weapons in Castlevania: The Adventure. Christopher’s whip is all you get. Immediately one has to wonder why Konami cut out one of the best features of the franchise. I assume it was hardware limitations, or because they needed to rush this one to the market. What they did do is add more functionality to the Vampire Killer whip. When it’s fully powered up it now fires a basic projectile. This is plenty helpful when you have it, but that’s a very seldom happening.
In past installments the secondary weapons were extremely useful in dispatching foes that move in odd patterns. Or those that would be otherwise a chore to strike with the whip and its short range. Instead of making the game more sensible with this limitation in mind the developers instead kept many of the franchise standards in place. You’ll face off against enemies that move in crazy patterns, or others that fly just out of your range. You can forget about hitting many of them with the whip and instead have to go into survival mode to avoid these guys. The real kicker is the fact that each time you are hit you lose a whip power-up. Taking damage is a common occurrence here so it’s not like the projectile attack will come in handy. You’ll almost never have it.
Hands down the worst aspect of this game is how incompetent the engine that runs it is. Castlevania titles have always been slower paced. We’ve come to expect that. In this case Christopher Belmont walks at half the speed as any other protagonist in the franchise. It’s baffling that Castlevania: The Adventure ever made it through testing without this issue being addressed. There isn’t a lot of content in any particular stage, but they all take a long time to get through because you move at a snail’s pace. Even with this in mind the engine still struggles when there are multiple enemies on-screen. There’s plenty of slowdown. It’s infuriating given how slow this game already is. I could almost forgive the cheap difficulty, and the lack of power-ups. This however is impossible to get past.
The level designs are really weird this time around. First of all there’s more timing elements than usual. You’ll have falling blocks lined up consecutively that force you to time your jumps really well. You have to leap at the last possible second or else the way forward will be blocked in these instances. You also have more pits than usual, and even areas with multiple paths. There’s too much precision platforming required in this game. This is made all the more worse by the character’s limited mobility. Worse yet whoever designed this game was a big fan of climbing ropes. There are pretty much no stairs (which is highly unusual for this franchise). Instead you’ll be climbing in every level. Often repetitively. Some moments are made interesting, but by and large the ropes are annoying.
Worse yet there’s still fall-back damage. Every time you’re hit your character is knocked backwards often into a pit. These cheap deaths weren’t as bad in the previous installments because you had special items to dispatch the more unwieldly foes. Here you just have to jump and hope for the best. Even the boss encounters are pretty weak this time. For the most part these are just larger enemies that either simply walk toward you and attack, or try to stay just out of range of Christopher’s whip. There’s nothing particularly inventive about them. I’d go so far as to say that Castlevania: The Adventure has some of the weakest boss encounters in the entire series. They aren’t particularly intimidating, but you’ll also be battling the controls at the same time. Expect a lot of deaths not because the boss characters are tough, rather, because you can’t move properly.
Castlevania: The Adventure is a decent looking game but hardly anything special. The sprites are fairly detailed by Game Boy standards. Some of the objects and patterns have been ported over from the NES games which is nice, but there’s lots of new graphics as well. Everything is surprisingly light for a horror game, but that’s likely to make it easier to see on the Game Boy screen. Unfortunately the animations are terrible. Christopher Belmont has just three frames of animation for walking. It’s noticeably bad. The same thing goes for enemies as well. This makes the slowdown even more unforgiveable. In terms of music there’s nothing amazing here. The compositions are decent, and made good use of the hardware. Best yet most tracks are instantly recognizable as Castlevania. The soundtrack is just missing some oomph. Castlevania is widely renowned for its soundtracks so this is disappointing.
