With a guide, Simon’s Quest still has challenging combat - and is a lot more fun. And as someone who lived through the pre-internet era and bought this game new, putting together those clues wasn’t even attempted: We used guides. Equipping a crystal and kneeling at a cliff may be hinted at by a villager, somewhere, in poorly translated text, but putting together the clues just isn’t fun. It’s an open world to explore with the exact same jumping and whipping of its predecessor how good does that sound? The problem is that jumping and whipping aren’t the only tools you need to explore the world, as its extremely obscure puzzle solutions just can’t realistically be solved without a walkthrough. Score: Masterpiece Castlevania II: Simon’s QuestLike Zelda II, Simon’s Quest is a failed but fascinating attempt at making an RPG platformer before technology and localization practices were ready for it. It doesn’t get any better: Play Castlevania before you die.
The feel is just right: Whipping, jumping, freezing time, discovering secrets… This is a desert island game for me. The music rips: The baroque Bach organ jams that inspired 1980s heavy metal shredding guitars in turn inspired Castlevania’s composers to make some of the best electronic music ever committed to a chip. Giant boss sprites pop off the screen with lively animations that you are *just* fast enough to outmaneuver. It demonstrates total mastery of NES hardware and game design: Backgrounds and settings don’t repeat but instead hint at the larger world, with late-game bridges and towers looming in the distance, painted in vivid blacklight poster colors. Here are mini-reviews for each of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection games: Castlevania The original Castlevania is the best game in this collection. Finally, there’s Kid Dracula, a fascinating spinoff that never came to the US… until now. At the other end of the spectrum are two poorly programmed Game Boy games that just don’t work. The 16-bit games are also great Super Castlevania IV and Castlevania Bloodlines show off now-outdated but once-impressive graphical effects that are fun to revisit. Castlevania and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse are masterpieces: Gorgeous, goofy, twitch-fast platformers, as fun and accessible today as they were decades ago, matched only by the Super Mario and Mega Man series from the NES era. The GamesThe Castlevania Anniversary Collection is full of fun, interesting games spanning the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
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