4.5/5 ★ – fez219's review of Castlevania.

An excellent adventure and one of the most beatable NIntendo-hard NES games. I beat this without save states, and it felt amazing! The level design is excellent, rewarding cautious but aggressive gameplay. There are only a few levels, but each feels very different than the last and does a ton with the NES's limited graphics capabilities. And each is full of new enemies and traps to master. Exploration is limited but necessary to finding health and other items. Overall, this is a short but tightly curated romp. It's amazing how a game manages to feel cinematic on NES hardware, yet Castlevania really pulls it off. The game perfectly nails its spooky themes. The music is simply perfect and classic. The bosses and enemies are an awesome mix of ghouls, and Simon has a unique toolset for slaying monsters and vampires. Each weapon is very useful (unlike, say, Ghosts n Goblins, where a few weapons utterly outclass everything else) and plays into Simon's vampire slayer identity well. Simon has very limited mobility, requiring players to instead rely on his strong offensive capability and trademark ranged whip. Gameplay becomes mostly about deliberate positioning and setup to keep yourself - and your whip/subweapons protected, and the best defense here is a good offense. Getting the whip rhythm and range down will make yourself into a very difficult target for most of your foes. And the different subweapons let players come up with a few strategies for surviving Castlevania's corridors. The game is quite difficult, but its continue system is merciful. Game over shoots you to the beginning of your level, rather than the beginning of the game, so you have a solid shot at learning levels. A few bosses are particularly cheap and feel a little random, where you can get screwed by RNG (Death, I'm looking at you). But at least they can still be cheesed by holy water if players lack the patience to survive these difficult encounters (I beat them without holy water, but it got pretty frustrating). Overall, this is an amazing little adventure and a great start to one of my all-time favorite franchises. Also, it came out a year before Phantom Blood. Yeah, I'm thinking JoJo is just one big long Castlevania reference.