 Castlevania® for Nintendo 64 The last game
in this hallowed series, Castlevania: Symphony of the
Night for the PlayStation was a masterpiece, so I expected
the latest version to be as good or better. It is not. That's not to say that the game's no good, but it's just
extremely average.
It seems that Konami got this game out too fast. They had a lot to
work with here but it doesn't show. From the outset, this doesn't have
the feel of a Castlevania game. You get the choice of playing not as a
member of the Belmont family, as in every other installment, but as some
jackass vampire hunter named Reinhardt Schneider or a
little magic girl named Carrie Fernandez. Carrie Fernandez? What the
hell were they thinking? Sometimes it seems that the Japanese guys who
make the games have absolutely no communication with their American
counterparts. To add to that, there are a few small pieces of text to
read in the game, and even those are translated horribly. I'd expect
that from a Nintendo game from 1986, but not one released in 1999.
Although it doesn't feel like a Castlevania game, the N64 version
definitely has something in common with all of its ancestors: the ungodly
frustration it creates. Rarely has a game had the power to drive someone
to murder like a Castlevania game. In past games it was usually
something like the bobbing Medusa heads that attacked you while you were
jumping in between platforms, and you would always fall to your death.
In this game that actually happens a couple of times, but the real
frustration comes from level 6 (or is it 5?), the Castle Center. This is
a huge level and easily the best in the game, but also the most
annoying. You have to fight your way through millions of rooms to get to
an area where you pick up flasks of magical Nitro. You have to carry it
all the way back to where you started. Easy enough, it may seem, but the
problem is that while you're carrying it, you cannot jump or get hit, lest
you explode. Several times I neither jumped nor got hit, but I
exploded. Like one time I was climbing down some stairs and boom – I blew
up. Then they make you walk on an impossibly thin, winding walkway, and
of course you fall off and explode when you swear your feet were firmly
planted. Then you have to walk through some gears, and you can't let
yourself get caught between the gear and the wall, or else you'll blow
up. When you finally are able to set the Nitro down, though, you get to
fight a gigantic undead bull that decays when you whip it, so it is a
decent reward.
Another frustrating portion is a level where you have to do a bunch of
jumping and grabbing, which is already difficult because you have almost
no depth perception. Several times I did the correct action and climbed
onto one block, then when jumping onto the next block, I did the same
action and slipped and fell to my death. All the while you have to fight
mini-bosses that take a good minute each to kill. So when you die you
have to do it all over again. If this weren't a Castlevania game, I
might have frowned upon this, but it's only to be expected.
The music in this game is above average, but not what I wanted to hear,
really. In most of the Castlevania sequels, there are levels with
remixes of the music from the previous games, like when in the clock
tower level of Super Castlevania 4 for Super Nintendo, the music is a
modified version of the music from Castlevania III. Most of the music is
just ambient, and there aren't really any tunes that you could hum in the
shower.
I'm kind of upset that they named this game Castlevania, because the
original is called Castlevania. They should have called it Castlevania 64, or Castlevania 3D or something. I was joking about naming it
Castlevania 3D.
This game has the same essential plot as all the rest, with Dracula
rising every 100 years and you (as a member of the Belmont family) have
to go through his castle, Castlevania, to stop him. The N64 version
takes place in the mid 19th century, which I swear was when a couple of
the other ones took place, too. Knowing that, though, there's one part
of the game that is just confounding. You're fighting some huge
monkey-skeleton, and out of nowhere come these skeletons riding
motorcycles. Zuhhh? Then there
is this demon named Renon (a turn-of-the-century businessman-looking guy,
with spectacles and a top hat) who sells you items at various points in the
game. When it's time to leave you, he says that there is a global war
about to begin and he doesn't want to miss it. He must be talking about
World War: 1850.
There isn't much in this game in the way of extras. There are a couple
of secret gems you can find (which aren't all that secret) which allow
you to select alternate clothing for the character when you play through
a second time. I'm sorry, but unless you get to play the girl naked, I'm
not going to play through again just for a change of clothes. Reinhardt
and Carrie, though, each have a couple of levels that the other character
doesn't get to play, so that's at least a little incentive to try again.
And of course, there are different endings you can get depending on what
difficulty level you play at and how quickly you finish. Naturally I
didn't finish fast enough (and as a result, had to fight an extra boss
battle). This really cheeses me off. If you're going to make a 3D
game, you reward the player for exploring the game, not for blazing
through it. I always get the shitty endings in games because I spend too
much time try to find secrets that aren't there. Then again, I haven't
played a game that had a good ending in a coon's age.
Since this game is titled as the original in the series, what Komani
should have done is recreate it in a three-dimensional format. There
were 6 levels in the first one, but those could have been expanded and
such. I would have liked to fight bosses like the giant bat, the big
Medusa head, the two mummies, and Frankenstein's monster again. In this
one, the bosses are pretty poor. As in all the others, though, you do
get to fight Death. For some reason, he summons a giant fish out a
pentagram to attack you.
One last complaint is that the camera angles don't work well at all. There are
many times when fighting a boss that you can't see it and end up getting very
injured as a result. Konami
should have just ripped off the Z-targeting system used in
Zelda 64.
I could probably go on about this game, but it isn't that deserving of
further scrutiny. Castlevania is a waste of money to buy, is probably
too long for a rental (if you want to play through thoroughly with both
characters), but is ideal if you have a friend you can borrow it from.
The next one is sure to be better.
Review by Eggle |
