I have played the Castlevania franchise since 1988. While I
can’t quite claim a true genesis - I was not around for the Haunted Castle arcade unit or Vampire Killer for the MSX - I have been actively playing, trying, or watching people play each of the available U.S. iterations. For an American player, primary fascination with the series rests in its artful combination of, on the one hand, the legacy of English Gothic fiction (The Monk, The Castle Of Otranto, later Dracula, and many more besides), and on the other, that iconic image of Indiana Jones fighting evil with a whip. Trevor Belmont and the rest of his extended family became the darlings of the 2-D adventure world, second only to Samus Aran. The Belmont clan were knights, ninjas, and mystics…their friends were wizards, pirates, and the spawn of Dracula himself.
Konami can’t be faulted for continually pumping life into their most “winning” franchise. Everybody does it. EA has made a monopolistic empire out of it. Capcom has streamlined their own corners of collective visual culture out of it. What remains stunning about Castlevania, though, is its openness to a certain degree of change but its utter failure of re-invention.
From 1986 until 1999, each of the Castlevania games unfolded in two dimensions. The extent of the universe, the required number of hours, and the available choices varied from game to game. The Castlevania Adventure (1989, Game Boy) strips the legacy to its barest minimum - frustratingly linear adventure, few options, next-to-no background color. A year before, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest (1988, NES) had launched the Belmont-adventurer into an open world, bounded only by the items necessary for advancement. By 1997, the platformer Castlevanias had seemingly run their course, yielding the game which is still regarded as the pinnacle of the series: Symphony of the Night (Playstation, Saturn, later XBLA). An open world combined with a multi-dimensional story, plus hundreds of items, a variety of enemies, and a slew of unlockables typified the best impulses of the genre.
Over the next several years, the series strayed into simulated 3-D environments with Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness (1999, N64, the fixed version of the previous year’s simply-titled CASTLEVANIA) and the recent-gen Castlevania: Curse of Darkness (2005, PS2 and Xbox). Relatively lackluster critical reception pointed to the fragility on which the franchise was built…the grand “betrayal” was the transposition from 2-D to 3-D, from expansive flatness to somewhat less expansive, simulated wholeness. These games do some things well, others poorly.
The main body of Castlevania since SOTN have been 1) re-issues of more obscure Japanese titles from the franchise and 2) portable adventures in the vein of SOTN. The popular and critical success of Castlevania and the Belmont name has rested on these games, spanning Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS. Marrying the strengths of the franchise (arguably, the gameplay/graphical/narrative features embodied in SOTN) with the strengths of the hardware (the processing capacity to easily transpose the games of the 16 and 32 bit era to the palm-of-one’s-hand, replete with some snazzier effects), these Castlevania titles are mainly about incremental, minute, or cosmetic innovation.
I just completed Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (2006, Nintendo DS), the most recent “original” Castlevania adventure. The game plays, feels, and acts like SOTN. It has a similarly rendered economy of items, resources, and skills. It combines the expectation of the bloodline battle with ever-so-much-more depth. Set during World War II in Europe, it weds two mythologies (the Gothic trappings of the series with the old-world European decadence ascribed to possibly helping precipitate the rise of fascism) to suggestive, though ultimately underdetermined, ends. The game is set in Dracula’s Castle (a mysterious appearance, indeed) but expands itself via portraits which contain whole other worlds.
The conceits of Castlevania meet the conceits of Final Fantasy Legend II - Portrait of Ruin is the old guard awkwardly dancing with the new. The game is seductively fun. It meets, greets, and eventually exceeds meager expectation. It is over almost as soon as it has begun: throughout a distracted week, I spent roughly 14 hours collecting every available item and skill. Recently, I’ve grown to appreciate what I consider to be an “adult” length game. With so many competing claims to a working man’s time, games that can hold relative interest over short amounts of time are almost ideal.
Portrait of Ruin is worth the slogging. It is fun, fast, friendly. It also seems rote, played-out, and somewhat lackluster. Is that all there is?
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