Castlevania Miscellanies

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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Blinge
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Blinge »

Wow speedrunning sucks and isn't fun at all!!!

Having an amazing run. die to minotaur and werewolf
Having an amazing run. forget to get the garnet/gem whatever in outer wall, realise 10 minutes later in the shop
Having an amazing run. don't have enough money to buy 2 library cards I need,
think ahh i'll just get one then buy the other when I come back. neglected to buy any.

Then i'm left like a muppet after getting the spike-corridor ring with no way to warp out

Okay, beat the game glitchless in 47 minutes. I might be happy enough with that to leave it.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by copy-paster »

vol.2 wrote:I was a Genesis kid, and I didn't play Bloodlines until the Collection came out on Steam. It came out in 1994, which was way past the prime time for Genesis; many (NA) players had moved onto SNES and would very shortly be playing PS1.
Konami were kinda late when they releasing games from MD and PCE, granted the games are great fun play. Probably they had to learn the hardware and how to utilize them at maximum.
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cj iwakura
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by cj iwakura »

A friend let me borrow Lament of Innocence, and it's pretty fun so far, especially the bosses.
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Vanguard
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Vanguard »

Blinge wrote:Wow speedrunning sucks and isn't fun at all!!!

Having an amazing run. die to minotaur and werewolf
Having an amazing run. forget to get the garnet/gem whatever in outer wall, realise 10 minutes later in the shop
Having an amazing run. don't have enough money to buy 2 library cards I need,
think ahh i'll just get one then buy the other when I come back. neglected to buy any.

Then i'm left like a muppet after getting the spike-corridor ring with no way to warp out

Okay, beat the game glitchless in 47 minutes. I might be happy enough with that to leave it.
Good job. I think playing for speed is fun in the early stages when you're still trying out different strategies, but it's miserable once you're just repeating the same actions again and again until you pull everything off.
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Squire Grooktook
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Squire Grooktook »

cj iwakura wrote:A friend let me borrow Lament of Innocence, and it's pretty fun so far, especially the bosses.
I played it through recently. It's an interesting title for sure. Combos and specials are snappy as all hell, enemies and especially bosses are pretty well designed. It's got...heart to it, despite its big problem of trying to be a dungeon crawl that can copy-paste rooms when the combat is just not built for that kind of playstyle.
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Blinge
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Blinge »

Vanguard wrote:
Blinge wrote:Wow speedrunning sucks and isn't fun at all!!!

Having an amazing run. die to minotaur and werewolf
Having an amazing run. forget to get the garnet/gem whatever in outer wall, realise 10 minutes later in the shop
Having an amazing run. don't have enough money to buy 2 library cards I need,
think ahh i'll just get one then buy the other when I come back. neglected to buy any.

Then i'm left like a muppet after getting the spike-corridor ring with no way to warp out

Okay, beat the game glitchless in 47 minutes. I might be happy enough with that to leave it.
Good job. I think playing for speed is fun in the early stages when you're still trying out different strategies, but it's miserable once you're just repeating the same actions again and again until you pull everything off.
Yeah that's exactly how I feel about it. Like, I go for a run that looks like the potential of whatever strats/route I have lined up. Once I get a decent showcase of it, I'm pretty happy. I don't need to repeat it 50 times just to shave a few seconds off total.
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Blinge
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Blinge »

https://youtu.be/P5tkPSfrewM

Well here's me glitchless run!
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by BulletMagnet »

Stumbled upon this, figured some of you might want to follow along until the inevitable takedown.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by copy-paster »

Holy damn that looks so impressive. Walking animation could have been better and I hope devs get rid of that screen edge ridin' next time.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Sumez »

That's cool but it looks really muted. The SNES might have been a better target platform?
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Marc
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Marc »

My new emulation box arrived last night. Runs PSP and DS stuff really well, so finally got to play the Rondo remake. Fucksticks, it's ugly.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by copy-paster »

I heard lot of bad things about PSP Rondo port, despite the translated and new english dub it does have some issues like music sometimes not play at all and gameplay glitch issues. PS4 Requiem port also taken from this port too and honestly doesn't look like it's comfortable to play.

Get RetroArch with Mednafen PCE core (or PCE.emu if your emu box are android based) and get the english translation/new dub patch for best experience.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Bloodreign »

I've never run into any glitch, or have music not play on my PSP copy of Dracula X Chronicles, no issues at all really.
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Rastan78
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Rastan78 »

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021 ... mes-listed

Very cool if this becomes official. M2 ports of the three GBA games plus SNES Dracula X.

Played the other 2 games on GBA like crazy, but I never got around to Harmony of Dissonance.

SNES Dracula X but no PCE Rondo!? (If this rumor is accurate).

Maybe if this does well Symphony/Rondo collection later?

Edit: Actually it's already on the eshop now for 19.99
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

I'm definitely going to snag a physical cart of it. Good shit.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by BIL »

I'll vouch for the PS4 Rondo/SOTN pack, too. Would rebuy M2 versions in a heartbeat, but being away from my stuff, they're decent stand-ins. The former seems to play fine compared to my PCE copy, going by basic nomiss play - I was surprised, given Konami's usual minimum-effort port from PSP.

The latter has some small but obvious graphical glitches (items on the ground are dimmed; a handful of minor effects are missing - Outer Wall's elevator cable, Lossoth's shadows), which kinda spoil the PS1's indulgent aesthetic. It plays great though - controls are sharp, and the instant area loading is a decent tradeoff. (speedrun mechanics are apparently different from the PSP version, let alone the PS1 originals, but I refuse to take SOTN that seriously Image)
Rastan78 wrote:Edit: Actually it's already on the eshop now for 19.99
Oh nice, on PSN too. :o Pleasant surprise, decided to nab it since it's got multiple regions. Never had AOS in non-JP format, and although I've got a GB Player, I've always thought COTM's tight dodges and tiny sprites could've used a tad more visibility. Guess I'll have to do a quick VampireKiller run to unlock MAGICIAN Image and get my beloved MARS UNICORN SWORD on. :cool: Rediscovered COTM a few years back, was briefly hooked on single-session Unicorn-driven killathons. Skewer 'em pointblank for bonus damage!

Feels exactly like the earlier Castlevania and Contra Anniversary Collections. No muss no fuss. Just gave COTM a quick spin, handles sharply and looks good. Can't imagine there's much amiss with XX, given how accurately Dracula IV and Contra III turned out in the earlier collections. There's some minor gadget thingy RE: enemy stats which I turned off immediately, very comfy.

Image

Image

Brotip for COTM first-timers - you don't have to double-tap [forward] to dash. A quick about-face will work fine, too (SOTN's Richter is exactly the same way, COTM being basically SOTN Richter The Game).

XX is a weird pick, but welcome regardless. What I really want is X68000 to get the M2 treatment. At this stage, it's one of the very few Draculas to never show up in accurate form on console (VS Castlevania was another until the recent ACA release). PS1 disc is nice for what it is, but was never a close substitute.
Played the other 2 games on GBA like crazy, but I never got around to Harmony of Dissonance.
Interested to hear what you think. :lol: A game of sometimes alarming incompetence that I've nevertheless bought four times now (including this latest pickup). Has neither COTM's straight hardcore nor AOS's mirror polish, and it's fugly as all hell too, but god damn is it an endearingly strange and violent first attempt from Igarashi.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by SuperDeadite »

So decided to pickup the Advance Collection on Steam. Happily it runs perfectly fine for me on Win7-64.
Getting Steam's buggy as hell controller config thing to work was annoying, but finally got it up and running perfectly
on a Playstation Classic controller. Feels great to play on a proper digital only pad. :)
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Marc »

Honestly, if I see one more website refer to Dracula XX as an 'inferior port; of Rondo, I'm going to lose my shit.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Sumez »

Welcome to the club :D
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Sengoku Strider »

copy-paster wrote:I heard lot of bad things about PSP Rondo port, despite the translated and new english dub it does have some issues like music sometimes not play at all and gameplay glitch issues. PS4 Requiem port also taken from this port too and honestly doesn't look like it's comfortable to play.
I'll stick up for this version of the game here. No idea what it looks like on a larger screen, but I played through it on Vita and I thought it was fantastic. The original is also part of the package, and honestly it felt worse to go back to. The remake has my favourite Castlevania walking animation, it just felt so perfectly paced and smooth. I could say the same for all the animations, the original felt a little herky jerky to go back to after hours of the remake. Going widescreen is nice too.
BIL wrote:Interested to hear what you think. :lol: A game of sometimes alarming incompetence that I've nevertheless bought four times now (including this latest pickup). Has neither COTM's straight hardcore nor AOS's mirror polish, and it's fugly as all hell too, but god damn is it an endearingly strange and violent first attempt from Igarashi.
Another game I'll stick up for! I'd read so much about it over the years that I was expecting a neon dayglo nightmare. But it was fine, didn't bother me at all. Pleasantly plowed right through it on Wii U. (Along with all the other GBA games and XX, so this collection is kind of a bummer. If they thrown in something otherwise unobtainable like Rebirth or even Legends I would've jumped in).
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Post by NYN »

Sengoku Strider wrote: The original is also part of the package, and honestly it felt worse to go back to.
Pardon me for being a stickler, but... when you say "original" you mean actually the included localized port of the PCE Chi no Rondo, right? Now officially dipped and dubbed in English as Rondo of Blood. Hardly original with certain deliberate changes to fit the IGA all-encompassing crown that is Symphony. That game and the SNES, uh, distant cousin, has so many people confused with it's title, I just wanted to check.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Sumez »

I don't think the story is the reason people usually praise Rondo :P
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Sanguis »

While I generally agree with the video game preferences of the members on this website, I don't understand why some of those same members revere the non-classic Castlevanias.

I've played Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow in the past. I must agree about the aesthetical qualities, but I found the gameplay to be atrocious. Please enlighten me.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Rastan78 »

Yeah Symphony is broken, unbalanced and has almost no real challenge unless you self impose limits or go for a speed run. If you look at straight up gameplay it pales compared to the classics like CV III for sure. For me Symphony is just about strolling through the castle casually enjoying the tunes and the beautiful animations. Fun can be had just farming for drops and trying to find broken weapons. Also it had a big impact on players at the time of release bc it was such a bold change up of the formula, similar to what Breath of the Wild did with Zelda.

Got the new collection and it turned out very nice IMO. Seems a touch more polished than the first collection, especially before it was patched to remove NES sound bugs in CV1, add in controller remapping etc.

Is this interpolation I'm finally seeing in an M2 port? I noticed that when playing the GBA games or the SNES one in non pixel perfect 4:3 or full screen modes I can't see any scrolling shimmer. If you're sensitive to the shimmer it can be annoying to have to play games in a non 4:3 aspect via pixel perfect mode to avoid it.

Mapping the buttons on the GBA vanias can be annoying. Jump is on A and Attack is on B. It matches the original GBA layout, but is very unintuitive for most players on a SNES style layout where most actions games use Y as attack and B as jump. Part of the problem is confirm and cancel are always bound to jump and attack respectively so you start playing with the Y/B setup and now you're pressing wrong buttons in menus due to a bazillion hours of conditioning that on Nintendo consoles confirm is always A and back out of the menu is on B.

A good solution I found is to just put attack on both B and X leaving jump on A. This way you can get that rolling jump then attack thumb motion going from A to X while still leaving cancel and confirm on the usual B and A buttons.

If I were on a US PS4 and always used to hitting X for confirm I'd recommend Jump/Confirm on X and Attack/Cancel on both Square and Circle using Circle only to back out of menus.

Also they have menu and map on face buttons by default. Unmap that shit ASAP and just use start and select. Nothing more annoying than brushing the wrong button in the heat of the moment and pulling up the map right in the middle of trying to attack a boss. Sure the convenience of having menu on a face button is great in a slow moving RPG but not in an action game.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Immryr »

Sanguis wrote:While I generally agree with the video game preferences of the members on this website, I don't understand why some of those same members revere the non-classic Castlevanias.

I've played Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow in the past. I must agree about the aesthetical qualities, but I found the gameplay to be atrocious. Please enlighten me.
i'm in a fairly similar position. i've never really been able to enjoy SotN and never even got round to finishing any of the other 'metroidvania' games i tried. i'm not quite able to put my finger on exactly why this is. i love the classic castlevania games, and i love a lot of metroid type games, but i've never been able to get into these.

i bought the gba collection on the switch anyway and so far i've been having a decent amount of fun playing circle of the moon. it's nothing earth shattering or anything, but it's a pretty comfy game with a decent enough level of challenge to keep me interested.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Volteccer_Jack »

Sanguis wrote:While I generally agree with the video game preferences of the members on this website, I don't understand why some of those same members revere the non-classic Castlevanias.

I've played Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow in the past. I must agree about the aesthetical qualities, but I found the gameplay to be atrocious. Please enlighten me.
Of the non-classic vanias, I revere Symphony and only Symphony. The mechanical aspects of SotN are masterful, I don't think that's even really debatable tbqh. Alucards moveset and controls are easy and intuitive to grasp yet have a lot of nuance and depth, you gain a huge array of abilities in the forms of permanent upgrades, equipment, and consumable items, and all of them feel great to use.

The balance is a total clusterfuck that almost singlehandedly ruins the game, and your ability to overlook this problem is a determining factor in your enjoyment of the game. It's why I exclusively play Symphony on Luck mode, and recommend the same to anyone else; it's nowhere near a complete solution but it at least makes it possible for you to die under normal play conditions.

All the games after SotN, though, are essentially just "SotN-likes", pale imitations that give you a tiny fraction of the options and freedom Alucard had and never come close to the aesthetic heights of SotN (I include Bloodstained RotN in this, in fact I think it is the worst example). The notable exception being Order of Ecclesia, which gives up on clumsily aping the exploratory freedom of Symphony and leans fully into being a linear action game. It's easily the best post-SotN vania IMO.

As for Aria of Sorrow, I think that game is massively overrated, and while I liked it on a first playthrough, I bounced off it almost instantly when I attempted to replay it. But it does have the distinction of being BY FAR the coolest Castlevania game in terms of story/lore.

For reference, I think the series peaked at Rondo (hence why everything after relentlessly stole from it).
"Don't worry about quality. I've got quantity!"
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Rastan78
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Rastan78 »

Volteccer_Jack, you hit the nail on the head with everything in that post. Alucard's movement, controls and animation are untouchable. Of course the quality of SotN's music also goes without saying. Yet the balance is so broken it's laughable and hard to even understand what they were thinking.

One thing I will say to add a bit of perspective on Aria of Sorrow is that it's a GBA game. At the time it came out it was just cool to have a reasonable approximation of a Symphony style experience on a humble little portable system. I got obsessed in the day with collecting all the souls. Don't ask me why as grinding for all the drops is sort of the equivalent of watching paint dry.

Of course in another few years you could actually play portable Symphony on PSP which still holds up as a very solid way to play it.

Speaking of grinding for souls the new collection has a surprisingly robust list of items, enemies drops etc. For example on Circle of the Moon you can see all the combos of what the DSS cards can do with a screenshot and inputs for their special commands as well as what enemies drop which cards. Pretty useful tool for trying to see more of what the game has going on without spending a lot of time grinding for every drop.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by BIL »

My love for ~Magical Vacation Dracula~ is real, as is my bemused, knowing indulgence. Despite the total lack of balance, I've no hesitation putting it on a desert island scrolling action list with Saigo no Nindou and Daimakaimura. I revisit every couple years, always having a blast messing about with its massive sparkly toybox over a solid fortnight. As Jack says, it can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Crissaegrim? Zzz. Where's me crocodahl knoife. Image

Image

My only real complaint is the same one that dogs much of its iterative sequels: lack of a Battle Arena, to truly push those gorgeous mechanics. While COTM's map is pedestrian, its Arena and generally deadlier action, driven by customarily airtight Umechan controls and collision, gets it a valued place in my rankings. Ecclessia is so well-done, with it deferring the usual nonlinear castle until endgame mobility, then stocking it with big fuckoff killers, I barely consider it part of the same sub-series. It, too, I love as much as any of the trad Draculas. Not coincidentally, Nobuya Nakazato helped out on all three of these games.

All the rest, including Bloodstained ROTN, I'm fine with but consider firmly peripheral. Special notes for 1: HOD, which has godawful air controls, and a blatantly padded map full of dead space - but also marvelously violent Spell Fusions, and the entire sub-series' most deviously entertaining breadcrumb trail, and 2: DOS+POR, which I've only played once apiece (true endings). Some of my favourite shumps bros love the former, so I keep meaning to revisit. The latter I just don't recall much, which might not be its fault at all.

ROTN, I enjoyed a lot, save for a nagging flaw: the enemy design is piss-weak compared to SOTN, COTM and Ecclesia's. The final area's big bads are barely on the level of those games' mid-carders. Of course, you generally don't play these games for harrowing combat... but I do want interesting targets for my super-deluxe firepower and mobility.

I had a blast with the cooking minigame, though, truly. Five-star idle grindan funnin. Image
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by Rastan78 »

Five-star idle grindan funnin.
Coming up with janky grindan funnin strats is a big part of these games as well. Even on my first play through in the day I had to go for SotN's duplicator just to see what it was all about. No doubt everybody who did came up with their own little tricks. Jewel sword? Bat boost or wolf through a certain room to grab a $1000 chest back out the door, rinse repeat? What's the most efficient way to replenish MP once you're down? Can you find a certain enemy close enough to a door to simply backdash out once you kill him to get a quick drop from him? There's probably more strategy involved there than in the basic AF boss fights.

It can get a little Diablo like. Since the combat isn't that satisfying outside of the great feeling movement and cool weapon set, the end goal of your game might be more about getting your EXP levels maxed, familiars leveled, or just seeing all of the obscure weapons and items in action and playing around with them.
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Re: Castlevania Miscellanies

Post by BIL »

Rastan78 wrote:Coming up with janky grindan funnin strats is a big part of these games as well. Even on my first play through in the day I had to go for SotN's duplicator just to see what it was all about. No doubt everybody who did came up with their own little tricks. Jewel sword? Bat boost or wolf through a certain room to grab a $1000 chest back out the door, rinse repeat?
I always use the Wolf :cool: QCF dash out of the sideroom, nail the moneybag (and any Cave Trolls dumb enough to interfere - don't get between a wolf and his prey!), QCF back. Relaxations AF Image

Also, I regret nothing :lol: (trying to see if Scarecrows were any easier to get a Muramasa from than Vandal Swords... or something, can't recall tbh)
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