Oh I was mistaken - MS1's bridge grenadiers don't do the terror flee after attacking. They
do jog off and never return, though. Smart dudes! Creating a diversion while their deadlier comrades move in. Don't chase after 'em, just kill as convenient.
I've got several near-1LCs on the boil at the moment, never an unhappy situation. However, one of them is
Akumajou Dracula (AC), and holy cow - this thing isn't fit to shine the others' boots. Some are mid/late 90s (Metal Slug X, Shock Troopers) but its contemporaries dunk on it too (Rygar, Saigo, and needless to say, VS Castlevania).
I was ready to pile in and say
BAH GAWD ITS TRUE, ITS RLY BAD - until I read up on its dev history
(ta CV wiki). It's a sad case. Random horror sidescroller, falling behind schedule, hastily rebadged with the newly-minted Dracula IP. Then (this is the sad bit), the devs enlisted to get it ship-shape returned to their own projects, and it was shoved out the door sans playtesting.
Game tagline wrote:"The ultimate version of the game that appeared on the Famicom and MSX".
NO ITS NOT 凸(■`W´■)凸 FIGHT ME IRL YOU FUCKIN LOUSY PRICKS
Explains the awful, sometimes outright broken collision. The fourth boss will landmine your ass clean off the stage, despite he and his projectiles being nowhere in evidence. Tap-dodging Creature's falling masonry is inadvisable, the blocks do
not reflect their hitboxes. Your broadsword may appear to cut a lethal swathe, but it handles like a stick of uncooked spaghetti. Either that, or Ravens are rocking some pixel hitboxes. They'd be entertaining foes, if Simon wasn't a gigantic heaving target.
YEAH ROCKDUDE, THAT MAKES SENSE
Game design is a petty, mean-spirited shadow of the original's artfully-tempered discipline. First loop is an easy 1CC, in classic rote memoriser mode. First everything kills you, then nothing does. A near-inversion of the original's good/bad (aka stage 6-1) ratio, right down the Stopwatch being the only decent subweapon of the lot.
DR. WANKENSTEIN PLS
Stage 5's elevator packs a kusoge cheap-shot on par with Saigo's execrable ninja pit. I am inordinately proud of figuring out the below method, in a fit of annoyance at myself for trying to learn the route.
BIG SPOILERS for BAD AUTOSCROLLER:
Phew, good thing they allowed that. I honestly cannot tell if they meant to or not!
All this said: the runtime is decently tight, the collision is not un-salvageable with experience, and there is an interesting survival aspect (the reason I'm still playing this). In its sole bit of excellence, the end-stage life restore isn't free. Rather, you pay one heart for each restored hitpoint. Any hearts left over, you keep for the next stage.
It's a great twist - the logical progression from Vampire Killer's letting you amass ammo over the game's course. Consistently excellent performance means more hearts to... watch-cheese your way through stuff Simon's gigantic swinging ass, zero mobility and weaksauce attacks can't handle without TASlike execution. More fun than it sounds, honestly.
The loop cranks up the bats, the game's one element that can't be memorised to oblivion - a far livelier challenge than the first loop, which gains new purpose as a supply run. Besides your end-game hearts and HP, it also lets you bring in your sword, to strike down st1's zombies and boneys with a little more vitriol. Sadly, you will never slay a leaping fleaman with a single deadly backhand, for whatever silly reason. A shame - the second hit spoils the simple satisfaction of the first.
Seems like a typical Konami infinite-looper. Not really interested in going beyond a 2-ALL for now, feels about right. I'm really fond of IREM's dedicated second loops nowadays, EG Metal Storm... or even better, their balls-hard single loops EG Saigo.
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"The legend is once again stained with blood."
Very cool, but as far as I'm concerned, that flyer and tagline are reserved for VS Castlevania.
Other than the neat survival quirk, the most interesting things on offer are aesthetic. It's not a success within the game itself - the first two stage's striking vistas and enticing air of wicked ruin don't last, unfortunately.
It's a fantastic opening, as
Cross Your Heart surges evilly. Undead horrors erupt beneath crumbling crosses, golden sunset plunges into black tempest as the cemetary wall unleashes its murderous hail, a tangled forest path turns deathtrap via diabolically toppling brazier... it's a glimpse of the continuous setpiece barrage perfected in
Strider. Stage 2 slows down a little, after a champion reveal of the moonlit castle, but compensates with a roving over/underground trek culminating in a surreal, bloody sky over a sepulchral realm, for all the world prefiguring Takumi's samhain-shaded
Night Raid.
Stage 3 gives the last of this wonderful AMUSEMENT MACHINE largesse. Everyone seems to slam that dining table as off-scale to Simon's model, but I took it as a menacingly blunt indicator of just how helpless humans are in this evil place. Meat, in so many words. Regardless, where stages 1 and 2 exude novelty and cinematic drive, stage 3 begins to flag. To paraphrase Christopher from
The Sopranos, Dracula's house looks like shit. Stages 4, 5 and 6 could pass for random launch-era HuCards, though the latter's collapsing bridge at least returns some sense of spectacle.
Of more note is the surprising amount of series firsts, seemingly borrowed by later, more accomplished entries - Rondo & Nocturne in particular. The aforementioned god-awful elevator's background instantly recalls the latter's Outer Wall, which contains its own (aesthetically) brutal take on the device, both leading up to a clock tower patrolled by Rondo-styled ghosts. Harpies debut here, in a similarly feral bare-breasted form to Nocturne's. The broadsword's vividly-coloured fuller and crisp lateral swing decidedly recall that game's zweihanders. Old favourite setpiece the collapsing bridge w/ bat chasers gets its first outing here, yet again directly referenced by Rondo.
There's also the tree monsters later seen in IV+X68k, and the lethally unstable statues of the former's library. I could swear the dragon sigil atop the first stage's evil wall even resembles the form of said statues from IV. The haunted paintings of both games seem prefigured here, as does the parallax-boosted inferno of X68k's late-game. The stained glass knight debuts as the third boss, interestingly enough in a form far more directly referenced by Mokushiroku's vicious pursuers than X68k's staunch defender.
Other stuff might be simply common horror stock, like the series' first intact Gorgon boss - but Creature's ceiling-caving attack is an interesting parallel with Akumajou Densetsu's take. Did he do that in the old Universal flicks? (I always wanted to see him rolling up in Husky-drawn sled packing dual hunting rifles, ala ye olde book!)
It's likely total coincidence, and a dubious one at that, but the garish hallucinatory scenery accompanying the castle gate is totally in the
Harmony of Dissonance mode of Argento-styled extreme hue terror.
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It's an alright game provided you can work with its harsh limitations. Whether that is worth it will depend on your tolerance for rote memorisers, your interest in long-haul survival play, and likely your affection for the Dracula series. VS Castlevania blows it out of the water, but that is probably to be expected given this thing's awful dev history. Badly unpolished but not without merits.