Awesome Castlevania adventure.
You play as Richter Belmont on a quest to take down Dracula, on this journey you will face a bunch of both familiar and new enemies including huge bosses. You have the trusty whip, along with power-ups such as the cross, the bible and holy water. The bosses are relentlessly challenging, but this is actually one of the more accessible Castlevania games. It is difficult, it is challenging, but it's not cheap and unfair. I like to consider myself an average-skilled gamer. This game, I could manage, sure I died plenty of times, I died a LOT, and usually when that happens, when I get frustrated, I tend to give up. That wasn't the case here, it never seemed impossible so I kept trying and trying until I beat it, and man, the satisfaction of completing a Castlevania game, that's something else alright. But the alternate fifth stage got on my nerves. You can unlock another playable character, which can double jump, is a little faster and has a powerful attack, however she can't take as much damage as Belmont.
There's one thing I rarely talk about and that's the music in games, simply because I rarely notice it nor care about it, I usually listen to the radio when I play videogames. But I must say, the music in Rondo of Blood is beyond kick ass on every single level. The game shouldn't take you very long to complete, however there are alternate routes to discover with various stages and a few other secrets. This is one of the rare cases, very rare in fact, where I have completed the game 100%, rescuedt he four characters, discovered every possible route and defeated every boss. I usually never bother to return to a game to finish it completely, but Rondo of Blood is so good I just had to see all it had to offer. This is a fantastic game and one of the best 2D adventure games I've played, and it's release on the Virtual Console will hopefully make sure it finds a new audience. NOTE: It's not the SNES version, but the PC version and Turbografx version, also known as the superior version.