Vampires, monsters, whips, and lots and lots of death... of your character of course.

User Rating: 7 | Akumajou Dracula NES
By BadSushi | Review Date:
I bought this game wanting to try and get into the Castlevania series, while it didn't crush my dreams of wanting to play them all, it did cause me to doubt wanting to play the older Castlevanias. Buyers beware: THIS GAME IS ONE TOUGH COOKIE. Alright with that said the game was overall pretty good. It has aged well in my opinion. The graphics still can send shivers down my spine, as I can imagine what this game was like when it first came out. The 2D graphics show everything with actually good detail. The crumbling castle takes shape you can tell what each monster is supposed to be, and not guess. And the power-ups you find along the way can be guessed of how they will work pretty easliy.

The power-ups are different in this game then others. They set limits which up the difficulty that much more, as many would be good to use many times. The game also has a very slight RPG element to it, and by slight, I mean slight. You can destroy certain things, mainly putting out candles, to have random drops. When a new whip drops it becomes upgraded almost like it was leveled up. The more whips you find the larger your whip becomes making it less and less likely for you to die. But beware if you do die the game resets the whips length.

The game's difficulty is a problem. Normally it wouldn't bother me, but this game at times can be so frustruating that you would not want to continue further. But also the Virtual Console version should be looked upon as a saving grace. The game will never send you to the beginning if you do not want it to. This is great as you can start out a the same checkpoint over and over again. And the 'auto-save' feature it has (which is when you turn off the system it saves where you left off, which the NES certainly did not have), makes the game easier then it predeccesor.

The game is simple, man goes in castle kills tons of baddies, and saves the day. The game is deffinetly for fans of the series and if I knew it would be like this I most likely would have saved the precious Wii Points. The game was tough, but alright to play in the end.

It gets a 6.9/10

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