Castlevania Dracula X
I write about two things on this site – my books, and my very obscure interests. Today we’re doing obscure interests! 🙂
Specifically, Nintendo games from the 1990s.
When the Castlevania Advance Collection came out, I got it, and I’m pleased to say that after 25 years, I have FINALLY finished playing Castlevania Dracula X.
Dracula X is something of an oddball game. It’s a Super Nintendo port of a PC Engine game called Castlevania: Rondo of Blood that came out for the PC Engine console in Japan. The trouble is that PC Engine games could have something like 650 megabytes of data but a Super Nintendo cartridge can only hold 2 megabytes. So Dracula X is sort of a very limited remix of Rondo of Blood.
It’s also a very hard game – I would say the difficulty is both “unforgiving” and “brutal.” Like, the plot of the game is that Count Dracula has returned (yet again) and kidnapped Richter Belmont’s girlfriend Annette and her sister Maria. So Richter takes up the Belmonts’ trusty magic whip and storms Dracula’s castle, fighting Dracula’s army of monsters. But to rescue Annette and Maria, Richter has to follow a very specific path and pick up the Key sub-item, and not lose it at any point on the third level. If you lose the Key, Annette and Maria die, and you don’t get the best ending.
And at no point does the game or the manual explain that! Not once!
For that matter, some of the levels seem designed specifically to screw with the player as much as possible. Like the clock tower level. Castlevania clock tower levels are traditionally quite hard, but Dracula X’s is extremely tough thanks to the combination of the bats and the spear knights. Oddly enough, I think the boss battle with Dracula himself is easier than in Super Castlevania IV or the NES Castlevanias.
But! It’s still a fun game. It makes the best possible use of the Super Nintendo’s graphics, and is one of the best-looking SNES games. The soundtrack is also amazing. I played Dracula X in the 90s, but I could never get past the third level. Thankfully, Castlevania Advance Collection makes excellent use of the Save State feature, so I was finally able to finish the game with the best ending.
-JM