Castlevania: The Adventure
Released during the early days of the original Game Boy, Castlevania Adventure has many good and bad aspects worth mentioning. First off, the game has some really top-notch music – some of the best for the Game Boy.
One of the biggest downfalls this game suffers from is how slow your character, Christopher Belmont moves. Granted, all Castlevania games up to this point moved fairly slow, but Christopher has got to be the slowest in the series to date. Even turning around fast is a burden. The gameplay comes down to memory. If you’ve played through the first stage 5-10 times, you should know exactly what to do where and when. A lot of the game boils down to memory. There are only four stages, each of them harder than the last. The third stage has you running through a collapsing ceiling complete with spikes. After you get past the first part, the floor raises, also complete with spikes. It turns the perfect timing of the game’s pixel perfect platforming into an absolute nightmare. I would say that it’s one of the hardest platformers I’ve ever played.
Perhaps one of the most annoying aspects of the game comes in the form of the whips you can get. Very early in the game, you find a beefier whip upgrade that turns your normal whip into a chain whip just like every CV game before it. However, when you get the second upgrade, the game adds one of the most unique techniques introduced in a Castlevania game. Once you get this final whip upgrade, not only is your whipe slightly longer, but it can also shoot fireballs in a straight line. This seemingly small extra can turn out to be your most valuable asset in the game. The problem lies in that your whip is downgraded a level if you get hit. For those with little skill, you’ll likely go through the game with a very basic whip and wind up on the floor quite often. For those who can manage to keep the flame, the game ends up being much easier.
Castlevania Adventure has very good graphics for its time. All of the character sprites are well drawn and look good reguardless of only having four to six frames of animation each. It doesn’t have the best visuals on the Game Boy, but you could do a lot worse elsewhere.
Enough of the overview. Let’s get down to my opinions. As I waded through this game after so many years, I found that I remembered all the little hidden spots and certain techniques to help make the game easier such as jumping over eyeballs on the bridge in the second stage and whiping them instead of whipping them and then jumping over the huge gap their explosions would make in the bridge. Little things like this is what used to define your skill as a gamer. Playing this game again gives me a certain feeling of nostalgia. More than that, it’s one of the few games that relentlessly challenges the player to the point where beating it makes you feel like you have accomplished something.
-Originally Posted by Bloodspoor
Portable Review 