Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

I'm a big fan of both the classic and Metroidvania style Castlevania titles. So I just about geysered with enthusiasm of an organic variety when I heard we would be getting a spiritual successor to both types of these games by Castlevania Symphony of Nights lead director Koji Igarashi. I guess you could say "I'm interested in this." Unfortunately, I didn't donate money when this Kickstarter initially started because I invested all of my previous earnings in safer Kickstarter ventures like The Ouya, Mighty No. 9 and Shut up and Jam Gaiden 2. Needless to say, my past investments left me penniless and without direction in life. Then I realized through the power of the internet that I could one day become famous enough to open a Patreon after I pretended to care about video games for a little while and with enough outright shilling and lying I might even become famous enough to have companies ask me to endorse their product under the guise of me reviewing it. Which is why I'm currently sitting in one of those extremely uncomfortable computer chairs that look like a car seat with no padding but shows the brand prominently at the headrest where Youtube and Twitch viewers can see it. Unfortunately, I got really excited and spent all my cash advance without buying a camera, mic or a video capture card, so instead of putting up low effort video reviews where I steal other peoples game footage. I instead have to write these in the hopes of one day hitting it big and paying off my massive debt over this computer chair sponsorship.
The video game industry is a long series of people leeching on each other or ripping other people off in the hopes of somehow getting in on the human centipede that is this unending gravy train of broken dreams, misaligned priorities, and unfinished products. Given the cynical nature of this business, one has to wonder if any amount of care or attention was actually given in a project like this with no production oversight. Further one might wonder, seeing that this is merely a side game to the actual game that was Kickstarted Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night did they actual care about making this particular entry good or was it just something they shat out to fulfill a "stretch goal." Whether or not this is a side game. I think a question someone wants to have answered immediately in a review like this is were people ripped off or not? Well, I can say in the case of both games that they gave you what was listed in the project details, with one exception I'll talk about in Ritual of The Night review, that they gave people exactly what they asked for which was an independently developed successor to the games of our collective youth. Most of the goals and stretch goals seemed to have been met. These games don't seem half-assed or rushed, to the extent that they have problems they seem to be problems that exist with games not funded in this way rather than the ones we have come to expect with other half-baked or outright con job projects that are funded through crowd sourcing means. So with the obvious out of the way, I think we can just look at these games as two games that exist independent of their means of being bankrolled and see if they're any good or not. Just because we want a game to be made doesn't necessarily mean that getting what we want is a good thing in the first place. I mean I want grilled Tofu with fried rice and I'm one more plate of that away from a heart attack. I want to have a significant other, but I can't care enough about other people to stop wasting my time doing dumb shit like these reviews. I want to have kids but I don't want the responsibility that comes with raising them. I want to live in a better world, but I can't even save my city from drowning in debt and sand. I want and I'm sure you want a lot of things that you aren't fully prepared to bear all the consequences of. For a long time, all I wanted in life was "Symphony of the Night" but with... And this is the part of the review where your mind gets blown, I wanted the same game but with "more." I thought this would be an easy task to do but Konami wasn't able to this and unfortunately, despite what I see as a noteworthy and heartfelt attempt with these two games I don't think they quite reach the heights of previous Castlevania titles either.

The gameplay in this is obviously a lot like older 2D Castlevania games. The third one being a particularly easy comparison with this as it has the same multiple character gimmick that game had. Like those older games, it also has sub-weapons and a lot more of them than those titles did as each of this game's characters gets their own set of four items except one of them who only has one sub-weapon. Health is given to you by hearts and not food, which makes it less confusing as little blue bottles give you weapon energy instead of hearts like in them olden games. A long-standing complaint or observation people having about hearts not being a health item in the series. Although I do personally miss the convenience of finding food in walls which made me realize wall meat was the greatest source of protein in real life and I viciously attack any undisturbed wall I see, hoping for my next meal.
You get to play as four different characters in this game. All of which are also characters from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. The first is the main character Zangetsu. He is cursed by the moon and by cursed, I mean his attacks have the second shortest range he has a weak jump and his special weapons are probably the worst all-around. On normal runs of the game I think he is best used defensively as in, since you can switch characters on the fly and they all have unique health bars, you should use him during normal platforming situations when any of the other three characters utility isn't specifically needed and him dying or losing health isn't as damning as any of them. The second character is Miriam and she has a big jump, a dash ability like Mega Man's and her standard whip attack can hit enemies from further away than Zangetsu. She has better sub-weapons than him and almost all of them have more range and versatility. Except for this one axe ability which is almost completely useless unless used against those treasure chest enemies and even then standard attacks will work just as well. She is the all-around best character and if all the box art and screenshots are any indication she is going to be the main character of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I started writing this review before BSR came out and yeah she is the main character. Her 8-bit sprite is this light purple-ish color and although it's supposed to look like a hood her head looks like it has horns on it. Actually, after playing the other game I think they're supposed to be horns and they just fucked up. She looks like a 2D sprite of a purple Draenei. For a second while playing this game I got both nostalgic for Castlevania and DrGraevling. I'm not sure better feels can exist than this combination. The third character is an alchemist named Alfred. Also known as Alphonse Elric. When I first played this character I thought he might be a joke. His main attack is a pitifully weak and short-ranged caning and his health bar like his pecker is tiny. At least without any upgrades. First impressions happen to be very false with this character because while he is made physically weak both with his default attack and in taking huge chunks of damage from even minor hits, his sub-weapons are without a doubt the best of the bunch and one of them, this lightning orb attack basically wrecks any boss or enemy it's used on even the first playthroughs final boss, remember me saying this when I start talking about bosses later. He also has a near invulnerability fire shield and an ice attack that can freeze even bosses and a mirror image attack that makes a clone of himself, which like the character himself doesn't seem that useful at first but there are a lot of situations where his invulnerable clone comes in handy. This character sees the most improvement with all the upgrades and there is a lot of experimentation that can be done with his sub-weapons. The last character Geble is basically Alucard from the third Castlevania. He is the character who only has one sub-weapon and that weapon is flying in bat form. Even though he doesn't get any other weapons than this, it actually makes him a little bit more useful because every blue flame that drops a sub-weapon for other characters will almost always drop a big blue weapon jar for him. So you can use him to hit the flames and quickly fill up an empty weapon bar, whereas other characters will only get another sub-weapon. His flight obviously makes him one of the most useful just in sheer utility because he can cheese so many platform mechanics by just flying over them. He can also fly through the small areas that Miriam can dash through, making him a useful replacement if she happens to be dead and you need to get through a tight space. His default attack is this upward arc of three bats that come out like Dracula's first attack in them older games. One thing that sucks about this attack is he can't hit enemies low to the ground even when he is ducking. That aside it's the second-best default attack after Miriam and it can help kill a lot of enemies that are just slightly above you, which is a situation that happens quite a lot in these games. He seems to take less damage than the other characters which is a plus, but when not flying he has the weakest jump. Which is kind of sad because it seems like the alchemist is an old man and his ass has a higher jump than bat boy Gebel.
A consequence of getting to play as all four characters whenever you want and given that some of them have a lot of utility a fair criticism of this core mechanic and the game itself is that it makes the game trivially easy even on harder difficulties. On the second quest nightmare mode, you lose Zangetsu as a character for story reasons I'll explain later, but his loss means basically nothing to you as a player as he has no real utility and basically exists to just be an extended health bar for the three actually useful characters. I was kind of bracing myself for impact when I heard about this game and having beat almost all of the classic Castelvanias I expected a much more difficult game than this. As is, I'm surprised to say that Shovel Knight is a harder game than this and I don't consider Shovel Knight to be difficult at all.
Yeah, one of the biggest problems of this games is just how many ways there are to cheese every aspect of it's gameplay. Bosses with the other three characters are easy enough, but with Alfred's lightning attack they might as well not even be bosses. Let me explain why. You see Alfred has this lightning orb attack that moves across the screen as you move to hit the enemy multiple times for a lot of damage from each use and while it helps a lot with on the ground enemies where it really wrecks shit is aerial combat, making most platforming unnecessary as you can hit the boss repeatedly from any area you choose with this weapon, without putting yourself in any danger. There are at least three bosses you can completely nullify with this attack and the remaining ones are either earlier than when Alfred is a playable character or like the very last boss of the second run they have special mechanics you need to do and hence can't be cheesed with this. Even without Alfred bosses in this game even on the hardest difficulty are extremely easy to kill and their easiness is reflected in every other aspect of the gameplay. The difficulty of early Castlevania titles is often exaggerated, but they were actually hard even for someone like me who not only played most of those games but a lot of other platformers from that era. Some of the difficulty of these games came from things that were technological limitations, like poor controls and bad enemy placement or weird respawn areas etc. That is to say their difficulty was due to somethings that were the result of archaic game design. Even with those caveats aside I think a game aiming to be a spiritual successor to those titles should reflect some of that difficulty. If I accept this as being a Castlevania game then it's the easiest one I have ever played, even Easier than Castlevania II: Simon's Quest [ドラキュラII 呪いの封印], which I can beat without breaking a sweat in less than an hour. The reason that game was so easy was it was ambitious and frankly too much so to the point that it had to be left unfinished in a lot of areas. I can't give that same excuse to this game which is really just a retread of a well-defined formula. In my opinion, it is too easy to be considered a "good" spiritual successor to the original platforming Castlevania games. I enjoyed this game and I can imagine people enjoying it, but the overall lack of difficulty and how fast I blazed through it left this feeling a bit more shallow than I think they intended.

Aside from the broad strokes of the gameplay, the game handles better than past games and it's controls are good. They remind me more of Castlevania Bloodlines and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood [悪魔城ドラキュラX 血の輪廻] more so than the NES games which had a lot of weird sprite flickering issues and weapon accuracy/tracking problems. If you're one of those people that judges every game in the series controls against Super Castlevania IV [悪魔城ドラキュラ] then prepare to be disappointed because you can't gloriously whip in every direction or do fancy footwork like that game. I would probably judge this game more harshly for these omissions but no other Castlevania other than that game ever had them and I didn't see a problem with any of those titles.

Did you ever see one of those large paper cutting devices in a classroom when you were younger that looked like a machete and a medieval torture device? One of my teachers had one of these that was poster board size and I remember constantly looking at this thing, imagining my limbs and other protrusions somehow ending up on the wrong end of that paper blade. Imagining bizarre scenarios where somehow accidentally my body parts end up on the chopping block of this paper cutter. I imagine thoughts and anxieties like this were going through the minds of this games music creators. By that I mean this music is constantly on the line of demarcation right on the razor's edge of Konami's copyright infringement of previously made Castlevania music. The music at it's best is a slight ripoff of older Castlevania tunes. One of the boss themes is so indistinguishable from a previous Castlevania tune that I felt compelled to listen to various versions of that old tune to see if there was any difference I could notice. There is a difference, you see theirs went, dun dun da da dun dun and Konami's went dun dun de du dun dun. That is to say, there was no real difference. It's hard to call this a criticism of the music when the game was clearly made to appeal to old school fans of Castlevania as a tie in product for their flagship title which will be more like Symphony of the Night. Some aping of those titles was a given. The problem is that none of this music really surpasses any of the previous soundtracks of Castlevania and that might seem like an impossible goal for a title like this but if you think that you just haven't played that many of these here revival platforming nostalgia cash-grab games. The key point of comparison for me is Sonic Mania, not only did it remix old versions of the music in a great way, but all of the original songs surpassed those previous titles. Tee Lopes the guy who created that games music deserves at least a quarter of the credit for any amount of positive reaction you have to that game. Also, Shovel Knight a game I already mentioned has a completely unique score trying to bring us back to titles like the NES Castlevanias and almost all of the music is banging. You know, maybe what I'm about to do is cruel and unjustified but, WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? I looked up gameplay footage and music for the new Bubsy revival game... And I thought it was not only better than previous Bubsy music but was better than this title's offerings on the whole. Yeah, Bubsy has a better soundtrack than an alleged Castlevania game, this happened folks. You can lie to yourself, but you can't lie to your ears, listen to those three games and tell me this soundtrack is better, it can't be done.

Graphically I have a similar criticism of this game it looks "good" but compared to other games with a similar appeal and a retro aesthetic it doesn't quite live up to a game like Shovel Knight. Some parts of the game do admittedly look really good, like the gambler boss Valefor which I think looks like a ripoff of a Shovel Knight more so than previous Castlevania games. I liked his design and the mechanics of his boss fight. The flying boss Andrealphus looks like an off-brand Mega Man [ロックマン] boss and it would be hard to differentiate him from a basic enemy. He also plays more like a Mega-Man X boss like Overdrive Ostrich or Storm Eagle only not as good as either of those. Just because the game dresses up like a good game doesn't mean that it is one. If I dress up as Mario, I don't gain the ability to jump high and shoot fireballs after eating a flower. I just look like an asshole with a Mario costume on. This game looks like an asshole with a mismatch of Konami and Capcom games on, only unlike Shovel Knight which did the same thing it doesn't really do enough to transcend these apings or justify its existence in comparison to those titles.
So boss and enemy design were a bit of a mixed bag. This sadly reminds me a bit of one of those games on the NES that was ripping off Castlevania like Frankenstein: The Monster Returns and Werewolf: The Last Warrior or even Altered Beast [獣王記] which despite your childhood memories Sega kids, was a piece of shit, I'm sorry to be the first to inform you of this. Rather than coming off as spiritual successor, it comes off a bit generic in regards to its enemies, bosses and character designs. I will give this game that the environments, on the other hand, did look good and I could imagine them being used for an older Castlevania game. I especially like the look of Zangetsu's boss fight and the level before it.

After playing Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night I'm not exactly sure how these games are supposed to work together with each other from a story standpoint because in that game Zangatsu hates Miriam the first time he meets her there and the reason he hates her is he doesn't like anything connected with demons and he doesn't know her and yet this game is supposed to come before that one.... I think. In that game we also meet Gebel and Alfred but Gebel doesn't look or act anything like the one in this game and Alfred is just some old asshole, until he becomes a madman with a heart of alchemical gold. You seem to know both of them in that game's story but they never reference any events or act like the characters in this game. So I'm assuming that these games aren't connected in terms of their story even though other reviews and promotional material would lead most people to think that. When I say other reviews, I mean in general and not on this site.
To the extent that it has a story, it is just Zangetsu slowly meeting the other characters in the first run, hearing one sentence of dialogue from each and then you doing what you do in any other Castlevania game of the 8-bit era kill things until you reach the last boss.
The second playthrough you only have the other three characters and Zangetsu whose cursed heart finally fell to temptation is the real final boss of the game in this run.
The story isn't much better or worse than the games it's homaging. I do have to say though that I think other Retro titles some that I have already mentioned like Shovel Knight and Shantae have more engaging stories than this. The landscape of what it takes to make a game homaging retro games has shifted and it's become harder to be impressive with this, it's not enough to just ape earlier titles you have to try to transcend not only those but also newer games trying to do the same thing. The bar was high and this game decided to duck rather than pole vault over that motherfucker.

I know some person out there is pedantic enough to criticize me and most likely other people for treating this like it's a Castlevania title when it "officially" isn't and I'm willing to hear those complaints and here are my instructions for those people to tell me I'm wrong in this way. Take your hand off the keyboard. Breath in nice and easy for a second. Move your hand behind your body and position it slowly towards your ass. Lightly dip your fingers into your asshole. After that move your hand towards your face and then slowly insert those fingers into your mouth. This is the process by which you revert back from your current state of anal retention to a more manageable oral fixation. If you still feel like posting this clever rejoinder and a much-needed bit of trivial minutiae after doing the above process five to six times, maybe I'll give it a listen, but like Kickstarter and Gofundme, I "guarantee" nothing.
This game is fun for what it is, the fact that other games have already done what it is trying to do better doesn't change the fact that I enjoyed the small amount of time I had playing it. I don't think it lives up to the 8-bit Castlevanias and its lack of difficulty means I probably won't ever feel compelled to play it again. So I would tell people to expect a mild amount of fun with this title, but nothing memorable and certainly nothing that surpasses previous games in the series.

“Where has my dear Castlevania gone?” cried the fans of the once glorious gaming franchise that helped define the challenging 2D platformer during gaming’s formative years. At first, these were the teary-eyed yelps of old-school Castlevania fans who longed for another 2D Castlevania game after the Metroidvania and 3D action games eclipsed any need to recall the roots of the franchise with a more traditional title. Nowadays, the once smugly satisfied Castlevania fans who preferred the Metroidvania titles are left in the dark as much as the old-school fans before them. Castlevania has been forsaken by Konami since Order of Ecclesia on the DS in 2008, neglecting one of the most gilded franchises in gaming with a consistent output of exceptional games. The presence of glossy, high-budget triple-A games that defined the late 2000s might have deterred Konami from producing more Castlevania games. Still, the following generation appreciated the artistry of the minimal quirks found in retro games, sparking a renaissance of retro revival titles in the indie circuit. Unfortunately, Konami still didn’t jump at the opportunity to reinvigorate its franchise as the company had shifted its priorities from making games, much to the chagrin of its fans. Hope was not lost, however as Koji Igarashi, director of Symphony of the Night, stepped in as the savior for the deferred hopes and dreams of Castlevania fans. Igarashi’s revitalization project came in the form of Bloodstained: the spiritual successor to Castlevania, with an initiative to spotlight the classic titles of the series. The first title released in Igarashi’s multi-phased plan to satiate the forlorn Castlevania fans with a new IP was Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon, an 8-bit 2D sidescroller intended to emulate the earliest Castlevania games on the NES. Initially, Igarashi planned to first release Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a specific spiritual successor to his own project of Symphony of the Night, but the support for Curse of the Moon on its Kickstarter page was so overwhelmingly positive that Igarashi decided to prioritize the project over his original one. Curse of the Moon reminds us all why the Castlevania series was so successful during the 8-bit era.

While other retro revival games like Shovel Knight borrow properties from a plethora of 8-bit era games, Curse of the Moon is a shameless Castlevania clone. In fact, Curse of the Moon looks as if Castlevania has been relocated via the most half-assed witness protection agency that just changed their last name by one syllable and made their client wear a fake mustache, promising that no one would know the difference. Igarashi knows what Castlevania fans have been bereft of for all this time and was evidently willing to provide it, even if his lack of legal rights to the Castlevania name would bring Konami’s cracked legal team to rain fury upon him. Indiscernibility in a spiritual successor of this magnitude has to rely on the changing of names to avoid accusations of plagiarism, and that’s ultimately what separates Castlevania from Bloodstained. For one, the main protagonist is not a blonde haired, Eastern-European warrior wielding a whip, but a swordsman named Zangetsu. Dracula is no longer the prime terror of the night, and neither is any other classic horror monster due to Castlevania already bogarting all of them for themselves. Instead, Zangetsu’s enemies are demons, a nebulous scourge of evil with loads of varied design potential. Whereas the Belmont family rids the land of Dracula’s presence out of obligation, Zangetsu is on a passionate mission to enact revenge against the demons who have cursed him, with the archdemon Gremory being the primary target at the end of the game.

One of the perks of modern gaming harkening back to simpler eras is the benefit of graphical progress. Someone might think this would be superfluous when crafting a game with 8-bit graphics, but they would fail to understand the benefits of hindsight. 8-bit graphics on the NES weren’t just primitive because their crude rigidity lacked a sense of realism, but they also tended to be murky and monocolored, making the individual pixels of characters, background, and foregrounds indiscernible. The Castlevania games were exemplary titles that used color contrasts for both graphical discernibility and to make the game more visually striking, but still faltered with some unrefined spots in the foregrounds. Curse of the Moon amplifies the impressive graphical groundwork laid out by the NES Castlevania games to a staggering degree, greatly surpassing the limited capabilities of the NES. Sprite work in Curse of the Moon is so crisply detailed that it practically ascends 8-bit graphics (10-bit?). Color contrasts between the foregrounds and backgrounds are noticeable, but we’ve moved past the era where this was needed for the player’s sense of discernibility. The ice cave at the end of “Frigid Hell” is one deep, cold color of blue, but no pixel is undetectable by the naked eye. I’m so impressed by how the developers crafted the pixel art so expertly here that I feel as if there is a magical secret they’re keeping from us.

Zangetsu seemingly doesn’t play like a Belmont, but his gameplay echoes the same basic principles of an NES Castlevania game. Jumping is done in a singular fashion and has a stilted range of trajectory. Destroying the candles strewn across the land nets the player additional weapons and ammunition for them. Hearts that would normally be used as ammunition have shifted back to a logical sense of healing items. Ammo is now restored with a blue elixir that comes in a few different quantities. However, Curse of the Moon still carries the Castlevania tradition of breaking through walls for big health items, only they are larger hearts instead of roasts. Despite everything here being a clear translation, Zangetsu’s gameplay in combat is too dissimilar to Simon or Trevor. The signature Belmont whip is a fantastic tool for close quarters combat because it provides the player with enough range to keep themselves from harm. Zangetsu’s samurai sword does not require the wind up that the whip does, but the piddly range for close range combat puts the player at a greater risk of taking damage. His special weapons increase his range and his attack power, but only to a certain extent. Zangetsu isn’t as ideal of a base character to introduce the player compared to Simon.

Luckily, if the player doesn’t care for Zangetsu’s restrained moveset, the game soon offers alternatives for the player. People often compare Curse of the Moon to Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, and the multiple character options are the reason why. After defeating the first three bosses of the game, a character with their own unique movesets will accompany Zangetsu on his quest, even if the man is shockingly hostile towards them. Miriam will feel more familiar to the veteran Castlevania player because she brandishes a whip with the same pullback and trajectory. Her higher jump ability and strong, versatile range of special weapons makes her my frontline character over Zangetsu immediately. Alfred is an old wizard who lacks the base attack range and defense of the other characters. However, he compensates for his frailty with staggering magic. I’d go so far as to state that his magic is borderline game-breaking like Syphas was. Lastly, Alucard Gebel is the supernatural wildcard with the ability to literally fly through levels by transforming into a bat. Grant from Castlevania III is the only character not to be imitated by a clone here, probably because his climbing mechanic was broken and years of hindsight decided it wasn’t worth improving upon. I never found myself switching from character to character in Castlevania III because the shift was a pace breaking slog, but all four characters transition beautifully at any given point. If the player prefers to stick with one character for better familiarity, Zangetsu can also kill the other characters and absorb their strengths, rectifying his deficient range.

The specific comparisons between Castlevania III and Curse of the Moon do not end at the characters. Castlevania III was advanced enough to where the player could take alternate forks in the road between the levels. This method of progression fostered plenty of replayability, but I think Curse of the Moon’s method of oscillating pathways is more nuanced. The level design in the NES Castlevanias tended to be relatively linear until a boss encounter, mostly due to hardware restrictions. In Curse of the Moon, multiple paths arrive at the same place, but the game rewards the player for taking the extra effort to attempt the alternate way. Normally it would be impolite to point, but the skeletons laying on the ground use their bony fingers to direct the player towards the alternate path. If the player manages to follow their directions, they can bypass the longer route with more enemies and other calamitous features. However, the challenge that comes with directing towards that path isn’t missing the skeletons, but not having the character that is able to go there. Alternate paths are usually locked by character specific obstacles like high ledges and firey stone demons. If that character is unavailable, the player is forced to take the more treacherous route. This design philosophy makes the player consider the collective characters more as a unit than picking their favorite for the duration of the game.

The team-like unit persists with Curse of the Moon’s difficulty. This is one factor that does not draw comparisons to Castlevania III because Curse of the Moon is a cakewalk compared to the hardest NES Castlevania game. Difficulty options are available at the start of the game, and normal difficulty will suffice for even those who have never played a classic Castlevania title. It’s funny to me how the legendary knockback malady that makes castlevania so difficult is a separate feature that is optional to the player, like putting hot sauce on your breakfast eggs for that extra kick. I’m no Castlevania noob, so I picked this feature to uphold my credentials. Yet, I never became frustrated with the knockback unlike so many instances in the Castlevania games. Zangetsu and his team apparently have more resilience than the Belmont clan which is both a blessing and curse. The difficulty of Curse of the Moon is again based on the absence of one of the four characters. Each of them has their own lifebar so once they die, the other characters can take their place after the game sets them back a bit. Losing all four characters will cost the player a life and the checkpoint will bring them back even further. Depending on the situation, the player might be screwed if they need a certain character. I made me other character commit suicide to bring them all back. It costs a life, but the game is pretty generous with them. I clamored for an easier Castlevania game while driving myself insane playing them, but Curse of the Moon feels like a regrettable wish being fulfilled.

A factor of Curse of the Moon more character specific than traversing through the levels are the bosses. The monstrous enemies at the end of each level are personal highlights in my regards. While I appreciated the tributes to classic horror monsters that every boss in Castlevania represented, I realize that this inhibited the creativity of the boss designs. No boss is alike the other and they all range in scope and size. A few personal favorites are the golden Valefar from a design standpoint and the bipedal electric lizard Bathin for accompanying every character’s moves to win his fight. Bathin is somewhat of an exception however as most other bosses seem to be character specific. How the hell is Zangetsu supposed to reach the flying Andrealphus? If he’s your last character, suicide is the only option, and that shouldn’t be the case. Even the final boss Gremory seems to only favor Miriam without using a shit load of magic with the other characters. Bosses tend to eat up lives at an alarming rate because of this.

At the end of the first natural playthrough with all four characters, Zangetsu fulfills his character arc by sacrificing himself to save the rest of the characters. Upon meeting them, his hostility stemmed from their relations to the demon scourge he longed to rid. As the game progresses, he starts to feel companionship towards them and starts to judge those by their character, not their background. It's a surprisingly deep ending for an 8-bit game, but Curse of the Moon is really far from being over. Completing the game once will unlock a different gameplay mode where the three characters save Zangetsu from Gremory’s influence, but it requires playing through the game again. In fact, all other alternative playthroughs involve playing the game again with only slightly different parameters. One more playthrough may be nice, but the six it takes to unlock every ending gets grating after playing through the same game multiple times.

As someone who greatly appreciates the NES Castlevania games and their impact on gaming, Curse of the Moon is a delightful return to form. It checks off all the boxes that I wished were present in those games, but I understood clearly why my grievances with those games couldn’t have been placated. Years of progress in the gaming medium now allow developers to fix those mistakes and add an extra layer of polish to make the end product more attractive than they ever could in the 1980s. My small spots of dissatisfaction with Curse of the Moon might just stem from being jaded. Curse of the Moon is the greatest NES-era Castlevania that is neither a Castlevania game nor an NES game. It’s the fully realized product that Castlevania III intended to be.

A great little tribute to the Classic Castlevania games of old. Its incredibly honest in the tribute, featuring pixel visuals that feel authentic, a very catchy 8-bit soundtrack, very silly use of language and hard difficulty.

Yeah the jumping is still uncontrolleable mid flight, but they did a good job of increasing the controllability of the characters without making the game feel too easy.

The level design is linear, but still varied enough to keep you on your toes. The same could be said about the boss fights, which are creative but at the same time not too frustratingly hard. The ability to change as you wish between the 4 playable characters is brilliant and makes the game as hard or easy as you want it to be, without being too restrictive.

Above everything else though, its a game that shows the huge amount of passion that the developers put into it.