Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge

Let's start this off by saying that I was afraid to play this game. The first Castlevania for Gameboy was a huge pile of crap and Castlevania 3 left a sour taste in my mouth. I know that this series will get good eventually but I was really sure that this game will not be it. And I was kinda right but also kinda wrong. Let me explain:

Belmont's Revenge starts off in an unusual for the series. We're immediately treated with a rather bizarre level select screen showing 4 (!!!) castles. Damn you're telling me I get to fight 4 Dracula's? So I just randomly picked the first stage and went at it. To my surprise all the slow tedious technical bs from the first portable game are fixed here. This game runs fast and play even more precise than Castlevania 3.

The whip upgrading system from the original is back turning it into a projectile weapon when fully upgraded. But this time around it won't degrade when you're being hit, or at least not all of the time? I seriously don't get how this system works. Sometimes it loses are level after being hit and sometimes it doesn't. It didn't really bother me that much as it didn't hinder my playthrough but it's still kinda strange.

Another welcome addition are the sub-weapons from the mainline of games. We have the cross and the holy water returning but I never used them as they do very little damage and are not really necessary to make your life easier. It seems like it's just there because it has to be.

Overall the gameplay stayed the same. We enter the level, do a few platform and combat sections and oddly enough a lot of rope climbing, then we face off against a boss and collect the orb to finish the level. I have to give them that: The 4 levels are all unique fun and not hard at all. I really enjoyed this first half of the game. Another thing is that halfway through a level you'll pass a check point that you can return to even if you run out of lives. So the game is super generous in that aspect and I really appreciate it. In addition you can just quit at any point and write down a password to keep on playing. Beautiful.

One short word on the rope climbing: I really loved these sections, they kinda remind me of Donkey Kong Country in a weird way. The combat opens up to a whole nother level and you just feel super mobile on them. Also oddly enough your buttons turn into tubro buttons which make you whip the whip like an automated rifle. I feel like there could be a whole game in there somewhere. Like a pirate spinoff or smthn lol.

The bosses are all straight forward and after you beat all 4 of them you unlock the real Dracula's castle. So there's only one Dracula after all. And here's where the bs starts again. It's a theme kinda throughout the series. The first half is a breeze and extremely enjoyable and the 2nd half is straight up hell. Long tedious stages and dumb bosses make this section another slog to get through. I swear why do the always fuck this up. The last boss is apparently you son or something... I didn't really get the story which is being conveyed through 3 overly dramatic Textboxes.

The final boss is Dracula and I really enjoyed it. All the Dracula bosses are extremely hard but unique and fun in there own way. Here you have to memorize locations of swirly eyeball patterns and it's trial and error at first but then it turns into this zen monk fight. I dig it even though I usually hate this kind of shit. Also the hallway before the final boss is the most metal thing on the gameboy. You need to find out for yourself. Go look it up.

This all doesn't sound half bad and it really isn't yet the game isn't all that rememberable. The game has some cool gimmicks like the ropes and this one part where the light is off but overall it's just a bland jump'n'run for the GB. The music is also not really that good tbh. Nothing really pulls me back. If you wanna play castlevania on the go this one is the obvious choice as the first game is complete garbage but other than that it has nothing going for it. But out of all of the games this had the best flow to it thus far which is remarkable. All I can say is that this made me really excited to play the 16-bit era Castlevanias.

After the absolutely horrendous experience that was Castlevania: The Adventure, I was incredibly sceptical about the GameBoy games of the Castlevania series, worried that everything terrible about that game would carry over. To my surprise, this game improved greatly on practically every front to the point where this is a genuinely enjoyable game that clearly expanded upon its predecessor in a meaningful way, keeping the main identity of the GameBoy series alive, while also discarding quite a bit of what made it bad to begin with, leaving the final product as a damn fine game for the most part.

The presentation of this game is significantly improved from the first one, gone are the blank backgrounds and extremely samey environments, replaced by scenery that manages to look vibrant despite the completely monochromatic nature of the original system, each of the 4 main castles feel entirely different from one another in terms of atmosphere, be it the grandiose feel of the cloud castle or the Egyptian ruins of the Rock castle, giving this game some decent visual variety along with honing in on one of the things I consider a core part of the Castlevania experience, atmosphere. Furthermore, the awful issues with lag and screen tearing seem to have been more or less completely fixed here, the only time that I found it a problem being a select couple of areas with a lot of moving sprites on the screen, making the still very slow, limited mobility of the player feel far faster regardless, ultimately making actually playing the game genuinely entertaining.

Level design was also a big step up as well, each area having some extremely memorable setpieces in them that took me back to the NES titles immediately, requiring a somewhat unconventional approach in order to get past the obstacles. Out of these there were a couple of personal favourites, such as the dark section of the Rock Castle, requiring you to realise that the candles are what light up the room and not to just destroy them immediately. What truly made this section clever to me however, was the presence of a type of enemy that only moved in the dark, which gave you a visual indication on where pits were by falling down them, providing some way of progressing even without being able to actually see the majority of the level, giving some neat variety to the game without sacrificing good design. In general I just found this game to be considerably fairer, no longer with constant moments that required unreasonable precision or just straight up didn’t function in a sound way, no longer having parts where you’d get hit during a screen transition, nor just being pixel perfect jump after pixel perfect jump without a hint of creativity to be found anyway.

Only issue I really have with this is that the first 4 levels out of 6 honestly feel a bit too easy, nothing really posing too much of a threat save for one or two spots, but I’d take this any day over onslaught of poorly thought out, artificial difficulty that came up in the NES titles quite frequently. That said, despite how much I generally enjoyed a lot about what this game did, the 2 final boss fights absolutely killed a lot of my enjoyment in a massive way, both constantly sending out moves that are seemingly impossible to avoid, or are at least relentless enough for it to not be very feasible, completely killing the sense of progression and gradual escalation in a massive way by not testing the player with anything particularly meaningful, but instead stacking the odds against the player in truly obnoxious ways.

Overall this is a game that I ended up enjoying despite the fairly small amount of content and the obviously limited hardware that the game was made on, much to my surprise. Genuinely found a lot of this to be some truly well thought out gameplay that also genuinely felt like a Castlevania game, rather than a platformer simply with its name, showing some damn good evolution and refinement from the extremely rocky start of this series of handheld games. A bit easy or primitive in parts, and occasionally unfair, but largely a good time that I’m quite glad I had.

Scattershot statements:

Music in this game is pretty good for the most part but I still feel as if the sound of the GameBoy gets in the way of them sounding truly great.

Bosses are pretty simplistic and easy for the most part but provide a fun little way to cap off the stages.

The dragon boss fight is extremely cool for managing to actually make a decently fun Castlevania fight based around mobility, which is pretty unique for this early part of the series.

Of all the subweapons to bring into this, the choices made of the axe and holy water really help benefit providing additional choices to combat and positioning in an effective way, definitely the combination I’d consider the best.

The sole fact that now only very specific enemy attacks can downgrade your whip instantly warrants another point compared to the first handheld game.

Across-the-board improvement to C:TA. Better presentation (with smaller sprites, allowing for bigger areas, better animation, and tighter controls. The linear level structure has also been replaced with a stage select screen, giving the player choice and visual diversity - and some of these places are bad ass, like a crystalline castle or grifty dungeons. The platforming sections are refined, too, with far less impossible jumps and a more forgiving coyote time window. And do I even need to talk about the soundtrack? It's sick and there's even more tunes here thanks to multiple songs in single stages.

Still completely unforgiving, and it's still slow as sin, but this is a massive improvement over the original and is definitely recommended for Castlevania fans.