Holy Diver

This here is my 9th review out of 9 tracks on the album about potential Castlevania clones. This game was never officially released outside of Japan and I only personally heard about it a month ago. So I have no prior history with this game and I don't know anyone who did. It may seem odd that a game never released outside of Japan has an official English name. Well, it isn't, because a lot of Japanese exclusives prematurely also have an official English name and also the name, in this case, is very significant because if we look really hard between the velvet lies... THERE'S A TRUTH AS HARD AS STEEL. Yeahhhhhh, this game was inspired by that Holy Diver. Aside from the name it shares some other names from the broader expanded Metal-universe for its characters like Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads, and Zakk Wylde. If I had to take a wylde guess I think its name and its possible trademark infringing elements of these people and this album in other areas might be why it was never released outside of Japan. That is the story for a lot of games that never made it outside of certain regions. So is this game a hidden rainbow in the dark or picking up dog shit at the park? I tried to think of a name from a Dio song that would fit the second half of the sentence and I just couldn't. I have already failed the fallen titan in the first paragraph here and I'll try to make up for it with the rest of this review. At the very least he can look me over and then walk away from me.

I may have already failed Dio, but in my defense, this game didn't do much better. Musically this game does not live up to its namesake. It has painfully average NES music and barely a whiff of it seems inspired by metal. The first level might fool you for a second into thinking that this game will have good music because that level's theme is good. That one track reminds me of music from Pokémon Trading Card Game [ポケモンカードGB]. A great soundtrack for a forgettable side game. A man could die happy listening to that pause menu theme.
The sound effects fair a little bit better and I would say it generally is the best in this regard of the games I viewed so far. This isn't saying a whole lot because doing this series made me realize a lot of NES games skimped on the sound effects.

Graphically I would say it's above average for the era. The game does a good job of contrasting colors, which mitigates the fact that a lot of its backgrounds are constantly reused assets throughout the entirety of this relatively short title. This is the biggest problem with the game graphically it reuses a lot of the same patterns and things in the back over and over again. Things that are visually striking to me at first are undermined by the fact that they get reused in different levels with only a color change, if even. Ironically I don't mind reusing assets as much in modern games where the cost of each pixel, animation, and texture raises the price by a lot, but in older 2D games like this I think they need more variety in levels and in unique visual objects to keep things fresh. Even with that gripe I generally like the look of the levels. The color schemes carry this game harder than Randy carried Ozzy in the formative years of his solo career.
Enemies look good for what they're but a lot of them including the bosses are just nonsensical shite. The animations for them are good and unlike a lot of the games I have looked at thus far, for this series, they actually do a lot more than just move back and forth. Which is a low bar to meet, but hey... I'll take what I can get at this point.
Although this game does have the kind of Universal/Hammer/Victorian horror we see in Castlevania it does also have a lot of biological aspects to its aesthetics, in that regard it reminds me a lot of Abadox [アバドックス] and Metroid [メトロイド]. Like with the enemies I like what it has aesthetically, but a lot of it doesn't really make that much sense or seem to be aiming for a general theme. It's just a random hodge-podge-o-shit. As my past reviews may have indicated, I don't really like it when games lack cohesion and just throw a bunch of shit in without trying to make it all work together. I think it's a definite negative and its graphics reflect its story and gameplay which also lack cohesion and a general sense of purpose as we will see in upcoming sections

This game has some platforming elements and I would even call it an "action-platformer" like that fabled series we're comparing it to. Unlike those games though your main attack is a very limited form of shooting some kind of projectile out of the main character's hands. You can also find "powers" for lack of a better term. Some of which act like sub-weapons, but others are necessary for traversing the levels. Like one of the powers is an ice ability that freezes lava that is blocking your path. The powers in and of themselves are not a problem, but one problem that I had related to them was the need to switch back so that I can shoot the now icy lava and jump towards it. The amount of time necessary to do all three actions didn't seem like enough when the lava or whatever I'm dealing with would revert back to its dangerous state. Also, the limited range of your shooting sometimes made these challenges harder than I believe the programmers probably intended them to because a lot of the time, iceblocks or enemies would just be ever so slightly out of the range of my attacks. Remember this when I start talking about the difficulty of later levels.
The first four levels of this game are pretty standard for the genre and pretty standard in their difficulty. The fifth level itself is not hard, but the boss that is just like this spinning tower thing that shoots in all directions really ramps up its difficulty from the previous bosses. You have very little room for mistakes and almost nowhere safe to stand while fighting this boss. It took me a lot and I mean a lot of tries to kill this thing.
The second to last level of this game is significantly harder than anything before it and if the game remained as hard as that fifth level I would be fine, but nothing can prepare your virgin bussy for what comes with the sixth and last level. The last level is fucking hard. I mean inch your way through every minute segment of it hard. You can't fuck around even a little bit on this level. I'll put it this way, if I hadn't already played a lot of games like this and seen a lot of people play games like it in speedruns so that I know tricks of the trade a normie would not, like double jumping from a hit, which was particularly useful on this level I don't think I ever would have beat this thing. It's not the hardest platformer I ever played, but this level is in that running at least. On the other "hand" precision platforming isn't always the easiest thing for me, because as I stated in a previous review. I have a nerve disorder so my hands shake and twitch uncontrollably. Someone thought I was joking about that when I previously mentioned it, but I wasn't it's a problem that causes me trouble when I try to do fine motor skills with my hand. It mostly affected writing with a pencil as I was growing up as my handwriting looked terrible and I was actually barred from learning cursive because the letters would blend too much the way I wrote. This is why I still don't have a "signature" to this day. I don't know if it was idiocy or persistence that kept me playing games with this problem or writing these reviews for that matter, but as a wise man with a thick red beard once said "I'll leave that one to the historians." The point is some games like this are actually a little bit harder for me than they might be for other people, but as I stated earlier with all the experience I have and knowledge of games like this It might be that I have too easy of a time. It's not always "easy" for a reviewer with individual circumstances like this to gauge how something will feel for an "average" player and games like this that are obviously harder than most make the evaluation all that much harder to gauge.
Everyone likes different shit and has a different threshold of what makes for good difficulty and what doesn't. I mean people think Contra, Bloodborne, and Mega Man games are hard, which I personally find to be laughable at the risk of sounding like a dreaded basement-dwelling elitist. So just imagine what people who don't even like games enough to be on a website dedicated to them would think of a game with difficulty like this one. What I'm saying is this game crosses the line. It's too hard and it's too painful and I'm tapping the fuck out. I really can't imagine most people being able to do this and I don't understand why the difficulty becomes such a steep incline that it becomes a line at the end of the game. This is where difficulty detracts from the overall experience. It doesn't prepare you well for these challenges, it doesn't give you enough time or resources to deal with them and I don't even think the creators intended the game to be as hard as it is, I think it was just bad level and projectile design along with some other minor oversights that created a difficulty clutch in these final levels that is borderline insurmountable and beyond unfair. The level itself is fucking torture, but luckily the final boss is pretty easy. Especially in comparison to the previous one. They had mercy on me.
Overall I find the gameplay to be a mixed bag. The first five levels are enjoyable despite the problems with your powers I mentioned and a lot of the basic gameplay aspects were fine to the point that I didn't feel the need to even mention them. I think this game was fun until the crippling difficulty of the fifth level's boss and the last level. If you extracted those last things out this might be the best game out of these 8-bit horror games I have played so far, but with them, it is in the upper middle of the pack.

This game has a "story" that is never stated in the game at all, so like the last game, I had to look at websites and promotional materials to find it out. The story is basically the typical fantasy mixed with future shit that has no cohesion or sense about it that a lot of games from this era have. The only real thing you need to know is despite your character having black hair and kind of looking like Dio from the Holy Diver video, his name is Randy. The story doesn't really add anything of value or take anything away from the game either, I could have not read about it at all and my opinion about the game would be the exact same that it is now.

I would say as a potential clone of Castlevania this game covered that one about as good as Killswitch Engage covered Holy Diver... Alright, I don't actually mean that, I just really wanted to write that line. This is the first game where I'm not actually sure whether it could accurately be called a clone or not. I see enough similarities in the games that I understand why many people suggested this in all those lists I saw on the subject, but at the same time, it is different enough in good and bad ways that I think it stands on its own. It's a borderline case, let's call this Castlevania-adjacent. You know when Black Sabbath looked for a replacement singer, they knew they couldn't replace Ozzy fucking Ozborne, so they didn't try they aimed for something different with Ronnie James Dio and they achieved something different with him. Being charitable you can say the same thing about this game. I don't think it's bad, but I don't think most people will find any enjoyment in the game given its difficulty, so I can't really recommend it at all.