Akumajou Dracula / Haunted Castle (Konami, 1988)
What made Akumajou Dracula for the Famicom so great is that it took the somewhat meager platforming of Makaimura and fleshed it out while making it a little more deliberate. The jump with the fixed height/direction and knockback animation stayed while demanding a little more from the player in platforming precision and combat; accordingly, the game's pace is slower, and Arthur's 2-hit death is traded in for a life bar, in addition to the new subweapon mechanic to compliment Simon's non-projectile whip. The result is a very fair, challenging, and satisfying experience.
Everything in the arcade Akumajou Dracula is big and ugly. This game's pitiful excuse for Simon Belmont is a sluggish, hulking buffoon sporting weak weaponry and a very inconveniently short and floaty jump. Nothing in this game feels right. Everything is just so goddamn huge compared to its Famicom counterpart, we're talking at least twice as big, which means the mechanics don't work nearly as well because you see so little at a time. The game doesn't have as much platforming as a result, so it ends up feeling more like a beat-em-up, and not a terribly interesting one. The huge sprites allow for more detail, but unfortunately the art ranges from bland to gross, and not gross in the way you'd want in a horror-themed game. The crappy rain in stage 1, the weird mist and baffling rainbow river in stage 2, Dracula himself being a giant cheesy-looking head, basically every enemy design... Aside from Simon's awkward walk cycle there's a sometimes shocking lack of animation as well. For example, when you defeat the giant rock golem boss in stage 4 the screen just freezes and the stage clear fanfare is played before moving on to the next stage; he doesn't even disappear. The stage 3 boss stupidly hops around the screen while standing straight up. The game feels very rushed.
More evidence of its rushedness comes in the form of the overall difficulty balance. There's way, way too many cheap shots. On the stage 1 boss Medusa, you have to take a hit either to the boss herself or the bat that's still onscreen; you can't avoid both. In the beginning of stage 2 you either get hit by a boulder coming in from offscreen onto a platform you need to be on, or you fall into the weird rainbow colored river and start the stage over. As an aside, this game handles bottomless pits very strangely: you only get one lifebar per credit, which is fine, but when you fall into a bottomless pit you start over at a checkpoint and your lifebar gets taken down to half of its total capacity if it isn't already there or lower. Setting you back in this way isn't really unfair, it's just weird. You'd think it would gradually deplete your lifebar or something instead of just taking it down once allowing you to fall into pits over and over again with only time wasted being the penalty. That is, if you're not playing the insane U.S. revision M, where it just game overs you right then and there (among other ridiculous unfair balance changes). Anyway, cheap shots: there's nigh invisible bats in the mist in stage 2, the mummies that appear from coffins in stage 4 are unpredictable in whether they shoot their bandage projectiles high or low and are very hard to prepare for because everything on the screen is so fucking huge, the fast rising elevator section in stage 5, the crumbling bridge in stage 6, and on and on.
However, the biggest "fuck you" the game has to offer is one single bat in stage 2. In late stage 2, as you ascend the stairs to fight the big demon snake thing protruding from the wall, there's a bat that flies overhead that you can either choose to let fly past to avoid taking a hit, or you can rush up to kill it. Killing this one innocuous bat spawns the only stopwatch weapon in the game, which can stop anything including bosses dead in its tracks for a few seconds. Now, it's not absolutely necessary to have it, but you make the game so much harder and more miserable on yourself for not having it (which says a lot about these enemy and boss designs), to the point where if you somehow miss this one stupid fucking bat, you may as well restart. It's just not worth it to strategize clearing this game on one credit without the stop watch if for some reason you even want to play it at all.
Going back to the odd ways that this game handles health is that you collect hearts to replenish your subweapon ammo ala other classic Dracula games, but here instead of getting a fresh lifebar every stage your excess hearts at the end of the stage will replenish your life until it's full or you run out of hearts. The game doesn't indicate this in any way and it took me until well after I cleared the game for the first time to realize this was happening. Not really a detriment, just strangely unexplained. Ideally you'd want some kind of animation like a score tally at the end of the stage showing your hearts depleting and your life bar increasing, the lack of which is indicative of an absence of care, or time.
The one aesthetic saving grace here is the music, which is roughly on par with other classic Dracula games, i.e., it's pretty good! Bloody Tears makes its first reappearance in stage 3 after its debut in Dracula II (a.k.a. Simon's Quest), but the original tracks are no slouch either. Stage 2's music is a highlight.
A short word on regional variations. Thus far I've been talking mostly about Akumajou Dracula, which, while insanely unbalanced, is at least not that challenging of a clear if you know what dumb shit you need to do. However Konami liked to make the U.S. versions of their games really hard as I've mentioned in my Mystic Warriors review. The U.S. "version M" release of what's known generically as Haunted Castle, in addition to making any bottomless pits an instant game over, also ratchets up the damage scaling to hilarious degrees. Getting hit by a bone thrown by the first skeleton you encounter in the game takes half of your health bar. Poor Simon doesn't stand a chance!
This review only has three screenshots because A. the game is so ugly and I'm not exactly trying to show it off and B. I really didn't want to play the game again to the point where I can get decent screenshots of the later stages, it's that irritating. There is no reason to play this when we have wonderful titles like Akumajou Dracula for the Famicom, Akumajou Densetsu, Vampire Killer, Chi no Rondo, and to a lesser extent the Super Famicom Akumajou Dracula (plodding and easy as that game may be, at least it looks and sounds incredible). Don't waste your time with this garbage and play one of those instead.
Final rating: 1/5 (Awful)