Ah, 1993. A time when men were men, women were women, and video games pounded players into submission until they were sobbing uncontrollably into the armrests of their easy chairs. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, the tenth game in Konami’s venerable Castlevania franchise, is very much of this era. The game was originally released on the TurboGrafx-16, a home gaming console popular in Japan but which never really got a foothold in the American market. For this reason, Rondo of Blood went unplayed by American Castlevania fans for many years. It is now available, among other places, on the Wii’s Virtual Console, and audiences everywhere have the opportunity to crumble beneath its difficulty.
Because Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is hard. You play as Rhictor Belmont, of the Transylvania Belmonts, who needs to make his way through Dracula’s castle to rescue his kidnapped fiancé. The game is broken up into several side-scrolling stages, and they are merciless. Much of the difficulty comes from Rhictor’s inability to maneuver himself. You can’t, for example, do much to control your jumps once you’re in the air, a problem for a game which requires microscopically precise platforming. Enemies take off a lot of life per hit, and opportunities to recharge are rare. Rhicter fights Dracula’s army of monsters armed with a bevy of sub-weapons and his trusty whip, but the whip has a limited range of movement and the sub-weapons often aren’t as powerful as they need to be.
The result: you’ll die a whole Hell of a lot before you finally conquer whatever obstacle has been giving you grief. But once you do, you’ll feel terrific. Rondo of Blood operates on a risk-reward system taken from an older school of game design, one which treated video gaming more as an ordeal to get through than as an experience to savor. The game says to the player “Beat me if you can” and the player either rises to the challenge or leaves to go do something useful with their time.
For players who stick it out, the game rewards them with a flashy production and generous extras. Rondo of Blood has a bright, clean look and a bountiful visual imagination. The art team clearly enjoyed themselves in designing all manner of nasty monsters to throw at you, and even as they tear you to shreds for the umpteenth time you can’t help but appreciate the variety. The elaborate boss battles are especially distinctive, not to mention especially difficult. Many of the designs are so solid that they were reused for the game’s more famous sequel, Symphony of the Night.
The connections between Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night don’t stop at the visuals. Rondo of Blood is notable for being the first Castlevania game to not be entirely linear. You still traverse levels one at a time, but many of those levels have more than one exit, and each of those exits lead to different stages. Eventually, all roads take you to Dracula, but how you get there is up to you. In Symphony of the Night, Konami famously tossed off the level-by-level format and made Dracula’s castle one giant interconnected environment. Rondo of Blood is an important step on that path.
There’s also an additional playable character, named Maria, to whom you gain access after rescuing her in one of the game’s early stages. Maria is much lighter on her feet that Rhicter, and her attacks are a bit more versatile. She takes some of the crushing difficulty out of the game and is very welcome. Rondo of Blood can be beaten fairly quickly if you know what you’re doing, but the addition of Maria and a network of alternate paths means that there’s quite a lot of game here to enjoy. For fans of Castlevania, fans of gaming history, and fans of throwing their controllers against the wall in anger, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is a worthy investment.
No comments:
Post a Comment