Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse (NES Review)

Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse
aka Akumajō Densetsu
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Developed by Konami
First Released December 22, 1989
Included in Castlevania Anniversary Collection

So much for basic, straight-line corridors.

While I hold the original Castlevania near and dear to my heart, there’s no doubt about it that Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is the superior game. Even Netflix seems to agree. The animated series is (loosely) based on it. While I still prefer my Vanias to have the Metroid prefix attached to them, among the linear Castlevania games, this is my favorite. I first played it on the Wii when I was 20, and to say I was blown away would be an understatement. After the abomination that was Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, this feels like the ultimate make-good. The formula Konami used was simple: take the original game, remove the conservative level design, add three playable characters and annoying branching paths and you’ve got yourself the best game on the Nintendo Entertainment System. One that is radically different between regions. They went a little overboard there. Like, I get that they had to remove the boobs from Medusa and the statues, because children might be traumatized or something, but they literally removed the.. I dunno what this is supposed to be. The holy presence of Jesus?

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The changes aren’t just cosmetic. Few video games have as significant regional differences as Castlevania III does. From the amount of channels the music features to the way damage is handled to how effective characters are to the overall difficulty, the alterations between the original 1989 Famicom release and the 1990 international release are.. well, game changing. The Cutting Room Floor, one of my favorite gaming reference sites and a place you absolutely should bookmark, needed to dedicate an entire page just to Castlevania III’s regional differences. The change that has the biggest impact is in Grant Danasty, the first character you can get to join your party. He’s a speedy little bastard who can jump really high and stick to walls. He can even crawl across ceilings. It’s like playing Castlevania with Spider-Man. In the United States version, Grant’s biggest drawback is his weapon. It’s a little flimsy knife that isn’t very satisfactory to use, and you can also only get two subweapons: throwing knives and axes. In Japan, that’s not the case. Grant’s main weapon IS the throwing knife, and it doesn’t even cost hearts to use it.

While Grant and Alucard can both circumvent large sections of the game, you have to turn into a bat with Alucard to do it, and that costs hearts. It’s free with Grant. In this picture, keeping Grant instead of swapping him for Sypha is rewarded with the ability to skip two rooms and go straight to the boss on the haunted ship level. I actually really admire that they went all-out with adding shortcuts, ledges, and free-lives in all subsequent levels specifically tailored for his abilities.

I seem to be one of the few people who enjoys the more difficult American version, but it’s not by a very big margin. Actually, the best possible version of Castlevania III doesn’t exist, and instead is somewhere between the two versions. In the US, the amount of damage you take depends on what level you’re on. The Japanese version is more nuanced. Each enemy has its own unique damage, and even their projectiles have unique damage values. In the US, you’ll take two ticks of damage in the first level when anything hits you. For the same level in the Famicom port, you’ll take three damage from direct contact with a skeleton and two damage from the bones it throws at you. Baddies gain a point of damage once you reach the final three levels, and I like that way better. It’s more immersive. I could be cool and say “not that Dracula’s Curse needs help with immersion with how excellent the graphics and gameplay are!” but actually, I think games should take every step they can towards immersion. Especially if there’s no drawback to it, and there’s really no reason they should have changed it.

One of the most memorable changes is the removal of the “GOTCHA BAT” in the home stretch before you reach the final battle with Dracula. It’s one of the cheapest enemy placements in the entire Castlevania franchise, but that was actually added excursively for us Americans.

On the other hand, in the American release, some boss arenas were altered to be tougher, typically by removing “space spots.” Bosses in the NES Castlevania games being the cheesable little kittens they are, I like that. Additionally, some bosses were beefed up in other ways. The Leviathans spit two small fireballs in Japan, but three large ones in the US. The twin dragons can aim their fire up and down. I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds with different editions, but Castlevania III is the rare 8-bit game with profound differences that’s actually good enough to immediately replay through just to enjoy the sight-seeing. It’s like the NES version of a spot-the-difference puzzle.

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When you play a complete cycle of Castlevania III, you’ll travel through ten levels. But, the game actually contains fifteen total levels. You’re ultimately given three potential pathways to take. Though not labeled as such, each path is tailored to be a specific difficulty. The “easy-medium-hard” road, if you will. The path for Sypha is the “easy way” while Grant path is the “medium way” and the path where you go to fetch Alucard is the “hard way.” No matter which path you take, you’re in for a treat. No NES game does settings better. No NES game gives the impression you’re actually traversing a vast, vibrant world better. The graphics are absolutely gobsmacking at times, and this was still in the era where Castlevania was meant to be.. you know.. scary! I should note here that I used a ROM hack that removes the branching paths and gives you a complete 15 level quest. You can get Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse – Linear Edition right here. It also speeds up the swapping between characters, which is a flow-breaking in either region. Without the hack, switching characters is so slow that sometimes I’d not switch to a more optimized character just because I didn’t want to break-up the action for a few seconds.

Alucard can jump higher than Trevor and turn into a bat, which absolutely drains hearts like crazy in the US version. On the Famicom, it doesn’t drain quite as quickly. Still, Alucard is easily my least favorite character. His attack is weak as hell.

My biggest knock on Castlevania 1 is the ultra-conservative level design. There’s nothing conservative about Castlevania III’s level design. While the graphics are dazzling and the set pieces are memorable, it’s the layouts that shine brightest. The ideal marriage of platforming hijinks and intense action. Mostly. There’s some truly putrid sections to Castlevania III that I want to skewer. Castlevania III is a white-knuckle gothic horror action game, and yet multiple times it wants players to just stand around waiting for something to happen. You’re not even doing anything fun, like fighting bad guys. You’re just waiting, and depending on who your partner is, sometimes the wait is agonizing. Like in this room:

Or this room:

Or this room:

Or, worst of all, THIS room:

That last one is especially annoying. Dodging blocks that rain from the ceiling really isn’t exactly exciting, and it’s not like the door is RIGHT THERE above you. It’s quite a ways up. Now, if you have Grant, you can reach the exit faster. If you have Alucard, you can turn into a bat and fly up to the stairway, but if you get hit by a block, you’re probably going to be dead. See, once you scroll upward, the previous area ceases to exist, because VIDEO GAME LOGIC! I found out the hard way that this means the blocks that rain and form the pillars you need to reach the exit no longer have anything to rain onto. If you scroll the stacks too high, you can’t finish the level. Like this:

The exit is on the far left side of the screen. I’m dead here.

Let me be clear: I like that they experimented with level design. I said that Castlevania’s level design wasn’t bold. And it wasn’t, but it was perfect. Of course it was. They knew they’d nailed one thing and one thing only: the combat. So, they focused the majority of their efforts on optimizing the levels towards fighting bad guys, limiting the platforming and environmental shenanigans to a few brief sections. Well, they couldn’t do that again. Perfection was off the table, because they absolutely had to get creative with what the engine could do. Some of their choices just didn’t work. The melting blocks are a great example. In that level, they divided the stage in half, with an upper and lower path. In theory, players who wait for the blocks to open up the lower path should be rewarded with an easier route. Instead, both routes are pretty pedestrian the first time.

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And the paths merge soon after anyway. It’s such an underwhelming difference between the upper and lower portions that I feel like the whole thing was just a massive waste of time. Wouldn’t it have been much cooler if it branched off into two completely different areas? If you’re going to make players wait as long as they have to for the bottom pathway to open up, you have to make it worth the wait. Castlevania III didn’t.

See what I mean? After waiting for the blocks to melt the path to the lower door, the two pathways converge almost immediately anyway. What you can’t see is that I killed the same enemy that’s seen below, too. Given how incredible the level design typically is, I know they’re better than this.

You know what? Given how exemplary the rest of the game is, I’m going to say that the developers were entitled to the occasional level design brain fart. Less excusable is how the stairs are harder to use in this edition of Castlevania than any other one. Being able to “bind yourself” to the stairs has an unresponsiveness to it. I’ve reached the phase of my gaming existence where I can beat the original Castlevania without losing a single life. I’m a long ways away from that in Castlevania III. I thought I’d had a one-death run on it, but I now realize I probably did rewind the occasional “just walk off a ledge when I was trying to take the stairs” moment that. Even after years of playing this, I still do nearly every single session.

As far as I can tell, this is the only “last pixel” jump in the entire game, and it’s not even that as long as you’re using Grant. However, without Grant, it’s a pain in the ass to judge.

Stairway from hell issues not withstanding, most of Castlevania III’s experimenting succeeds. It starts right off the bat with a climb up through a church. Curse wastes no time in letting players know things will be different. There’s going to be vertical levels and lots of jumps. It’s not inconceivable that you could die from an errant bat knocking you back. That’s literally right as the game starts, too. Branching paths and multiple characters aren’t the only concept introduced. Auto-scrolling makes its Castlevania debut, though every instance of it is a vertical section. A couple are smooth scrolling, and you die from both being too far up on the screen (as in you’re above where your life bar is), but also from falling to where a ground hasn’t appeared yet. VIDEO GAME LOGIC! I’ve never been a big fan of auto-scrolling in general. I mean, what is the malevolent entity that is causing you to die when the screen automatically scrolls? At least in Castlevania, you can imagine it’s something awful. Especially when the game introduces what I’ve termed “slam-scrolling.” It looks like this:

I’ve never seen auto-scrolling like that before, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t an absolute thrill. It’s great! Sure, the Castlevania tropes are all here. Even a souped-up version of the original first level from Castlevania 1, complete with music, shows up late in the game. The optional second level sees you climb up a gigantic clock tower, THEN after you rescue Grant Danasty, you have to climb back down it, and it’s such a thrill. So are the collapsing floors, clock pendulums, tilting platforms, and gigantic gears. The one set piece that doesn’t work.. well, it really doesn’t work. Like the original Castlevania, the spiked presses have badly done collision detection, but this is historically bad.

It took me quite a while to find the max distance your sprite can be from the spiked presses. This is the exact moment I died. Look at how far my head is from the press. I like to use the “against instinct” rule for determining how bad collision detection is. I understand that some wiggle room is required for these older games, but if the collision detection stretches beyond what your instinct would tell you is safe, you have a problem. That is WELL past what anyone would instinctively believe is a safe distance based on your sprite size. If this is the best they could do, then the presses should have been removed from the game. And, unlike Castlevania 1, they show up multiple times. On the plus side, you can stand on them this time.

That’s the thing about Castlevania III: whereas the first game was nearly perfect in what it could do, this one is so far removed from perfection that it couldn’t see perfection with a pair of binoculars. The wall clinging controls with Grant are so unintuitive that using them is actually kind of dangerous if you’re hanging over a pit. Alucard’s bat form handles so poorly that I almost never used it. And then there’s Sypha, who’s magic balls are so insanely overpowered that, if not for the sloppy stair controls, they might as well run the credits when you pick them up. I’m kidding. Actually, this is a pretty difficult game. Among other things, the bosses aren’t all cheesable this time around. While a triple-shot holy water can take the first and second bosses down in a single second, others require a little more finesse. The final battle against Dracula is probably one of the better ones in the entire franchise, and this time around, there’s three forms instead of two. Overall, if you replay the game with every path (or you play the Linear ROM hack) there’s 27 bosses. Well, if you count multiple forms and the constant repeats that occur. Some of the battles are pretty intense, too.

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Besides those annoying melty rooms and falling block sections, the action is non-stop. And really, it’s only cheesable on the basis of experience. Anyone who has somehow not played this yet won’t be able to just waltz through it. There’s a massive variety of enemies that take a while to get a feel for. Mastering the four player characters takes time, and some of the sections are absolutely brutal. The vertical stages are some of the toughest I’ve ever experienced, based around both enemies who fly in curves and towers that shoot projectiles. And, since you spend most of the time on stairs, the towers aren’t that easy to kill. Well, depending on your load-out. Sypha with her magic balls kind of nerfs them. Even nerfed, if one shot gets you and you’re on the edge of a platform, you’re probably going to die from the knock-back.

Yea, I won’t be acing this game any time soon.

For all of its shortcomings, Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is my favorite NES game. I’ve played through it around a dozen times now, including three in a row for this review, and I still never get bored with it. It nails the look and feel of a lot of my favorite gaming tropes. I absolutely love the fact that the game feels like an actual tour through a cursed countryside on your way to the castle occupied by embodiment of all that is evil. And basic Castlevania action is almost always satisfying on its own. The “Vampire Killer” whip has to be one of the greatest weapons in gaming history. It’s just so dang fun to snap endless undead baddies with it. Oddly enough, what’s scariest of all about Castlevania III is that it doesn’t even come close to being flawless. The places where it can be improved-upon are self-evident. Oh, and I wish you could have more than one extra character. I think that’s why I enjoyed Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon so much: because it’s a game that built upon the groundwork laid here. Yet, I can’t help but wonder if the greatest 2D action game that will ever be made isn’t buried in the original Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse, waiting to come out. Maybe one of these days, it’ll happen.
Verdict: YES!