played a shitload of cv2 yesterday. gonna keep playing it but
yeah i’m pretty sure 2 is kind of a misstep overall despite having cool ideas. it is a real slog to play, and the encounter design and overall balance is honestly kind of bad? it is shocking because those two elements are absolutely incredible in 1 and 3 and 2 by dint of its nature just can’t control the space and pacing to that extent. it gets downright miserable at times. go too far without a whip upgrade? oh yeah these enemies take 6-8 hits in this state, cool. come to a screen from the wrong side? you have 3 frames to jump or you will take damage that will knock you back off the screen. urrrrgh
it massively sacrifices the “puzzle-action” perfection of cv1 and i’m really not sure any of the new ideas are actually sufficient to make up for losing that
the falling blocks room patience-testing is absolutely nothing compared to arriving to a town right as the zombies come out and then having to either jump over both extremely trivial and extremely obnoxious zombies or just wait outside until the sun comes back up
CV2 dumps you back exactly where you died, with just your accumulated heart money being lost when you use one of your unlimited continues after losing your last life. It’s actually really approachable for that reason, and that gets overlooked.
haha whoops, I was completely stumped on where to go in Portrait of Ruin because I went backwards out of a boss room and didn’t pick up the power glove. I still don’t think it needs more direction there but I DID do an entire other portrait after that which seems silly.
i’m not sure it’s actually good but it is very evocative and cruel in an interesting way.
the kindness of progression alluded to by LaurelSoup i would argue is definitely not overlooked; the approachability as salve for the opacity ultimately means that the experience of playing this game is largely boredom, confusion, and frustration, with pockets of “oh, oh, oh, did i figure something out??”
in cv1, the entire game is a hit parade of interesting setpieces. most of cv2 is allergic to an interesting setpiece. even the mansions in cv2 are committed to puzzling over action… dramatically so… which makes it a very fucking tedious game.
i am probably going to beat it but having finally peeked at a guide, i’m like. hm. i guess i could have tried using the oak stake on the weird orb. even though every time you use one it’s gone and you’d have to trek all the way back thru the mansion to the old man if you were wrong about that.
microcosm of this game. you either know what you’re doing or you’re going to suffer. immensely. for a long time.
Wow, the nest of evil in Portrait gets awful, huh. I know I’ve gotten through this before but the double Frankies plus the stupid conductor boss zone is just appalling
wow wow wow cv2 is amazing and terrible and so, so interesting
i really honestly love it but i think it is not enjoyable to play for the most part. after getting two important hints so far - 1. the oak stake thing i mentioned above and 2. kneeling by the lake with the blue orb
this was enough to get me two of dracula’s body parts. i also found the fire wall subweapon. i have read in a hidden book something about dracula’s heart breaks the curse i think. anyone have any clues or hints?
CV3 feels underrated insofar as most people have played the NES version and if we had all exclusively played the Japanese version it’d be much further in the contending for best oldskoolvania
what i find extremely interesting about cv2 is that the game is nearly entirely gated in what i’ve seen by knowledge and a bit of patience and pretty much never by what the first game demands. it really is the RPG-ified castlevania
i feel like the fundamental questions of cv2 are twofold
what if we made an RPG but instead of top down overworld it was just outdoor castlevania levels and instead of turn based battles it was castlevania combat - that’s sick right. and we can have towns with NPCs to talk to
what if we made a puzzle box game that was in the vein of tower of druaga. and those NPCs would just say any old shit that in some cases would be deliberately intended to confuse you
these are both great ideas and they are especially interesting in this perspective, which gives you that microcomputer, falcom-y thing a bit, yeah?
but man. what you actually have to do in this game is rough.
and it’s actually really kind of a buzzkill to look something up in this game. it’s not unlike looking something up in Myst - that really is a huge, huge percentage of the game and what you can get out of. every thing you look up is another bit of the game you won’t be able to enjoy, because as far as i can tell so far, it’s not like you’ll be using this hint to get farther in the game to… a part that’s fun? it seems like that’s not so much a thing
the part that is striking to me about why the game is fun anyway is that it is so directly hostile and antagonistic to the player. the very first mansion has an absurd number of false floors that are like, idk, kind of funny but they are just a binary check - do you know they are there? they pose no challenge other than a functional knowledge check. and that’s the thing. the game is all knowledge all the time. there is some tricky platforming but the stakes to that are never really there since you don’t really lose much progress other than sometimes potentially having to grind for hearts.
so there’s a real joy to it with the adversarial nature and being able to overcome that. but the game is also just like. kind of mean and dreary and rude? everything takes so long and there’s nary a ‘good part’. the ‘good part’ of the game is the way it nestles its ideas into your brain, like little traps waiting to go off.
but i think it’s ultimately a game in want of someone to take the ideas and make a better game. maybe - coming full circle - that’s why cv3 can feel like a creative retreat. it is unwilling to try and fix the (pardon me) shittiness of 2 and instead tries to take all the good things from 1 and do it fancier
this is essentially how I feel about link to the past and super Metroid. feels like creative retreats instead of embracing the weirdness of their direct predecessors.
i gently yet firmly disagree but it also feels passé to defend like the most popular videogames of all time lol. i think all those games are splendid because they integrated the weirdness! but there is also virtue to having the weirdness exist for itself inarguable
did anyone else not know about the II/III subweapon score mechanic for like most of their life/time playing Castlevania. it unlocked the first game knowing i could be always throwing 3 crosses at everything lol
oh to be clear I adore Super Metroid in particular, I just think it’s safer than Metroid II. I’m take it or leave it with LttP but my opinion is not meaningful for, as you say, one of the most popular games of all time haha
anyway I’m not derailing. I sure like to castle those vanias.
I should really give the original trilogy another shot, I’m a lot more patient than I used to be.
i often think about what kind of game metroid 3 would have been if it wasn’t a return to zebes
i also think about what zelda 3 would have been if it leaned into the RPG-ness and unrealized ambitions of Z2 and gave you other party members and whatnot
now you have me wondering what CV3 would have been like if it tried to iterate on the action-adventure tropes of its day
@Rudie have you played the Japanese version of Castlevania 2? i think it is on Famicom Disk System. apparently the NPC dialogue makes way the fuck more sense in Japanese
Looking at the whole script, it doesn’t seem to have as many errors as people claim. Plus, a better translation would cause us to lose the Graveyard Duck.