Castlevania Chronicles (PS1)
Cheesed that unlucky boss on the next try by hiding behind/under a platform.
Some nice-looking set-pieces
but also increasingly cheap gameplay
relying on ambushes
that you’re just not going to avoid getting hit by until you memorize the level.
Was just trying to kill myself off to get to the save screen so I could quit for the night but trundled all the way to getting killed at the final boss area, with the encounter recycled from mirrored in Rondo of Blood but the main sprite art redrawn–for this Arrange mode version–along the lines of Ayami Kojima’s Symphony of the Night designs.
Oh jeepers I’m an idiot, I hadn’t realized Ayami Kojima is female. Well, that rules. Here she is in a ridiculously over-the-top drawing session in Monte Carlo a few months ago:
Hopefully I’ll also remember now to look at the unlocked art gallery of her stuff once I get through all the stages; it’s low-res and lossy but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that just maybe there’s some work of hers in there that I haven’t found yet on the internet.
Back to the game itself, on the plus side there are only two elements that jumped out at me as egregiously breaking the original Castlevania’s Gothic romance theme: the princess/clown dolls from the previous session and the ninja maids.
As breaks from the theme they’re worse but much less frequent than the stuff in Castlevania III, which seemed not to be aware that there had been a theme at all, really.
There’s also this from Chronicles, which is just silly–and not actually very dangerous, either; you can kind of just jump right through it:
