Castlevania - The Bloodlust Curse of Dracula

Name: Castlevania: The Bloodlust Curse of Dracula

Develpor: richterw

Story: This is a remake of Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. After defeating Dracula, many years later, Simon is afflicted with Dracula's Curse. He must journey Transylvania to find the five parts of Dracula's resurrecting body and return them to a secret altar in Dracula's Castle where they may be purified, destroying the fiend once and for all, but the citizens are tired. They have long lived under the curse and you can't always trust what they say.



Writing: Classic Castlevania, and seems to mostly be the same script as Simon's Quest. I have nothing I can really criticize about this since, even if it isn't the original dialogue, it's fairly bog-standard platforming dialogue. It's really just there to either tell the story or explain the game mechanics, which it does!



Gameplay: Considering this is a richterw game, I came into this with some pretty high expectations. What I found was hit or miss. The hit detection is en pointe. I mean, how did he do it? I thought my hit detection in Brigida was pretty solid, but unlike Brigida, this hit detection never fails! Platforming, however, is horrible! Wait, I don't mean it like that! It took a ton of work and he managed to get some fairly decent jumping mechanics out of RM2Tsuk3. if this game shows anything it's how damned hard it is to get jumping mechanics to work even passably in RM, and I'm not so sure this is passable.

In the beginning, it's fine! You climb some steps that demonstrate that the jumping mechanics are clearly wonky and not working as well as the dev might like, but once you get into the next room, jumping seems okay. You can jump attack the candlesticks to get hearts, and seems to have the same precision issues that the original Castlevania games had where you had to time the attack just right while jumping or you'd miss the candelabras.



Then you get to Dracula, stand off to the side just out of his attack range, and just keep attacking until he's dead. Then the game starts, and you get that lovely scene that I showed you up top. And then you press enter to advance the text.



So, I went through the town. I made the mistake of going left first and trying to jump over lava. And dying. Oh! Only one life! What are those numbers on top of the life bar for then? It turns out you can save, allowing you to save scum if you can remember, but I don't think it'll work too well if you're in the middle of a level constantly worrying about dying. If we use dyn_RPG, I wonder if there's a way to make it so you can just press a button that autosaves, like a save state. That would be a really nice feature for a game like this, where you're more concerned about getting through a level than making sure you've saved your progress. The way it is now, more than one life would definitely be nice.



My second attempt, I went left and found the level much easier. Then I came to the platforming...oh, lord and lady. You know, this probably wouldn't be that bad, but, here we go:

• When jumping, left and right input doesn't immediately work.
• When left and right input does work, it jerks in the direction of your input.
  
• When attempting to compensate for this, it overcompensates.
  
• Precision platform jumping is almost impossible.
  
• If the ledge is short enough, it often won't even register the jump input.
  
• If you jump on a short enough ledge, you have to specifically hit the jump input first. Upon doing so, recall the first two entries in this list. Watch what happens!
  
• In order to avoid this, your jump/left-right movement timing has to be perfect every single time or you will miss every single time.

Obviously, this isn't an issue with a lake of lava with no platforms going over it. For the bridge, however, it was a problem. I got to the point where I got pretty good at it and I really felt like I could work with it, but then I was in these woods and there were points where I was being expected to land on a single tile over these death pits. I tried to be careful at first, but if I could land on the tile, I couldn't jump off because half the time, it just wouldn't register the jump, and then I'd just go down as if I didn't jump. This probably wouldn't have been too bad of a problem either, but I kept losing too much progress, because, as I said, you don't save when you're in the middle of a platforming level, so, I found myself going back two whole areas after that death.

So, there are other issues with jumping. There are these platforms that you are supposed to be able to jump through and stay on them. Well, that doesn't work a lot of the time. A lot of the time, you walk on them and fall straight through. A lot of the time, you jump through them and just fall back. I find that in order to get these to work, I have to constantly press the up button. Even the monsters seem to have problems with this. The above picture has an example of the type of platform I'm talking about. Simon is standing right below it.



There's another issue with the townsfolks. The game could give us an interaction button, but no, it has to make interacting with the townsfolks automatic. So, you get stuck in these loops where people are walking with you and you're triggering their dialogue every single step and there's no way to get away from them.

The hit detection in this game really is solid, though. Seriously. No trouble actually fighting enemies.



As an aside, I was supposed to buy a white crystal from someone. That was apparently where it all starts, but I couldn't because I had no money. I thought that would change as I played through the levels, but it didn't, and I had no reason to come back. I can't think of how essential that white crystal is, but I've got to thinking that maybe having it adds platforms to these unjumpable rifts I keep encountering, like the one at the beginning of Berkeley Manor.



Berkeley Manor is where I really threw in the towel. First, a bat attacks me and knocks off some of my life because there's a text window in the way. Then I saw this nice platform over a moat I could jump on and then fell straight through because it was actually part of the background. Of course, I forgot to save and went straight back to the most recent town where this guy was talking about ribs.

You know, I nominated this game for Best Lawsuit Waiting to Happen, but I think I might also nominate this for Dark Souls of RMN. You are going to die, over and over and over again, and most of it isn't going to be because the game is so hard. It's going to be because platforming is so broken.

Also, do hearts heal you? The priests heal you! I thought the hearts were healing me because my health was consistently high, and come to think about it, no! I'm nailing these creatures with my whip because hit detection isn't messing up for me! I'm just straight dying on failed jumps. But I reached a point where platforming was such that I was surviving my failed jumps, and hearts don't seem to have been healing. I also didn't find any roast chicken in any walls, but maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Graphics, Music, and Sound: Graphics seem to be imitations of original Konami material. Perhaps the music, too. The credits aren't too clear on what is what, but it would seem that a significant portion of this was original material created to mimic Konami content, and the credits also indicate that some of this was ripped. But look at it. It looks amazing. It looks authentic. It looks like Castlevania!

Conclusion: I'm on the fence about this one. On the one hand, this is definitely one of the best platformers made in RM, and it clearly took a tremendous amount of work. The game is incredibly faithful to Castlevania. If you're an RPG Maker fan that is also a Castlevania fan, I would say this is certainly worth a look, but the issues this game has--it's unruly platforming, mostly, and NPCs that lock you in place as just a couple of examples--make this game a real chore to play. That said, the game is playable. It's not broken. It's extremely well made for the engine being used. A ton of really good work was put into this game, but it's another piece of evidence why a game of this type would just be better suited on another engine.