Whip It Good: A Love Letter to the Castlevania Trilogy

There are many contenders for the best series of games on the NES: Super Mario Bros, Megaman, Donkey Kong, Wizards & Warriors, uh, …Robocop? For me, there was no beating Castlevania, and in the case of the first game, that’s pretty literal. Created by Konami, a company that had one of the best reputations on the Nintendo, the trilogy of Castlevania had it all – great graphics, excellent music, fluid controls, and the level of difficulty that kept our hearts pumping. Taking inspiration from Universal Monsters, Castlevania featured famous vampire hunter Simon Belmont on his quest to rid his lands of the threat of Dracula. 

One of my favorite things about the game was the gothic setting as you navigated through Dracula’s home, the titular Castlevania. After a short animation of Simon approaching the gate, you pass through banquet halls, over crumbling ramparts, and along underground caverns, until finally reaching Dracula’s suite (if you’re lucky). Along the way, you face many monsters, including bosses like the Mummies and Frankenstein’s Monster. Skeletons patrol the pathways, tossing bones at you while hopping out of reach. Vampire bats swoop in, while zombies saunter all around. Using his trusty whip, Vampire Killer, along with holy water, crosses, and daggers, Simon vanquishes the creatures of the night, collecting… orbs? I never understood that part.

The difficulty in Castlevania was legendary. As a kid, I could never get past the level 5 boss, Frankenstein’s Monster and Igor, a hopped-up version of the annoying fleaman enemy. As an adult, I finally managed to defeat them and got all the way to the next boss, Death itself, the Grim Reaper, before meeting my end. Castlevania is one of the hardest games I ever played on the system, but not once did I feel the difficulty wasn’t fair. It slowly ramped up over the course of the levels, the bosses getting a little harder each time. When I died fighting Frankenstein every time, instead of feeling cheated, I felt proud of how far I had made it. 

Castlevania was quickly followed by the sequel, Simon’s Quest. While the game is frequently disparaged for its changes to gameplay and its sometimes confusing secrets, I loved this game. The linear structure of the first game was abandoned, letting Simon travel around the country back and forth, visiting castles to collect the slain Dracula’s body parts, and tasking Simon to talk to townspeople to find the way forward. Yes, the clues were usually garbage, but I liked discovering some things for myself (or from friends). As Simon roamed the countryside collecting hearts to buy upgrades to his weapons and other power-ups, the dynamic day/night cycle kept you on your toes, replacing enemies at night with stronger foes. I admit, I didn’t beat the game myself, instead stealing my brother’s game and defeating Dracula before he could do it.

After Simon’s Quest came Dracula’s Curse, which returned Castlevania to his side-scrolling platformer roots while adding some awesome new features. Simon’s path to Dracula isn’t completely linear, offering branching paths to different locations. Along the way, Simon meets three others; the pirate Grant, mage Sypha, and Dracula’s own son, Alucard, giving the player new ways forward and alternate attacks. Sypha was my favorite, using her magic spells, but Grant’s acrobatics and Alucard’s shapeshifting offered the chance to reach other areas inaccessible to Simon. I did beat this game in my youth but only managed to do it with Sypha’s Flame Tongue spell. Beating the game with each of the secondary characters (of which you could only have one at a time) had its own ending and finding out Sypha was a girl during that ending blew my mind!

I love everything about Castlevania – the mixing of gothic horror, Greek mythology, and any folklore in between. The different power-ups you could collect, while only being able to keep one, made you think on the fly about how best to defeat a boss. I loved the ambiance in Simon’s Quest, exploring locales around Transylvania. I still remember the line when you upgraded your weapon to the Flame Whip that was so cool to read as a kid. The multiple player characters in Dracula’s Curse gave you a lot of replay value and expanded the lore in ways that still are important today.

My friends in the 6th grade were all Nintendo fanatics, trading games and making up our own on graph paper. They called their “studio” Ninvendor, and mine was Infesto – what horrible names! Of course, we had no idea how IPs worked, so I devised my own much-desired Castlevania 4. I made up a bunch of other playable characters, like a knight and a werewolf, though they were completely generic and, in my mind just jumped differently. Nothing ever progressed beyond drawing characters, but it started me on a long path of wanting to become a programmer for the first twenty-some years of my life. 

A few years later, as a gift from my parents, my brothers and I got a Super NES, and of course, one of the first games we got was Super Castlevania 4. It was a retelling of the original game with updated graphics and gameplay. I loved it as much as the originals, if not more. Castlevania remains my favorite game series to this day – I listen to the soundtrack often, and still pick up the games to play now and then. Then there’s how much I enjoy watching the anime on Netflix, with a new season of Nocturne coming out this week - I’m so excited. But nothing will top that feeling of excitement as I saw Simon approach Castlevania’s gate and crack his whip as that short intro music played.