Dracula X was the first Castlevania I ever played. This would have been in ’97 or so when I was first dabbling with emulation on ZSNES and I dragged the colossal 1.2 megabytes rom down a 33.6k connection. I played a bit, got annoyed, and moved on to something else.
Since then I learned that it’s essentially an asset flip of the excellent Rondo of Blood, that it has a poor reputation amongst series fans, and that it’s considered at best something of a footnote.
Then came a long train journey with not much else to do. Dracula X was tossed into the Castlevania Advance Collection for some reason, so what the hell. Let’s give it a whirl and see what I missed out on.
The answer is a competent but demanding old-school adventure. I can also easily forgive most of the common criticisms: yes it recycles a lot from Rondo of Blood, but that game looks great and this echoes it decently enough. There’s also some criticism of Richter’s sprite being too small, but as far as I can tell that just gives you more room to maneuver.
It is difficult (the final Dracula fight is unforgivably badly designed), but if you take it slow and careful you’ll usually squeak through. As with the 8-bit games, success rests on knowing exactly how your character moves, liberal use of sub-weapons, and crackerjack timing on your whip swipes. Dracula X does have the odd genuinely unfair moment, but that’s what the Advance Collection‘s rewind function is for.
As far as outright positives go, Konami had clearly figured out every intricacy of the SNES sound chip at this point and those classic songs sound great. My barometer for these games is always ‘Vampire Killer’ and it’s one of the best I’ve heard so far in the series:
But there’s no getting away from this being a graphical and gameplay step down from Super Castlevania IV (already four years old in 1995) and that it can’t ever escape the shadow of Rondo of Blood.
Incidentally, I’m sure the SNES could have managed a more faithful port of Rondo, (albeit without the flashy CD-ROM soundtrack and cutscenes) but I think Konami’s deal with NEC meant a direct port was out of the question and they had to settle for this ‘remix’.
Ultimately Dracula X being an objectively worse version of Rondo of Blood is the kiss of death. Why play this when you could be having a much better time with that? On the other hand, the new stage layouts make it a very different game and I enjoyed it as a refinement of the 8-bit style.
However, unless you’re on a train with time to kill and nothing else to play, Dracula X is probably skippable.
Pixel Hunted 