The Hardest Game I've Ever Played?
[Retro Review] Replaying Castlevania: Rondo Of Blood
Three years since the end of that terrible virus that held the world by its throat, many a gamer, myself included, has felt the curious pull of Covid Nostalgia: a certain fondness for the lockdown and all that time we spent at home watching the world unfold on our screens and traipsing through virtual worlds; the franchise that comes to my mind the most when I look back on the lockdowns is Castlevania.
The lockdowns, fuelled by a gifted PlayStation and Konami’s Castlevania collections were my first forays not only into retro gaming but into the realm of PC too; it was at this time I got my first gaming rig that wasn’t a hand-me down.
But why Castlevania?
Something about grinding through these famously difficult titles felt more poignant at that time and I figured that with a future stint in university on the way, it would be my final chance to put a lot of time into finishing some incredibly difficult games. Chief among these in difficulty was Rondo Of Blood, this game took me 2-3 weeks to finish… but I had an absolute blast doing it.
No PALs
It’s at this point in a review where I’d usually discuss the best versions of the game, what platform it released on and how it was received… but I can’t for Rondo Of Blood. Not only did this game never come to the West but the PC Engine (or TurboGrafx-16 as it’s known in the US) never even released in Europe!
Our counterparts across the Atlantic could have imported Rondo Of Blood from Japan and played on the TurboGrafx-16 via an adapter but the closest we got to this game in the UK was Castlevania: Vampire’s Kiss on the SNES, also known as Dracula X in the states (this is getting exhausting) a butchered port of Rondo Of Blood.
A lot of fans enjoy this game’s alternate take on the Rondo Of Blood soundtrack but personally? I prefer the real thing.
I’ve never played this version but as mentioned in the Symphony Of The Night review last month, Rondo Of Blood was remade for the PSP in its first official release outside of Japan: Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles.
I’m writing this under the assumption that you’ve probably read my Symphony Of The Night review also, so I won’t go over the finer details but the short version of this story is that today? Both Rondo Of Blood and Symphony Of The Night are only playable on modern hardware using a PlayStation 4 or 5. This review was written based on that Castlevania Requiem bundle for PlayStation 4 that contains both games.
I’m sorry this has been a particularly brief section, this is not a game we’ve had an easy time getting a hold of in the West, especially for those like me who largely dipped from PlayStation after the PS2 for greener, more Xbox-y pastures.
The Wheel Keeps Turning
Rondo of Blood begins in 1792 with a deliciously ominous German narration accompanied by a wonderfully animated scene depicting the resurrection of Dracula before throwing you into a full-blown, 90’s anime intro, it’s awesome. The plot is nothing too detailed but neither does it need to be; this is a classic, side-scrolling, ass-kicking, whip-cracking Castlevania game, not a Metroidvania like its sequel. You’re not here for Shakespeare or Chaucer, you’re here to slay Dracula and die (a lot) trying.
Rondo stars a new Belmont: Richter, he wears a cool blue tunic and presumably, looking at those delts, has armed himself with some trenbolone and test enth’ alongside the usual holy water and whip. Look, if you were fighting death himself, you’d get a bit saucy too.
Something I really enjoy about Rondo Of Blood is how, despite being in the anime-style and even sharing many assets with its sequel: Symphony Of The Night, it manages to carve out a style and atmosphere distinct from every other entry in the series.
As anime grew in popularity in the West, especially in the 1990’s, it became more common for video games to adopt that style too; from The Legend Of Zelda to Final Fantasy, most Japanese franchises turned away from European folklore and cultural influences to adopt more of those found back home. Rondo Of Blood sits at the middle point of this shift in its own franchise. This game is in an anime style but Richter is clearly of Schwarzeneggerian stock and the foes are largely traditional fare for the series; the sequel: Symphony Of The Night would lean harder into the Japanese style before later entries in the series saw you playing as a secondary school student in Japan or in a Devil May Cry-style hack and slash… no wonder this franchise vanished for a rethink.
Rondo Of Blood is the point in the series where all pretences of Castlevania being a horror franchise were dropped. Up until this point, the series played up its Hammer Horror and Gothic Horror influences; Super Castlevania IV opened with a Star Wars-esque creepy text crawl and the original NES game’s manual even had a light-hearted yet foreboding warning for the player.
But Rondo Of Blood is full of bombastic tunes and high action.
Horror games were blossoming into their own unique genre at this point with Alone In The Dark having released a year prior, so it was about time Castlevania cut ties with that particular label.
While the feature was missing in Super Castlevania IV (since that game was essentially a remake) extra playable characters returned in Rondo Of Blood with 12 year old Maria Renard introduced. I'll talk about Maria from a gameplay perspective later but she fills that loud, obnoxious comic relief anime trope I despise so much; her character design is completely out of place and her voice is exceedingly irritating.
Maria is one of several hidden maidens to rescue but only she is playable.
Something wonderful that Rondo Of Blood manages to capture is how much of a threat Dracula is to the world.
In the original game, as Simon Belmont, it isn’t easy to fathom exactly why Dracula should be stopped other than because the game says so. The entire journey takes place across desolate ruins within the castle courtyard followed by the occult interiors of the fortress itself but throughout it’s clear that the player is the aggressor, we don’t see the consequences of Dracula’s reign or the destruction he has wrought. This isn’t a criticism, just the realities of creating a game on a console less powerful than a flip-phone. Rondo Of Blood remedies this. We see towns engulfed in flames, haunted cemeteries and infested wilderness on the way to Castlevania: the fruits of Dracula’s reign that make it clear the dark lord must be slain.
Creatures Of The Night
While made more famous by Sega’s later, ill-fated attempt at the concept, other consoles had their own CD-ROM add-ons including the TurboGrafx-16.
Like any good CD-ROM add-on, the TurboGrafx-CD made the console look absolutely hideous; Rondo Of Blood developed for this attachment.
If you’re not into the tech then speaking in the most basic terms, the greatest advantage of disc-based media over cartridges and cards is storage capacity; a Switch 2 cartridge has a capacity of 64GB while the PS5 Blu-Ray can hold about 100GB, the Nintendo 64 cartridge holds 64MB while the PS1 disc can hold an ‘impressive’ 660MB, you can see how transformative this is. The TurboGrafx-16’s library was generally not as graphically striking as that of the SNES but the CD attachment does allow Rondo one key advantage: its soundtrack. This one is a banger and comes very close to its sequel in terms of quality.
The opening mission takes place in a burning town, infested the minions of Dracula and Divine Bloodlines acts as an upbeat, high-energy opening track to build excitement and to fuel the power fantasy of ploughing through this dark army as Richter.
Rondo Of Blood is also replete with remixes of classic Castlevania tracks, like this excellent version of Beginning from Castlevania III.
Opus 13 has a very Sega feel to it and I’m sure you’ll agree; this reminds me of the kind of music you hear in Nights Into Dreams or perhaps even Sonic Adventure, I love it.
I’ve written this section somewhat out of order but rest-assured, the graphics of Rondo Of Blood don’t disappoint either; the TG-16 didn’t have the longevity of its competitors, neither did it have the power of the most advanced console of its day: the SNES but as is always the case, with a little hardware knowledge and a motivated developer, Rondo ends up looking just as good as anything on Nintendo’s machine.
As expected from classic Konami, the sprite-work is top-notch and Rondo Of Blood (at least on PS4/PS5 hardware) runs flawlessly. Something I particularly love about this 16-Bit era of Castlevania is how the colour palette from the NES games’ levels was pulled into the next generation and enhanced, you can see those same level themes and shades shining through giving Rondo and Super Castlevania IV a great sense of continuity with that classic trilogy.
I will say, as a small criticism, Rondo Of Blood doesn’t seem to me to be as well animated as its SNES contemporary. Richter isn’t quite as capable as Simon Belmont (which we’ll get into later) which factors into that equation but as well as that, due to the smaller sprite size and weaker hardware, Rondo lacks a sense of weight and power that I feel when I play Super Castlevania IV. The item crushes are a huge exception, these big, bombastic special attacks look exactly as damaging and devastating as they should.
Cracking The Whip
Rondo Of Blood often gets labelled as the most well-polished ‘run of the mill’ 2D Castlevania and while elements of that are true… I do think the statement sells it a bit short.
Let’s get the biggest issue with Rondo Of Blood’s gameplay out of the way first: no omnidirectional whipping, this is one of those gameplay innovations that I’m shocked didn’t catch on, it would be like playing a tank controls Resident Evil game after RE3: Nemesis without the quick-turn. Setting that aside, Rondo Of Blood makes 2 primary innovations in the gameplay department in regards to the standard Belmont style: the Item Crush and the Backflip.
A selection of stylish use-cases for the backflip.
Of the two, the backflip is the most significant and my personal favourite. Certain bosses and enemy encounters were clearly designed with expedient use of the backflip in-mind, so if you want to have a go at Rondo Of Blood yourself (and you definitely should) you’ll want to master this technique.
Full-disclosure: I didn’t replay the entire game for this review, only about half of it; I’ve been on a serious Bond FPS binge lately. I might be proven wrong when I go back to finish it but Rondo Of Blood wasn’t as difficult as I’d remembered, no doubt due to my more extensive experience with retro games now but also because of learning when and where to use this backflip. Of course, if you want to have a much easier time with Rondo you can play as Maria, who serves as the game’s easy mode… but let’s be honest with each other for a second, if you beat Rondo Of Blood as Maria, then you didn’t really beat it at all, did you? I don’t care if I’m gatekeeping, sue me.
The Item Crushes are a lot of fun. How this works is that each heart-shaped piece of ammunition you collect contributes to a meter on the side of the screen, once it’s full the player can unleash a weapon-specific, special attack that usually ends up clearing the screen, these moves are a life-saver and contribute towards Rondo feeling like the fairest Castlevania yet in spite of its steep difficulty.
A comparison video showing all Item Crushes from Rondo Of Blood and Vampire’s Kiss/Dracula X.
Another refinement over previous entries is Rondo Of Blood’s interpretation of the branching paths mechanic present in Castlevania III. In that game, each path was a binary choice between going up or down between missions, it was good enough but Rondo Of Blood certainly improves on this system.
This time the extra stages are treated like hidden levels, not unlike Super Mario World on the SNES (only much less telegraphed) this is one of my favourite parts of Rondo Of Blood. This is the biggest Castlevania game yet, no doubt thanks to it being disc-based and the alternate stages give the player a lot of agency to customise the experience. Have you been stuck on one level for ages? Retry the previous one and find an alternate path to tackle a separate challenge. Replaying Rondo Of Blood? Look for the stages you missed. This is a game where 3 players can potentially play entirely different configurations of stages 2-5. I don’t even know where some of the entrances to the extra stages are and that will keep me coming back to Rondo for a long time.
Dracula Returns… Again
Listen, I love Rondo Of Blood: this is most certainly my favourite of the traditional side-scrolling Castlevania games and I would argue that, overall influence on the history of the medium and gaming cultural impact aside, Rondo Of Blood is a more enjoyable game to actually play than Symphony Of The Night… but by this point, you do feel a certain sense of having been here and done all of this already.
You can add a backflip, a second playable character, Item Crushes and branching paths but fundamentally? This is the same game players had been enjoying since the NES; Castlevania’s one foot into the action genre and one foot into the platforming space harms its flexibility as a gameplay style. If you want to make a new Super Mario platformer then you can do all sorts with the level themes, power-ups and enemies but Castlevania isn’t like this, it must be gothic horror, it must take place in a castle and it must incorporate that whip and sub-weapon gameplay style in order to even qualify as a Castlevania title.
There has been a lot of talk over the years about why Castlevania vanished from shelves and I have some thoughts on this too. It’s true that this franchise never had a decent 3D game like Ocarina Of Time, Super Mario 64 or Sonic Adventure (yes, I’m outing myself as a Sonic Adventure enjoyer) but more than that, it’s the innovations that came with those entries that never arrived for Castlevania. Ocarina Of Time expanded the lore not just of the Triforce and of Ganondorf but of the entire world of The Legend Of Zelda; the entire franchise is based upon the story concepts introduced in that game. Sonic Adventure, however fumbled elements of it were, invented an entirely new gameplay system that felt true to Sonic’s 2D origins and Super Mario 64 did much the same; Castlevania has never innovated on the same level successfully, therefore, as cool as the new Belmont’s Curse game looks, I don’t think the series is going to see any real mainstream success again.
Symphony Of The Night looked like Super Metroid, nobody likes the N64 Castlevania games and the Lords Of Shadow games are like poor man’s Devil May Cry. Castlevania has no gameplay identity in the modern era and there’s no reason to play a new version of the classics when you can get them all for less than £20 off Steam.
But let’s end on a high note: Rondo Of Blood is fantastic. This game made my lockdown more tolerable, it’s a blast to play and might even be the perfect entry point to classic, punishing Castlevania for those who have already played the comparatively easy Super Castlevania IV.
TL;DR: Rondo Of Blood is more of the same but that same classic Castlevania DNA is sublime. This is a fairer, funner and faster take on the NES formula and flies unfairly under the radar in comparison to its Metroidvania sequel.
Thank you very much for reading to the end, I hope you enjoyed today’s post, as always I’ll be happy to chat in the comments below and please like and subscribe to the Journal for more.
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What killed Castlevania is that the Metroidvania ones were actually good but then they forgot how to make those and just started rebooting the franchise over and over
Oh, come on...that guitar absolutely slaps in the first stage in Dracua X! I get it though...the soundtrack on the PC Engine version is truly superior. But I'm a sucker for that bass in the SNES port, butchered though it may be. Honesty...I only play it for the first stage. I kinda check out after that.