RichterB Thanks for sharing your thoughts on CV64 and the other titles. CV64 seems like a great classic CV title based on the video you provided, assuming the controls are tight and precise. Also for the combat in CV64, is there a targeting mechanism or is all the combat directed manually by the player?
I sampled the CV64 soundtrack on YT and it wasn't bad at all. Hopefully Konami includes this title in the next CV if they decide to release one. Would love to give the game a chance.
Sorry to hear you got cheated out of the CV CoD soundtrack. I remember having to
ask for it at the store lol. If you have multiple stores close by it can't hurt to pre-order from more than one just to make sure it doesn't happen lol. Remember doing that for PoR and a few other titles.
I edited/expanded the below since first posting:
No problem. I am trying to slowly work on the article that goes into the development history of the N64 era again thanks to your encouragement. I already had a lot more written than I remembered. (Ironically and sadly, I have a feeling the bulk of Castlevania fans have made up their minds about these divisive games and won't care. lol. Sort of a fool's errand on my part to shed further light on these uneven but rather inspired titles). I finished my promised
Bloodstained fan art recently, so I'll try to balance work around that article around my other work.
You noted "classic CV title," and I assume you mean Classicvania. If so, I wanted to clarify: CV64 sort of defies definition in terms of Classicvania or Metroidvania. My video was just pointing out that later 3D entries largely abandoned Classicvania ideas. Let me just briefly explain the basics of the first three levels, design-wise.
Level 1 is a forest that is set up like a maze due to tall iron gates that need to be unlocked. Skeletons spawn fairly consistently by crawling up from out of the earth to track you down, so there's always something to whip, like a Classicvania. And due to poison river death-pit canyons, there is platforming to be had over broken bridges, just like a Classicvania. But, like a Metroidvania, there is backtracking, because you have to find the mechanisms to open the gates to get deeper into the forest and then go back to that previously locked gate. Also, there are small mausoleums and such where there are items you can collect and store in a menu, including night-and-day-altering Sun and Moon Cards and health-restoring Meat. (There's even a secret item to collect that will unlock an alternate costume upon replaying the game.) I edited this map I found online to show the flow of the level by drawing in pathway lines and a few notes. In other words, it's not entirely linear like a Classicvania...
Level 2 is a pair of towers connected to the castle wall where you have action and platforming as you work your way up one tower to get the key to the second tower. A shortcut for backtracking is revealed, and you then can advance through the second tower and activate the mechanism that will open up a courtyard area of the castle with a cemetery. (This is a largely vertically designed level, something that never appeared in a 3D Castlevania game after the N64 that I can think of off the top of my head.)
Level 3 is one of the game's most impressive, and it has won praise even from people who don't love the game. You enter a villa, and it's basically a mini Metroidvania. You need to solve puzzles and find keys and trigger events of meeting NPCs to work your way through the villa and its connected garden. The game's merchant appears here for the first time, too, allowing you to buy things like in a Metroidvania. Unlike Level 1 and Level 2, there are ZERO death pits and no consequential platforming...
The game does this thing where most levels have some amount of exploration and item management involved, even when they have action and platforming; and then there are two levels, the first appearing in Level 3, where the action and platforming take a back seat to exploration and gathering clues to advance in Dracula's castle. (The second of these is even more expansive than the first.) Geometry-wise, the levels generally naturally flow from one to the next, and while there are some instances where you can return to a previous level, this is never required. The areas are self-contained in terms of gameplay requirements, much like Portrait of Ruin's paintings. The formula is not entirely balanced and hardware limitations and the rush to get the game out left some areas emptier than one would like, but it's a brilliant concept that sort of gives you the best of both Castlevania worlds, in my opinion.
In terms of the combat, yes there is targeting. It's not as accurate as Zelda's Z-Targeting, but then this game was developed at the same time as Ocarina of Time, so they didn't know what Z-Targeting would be like. In fairness, while less accurate overall, it's a lot less stiff than Z-Targeting. Here's how it works. You have four ways to attack. All can be done manually, two can be done with targeting. Your main "strong" attack, the whip, automatically seeks out the nearest target in range. When you see a red target appear over an enemy, it means that's the one your whip is going to strike. When you see a yellow target, that means that enemy could be targeted instead if you were closer to it, or else will immediately be targeted after the red-targeted enemy is eliminated. This happens whether you attack on the ground or while jumping. It happens in a pretty seamless manner, and it oddly is done in a subtle way that feels rewarding rather than cheap.
If you hold R on the ground, you turn toward the nearest target, centering the camera on it, and lock your character's feet into place. If you don't hold R, you can move freely around the target or head for a different target with the exact same controls as you use to navigate the game's non-combat scenarios. (This is unlike Zelda's Z-targeting, which locks you into a one-on-one, almost circular arena-type battle.) You can also tap R to center yourself to whatever direction your character is facing. That's how, in the video, you see me do freestyle moves that most players don't bother to try, where you jump over or slide past an enemy, turn on a dime, and then attack with your follow-up method of choice. (The whip simply cracks like NES/SNES/Genesis, by the way; there are no combos where you're flailing the whip back and forth.)
All of this works exactly the same way for sub-weapons (knife, holy water, axe, cross), except they give you further range on what you can hit. Unfortunately, this does sometimes make it hard to target exactly what you want, and sometimes you'll miss just like you would in 2D. (Occasionally, an enemy will move out of your range or fire a projectile that causes your aim to go awry; this can also happen with the whip.) Your weak attack is with a short sword, and I'm not sure the targeting comes into play, as it's mostly to get enemies off your back if they get a little too close. The final kind of attack, the slide-tackle, is all manual. (A lot of people don't know this, but the game has side-step dodging by tapping the jump button and flicking the control stick simultaneously either left, right, or back.)
Some of this stuff was tweaked in Legacy of Darkness. While I've beaten it with all its characters, I haven't replayed it as extensively, and the subtle changes sometimes get confusing to me. As far as I remember, they decided to go with yellow targets for everything without the red "immediate target" indicator, which seems an odd choice. The R-targeting isn't as set-in-stone, either. One improvement was the ability to not only use a weak sword attack while sliding, but you can now also whip mid-slide, too. Another improvement is you can stack identical sub-weapons for more powerful versions up to three times. For example, if you collect three axes in a row, the axes will drop lightning on enemies from the sky when they connect with their target. They also added a fully controllable 3D camera (awkwardly with the D-pad), but that was rarely an issue in CV64 if you're someone who realized that the R button can almost always center the camera behind your character, not unlike in Banjo-Kazooie. Most times people complain about the camera, they never utilize the R button technique. (Granted, some areas you cannot, but those spots that have a fixed camera AND pick a bad camera angle are few and far between.)
I didn't mention other characters besides the Belmont-type (Reinhardt), but while each of them plays a little differently, they adhere to a lot of the same principles. Obviously, the magic-wielding Carrie, who's related to Sypha, can hit a much wider range of targets when you charge up her magic (like in Mega Man by holding down the attack button) and then release a homing shot. Legacy of Darkness' Cornell (with his energy slashes) and Henry (with his six-shooter) are stronger, taller versions of Carrie, minus the homing powers.
Legacy of Darkness is such a weird game. It's a tweaked CV64 that either remixes or completely redesigns the levels from CV64, adds two more characters, some new bosses, and adds four completely new levels. It's almost like how Rondo of Blood and Dracula X SNES are similar but very different games. Most prefer LoD over CV64, as it has more content, smoothed out some rough edges, and gave more camera options, but it feels more of a disjointed experience to me. For example: The Tower of Execution used to be a vertical tower, but now it's more of a gauntlet of traps set up to resemble a horizontal sewer. Why? (Maybe to eliminate some slowdown issues with the original level design being one continuous tower?) And there is some give-and-take, too: Some of the special effects were taken out, like the magic bubbles that floated around the Tower of Sorcery; and the voice-acting, while not used in every cut scene in CV64, now is used in NONE of the cut scenes. It's all been removed. Also, Reinhardt and Carrie have been redesigned (and look more generic/less rugged, I think), and while you can unlock their original outfits, you can't unlock the bonus outfits from CV64, which were inspired by Simon and Maria. The new outfits aren't bad...but for the outfits you have to start with, they seem to lose some of the gritty aesthetic that the game's world is going for. (Castlevania 64 reminds me most, aesthetically, of Super Castlevania IV.)
Legacy of Darkness was essentially an apology mixed with a cash grab by Konami. I found from one report in my research that CV64 was roughly 40% complete a month away from launch and had to start chopping content and cutting corners to get the game to the public. Konami decided it was time for it to come out and put their foot down. So if CV64 represents, say, 50% of the designers' intentions at launch, Legacy of Darkness represents probably 25 to 30% more, but added on in a way it was never intended to be. They had to completely change the context to cram as much of the cut content as they could in a new context (Cornell's story now is a prequel tale instead of him being a fellow traveler with the others, and Henry's quest is a bare bones version of what the original 4th character, Coller/Kola, was supposed to be). What's more, they were basically given less than a year to do this! As a result, it's fun to see some of the positive technical changes and get some new characters and levels, but the remixed levels often feel sloppy, some things are lost that were actually fine or interesting, and the whole thing feels less cohesive than CV64, in my opinion.
Something I didn't mention is that Castlevania 64 has a pretty good story, too, most especially Reinhardt's story. LoD doesn't change this (aside from deleting the sporadic voice acting), but hiding it behind Cornell's story (which you are forced to play through first) gives it a little less prominence. To their credit, by making Cornell's story a prequel, you do learn how some things in the castle came to be as they are when Reinhardt ventures through it. I like LoD...but I like it in more of a DLC sort of way rather than the main course.
Oh, jumping. The controls are not perfect, but you get used to them and they are tight enough. Certainly not a disaster. The jumping is certainly better than something like Lords of Shadow. Honestly, I picked it up the other day to see how it feels, and I fell right into it. The characters basically move similarly to Zelda's Link in 3D, except they slide a few centimeters when they stop if they were in a full-on sprint (physics). The jumping is manual, though, unlike Link pre-BotW. The jump physics feel similar to Miriam in Curse of the Moon or Grant in Castlevania III. So, the jump is a little higher and slightly floaty, but for the most part, the game feels like a direct translation of, say, Super Castlevania IV's jump in 3D.
It comes down mostly to players getting a feel for that and judging distances. I'd give the controls an A-. Room for improvement, but rarely a hindrance. You can grab ledges, too, which helps. There is a control issue there with pulling your character up versus shimmying sometimes. It's hard to describe, and doesn't always happen. It's a quick, minor player adjustment to overcome it, though. (For what it's worth, you can also crawl like in Super Castlevania IV while ducking. This is rarely used in the game design, however. I think there's maybe one area with low-hanging spikes.) I will say that there are a few jumps in the games, especially CV64, that are brutal, however. Level 1 has a terribly designed section when you're climbing up a cliff that includes a jump that is always a leap of faith. The camera is fixed in that segment, and it makes it hard to know if you're going to make it. You just jump and hold the stick as far in that direction as you can to extend that jump, and hold onto the jump button so that you'll grab the edge of the ledge. This section was removed in Legacy of Darkness, I believe. Some people just quit the game over that one jump, before seeing what the game has to offer. This is one section where the "pulling up" process can cause problems. I think that quirk was fixed in Legacy of Darkness. But here, if you get into that spot and make the jump to grab the ledge, some people let go on accident, thinking they'll pull up faster than they do. What you have to do there is keep holding on by keeping the jump button pressed in, and if the stick/camera alignment don't agree, just keep moving the stick in a direction you feel will pull you up until it does all the way.
I'm not trying to paint either Castlevania 64 or Legacy of Darkness as perfect. They have a number of flaws. But none of those flaws are as bad as most say. In the end, I like a lot of what they did, and I feel like if Konami had kept them in mind as a starting point, Castlevania's march into 3D and overall popularity might have gone differently. What's strange is why they didn't. Here's an excerpt of research from my in-progress article:
I think abandoning the work done in the N64 era had to do with Konami moving the franchise's development from Kobe to Tokyo and IGA after Circle of the Moon. IGA wasn't familiar with 3D and seemed to reject the N64 efforts, and things like Devil May Cry set a new precedent that seemed like a wave to capitalize on. It seemed to me that post-N64 3D Castlevania games were trying to ride cultural waves in the industry versus blazing their own path. (The missing link is the cancelled 3D Dreamcast game, Castlevania Resurrection, which was supposedly going to literally be Classicvania in 3D, though perhaps minus platforming? Anyway, like IGA, those developers wanted to do something different from the N64 games, too.) IGA did admit circa 2008 that he had warmed up slightly to the N64 games, praising their distinct atmosphere and including Cornell in Castlevania Judgment. Funny enough, Legacy of Darkness starts out with its first level very similarly to Bloodstained: RotN!
I would love the N64 titles to get a release in a modern collection. Honestly, a remake with the game completed as originally intended would be even better, but even more unlikely. I hope you get the chance to play it someday. I would say the N64 games are like Super Castlevania IV meets Simon's Quest and Symphony of the Night, with all the growing pains that combination would logically have, but in 3D. I'm amazed it A.) Turned out as good as it did, and B.) Had so much crazy ambition in its design.
The
music in CV64 and LoD is not bad. It grows on you. Certainly with everything Yamane has done since, the tone of Castlevania music has more breathing room than it did when these games launched. CV64 and LoD largely have a subtle, haunting soundtrack. CV64 in particular is one of the spookiest Castlevania games in my opinion. There are a few great remixes of classic tunes between the two games, including
Opposing Bloodlines and Yamane's own
Sinking Old Sanctuary, alongside a ton of original works like the slow, elegant chiller
Silent Madness; the adventurous, game-defining
Castle Center Theme; the tense
Castle Wall Theme and
First Struggle; the mysterious
Rose's Theme; and the often overlooked
Outer Wall Theme. (Oh, I almost forgot the dignified
Renon's Theme and the somber yet hopeful
Invisible Sorrow...I guess there's more of interest here than I usually think of.) By and large, the games have slower, more mood-setting themes to match the variety of the gameplay, because not every player is going to play a 3D game like this that mixes action and exploration at the same pace. It would be years before I'd understand that point. With all this, I suppose I'm saying that it didn't grab me in quite the same way as, say, Lament of Innocence, but it's good in its own right and serves its purpose well.
Man, I was upset about that CoD CD! I even emailed the company. I didn't get a reply. I ordered plenty of time in advance, excited by IGA promising a more Castlevania III world-trotting adventure. I heard online at the time that those preorders were kept and sold by store employees on eBay. Not sure if that's true. Glad you got yours, and now I know how to get it next time. lol.
Yikes, I went on long here. There is just so much to say about these games, and I feel like they've been blackballed and largely forgotten. They were just stuck in an awkward spot, where Castlevania had just resurged a bit thanks to Symphony of the Night, and most people wanted Symphony of the Night 2.0, not some 3D games that pulled from all over the Castlevania franchise. And then after these, the Metroidvania games on GBA took over and gained a lot of new fans, and so these N64 titles were left in no-man's-land. I grew up around Castlevania 1-4, playing 2-4, especially 4, a lot. But I didn't have a Genesis or a PS1, so I missed Bloodlines and SotN the first time around. Circle of the Moon (also by the studio behind the N64 games) solidified my modern Castlevania fandom, but it was Dracula X SNES and Castlevania 64 that got me back into the franchise and made me realize how much I loved it.
If I ever get done with my article, I just want to point out why, design-wise, I've come to decide the N64 games were the most "important" games. Not the best, but most important. Why? Because they showed a template that Castlevania could exist on its own terms in 3D. Even if they were flawed and rough around the edges, they were a starting point that could be built upon immensely. Any game series that fails to transition to 3D ultimately ends up on the cultural back burner, and that's what happened to Castlevania. The N64 games were, unknowingly at the time, a make-or-break junction for the series. That's why I feel they were so important and remain important.
...And why would a company that had something that worked more than it didn't (the reviews weren't bad) decide to never return to its ideas? It'd be like if Mario 64 came out with just a few more flaws, and Nintendo said, let's start over from scratch. It baffles and frustrates me. Especially when Lords of Shadow came out. I was like, you took so long to reboot the series in 3D after the reboot of LoI/CoD, and this is all you did? It felt like a bloated, disjointed version of Lament of Innocence that didn't even capture the Castlevania vibes and likeable cast like LoI did. All the complaints about IGA and 3D, and the results with LoS1 weren't definitively better, in my opinion.
Thanks and congratulations if you've made it through this wall of text!
P.S. I forgot to mention earlier on from your original post that I was surprised to learn about how much fans brought to the table for Bloodlines. Some of these submission inclusions are pretty memorable.
yey