playing castlevania for the first time this year was a super nostalgic experiance which was weird because i'd never actually played it before. before this my only real experiance with retrovania was playing super castlevania 4 earlier in the year which is enough of its own thing that i didnt think that factored into it, as a teen i had only real experiance with the 3D action castlevania's like curse of darkness (my favourite one) and lords of shadow and some of the 2D rpgs. it felt nostalgic because of how iconic the game was especially around the time in the early 2010's and to an extent before my game time in the late 00's where the game was basically unavoidable in the online games space with it being a fixture in basically any real video creator around that time, i was able to tell you all of the most iconic parts without even having had played it and it was cool to actually see the context behind those iconic things like the madusa heads, the clock tower, death and the amazing OST by Kinuyo Yamashita and Satoe Terashima. it was nice and it felt like coming home to a place i never actually went and it helps the game was actually as good as i'd always imagined it for all those years.

i don't really even have to explain how it plays, it's iconic enough that it should be obvious to anyone that somehow found their way to a random womans neocities page for video games and it plays as well as it looks like it does, the jumps are fine, if a little limited and maybe stiff but the game is very clearly designed around that limitation and it never becomes annoying, it's a feature and not an issue with it, the game is difficult sure, too difficult for me if i wasn't using save states but i'm also not going to hold that against it because i did use save states and it made it more than managable, i was never stuck on a segment for long enough for it to get boring and it helped the games pacing a lot for me. The pacing is also really good, there's enough variety in the levels and their gimmicks that just as one could maybe wear its welcome out you have a new area with new enemies or a gimmick like the rotating platforms in the clock tower or the jumping enemies and moving platforms in the water area. you even have a decent amount of combat options with all the extra weapons you can pick up and it's fun to try and decide on the fly which ones work best for which segment and ads to the games variety a lot, you never feel stuck with one weapon for too long because give it a few minuites and youll have another one, maybe even a new one, to use against whatever the levels challanges are. helping all of this is the super short length, you can easily beat the game in around half an hour to an hour, two at most if you're bad at it like me and it makes it a perfect one sitting game you can play at the end of a nice day.

the game looks and sounds amazing too, the ost as i mentioned before is iconic and it's been remixed multiple times across the series for a reason, every single track is memorable and fun and worth listening to even outside the game, picking a single song for this page was not easy, believe me. and the visuals! it looks great, the sprites are all cool and detailed and iconic, it really has a distinct look that really only konami games of that era like this and getsu fumaden had and it's just cool to look at and the universal monster stylings give it a very campy charm to it, all the monsters are cute references and the titlescreen even has a little film reel and the end credits are full of references to these classic movies too, the developers clearly had a lot of love for these movies and it shows and it's infectious, even though i've never seen these movies it makes me want to check them out because if they were passionate enough to make this as an homage, it must be good. though there isn't much of a story here much like other games of the time but it doesn't really need it, it's fine as it is.

the game was mainly directed by Hitoshi Akamatsu who had worked on many later NES cv games as well as other classics like goonies 2 and the snakes revenge.the game has been ported to a fairly sizable number of consoles, from the zx spectrum to the switch and a bunch of other versions inbetween like the GBA and the wii, it has numerous remakes and alternate versions like castlevania chronicles with its twinky hot simon, super castlevania 4 and haunted castle (an arcade version with amazing spritework) and simon himself has shown up in a ton of places, weather its the castlevania fighting game, judgment, smash, as a playable character in mobile games and the multiplayer game HAROMONY OF DESPAIR and even bomberman, it's led to a long running series with some of the best games ever made in it and it's fitting because the game was always good enough to support a legacy like that.