It’s time to continue our look at the Angry Video Game Nerd “Castlevaniathon” series from 2009, and this time The Nerd takes a look at two more games in the series – Castlevania II: Simons Quest and Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.
We start off looking, again, at Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. It’s funny, at the time he talks about his original review as having been filmed 5 years ago — it’s now been 15 years, and what a wild 15 years it’s been.
On point, he addresses the fact that he really didn’t show much of the game, and used a code to skip to the end. This time around, since he puts far more effort into videos than he did originally, he’s going to “do it for real” and show us all the terrible aspects of this game.
He does have positives to say about the graphics, music, and atmosphere — it’s a game that has a lot going for it, but the flaws make it terrible. Having to grind for hearts (currency, in this particular game,) the day-night transitions, the annoyance of being in a town at night with nothing to do but fight enemies, and more.
He goes over the plot of the game, having to find the parts of Dracula and destroy them, thus destroying him once and for all. It’s a non-linear game, quite ambitious for its time, with a key problem in that nothing is explained to you.
Well, it is, but it’s done in broken English, sometimes hilariously broken at that! James looks at this as a sign of the time spent on the game (or lack thereof) and criticizes heavily just how misleading or otherwise confusing some of the text is! It’s enough to make you need to break out Nintendo Power!
James continues to go into detail on some puzzles, difficult jumps, enemies, and more. Ironically, bosses in the game are trivially easy for him (he just walks past the Grim Reaper) and ends by focusing, once again, on the bland final castle and the “easiest final boss in gaming history.”
In a way, things come full circle as he talks once more about the game which started the whole AVGN series, but that’s the end of that, and it’s time to move on to the other game in this episode, and the end of Castlevania on the NES: Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse.
This one is a prequel, and goes back to the style of the first game, with some twists. It’s naturally improved, but feature multiple player character and branching paths, both features James sees as improvements.
That isn’t to say everything’s great here — he finds this game as the hardest of the three Castlevania games on the NES, finding the stairs, of all things, to be the worst. That, and collapsing floors — these really piss him off.
The game is, again, one of those that’s incredibly unforgiving, pushing the Nerd to put in the “HELPME” code for extra lives. Try as he might, he can’t finish the game – Dracula is just too much for him, and the fact that you start back at the beginning of the final stage (and not at the stairs, like in previous games) is the last straw, pushing him into a classic rant.
At this point he’s done with Castlevania games on the NES, but then, much to our surprise back in 2009 says there’s “more memories to be shared” while holding a copy of Castlevania IV on the SNES before announcing the Castlevaniathon is going into November.
Needless to say, for a Nerd fan at that time, it was awesome and I couldn’t wait for the next episode.
Final Rating: 4.5/5
Another solid entry. It was nice to see Castlevania II get a “updated” review, and seeing all 3 of the Castlevania games for NES get given the Nerd treatment was just great. On its own this and the previous episode would have been good Halloween episodes, but the fact this was just the middle of a Castlevania marathon made things even better!
1 Comment
Add a Comment