A very scenic stable at that—check out the incredible picture windows in the background. Dracula’s horses didn’t want for a glimpse of the great outdoors.

You might become so caught up in admiring the scenery here that you overlook the threat that appears immediately after reaching Block 1-3, though: Viper swarms that cling to the ceiling and drop down to the ground as you pass beneath them. We’ll see falling objects that work this way throughout the game, but viper swarms work a little differently from the usual acid drops and stalactites of video games. Once they hit the ground, they don’t explode or cease to become a threat. Instead, the creep slowly toward Simon, still entangled.

Because they’re placed at the very top of the screen in this first encounter, they take long enough to hit the ground that you have time to walk past them safely before turning and whipping them. Of course, Simon can also whip upward, so you could just stand beneath the vipers and smack them out of the air. If you advance at your usual pace, you’ll trigger the trap without putting yourself at risk, making this a decent introduction.

The holy water subweapon comes in handy against the viper nests, since they’re so low to the ground, but this is more of a convenience than a necessity… which basically describes subweapons in Castlevania IV in a nutshell.

The holy water also comes in handy against the horses that live in these stables, which aren’t your typical equines; taking a cue from The Godfather, perhaps, these are decapitated horse head specters which lie in wait for Simon and begin flying toward him as he approaches. The first couple lurk on the ground and fly low, putting them exactly within range of the holy water’s flame. Further, uh, ahead, you’ll find one of these phantasms clinging to the ceiling. It’s also easily dispatched with other means…

…but it respawns once you pass, climb the stairs to the upper level, and double back. The design and placement of the horse specter relative to the stairs seems carefully calculated to take you far enough from the ghost’s resting point that it causes the enemy to reappear as you retrace your footsteps on the upper level. This seems like a fairly innocuous way to introduce the idea that enemies can return if you backtrack, while at the same time forcing you to interact with an enemy you’ve already destroyed in a new way (since this time it approaches you from below rather than above). It also demonstrates the effective range at which this enemy will be activated by Simon’s presence, as the upper path is situated high enough that the horse heads on the ground don’t come to life as you pass overhead.

And now the chunk of game basically lifted straight from Castlevania III: A series of floor sections that flip upside down and drop you off the screen if you jump onto those thin sections. You’re OK to walk over the spinning platforms, as they’ll bear Simon’s weight. They only flip if you land on them.

The trick, of course, is not to jump in this section, but the introduction of a new enemy type can make it difficult to stick to the ground: Medusa heads. As in previous games, Medusa heads fly in an undulating sine wave, similar to bats but much faster and at a much higher “frequency” between their high and low points. With less visible space between Simon and the edge of the screen, you have less time to spot and react to Medusa heads here than in previous games. If one slips through your guard and strikes you, there’s a good chance the knockback effect Simon suffers upon taking damage will cause him to land on an unstable section of floor and fall to his death.

In Castlevania III, the first few flip-floor sections appeared on an upper tier of the screen with safe ground below as a sort of safety net as you learned their mechanics. You’re extended no such courtesy here, though I don’t know whether that’s because the designers figured you’d be a seasoned and experienced player or simply because the overall game is so much easier than the 8-bit chapters and it needs to bare its fangs somewhere.

Beyond the Medusa onslaught, you achieve a hat trick of decapitation as a ghost materializes; unlike their 8-bit counterparts, these ghosts much more clearly depict a severed head with a few dangling vertebrae. Between the horses, the Medusas, and the ghosts, it seems beheading was all the rage in Transylvania.

Also note the viper swarm sneakily tucked in the little nook in the ceiling above the lower path. While the thing is sitting in plain sight, you could potentially overlook it after having recalibrated your expectations to deal with more active hazards. If you walk blithely beneath it once you double back to the lower level, it could potentially knock you off the edge of the stairs.

The sneaky viper swarm does serve to remind you of that hazard’s existence, so you’ll be more alert for the next one to appear, clinging to the bottom of a suspended platform. If you don’t take this one out in advance, it will definitely knock you back onto a spinning platform and into a hole.

One final surprise as the level reaches the end: Health-restoring meat hidden in a candle. I don’t think the NES games ever tucked healing items into candles, only walls, so this is a bit of a novelty.

A screen ahead, the scrolling locks into place as the boss emerges. In keeping with the stable theme of this section, Rowdain appears as a skeleton riding horseback (on a horse skeleton) and armed with a lance.

He’s a pretty aimless boss; he shuffles back and forth while his horse spits fireballs at Simon, but Rowdain himself surprisingly doesn’t attempt to use his lance. While fittingly easy for a first boss, it does seem a little disappointing that he doesn’t act more like Zelda II’s Rebonack and attempt to run you down.

The lance only comes into play once you whittled half his health down, at which point the horse skeleton explodes and Rowdain takes to his feet. He leaps around the room, attempting to reach the peak of his jump arc directly over Simon’s head, at which point he plunges lance-first toward the hero. This, too, is easily avoided.

In a neat touch, once you knock Rowdain’s health down to a single block, he fakes his death: He explodes into a shower of bones, just like the normal skeleton foes you fought at the beginning of the stage… but this is merely a feint. His component parts hover into the air for a moment, then reassemble into the boss, who takes a big swing at you while appearing to laugh.

The creativity of this gimmick is only slightly undermined by the fact that Rowdain is an embarrassingly easy boss. But that’s kind of Castlevania IV in a nutshell: Not especially difficult, yet nevertheless packed with wonderful details. As usual, a crystal appears at the end of the stage, refilling Simon’s health and giving a bonus for whatever time remains on the clock.

From here we see a full map of the game; the stables are the small building next to the larger ruins in the lower-left of the map.

With each stage, the map zooms in to draw a line through the path ahead—in this case, up a cliff and down a spillway. You may notice that, unlike in earlier games, the icon depicting the boss of the stage doesn’t necessarily appear at the end of the stage. That’s because Castlevania IV doesn’t always put bosses in the expected places, as we’ll see, part of the Castlevania IV experience is soldiering on beyond an encounter without a proper refueling from a boss crystal.

Once you pass through the castle gates, you really get a sense of what Konami was trying to bring to the table with Castlevania on this newer, more powerful hardware. You don’t immediately face a threat upon reaching the castle grounds, but everything seems… livelier. A rousing new musical theme kicks in—you’ll encounter new melodies in every stage, and sometimes multiple times within a stage—and the castle transforms to “greet” the would-be hero. The spiked iron gate rises in the background layer, as if it were some kind of inverted portcullis, slamming into place once it fills the screen and creates a prison-like sense of encagement. Once the spikes lock into place, vines of ivy creep up over them.

A screen into this section, you encounter your first enemy, standing at the top of a short staircase: A skeleton, which occasionally chucks bits of itself your way. It’s slow and almost no threat, and it explodes into a shower of bones when struck.

Shortly beyond the skeleton, Simon drops down onto the grass of the courtyard and encounters something new: An insurmountable chasm. The door in the iron gate suddenly makes the purpose of the massive fence clear. Castlevania IV takes a cue from Super Mario World and uses the Super NES’s graphical layers feature to create a 3D effect within the 2D world, dividing this area into the foreground and the background with the fence as your parrier.

Between the door and pit, there’s no question about you need to do here.

Duck through the door into the background.

This is a neat effect, but like a lot of things in Castlevania IV it doesn’t have much place in the overall game. The entirety of this adventure has a crazy grab-bag feel to it, throwing one new idea at the player after the other and rarely pausing to reprise its most wild concepts. Layering is the first of many gimmicks that fails to play a major role throughout the game.

While this doesn’t exactly fit the rules of sound game design in the traditional “introduce and iterate” sense, it does make for a varied and constantly surprising adventure.

You can fight monsters in the background—besides skeletons, you have bats flying in their usual parabolic arcs as well. The closer you get to the end of this sequence, the thicker the ivy growing on the fence becomes, obscuring the action and making the bats a little harder to spot before they come close… though Simon can simply hold out his whip to defend himself; it dangles in front of him, creating a barrier that projectiles and weak enemies like bats explode against.

In an interesting choice, you move back and forth between layers before ending this sequence in the background rather than the foreground—

—yet emerge into the next area, an interior space, in the foreground.

Each segment (designated as “blocks”) of this stage introduces new enemies and increases the threat level over the area that precedes it. Here, you encounter Bone Pillars, those classic stacks of dragon skulls that spit flame in alternate directions. In the original Castlevania, these didn’t appear until late in stage two; here, they appear in the second portion of stage one.

This doesn’t mean Castlevania IV is aiming to be a more difficult game than the original, though. (If it does, the game fails miserably.) Rather, it’s creating context for greater creative divergence later in the game. By introducing familiar Castlevania concepts early on, the game establishes its world as belonging to the franchise—which allows it to be decidedly Castlevania while throwing out all kinds of interesting innovations at the same time.

The game allows you to upgrade your special weapon from the dagger to the boomerang in this area. That seems pretty handy, but honestly special weapons turn out to be considerably less useful in Super Castlevania IV than in previous games. Even the miserable dagger had some value in Castlevania; here, however, weapons prove to be extremely situational in nature. Thanks to Simon’s increased versatility as a warrior, his standard attacks largely achieve the feats you formerly needed subweapons for.

He has greater reach relative to the boundaries of the screen thanks to his huge sprite proportions; his fully-powered whip now covers 2/3 of the distance between his body and the edge of the screen, greatly reducing the value of the dagger and boomerang. Simon can whip in eight directions, which means the axe—formerly essential for hitting things at an angle—has far less utility. Even the holy water, which was handy for creating an obstructive barrier, is largely mooted by the fact that Simon can hold out his whip to block projectiles.

But, hey, boomerang.

Once you climb up to the higher tier of this block of the stage, you find a series of uneven platforms that require some mild jumping to get past. There’s also a strange, bat-like object here which stands out from the rest of the background. If you attempt to whip it, treating it as an enemy or hazard, Simon will latch onto it with his whip and swing like he was auditioning for Bionic Commando or something. This action is completely useless in this spot…

…but you need to figure it out a short distance ahead, where the grappling bat-hook is your only means for traversing a large gap. You can’t duck into the background here, so there’s nothing to be done for it but swing.

The second mandatory grapple is more difficult, as you swing only to face a Bone Pillar immediately upon landing. While it gives you time to land before belching flame—the swing mechanic here is extremely limited in nature, so it’s not like you can really do anything besides grapple and release—you need to be quick on your feet to avoid being hit and knocked back into the opening you’ve just cleared.

Dracula is dead!

Long live… Dracula!?

It’s true: You can’t keep a good villain down. Or a good franchise. Especially when that franchise’s thin excuse for a plot revolves entirely around a specific villain.

1991’s Super Castlevania IV saw Konami extending its popular NES trilogy into the exciting new world of 16-bit power. Granted, the 16-bit era had begun several years prior with the TurboGrafx-16, but Castlevania wouldn’t make its way to NEC’s platform for a few more years—and that game, Rondo of Blood, would prove to be radically different from this entry in the series. They’re still recognizable as belonging to the same family, but they’re more cousins than siblings. The same could be said for the series’ Sega Genesis outing, Bloodlines.

While you can see a clear through-line for Castlevania‘s development in the 8-bit era—a great NES trilogy that makes it easy to disregard all the mediocre spinoffs on other platforms—things weren’t so cut-and-dried once the 16-bit consoles arrived. There are probably a few reasons for this, first and foremost being the fact that the 16-bit era didn’t have a clear victor the way the 8-bit era did. The NES cleaned up in the world’s two biggest gaming markets, the U.S. and Japan; the Super NES, however, did quite well for itself in Japan and struggled to catch up to Sega’s head start everywhere else. And given that Castlevania sold much better outside of Japan than within, Konami found itself struggling for a strategy. Genesis’ Japanese equivalent, Mega Drive, was a dud in Japan, so any Castlevania for that console would probably bomb at home. Meanwhile, the TG16’s Japanese counterpart, the PC Engine, acquitted itself nicely in Japan but was practically unknown elsewhere. And so: The conundrum.

More so than any other period in its history, the 16-bit chapters of Castlevania demonstrate the greatest diversity the series ever saw. Where the NES received a visually and mechanically consistent trilogy, the 16-bit titles represent a trilogy of a very different kind. These three games—Castlevania IV, Rondo of Blood, and Bloodlines—share similar themes, enemies, hazards, and character mechanics. However, they each express these concepts in very different ways. In this, the second volume of The Anatomy of Castlevania, I’ll be picking apart these games with an eye toward their differences, the distinct ways in which they build on the NES trilogy, and how they establish hooks for the series’ future.

To begin, let’s look at Super Castlevania IV.

So, that’s a little weird. The opening crawl establishes the concept of Dracula returning to life on a 100-year cycle—a plot nugget that would become the backbone of the franchise when Koji Igarashi tried to lock down a firm timeline more than 20 years later—but it also says Simon Belmont is called upon to stop him “once again.” So evidently Simon not only didn’t die from his curse in Castlevania II, he ended up living forever!?

Well, no. Despite what it says on the title screen, this is not chronologically the fourth Castlevania game. In Japan, the creators’ intentions were much clearer right from the start: There, the game’s title was simply Akumajou Dracula, exactly the same as the title of the original NES/Famicom Disk System game five years prior. Super Castlevania IV is not a sequel, it’s a remake: A retelling of Simon’s story, informed heavily by the structure and design of Castlevania III.

The original Castlevania may actually be the single most retold/remade video game ever. Super Castlevania IV was actually the second attempt, the first being 1988’s dreadful mess of an arcade game, Haunted Castle. Two years later, Konami attempted a significantly more direct remake on Sharp’s powerful X68000 computer, also called Akumajou Dracula (Castlevania Chronicles in the U.S.); it hewed much closer to the layout and design of the NES game than other remakes, adding material rather than heavily reworking the source material.

(Yeah, this series will touch on that remake as well, briefly.)

As for Super Castlevania IV, it’s a much larger adventure than the original Castlevania. Big enough to warrant a password system, even in the U.S. (where Konami previously figured Americans were cool and tough enough to complete the original NES game without the save system present in the Japanese version).

In a nice homage to the source material, the game opens not with a prayer and a rousing fanfare like Castlevania III‘s, but rather a moody tribute to the NES box art:

This castle appears much larger than the one on the old box—and, drawing on Castlevania III‘s structure, there’s now a lot of ground to be covered between Simon and the castle proper.

That said, you don’t have to fight through the zombie-infested buildings of Aljiba or Warachiya in order to reach the castle grounds this time; rather, you begin at the outskirts of the castle, and about half the game consists of clearing the extensive ruins and caverns between the outer wall and the keep proper.

From the very first screen, it should be quite clear and obvious that this Castlevania isn’t like its predecessors. Even before you take control of Simon, you can tell at a glance that this incarnation isn’t based on the NES sprite. He’s bigger, and while he still kind of hunches, it’s a more confident hunch rather than the sort of huddled, shrinking-into-himself stance that the NES Belmonts adopted. That introduction at the castle gates wasn’t a cut scene featuring a larger-than-life vampire hunter—it was the actual Simon as he appears in the game.

The difference, clearly, is one of scale. Simon’s sprite on NES was 32 pixels high; as befits the more powerful sprite-handling capabilities of the Super NES, however, he stands 48 pixels high here. This does not amount to a merely cosmetic difference: It has a radical impact on the workings of the game. Some changes wrought by Simon’s increased height are very good, and some are very bad. A games journalist might even call the change a mixed bag.

Simon gains even more height when he attacks—his whipping posture is more upright, and he now raises his arm more. In action, Simon can cover far more of the screen than in the previous version of his quest to destroy Dracula. In fact, this is by far the most capable and powerful rendition of the character ever, outside of his bonus appearances in some of the latter-day IGAvanias (where he commands raw power to make up for his lack of advanced RPG traits).

One of his new abilities, for example, is the power to jump onto and off of staircases. More than simply a technique to speed the action along, it also opens up a variety of new tactical and evasive opportunities.

The introductory phase of Castlevania IV hearkens back directly to Simon’s approach to the castle in the original NES game. Before reaching the moat and drawbridge, you first need to pass through a brief area with no active threats and enough magic candles to bring your whip up to full power. The whip upgrade path remains the same as in Castlevania and Dracula’s Curse: The first candle you whip that would normally contain a Heart (to power your subweapon, per usual) will instead contain a power-up that increases the power of your whip. After you collect another five Hearts, the next Heart-bearing candle will drop a second upgrade that adds about 50% to the length of the whip.

What I find interesting about this no-hazard zone is that newcomers to the franchise are more likely to get a feel for all of Simon’s new skills than a veteran. There’s nothing here that forces you to put his new moves to the test, so it would be understandable for a seasoned player to treat it as business as usual. Someone who doesn’t already know the ins and outs of Castlevania, however, will likely be more inclined to experiment and learn about things like multi-directional whipping.

Ah, but that would be getting ahead of ourselves. In order to cross the moat, Simon has to deal with the one tiny hazard in this section: A platform of bricks that crumble as you cross them. With nothing to collect in this screen and no other threats present, these four bricks simply serve as a warning of future dangers to come under more harrowing circumstances.

Still, Castlevania literati may notice something about these bricks: There’s nothing holding them up! The thoughtful architectural discipline of the original Castlevania and its second sequel have already been cast aside; the first game in particular went to great lengths to place background elements in conjunction with traversable surfaces to make it clear that the platforming challenges you had to undertake were the result of ancient masonry falling away rather than video game magic. Castlevania IV doesn’t discard that philosophy altogether, but it definitely lacks the scruples of the classic it aims to remake.

Unlike in the original Castlevania, the entrance to the castle doesn’t merely consist of a door for you to walk through. No, Konami has fancy hardware tricks at their disposal, and the gate to the castle now involves a massive door/drawbridge that begins to rotate closed once you set foot on it. It’s the first of many Super NES-specific visual gimmicks Castlevania IV has up its sleeve, and it’s a good one. The bridge rises slowly but inexorably, and the finality of its closure creates a sense of no escape. Not that you’d be backtracking in a linear 2D platformer like this, but there’s something to be said for the psychology of the whole affair.

Next: Theme of Simon