The Haunted Hoard: Kid Dracula (Game Boy)

The Castlevania series has explored many genres and styles, but no other game feels as starkly different from the rest as Kid Dracula. Where most games in the series involve playing as a beefy whip-wielding vampire slayer or a more lithe anime hero or heroine in their quest to defeat the vampire lord Dracula, Kid Dracula squishes everything down into a friendly chibi art style and has players play as the son of Dracula. While Kid Dracula is not quite Alucard, this cuter Dracula kin sets off on his own adventure, one that shifts the Castlevania series into a more strict platforming focus than usual.

While Kid Dracula is an action platform game, jumping at the right time and using your abilities to get around levels is definitely a bigger focus than how you deal with the enemies along the way. Kid Dracula actually has quite the collection of skills to use to push through levels and attack his foes, but things start off relatively simple. Kid Dracula’s basic attack is a fireball with a small bit of range, and due to the Game Boy screen’s limitations, it flies about as far as you can see. However, you can charge this fireball up to make it better, but the charge effect can activate plenty of different effects depending on what skill you’ve set. While it can be a bit fiddly to try and navigate through all your powers once you’ve gradually unlocked them over the course of the game thanks to having to cycle through the powers in order, they do provide a lot of different options for movement and fighting. Early on you already have the option to briefly turn into a bat, giving you the ability to move around tricky platform arrangements if need be, but the later levels definitely plan around it to avoid you abusing this power. In fact, later levels basically start requiring the use of other abilities so you can’t have your charge shot or bat form set too often. Walking on the ceiling is a necessary addition, and when the umbrella joins your arsenal, using it to protect from projectiles requires essentially giving up your offensive options for a bit. Some of your unlocked skills are focused on damage, with the Bat Attack providing a strong attack with short horizontal range but a bit of vertical range quickly becoming the best option for bosses. None of these skills are really bad on their own, a few of the less exciting ones like umbrella even having potential, but it is the level design in Kid Dracula that may make a player hate what could have otherwise been fun gimmicks.

Kid Dracula’s commitment to its cute look came with a price, and that’s large character sprites on a console that doesn’t have the screen space to spare. Kid Dracula fills almost 1/3 of the horizontal space on the screen with a camera that usually centers on him, meaning that the sidescrolling levels don’t have a lot of room to show you what’s coming up ahead of you even when you take things slow. Vertical areas, while not as common, aren’t much better off either, with moments like ascending trees or going up a shaft with wall tiles that propel you upward not helped by the fact the screen can’t show you areas too far ahead and you only have his body length above you to see what’s coming. At first these complaints might seem silly, the first bit of the game so shockingly easy and straightforward you might imagine the game was indeed meant to be for the youngest of the young, but when Kid Dracula removes the kid gloves, you’ll find yourself constantly running into dangers you didn’t really have the time to see. A slight movement of the screen might reveal an enemy you know nothing about who is already in range to hurt you, but the absolute worst moments of this blindsiding issue come with the game occasionally insisting on fast movement from the player.

If Kid Dracula was just the slow platforming with a need to jump well and kill enemies who are trying to sabotage your jumps, then maybe it wouldn’t be as bad. However, there are plenty of moments in the game that require blindly rushing forward, this no doubt being the game’s way to try and pad its length to make up for 8 overall small levels and an otherwise short playtime. One of the early indicators of this issue is a run across a falling bridge, where slowing down even slightly will make you unable to keep up with its falling planks. A waterfall beside this bridge has fish pop out to attack you, but their shadows only really appear when you’re close enough that you don’t have the time to react. Even worse, the behavior of these fish isn’t universal, some jumping high or going low. You need to learn when they’ll appear and when to use an attack or just keep running so they jump overhead, and the only way to figure this out is trial and error. Even cheeky solutions like turning into a bat to try and fly over this section are not effective enough to completely circumvent this issue, but things only get worse from there. There is a late game vertical section where you hop from platform to platform to ascend, the game encouraging you to leap as soon as you see a new one above or else you won’t have the timing right to get to the next one. The necessary timing of these platform jumps abruptly changes without indication though, meaning you’ll likely die because you can’t afford to wait and see if the pattern will continue. Another moment near the end involves running through a collapsing tunnel where enemies will appear in front of you, and while there is at least a trick that’s easily learned to handle these enemies, it’s not the intuitive method if trying to attack them to remove them from your path.

Worst of all though has to be a roller coaster level where Kid Dracula needs to stand on a moving platform that controls his entire forward movement through the stage. There are moments where you need to leap off at the right moment to avoid instantly plunging to your death and ones where if you don’t time your jump properly, an enemy will push you off your coaster to your death. Kid Dracula has a small health meter that can only be upgraded a little over the course of the game, so it’s even more annoying that the roller coaster level has some enemies that will hurt you if you don’t have a perfectly timed attack waiting for them, blind firing off ahead sometimes the best option just to avoid these ambushes. A baddie riding a cloud even serves as a sort of midboss in the level, his attack shortening your cart and requiring expert dodging that is best done by memorizing how he’ll attack you by dying to him. There are mid-level checkpoints so you won’t always have a full level restart, the game saving those instead for after a game over.

Getting extra lives is important to keep your health upgrades and not get shunted back any further than you have to be after a death, so there are post-level minigames that involve spending coins you get from killing certain enemies. Many enemies in Kid Dracula can respawn, especially if their spawn points are briefly offscreen, so it’s actually a boring but effective tactic to grind out the early easy moments of the game for oodles of coins to spend. The minigames consist of four options that you pick from an easy magical cups arrangement, two being games focused on player participation by catching bats with a net and using a pogo stick to pop balloons and two being games focused essentially on random chance with the rock-paper-scissors challenge and a barrel stabbing game where a random sword bothers the skeleton inside and triggers the minigames end. With tedious commitment you can get plenty of lives from the less random games, and while it doesn’t make the game in general much more bearable since the offscreen woes are never enjoyable to encounter, it makes things like the boss encounters work better. Whether you’re fighting a scythe-wielding witch ghost, a knockoff of Jason Voorhees, or a giant robot, the battles feel like they’re calling on different approaches from the player and attack with different methods. There are even a few clever fights like one where you and a boss send chunks of a central separating wall at each other as attacks or the weird escalation of the battle with the steadily stronger three ghosts of Halloween.

If there is one thing to be enjoyed in Kid Dracula though, it’s the stylization, both when it comes to cute versions of horror creatures and the game’s attempts to sound hip with its 1990s focus on being cool. The manual is a treasure trove of over the top attempts to make Kid Dracula’s adventure sound cool, although the characters in game are just as silly. The events of Kid Dracula kick of when the villain Garamoth returns, a demonic lizard king who was the boss of the original NES Kid Dracula game the U.S. only got to see when it was released years later in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. Despite not having an English release at the time the Game Boy follow-up was localized, neither Kid Dracula or Garamoth hide that they’ve fought before. Besides the manual being riddled with vampire puns, it also gives goofy names to his abilities like calling the umbrella Umbrella Lagosi after the horror movie actor and calling his ceiling walk the “Hangin’ with the Bat Boys Maneuver”. The best part of the attempts to be cool and silly though has to be what the game’s chosen to name its villains, with the fish from the waterfalls all somehow called The Trout That Wouldn’t Die, a drill enemy containing the weird referential name Phyllis Driller, and a bird boss getting the excellent moniker The Spirit of the Last Fried Chicken You Ate. While the game’s commitment to horror imagery swings all around as you go from starting in an appropriate castle to places like a volcano and a robot factory, it does make use of enough of the expected skeletons, bats, and characters like Frankenstein’s monster to still keep some of the horror imagery around. The manual is a fun and kid-friendly dash of delightful weirdness, which makes the unfortunately reality of the gameplay even sadder.

THE VERDICT: Kid Dracula could have been a fun platform game with tough boss fights, a good mix of abilities, and charming chibi versions of classic horror monsters, but the screen crunch absolutely kills it. Big character sprites fill limited screen space, and with plenty of moments requiring quick, exact movement, learning ambushes through repetition is an inevitability as offscreen threats appear too suddenly and keep robbing you of health or lives. Memorization is a must in Kid Dracula, and its implementation of learning what’s ahead by dying only has the payoff of not dying to it next time rather than some substantial improvement waiting on the other side. Blindsiding the player with dangers or movement requirements they can’t anticipate is too heavy of a focus in Kid Dracula, meaning this little Game Boy platformer unfortunately bites.

And so, I give Kid Dracula for Game Boy…

A TERRIBLE rating. Had it more screen to work with, Kid Dracula could overcome most every issue it has. Even the most egregious cases of blindsiding like the roller coaster level or platform hopping in the vertical shaft could be remedied if you just had the space to see see what’s further ahead than a few small steps. All your abilities but your basic fireball have a small charging period that means you can’t react on the fly too often with the appropriate one unless it’s already ready to go too, but if you could just see the enemy or situation a second earlier than you can in Kid Dracula, you could at least have the time to react appropriately. In fair moments of level design it’s easy to see that ideas like the ceiling walk could have a decent spot in a good platformer, but here they contribute to a messy arrangement of level challenges. Switching abilities isn’t done the best way, having to charge to activate them makes the immediate responses some are required for impossible without foreknowledge, and having the umbrella out at all pretty much only has the results of it being completely useless or essentially mandatory.

It doesn’t require booting up the game to enjoy Kid Dracula’s fun character designs or the silly lingo in the manual, but if you do give it a play, be prepared for frustration as it ends up another victim of Game Boy screen crunch. There are games where developers wisely shrunk sprites or designed the game around having big characters, but Kid Dracula wouldn’t compromise its looks, meaning it may be endearing visually, but the gameplay is incredibly off putting with its constant punishment of any player who hasn’t memorized the dangers that lie ahead.