The Haunted Hoard: Castlevania: The Adventure (Game Boy)

Castlevania: The Adventure was the first entry to bring the whip-cracking, monster-slaying platformer action of the Castlevania series to the Game Boy, and it did not do so in style. Oddly slow, limited in ways even the first game wasn’t, and not really able to say it does much unique besides bring the battle against Dracula to a handheld system to help it stand out from its predecessors or follow-ups, if it hadn’t been one of the few games released during the Game Boy’s first year of life, it might have looked much worse compared to titles that came after. Whether it was a desire to get the game out quickly, struggles with new hardware, or a lack of imagination, Castlevania: The Adventure ends up a hard game to go back to even for those with an interest in retro games or the series’s history.

 

However, the game’s manual, at least in English, is at least surprisingly playful. A bit too busy cracking jokes and making spooky puns to even mention the hero’s name is Christopher Belmont, the pretty simple premise of “everyone’s favorite blood sucker” Count Dracula coming back to life in his domain of Castlevania is delivered with as many puns on the word “dead” as can be reasonably fit, with even the “Tips to Evade Torture” section first saying “Don’t bet the ponies… don’t spit in the wind… (OK! OK! Enough joking around…)” before actually giving some helpful information. It ends up giving off a delightfully strange tone for a series that often presents its Gothic horror elements as something serious even if not gravely so.

Of the game’s four somewhat lengthy levels, three house Primary Evils as their bosses you must beat first to unlock the confrontation with Dracula himself, but as you start Castlevania: The Adventure, you might feel like something is wrong. Christopher Belmont is a very sluggish vampire killer, a regular person’s walking speed easily outpacing his slow stroll as he infiltrates a vampire’s deadly castle. When enemies or objects are on screen and cause a bit of slowdown this walk only ends up dragging even more, but if the game was built around this limit, it would just make the game a bit leisurely but not necessarily bad. Instead, every level has a timer ticking from the moment it starts, Christopher dying should it run out before he can beat the level’s boss. You are given a few lives to start and continues are infinite, although a Game Over does throw you back to level start to trudge through all that walking once more.

 

Jumping isn’t exactly better either. It does its role well enough when all you need to do is hop up to a ledge, but Castlevania: The Adventure likes to make jumping challenges where instant death is your punishment if you mess up the timing or leap from the wrong place. The main trial that can strain the jumping are little platforms made up of cubes that start dropping the moment you touch them. You’ll often need to hop across a few of these quickly, and if you don’t do it from the right spot, you’ll miss your mark. Christopher Belmont seems to be a heavy guy, his stiff walking joined by him plummeting downward rather quickly after the initial arc of your leaps. While this is what make the quick jumps a bit rougher, it also makes rope climbing tough too. Castlevania has many ropes to climb, but you often need to climb to their very top if you want to hop to the one next to it and barely grab the bottom. There’s surprisingly little horizontal distance on your leaps, making simple jumps sometimes the greater danger than the horrors of Dracula’s castle that the manual cutely calls “Some Pretty Frightful Dudes”.

 

Thankfully, Christopher Belmont’s beefiness does mean he can take a few hits, the monsters you face in Castlevania: The Adventure still having their issues but less likely to lead to immediate deaths unless they’re working alongside bad platforming to send you falling down a bottomless pit. Big Eyes, for examples, are exactly what they sound like, often rolling towards you as a surprise dropping in from above to test your reaction time. This works as a decent danger, but when they’re on a bridge that breaks beneath them when you kill them and your jump can only barely go over them if you time it with incredibly precision, they are more likely to kill you by making those holes than hitting you. A scythe throwing fiend called Zeldo though is a challenge that feels reasonable any time you encounter it, throwing his boomerang scythe’s high or low so you must identify and dodge them and then get in strikes with your Mystic Killer whip. However, while Christopher can take a hit, how much damage he dishes out also has an unfortunate limit on it. Occasionally, when breaking candles, you will find items within. Usually these are coins to go towards points for earning extra lives, but they can be hearts that heal you, a cross that makes you briefly invincible, or special crystal spheres that increase your whip’s power. Two crystals will even let your whip launch a little fireball when you attack, great for hitting an enemy before it can reach you. However, the moment you take a hit, the whip upgrade will disappear.

While regular foes can often be taken out with an appropriate amount of blows to match their danger level, a weak whip often makes the game’s bosses or special enemies agonizingly slow to fight against. The Under Mole, a team of fleshy creatures that hop out of various holes during their boss fight, feels like it doesn’t need a whip upgrade to handle at least, but others like Dracula himself can be a slow and repetitive process where you just try to find a safe spot to fall into a rhythm of repetitive whip strikes to eventually win the fight. Where Castlevania: The Adventure can get a bit egregious though are sections like a hallway in the final level where you rematch the game’s first boss Gobanz repeatedly. The hall itself has multiple instances of the boss, and while facing down one won’t be too hard by that point if you learned his moves, as you press forward, a new Gobanz may force you to back off during the fight. Unfortunately, when an enemy’s spawn point goes off-screen, the next time you reach it, they’ll reappear, meaning you can have a Gobanz you already defeated pop back up and join the new one in harassing you in a way you don’t have a good counter for even if your whip is fully upgraded. You can sometimes use spawn point shenanigans to your benefit, Castlevania: The Adventure having a limit to how many foes appear at once to avoid becoming too slow. Mudmen (called Manman in the manual) are very easy to kill but follow you doggedly, so if you want to avoid the trickier and swifter bird enemies in their area, a clever player may lead some Mudmen around to prevent the birds from spawning.

 

There are little tricks to gain an advantage and little platforming sections that aren’t harmed too much by the major issues. Surprisingly, a section where you need to outrun an approaching spike wall has some real tension to it even though everything is moving so slowly, and one where the ceiling starts crushing down on you if you don’t destroy the mechanisms causing it in time once again does a surprisingly decent job balancing your shuffle of a walk with a time-sensitive danger. The soundtrack in particular though is surprisingly excellent. Adventurous level music with some of that otherworldly flair that suits the supernatural combat, level 3’s track “Death Fair” in particular has exciting melodic hooks that can ease some of the pain of the rough platforming challenges you’ll have to overcome. There are bits that can work, and later remakes or rereleases, official and fan-made, try to push things a little to make it a more playable journey. It’s not teeming with wasted potential though, but at least the game seems to understand some of its issues and can build some dangers that suit them, even when others suffer because of the game’s fundamental platforming flaws.

THE VERDICT: While its soundtrack might be one of the best on the Game Boy, Castlevania: The Adventure certainly won’t sit near the top of the best platformers on the system. Walking is obnoxiously slow before you even consider that every level is timed, jumping barely travels forward but sends you falling fast so certain challenges are quick to lead to an instant death, and enemy placement can sometimes lead to awful situations where your precious whip upgrades are bound to get knocked out of you. Some area layouts or specific sections like the spike wall chase can work despite it all, but they’re often just a reprieve from the points where you’ll lament how Christopher Belmont feels like he’s far too weak and slow for even this four level adventure.

 

And so, I give Castlevania: The Adventure for Game Boy…

A TERRIBLE rating. During some early sections, you can learn to start to accept the game speed or rough jumps, but Castlevania: The Adventure seems like it forgets some of its issues as it almost starts building situations specifically to make you rub up against them. The timer, thankfully, feels more like an insulting concept than a constant threat since the levels do feel designed not to take up the allotted time, although if your whip power is limited it can be obnoxious to see it ticking down as you repeat a dull attack pattern hoping the boss won’t take so long you run out of time. The falling platforms and specific gaps like the ones made on the eyeball bridges are the meaner moments where you need to sometimes be perfectly positioned for your jump or you will just die. Those sections where the game puts up a decent fight with a gimmick or specific enemy type are the nice little breaks from upsetting moments where it feels like you were given very little room to succeed just so that you’ll come up short and make your Game Boy game harder to beat in one session. A little more speed would let you get back to where you died better and a bit of a better jump means fewer instances where you fall down a pit by being a pixel off, but Castlevania: The Adventure still feels like it would need more enemies like Zeldo to make its regular stages more exciting even if it was smooth to play.

 

While its soundtrack almost justifies its existence, it is clear that Castlevania: The Adventure did not benefit from being one of the first Game Boy games out the door, and in a game series that was already fairly difficult for the time, it might have even given off a worse impression than more obtuse entries like Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest because of its plodding pace and plummeting drops. It’s perhaps fortunate that handheld entries in a game series were often graded on curves or had little expected from them, Castlevania: The Adventure a more easily overlooked flub rather than something that harmed Castlevania’s reputation.