"I now process Dracula's heart." LOL! What!? Process? Isn't it posses? Typical old school NES misspelling back in the old days. I've spent the last two weeks playing this game and let me tell you I did not enjoy this game at all. While the 1st Castlevania was hard as fuck, this game way to easy to get by. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest was nothing like the 1st Castlevania game. Instead, this game is more of a action / RPG game, which most Castlevania games on PS1, GBA and DS are. At the time, this element of game play was new to old school NES gamers back in the day and most of us didn't like it one bit. Today, a game like Simon's Quest would be greeted with open arms but only if they fixed some of the flaws this game had.
So picking up where the 1st game left off, apparently Dracula was defeated but put a curse that is spreading through out the whole village and etc. So what is Simon Belmont to do? Grab his whip and collect all the remains of Dracula scattered all over several towns and bring them back to Transylvania and bring Dracula back from the dead to kill him again. Ok? Wouldn't it have been easier to just destroy the remains to finally put Dracula at rest? Reminds me of the movie Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors where the only way to defeat Freddy was to dig up his remains and pour holy water on it so that he is finally destroyed. Anyways, I'm just stating it would've been easier for Simon to do just that instead of going to Dracula's castle and bringing him back to life only to defeat him. So the game is your typical walking around talking to people in every village / town and they provide you with some clues and tips but mostly all their info are useless. You start off with the leather whip by default but the game introduces you to other weapons and upgrades. Instead of having one whip there are 5 types when you progress through the game. The five whips consists of leather, thorn, chain, morning star, and morning star / flame whip. Other weapons are 3 types of daggers, regular, sliver and gold, a cross which acts as a boomerang, of diamond which can be used to throw at your enemies, the holy water, and a ball of fire to throw.
The game is alright but after a while of playing it for hours you kind of get pissed off at the little things. For instance, there are only three bosses in total in this game. The Grim Reaper is back, a huge face / mask dropping tears of blood that turns into fireballs, and finally of course Dracula. Like the Angry Video Game Nerd stated in his review of this game not so long ago, you could just walk by the Grim Reaper and the Mask and not put up a fight at all. I did put up a fight against them cause once their defeated your rewarded with a special item. To be honest, the battle between Death and the Mask aren't even hard. This time around, Death was easier to defeat compared to the 1st Castlevania game which Death would tick me off every time he beat me. As for Dracula, LOL! Keep throwing that flame attack on him and you win. So another Castlevania game in the books but it's unfortunate this game is the black sheep of the whole Castlevania series. The game was going in the right direction but I believe it was too early for it's time to adapt to a RPG / action game back in 1988 - 1989. This is why the next game in the Castlevania series - Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse makes up for the poor game play of CastleVania II. Castlevania III takes you back to the old game play style of the 1st Castlevania which every fan preferred.
Coming up next: Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse
No comments:
Post a Comment