I'm not sure how many of us there are, but I know there's at least a few people here who still love this series as much as I do. What with Portrait of Ruin kind of being major suckage, I spent a while this morning assessing the series and what's wrong with it. The following is a list/essay about what can be done to fix things for the next installment.
1. Scale everything way back. Consider losing the armors, the accessories, the weapon types, and limit things to four or five subweapons. Alternatively, keep a few of these things, but make sure that each and every one of them does something unique and has a definitive place in the game.
2. Lose the leveling. It could be present in some form- i.e. getting gold from killing monsters- but in its current incarnation, it’s too easy for the player to ruin the game by becoming too powerful.
3. Bring back level design. Not this cut-and-paste rectangle crap, but genuine LEVELS, with carefully-placed elements, environmental challenges and obstacles, themes that directly affect gameplay, clever setpieces, and actual flow, where challenges in point A will prepare the player for harder challenges in point B. And bring back some genuine platforming. It doesn’t matter if they’re segmented like the old games or part of a cohesive whole like the new games, although I would prefer the latter. What matters is what happens inside them.
4. Scale the monsters back as well. Give them some weight. Make it so each one requires different tactics to defeat, and give them some depth relative to their placement. In other words, do something with them, Don’t just introduce a new monster for the sake of it; ask how that monster can be used to genuinely add new elements to the level design. If the answer is, “nothing,” consider redesigning it.
5. No more potions/healing items. These items, especially in overabundance as in all the SotN-and-on Castlevanias, dull the purpose of evading danger. They encourage the game to devolve even further into an RPG-like state of trading blows rather than actively trying to play well.
6. Give bosses life bars again. This is debatable, but I’m of the opinion that it adds a lot of drama to a battle when you can see how close you are to victory. It helps the battle feel like it has a definitive beginning, middle, and end. While we’re on this note, give the bosses less hit points, and make them harder in other ways. I’m sick of the not-very-engaging boss fights dragged out twice as long as they should be formula.
7. To go along with the improved level design, place important items, spells, powerups- whatever’s left after stripping things down- in accordingly important places. Don’t just stick a half-dozen relics directly in the player’s path; put the double-jump relic on a high plateau which requires the player to navigate a precarious series of platforms using only the single jump. Make us feel like we’ve earned things. This leads us to 8:
8. Eliminate the double jump. It’s almost completely pointless, especially when it’s always given at the very beginning of the game. It has the tendency of making the combat looser than it should be. Consider doing the same for just about every other accessory or ability in the game, including the gravity boots, miscellaneous flying abilities, and what have you. If a new ability is introduced, do something with it. Construct challenges that utilize it, and make them numerous. This will give it a sense of meaning and importance. Make sure of its place in the game. Make sure it isn’t breaking anything or making anything too easy.
9. For ****’s sake, take the series aesthetics seriously again. Ditch the horrible anime stylings, in dialogue as well as artwork. Hell, get rid of the majority of the dialogue in the first place. The “plots” told by the original Castlevanias use almost no dialogue whatsoever, and they’re considerably more mysterious and compelling for it. If it absolutely MUST be there, make sure it’s not directly contradicting the tone of the series, like most of the dialogue in Portrait does. Get some good ****ing writers to write something that doesn’t sound like it came from a badly-translated kiddie anime.
10. On the subject of aesthetics, there was a time when Castlevania games could actually take place outside the goddamn castle. Portrait of Ruin tries this to an extent, but fails by making almost all of the new locations look and play exactly as if they were still part of the castle, right down to the majority of them being indoors. This is a catastrophic failure of imagination.
11. Stop recycling things. Take the time to craft an entire game full of original content. This shouldn’t be too hard, what with stripping everything down. If something is going to be reused- say, an old theme song- it needs to be somewhere where that song will be of emotional worth, instead of just randomly thrown in as fanservice. Why is the Prelude from Castlevania 3 playing on the stairs leading to the last boss in Portrait? The game has next to NOTHING to do with Castlevania 3. The same can be said for Iron Blue Intention playing on a level that shares absolutely nothing to do with the munitions factory of Bloodlines, or even ANY part of Bloodlines, really, at least not outside of a couple of arbitrary character names.
12. The series’ controls have become considerably refined since the original games, and this is a good thing. However, while the player has been given such enhanced powers of evasion, the monsters and their attack patterns haven’t grown up that much. This needs work.
13. Miscellaneous: bring back the multidirectional whip from IV, and the whip grappling from the same game. IV and Bloodlines are good places to look for examples of amazing CV level design. Bring back multi-form boss fights for more than just the final battle (which should be hard as all hell). Screen-filling enemies are nice, but make them play like they’re huge, instead of making them all pussies. Bring back multi-screen enemies. Give us a genuine chase sequence. We don’t necessarily need bottomless pits, but there needs to be some mechanism in play to keep players in check for sloppy platforming. Make the game have some genuine meat and length to it, say, 15 hours at least.
14. Stop trying to make a new game in the series every year. Don’t worry about the profit margins. They’re going to go to **** anyway when everyone realizes how sick they are of playing Castlevania by Numbers. Make one big, bold game, much like what SotN was to the PSOne back in 1997. Don’t try to make it another SotN clone; stop playing it safe and don’t be afraid to apply all the above steps and more. Put some genuine love and care into the game. Put it on a next-gen console and give it a soundtrack with quality on par with SotN or better. Do something new and impressive with 2D rather than using portables as a way to keep giving us the same graphics we’ve had for ten years. In short, show some love.
1. Scale everything way back. Consider losing the armors, the accessories, the weapon types, and limit things to four or five subweapons. Alternatively, keep a few of these things, but make sure that each and every one of them does something unique and has a definitive place in the game.
2. Lose the leveling. It could be present in some form- i.e. getting gold from killing monsters- but in its current incarnation, it’s too easy for the player to ruin the game by becoming too powerful.
3. Bring back level design. Not this cut-and-paste rectangle crap, but genuine LEVELS, with carefully-placed elements, environmental challenges and obstacles, themes that directly affect gameplay, clever setpieces, and actual flow, where challenges in point A will prepare the player for harder challenges in point B. And bring back some genuine platforming. It doesn’t matter if they’re segmented like the old games or part of a cohesive whole like the new games, although I would prefer the latter. What matters is what happens inside them.
4. Scale the monsters back as well. Give them some weight. Make it so each one requires different tactics to defeat, and give them some depth relative to their placement. In other words, do something with them, Don’t just introduce a new monster for the sake of it; ask how that monster can be used to genuinely add new elements to the level design. If the answer is, “nothing,” consider redesigning it.
5. No more potions/healing items. These items, especially in overabundance as in all the SotN-and-on Castlevanias, dull the purpose of evading danger. They encourage the game to devolve even further into an RPG-like state of trading blows rather than actively trying to play well.
6. Give bosses life bars again. This is debatable, but I’m of the opinion that it adds a lot of drama to a battle when you can see how close you are to victory. It helps the battle feel like it has a definitive beginning, middle, and end. While we’re on this note, give the bosses less hit points, and make them harder in other ways. I’m sick of the not-very-engaging boss fights dragged out twice as long as they should be formula.
7. To go along with the improved level design, place important items, spells, powerups- whatever’s left after stripping things down- in accordingly important places. Don’t just stick a half-dozen relics directly in the player’s path; put the double-jump relic on a high plateau which requires the player to navigate a precarious series of platforms using only the single jump. Make us feel like we’ve earned things. This leads us to 8:
8. Eliminate the double jump. It’s almost completely pointless, especially when it’s always given at the very beginning of the game. It has the tendency of making the combat looser than it should be. Consider doing the same for just about every other accessory or ability in the game, including the gravity boots, miscellaneous flying abilities, and what have you. If a new ability is introduced, do something with it. Construct challenges that utilize it, and make them numerous. This will give it a sense of meaning and importance. Make sure of its place in the game. Make sure it isn’t breaking anything or making anything too easy.
9. For ****’s sake, take the series aesthetics seriously again. Ditch the horrible anime stylings, in dialogue as well as artwork. Hell, get rid of the majority of the dialogue in the first place. The “plots” told by the original Castlevanias use almost no dialogue whatsoever, and they’re considerably more mysterious and compelling for it. If it absolutely MUST be there, make sure it’s not directly contradicting the tone of the series, like most of the dialogue in Portrait does. Get some good ****ing writers to write something that doesn’t sound like it came from a badly-translated kiddie anime.
10. On the subject of aesthetics, there was a time when Castlevania games could actually take place outside the goddamn castle. Portrait of Ruin tries this to an extent, but fails by making almost all of the new locations look and play exactly as if they were still part of the castle, right down to the majority of them being indoors. This is a catastrophic failure of imagination.
11. Stop recycling things. Take the time to craft an entire game full of original content. This shouldn’t be too hard, what with stripping everything down. If something is going to be reused- say, an old theme song- it needs to be somewhere where that song will be of emotional worth, instead of just randomly thrown in as fanservice. Why is the Prelude from Castlevania 3 playing on the stairs leading to the last boss in Portrait? The game has next to NOTHING to do with Castlevania 3. The same can be said for Iron Blue Intention playing on a level that shares absolutely nothing to do with the munitions factory of Bloodlines, or even ANY part of Bloodlines, really, at least not outside of a couple of arbitrary character names.
12. The series’ controls have become considerably refined since the original games, and this is a good thing. However, while the player has been given such enhanced powers of evasion, the monsters and their attack patterns haven’t grown up that much. This needs work.
13. Miscellaneous: bring back the multidirectional whip from IV, and the whip grappling from the same game. IV and Bloodlines are good places to look for examples of amazing CV level design. Bring back multi-form boss fights for more than just the final battle (which should be hard as all hell). Screen-filling enemies are nice, but make them play like they’re huge, instead of making them all pussies. Bring back multi-screen enemies. Give us a genuine chase sequence. We don’t necessarily need bottomless pits, but there needs to be some mechanism in play to keep players in check for sloppy platforming. Make the game have some genuine meat and length to it, say, 15 hours at least.
14. Stop trying to make a new game in the series every year. Don’t worry about the profit margins. They’re going to go to **** anyway when everyone realizes how sick they are of playing Castlevania by Numbers. Make one big, bold game, much like what SotN was to the PSOne back in 1997. Don’t try to make it another SotN clone; stop playing it safe and don’t be afraid to apply all the above steps and more. Put some genuine love and care into the game. Put it on a next-gen console and give it a soundtrack with quality on par with SotN or better. Do something new and impressive with 2D rather than using portables as a way to keep giving us the same graphics we’ve had for ten years. In short, show some love.
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