Thoughts on Castlevania, Part 2

I feel if my comments are to take on any semblance of order, they should be structured with a mind toward categorization. My goal here is to delineate why Castlevania works so well, and why I feel that what was once so great is now lost to a certain degree. To illustrate, let's start with the constituent parts of the series:

The Castle (and environs)

More than almost any other feature in a Castlevania game, the castle itself is paramount. Each Castlevania game presents its own riff on the way the Count's home is presented. Of course, this is Dracula we're talking about, and the castle has been privy to its share of cinematic interpretations as well. In Tod Browning's original 1931 film, the castle is cobwebbed and immense, but still retains trappings of finery. Both versions of Nosferatu present the castle as crumbling and defunct. The Hammer Horror collection presents the castle at the height of gothic finery, withered and decayed.

What Konami did with the first Castlevania was realize the potential of video games to fill in the gaps left by various literary forms. No matter how elaborate the set design of any film or play, Dracula's home never gets explored much further than the entrance hall, the dining room, and various bedchambers. This is due to the art form. The story doesn't require a room by room tour, and so, we are left to imagine what crawls in the dark places. The novel sheds little further light. Jonathan Harker is confined mostly to his room and the adjacent dining area. He visits a library, and on his one venture from his chambers, encounters Dracula's wives. Stoker is not forthcoming as to much else, though he does give us a wonderfully malicious scene at the castle gates in which the Count offers to let Harker go free while reminding him of the dangers of the surrounding countryside (he displays his power over the wolves).

From the very first, Castlevania removes notions of powerlessness. Simon Belmont is not Jonathan Harker. He is unafraid to enter the castle and storm through the halls on his way to his final encounter with evil. Konami's programmers had to give him a journey to undertake, and so six levels were crafted, using the license given them by the book's vague descriptions.

It goes without saying that this is as simple as the castle ever gets in the Castlevania series (okay, I'm forgetting Simon's Quest, but more on that in a minute).

If you take a close look at the map above, you can see that the designers did not really intend for this to represent a complete castle or even a particularly habitable one. It is a ruined castle, held together by the will of its master. Maybe this is ascribing too much to the intentions of the original programmers, but it makes sense inasmuch as the game ties into the Stoker novel. It also ties in well with Dracula's Curse, as the castle is much more intricate in that earlier time. What really matters here, though, is a sense of scope. Simon Belmont's assault on Dracula's lair is not a straightforward one. He has to make his approach through the lower keep, across the drawbridge, through catacombs, up into the clock tower, and finally to the precariously arranged inner sanctum in the highest tower. Dracula does not come to meet this man. He bids him come forth and prove himself.

This is a fairly extreme re-imagining of an established character. In every other iteration of the Dracula mythos, the Count is portrayed as a monstrous figure, but is menacing in the way that a disease is menacing. Castlevania transforms him into a towering lord of darkness, something that is inferred in Stoker's novel, and reinforced by the next few games in the franchise.

But enough about the Count. I'll have extended thoughts about him later.

Castlevania introduced the idea of Dracula's castle as something more than just brick and mortar. It is an indelible character in its own right in the series. This is a theme that would be seized upon by Koji Igarashi in Symphony of the Night and other games of its kind, but Konami's original Castlevania team had a different idea in the immediately proceeding entries to the series.

What's most striking about Simon's Quest is the fact that the castle is hardly there at all. While the game deservedly takes its lumps in the retrospective critical community, it took a bold step in examining the possibilities of exploration beyond the castle walls. Taking place several years after Simon Belmont defeated Dracula, Simon's Quest examines the notion that Dracula's evil endured, and that by cursing the entire countryside surrounding his castle, and Simon Belmont with it, he would finally be rid of his preternaturally gifted vampire slaying foes. The following is the entirety of the castle in Simon's Quest:

Yup. That's it. Number of enemies: zero. The entire, sprawling game takes place outside the castle, in the wasted, hopeless lands under the thrall of Dracula's curse. This, in itself, is a massively ambitious move. The cowering, superstitious folk of Transylvania are only glimpsed for a few pages in Stoker's novel, and films use them almost exclusively as extras intended to ratchet up the tension. Simon's Quest, flawed as it is, gives insight into the reasoning behind the inhabitants' dread. It displays the aftermath of Dracula's war, and gives life to the legend of the Belmont clan in their effort to end the Count's poisonous influence.

The reason why I'm focusing so much on the setting of the game is that Konami's original decision to look at Dracula prior to the events in the novel was groundbreaking, and by expanding beyond the walls of the castle, it expanded the scope of the ambition. What was dispelled was the notion that Dracula's castle existed in some other space, beyond the world of men, and was only the source of distant superstition. Simon's Quest gives depth to the experience of the first game, and provides a good precedent for Dracula's Curse.

Castlevania III: Dracula's Curse is viewed by many as the true sequel to Castlevania, as the gameplay is intentionally similar, and this leads many to view the more esoteric Simon's Quest in the cold as something of an outlier. I contend that without Simon's Quest, there could be no Dracula's Curse, because the former had already broken the boundary of the castle walls. Indeed, where Dracula's Curse could have easily aped the original game by limiting action within the castle, it instead makes great use of the approach to the famous gates through which Simon Belmont will eventually cross. More than half of the game takes place in the dark places, marshlands, caverns, sewers, and ruined keeps that surround the Count's home. If one is so inclined, a haunted ship will provide passage from the closed drawbridge to the castle port.

The point, belabored though it is, is that there is much more than the castle going on here. There is a feeling that something outside the castle matters, that it's not just an insular world with no consequences. In fact, just the opening image of Dracula's Curse, of Trevor Belmont praying before a giant crucifix before heading out for battle, indicates that he is fighting for his people, and that the oppressed masses are counting on him.

This is important because it's a theme picked up for the remake of the first game. In Super Castlevania IV, Simon undertakes a solo quest (unlike Trevor, who gets the option of some limited help), just like the first game, but has to approach the castle in much the same way as his grandfather did, making his way through the desecrated lands surrounding the castle before entering.

Here's where the major split begins. After this point, Konami had two separate teams working on Castlevania titles. The two games they produced, Castlevania Bloodlines and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, were very dissimilar in feel and approach. Where Bloodlines attempted to further integrate the Stoker novel by inserting the son of Quincy Morris (the slayer of the Count in the book) into the timeline, Rondo of Blood dove straight into the continuing tale of the Belmonts, one hundred years after the end of Simon's Quest.

Bloodlines took a stab at expanding the world of Castlevania even further, taking place in multiple locations around Europe. Unfortunately, the game was less than memorable, and the lack of a castle (sorry, Carmilla's Mansion doesn't cut it) makes it feel second rate.

Rondo of Blood, on the other hand, is a stunning masterpiece of gaming. Richter Belmont is a worthy successor to Trevor and Simon, and his journey through Dracula's castle is memorable and unique. In Rondo, Richter must make his way through linear levels, but which have multiple exits, making for an enormous number of paths which all lead to the same place: Dracula's inner sanctum. Though the game does make the player at least consider rescuing Richter's girlfriend and a number of other distressed damsels, it maintains the look and feel of the first games, and replicates the same winning formula: Belmont. Whip. Subweapons. Kill Dracula.

That having been said, Rondo of Blood is the first game in the series to initiate a subtle paradigm shift. Never intended for the eyes of western audiences, Rondo has numerous anime-styled cutscenes, and utilizes some tropes from that genre in telling the story. In fact, Konami was so sensitive about this that when they agreed to port the game to the SNES, the resulting attempt to westernize the game was the undercooked embarrassment that was released as Castlevania: Dracula X. If you want any pair of images to show what a diversion the games were from each other, check out screens from Rondo's final battle, and then Dracula X's:

Don't ask. Not worth the effort.

What I'm driving at here is that the Castlevania series, based originally on the effort to pacify western audiences with a re-imagining of a familiar story, was becoming more eastern in style and feel. This may seem fait accompli considering it was being developed entirely in-house in Japan, but it wasn't until Rondo that these elements began to take hold.

By the time Symphony of the Night rolled around, all vestiges of the original concept had been revamped or discarded. Though the game itself is an unchallenged classic, it drastically altered what the castle in Castlevania was meant to suggest. In the first games, the castle was menacing, decrepit, dangerous, and shrouded in mystery. In Simon's Quest, it's a collapsed ruin, and it's still creepy as hell, if only because it's so empty. And in all of the early games, the castle was synonymous with its master and the curse he represented. In Symphony of the Night, the castle is the only battleground. No stone is intended to be left unexplored. The entirety of the structure is in tact, other characters traverse the hallways and meet Alucard as though they're extras in a remake of Clue, and, most annoyingly, the castle is then flipped upside down to double the play time.

Don't get me wrong. I love Symphony of the Night. I love it good. But it introduced the precedents that have fueled the 2D Castlevania games since. The castle is no longer the seat of an ancient evil, but the transmogrified representation of the age it infects, or something like that. I believe Death tells Juste Belmont in Harmony of Dissonance that the castle changes every time it re-appears due to the ever-changing nature of evil or Dracula, or something. Hell, in most instances, in the new games, the castle appears before Dracula ever awakes, and it's the player's job to prevent that from happening. But more on that in the section on the Count himself. I need to wrap this section up.

The overall point I'm making is that by reducing the scope of the game to transform the castle into a supernatural event existing outside of space and time diminishes the impact of the very quest. When Simon Belmont marches up to the gates of the castle in Castlevania, whip in hand, ready to join battle, it means something. But when Soma Cruz stumbles upon the castle in the year 20XX in Japan because of some solar eclipse, there is something lost.

I'll elaborate on those thoughts in the next section, when I analyze the heroes of the Castlevania series, starting with the one who got this whole business started in 1987: Simon Belmont.