Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

Ever since I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night I wondered about the game that came before it. At the beginning of SotN the first thing you do is fight Dracula from the previous game using the previous protagonist Richter. That’s kind of cool. How many games exist that have what is essentially a fully interactive recap? I wanted to play the previous game just so I could hear Dracula’s “What is a man?” speech again.

Then I find out that the game before it was “Dracula X.” This seemed weird to me since I can distinctly remember already having played that game a long time ago and I don’t remember the final fight with Dracula being ANYTHING like what was in the beginning of SotN. A couple of Google searches later I find out that the Super Nintendo Dracula X that I played was actually a shitty port from a PC engine game called Dracula X: Rondo of Blood which was only released in Japan, not counting the ‘07 PSP remake.

So I… acquire the game and boot it up. Naturally I’m expecting it to be in Japanese which puts me off because I assume the characters are actually going to be speaking to one another unlike in the port and I’m not going to understand any of it. But my mind is instantly blown when a black screen appears and I begin to hear a German narration with Japanese subtitles. What the hell? Why German? My only guess is that I’m in Germany. I mean anyone named “Richter” has to be German right? But why’s Dracula in Germany? I thought he hung around Wallachia or whatever… Transylvania. Though I guess his castle does have a tendency to appear in random-ass places. But in the port it actually says you’re in Transylvania so I don’t know. After that I’m only further mystified when I find that the beginning menu screens are all in English. Well that’s nice for me but how many languages are going to be in this game? I haven’t even started it yet.

Unlike past Castlevania games this one lets you create a file and save your progress instead of having to use passwords. When you start a new game you get to see a cinematic of a village getting attacked and Richter coming to town to kick some ass. The whole thing looks like some cheesy early 90’s anime, which is… awesome. Richter looks exactly like Ryu from Street Fighter.

There were no cinematics like this in the port which is lame. You get one explanatory one if you wait at the start screen and another one at the very end and they aren’t nearly as impressive; they also lack dialogue but it’s not like I could understand it in Rondo anyway.

Once you start playing you immediately notice that everything’s different. A lot of the stuff is similar but they also changed A LOT of things. It’s like déjà vu. You’re in the same burning town with slouching skeletons attacking you but the background is less detailed. There are enemies you’ve never seen before and the entire level has been redesigned. At the end of the level in Rondo of Blood you fight a fire-breathing dragon. In the port you fight a fire-breathing cerberus panther thing. Why’d they change so much stuff?

Now the reason that Richter is in the castle is because his girlfriend and her sister, (who also bares a strong resemblance to another character,)

were abducted by Dracula. You can rescue them in both versions of the game, (albeit a completely different ordeal in each of them.) The thing about Rondo though is that you get the option to play as Maria which means throwing cats and birds at skeletons and bats. What’s stupid is that you can’t switch between characters except at a game over screen. It would be nice to just be able to switch characters any time for particular obstacles along the way but no. In Castlevania III you could switch between characters by just pressing “select.” But what was stupid about that was that the characters shared the same life bar. They’re not one person. They should have exclusive life bars.

I played Rondo on PC, not through an emulator which meant no save state. I was reduced to doing it the old fashioned shitty way that the game makers intended. AKA play the same thing over and over and over until every minute detail of the level has been burned into your mind before finally beating the boss and advancing. This is typical of every Castlevania game prior to SotN and it really irks me. You get three lives and as you go through a level there are a few check points that you can respawn at when you die. There’s always a checkpoint just before the level boss and however many lives you have left after the level is how many shots you have at killing the boss. Once you’re out of lives you have to start at the beginning of the level. Why do you have to do that? I already passed the level. I don’t want to do it again. It’s not fun to have to keep doing it over and over every time you come across some ludicrously difficult boss. It’s just fucking annoying and a waste of time. Shinobi on PS2 is one of the most difficult and cruel games I’ve ever played but even they had the sense to have infinite boss retries without having to play the whole level again. And It’s not like I just use save state to cheat in all the boss battles I just don’t want to replay the fucking level every time I fail.

There came a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Stage 6 was where I decided it would be much more fun to stop playing. The nice thing about the level is that there IS no level. It’s just a boss, or bosses. When you go into the room the dark priest Shaft is there… doing something. He disappears and then brings back the boss bat from the first Castlevania. Then you have to beat it. When he’s dead the medusa/gorgon thing from the first game appears. (They’re all from the first game.) After that, the mummy appears. I assumed this would be the last boss just because it’s the third one. I don’t know… It made sense to me. It took me like 20-30 tries to finally beat all three of them. When I did I was very pissed off to find that Frankenstein’s monster appeared and killed me. OK, so there are four bosses. You know, it’s kind of dumb that all these bosses are like 1930s Hollywood monsters. What the hell is Frankenstein’s monster even doing here? I thought this was DRACULA’S castle, not Dr. Frankenstein’s. Did Dracula kidnap him too? So like 15 tries later I beat him as well. Good, now I’m done. No, Shaft reappears and I die. What is this shit?! Will it ever fucking end? Putting two bosses in a row is a dick move unless one’s really weak, but five all in a row with no checkpoints? That’s completely unreasonable and logically you’d think Dracula would be even harder than that. Fuck this shit! Where are the cheats? Give them now!

There is only one cheat as far as I know. It gives you the ability to select any stage. So I go straight to Dracula and… it’s still not like the scenario in SotN at all. They both have floors, which is more than I can say for Dracula X. (Dracula’s actually harder in the port than in Rondo) Richter and Dracula don’t talk. It’s a lot harder than it was in the recap. Maria doesn’t come to save you if you die. (I realize this is a necessary change because it would be stupid to expect you to just beat Dracula first thing without a handicap.) There are moves that Richter can only do in SotN like running, twirling the whip and the slide kick that he can’t do in Rondo or its port.

After beating Rondo Dracula, (much easier that beating five fuckers in a row or that stupid room with all the pits in the port version), I came to three conclusions.

1. If you only played Rondo and then later played SotN, you’d be confused.

2. If you only played the port and then later played SotN, you’d be like “What the hell is this? I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

3. They really fucked up the port. How can they even call it a port when they changed nearly everything? Why would they EVEN change anything? It’s easy to just translate a game and do nothing else to it. Maybe the Super Nintendo wouldn’t be able to handle the cinematics/dialogue but why did they put so much effort into making everything else shitty? It’s mind-boggling. Well, it’s not like Dracula X was a terrible game but the game it’s supposedly ported from makes it look like a concept model. It’s like if Super Mario Brothers 3 was “ported” and you ended up with Super Mario Brothers. It just removed a whole other dimension for no reason.

From top to bottom: Dracula X, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night

Whatever happened to consistency?