So, Castlevania: Dracula X — the Super NES one, not the PC Engine Duo one. People hate it! But maybe, just maybe, it’s not that bad. However, there’s an important question to be dealt with here: What on earth is Richter doing in this picture? Yanking an invisible toilet chain? Changing a magical lightbulb?
Looks like he’s trying to read the prescription on a bottle of medicine.
Perhaps he’s about to shake his fist in anger and frustration at Dracula? ‘Why I ought…’ type of scenario.
Maybe he’s milking a giant invisible cow?
Holding up an invisible goblet of wine (his mommy won’t let him drink)
Brandishing an invisible cross?
I played through Dracula X once via emulator. I don’t remember it being too bad, except for the Dracula fight. That ranks up there with the Wily fight from MM7 as one of the most needlessly difficult final boss fights ever.
For some reason, the final fight was pretty easy for me once you get the pattern. It’s the lack of a decent sized stun-pause that gives me fits in certain areas. And the bats. Oh, the bats. And Medusa heads. They’re placed in prime positions to cause one to plummet to their doom, even more so than most Castlevania games.
Anyway, great writeup. It’s an unfairly maligned game, because on its own, it holds up rather well. And kudos to anyone that has beaten it, indeed.
There are actually some gamers that feel Rondo was too easy, and SNES Drac X was just right. If one thing’s true, that Dracula final battle was like, “Why?” It’s like they overcompensated for the decidedly rote final battle from SCV4.
I think another source of disappointment had to do with it being the same system follow-up to said game, with the “loss” of directional whipping, and the more bright, animesque art style. This is of course from the perspective from the people who knew not of the original Rondo.
The music is very much “arguably” better in that it isn’t, at all. It’s missing two of the best tracks, for one.
It’s not that bad, and visually it’s quite striking, going for a sort of gothic comic book look in the backgrounds. The raster deformation effect on the semi-opaque flames in the background of stage 1 is super cool, and I also thought it was neat how the original DX used one of the towns from CV2 for its first stage, while SNES DX used the first stage of CV3.
It’s missing Maria (who was the most fun to play as, easy as she made the game), and it’s definitely not the joy to play that the original version is though.