MadCap's Game Reviews - "Super Castlevania IV"

I meant to get to this last year, but life unfortunately got in the way. There are officially more Castlevania games than there are planets in the sky by this point. Out of all of those astounding adventures brought to us by Konami...this is one of them.

Don't react angrily too quick, it's also my personal favorite besides Symphony of the Night, the first Castlevania game I ever reviewed back into 2012. Y'know, when I knew nothing about editing!

Amazing how times haven't changed, huh?

Before Hollywood got big into the remake craze, video games were already doing it. Such as it was with Super Castlevania IV, being a remake of Castlevania. As before, so is it now: you're Simon Belmont and you are heading off with your whip in hand to declare to Dracula "die, monster! You don't belong in this world!", only with less bad voice acting and more indiscriminate whipping.

The game's director and programming lead Masahiro Ueno wanted to make a game like Castlevania to begin with, but some of the elements that players found frustrating in the original game such as a lack of control over the player character. This time, stepping into the leather boots of Simon Belmont, you're completely in control. You can control what direction your whip fires off in and you have better control over your momentum as you jump and fall.

The game is very much a remake of the original, though it's clear that Konami learned it's lesson from the previous entries in the series (which is something that they could really learn to do now, am I right?) and spruced it up a bit.  Beyond the gameplay changes, the graphics and music were updated to utilize the best that the 16-bit era had to offer. The atmosphere is absolutely perfect to the last detail, everything from outside on the roads to Dracula's castle to within Castlevania itself is just dripping with it.

Also, the music utilizes not only new tracks, but also tracks from the first three games, particularly on the final stretch to the final battle with Dracula.

Unfortunately, there's also a bad side. This has been covered before by Egoraptor in his Sequelitis series (y'know, before he went off the deep end), namely that the secondary weapons feel kind of superfluous. With the redesign on the whip, it pretty much covers everything and you use it more often than you do anything else. You don't really have a reason to use anything else. That may not necessarily be a bad thing from a player standpoint, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the work that the programmers put into putting those items into the game.

However, that's just a tiniest complaint atop a myriad of good. Super Castlevania IV holds up well as an entry into the series. It provides some variation to the existing formula and while that does come at the cost of the effectiveness of some of it's assets, it does not ruin the full experience. Just as it was in 1991, it's a spooky good time in 2020.

Super Castlevania IV was originally made for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by Konami. It is available in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection for the Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.

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