Super Castlevania IV

I’m reluctant to do the full-throated condemnation of the expanded toolkit here because, outside of a comparison against the NES Castlevanias, it’s still restrained. Simon doesn’t move particularly fast, his jump height is fixed, and he still can’t jump off of stairs. The Ghost ’n Goblins games had presented more significant challenge with looser handling and free, rapid-fire projectiles, but they also leaned into dynamic enemies and random placements. Super Castlevania IV doesn’t just tack the other way on this, it falls short of even the game it’s ostensibly reimagining. Skeletons usually stay glued to the ground and move slower, and Medusa heads seem to not track the player at spawn time, to the extent that they often appear in places where they would never get close to grazing Simon. Enemies that do get spammed in every level, such as axe knights, skele-dragons, and skull cannons, all lack tools to chase down the player or prevent them from hitting from below, while the agile hunchbacks and dogs from the original game appear rarely or not at all. Arguably this game would have been improved if it was a 1:1 recreation of Castlevania with the new additions, using the original game’s enemy balance and AI rather than this neutered update.

The way to solve this might have been enemy density (something the original also arguably does better), but Super Castlevania IV instead opts for a plodding pace that rarely puts more than a single obstacle on screen at once.¹ Generally my rule of thumb for these old action-platformers is that you’re looking for moments where 1) multiple enemies overlap such that that dealing with one enemy opens you up to the other or 2) the terrain interferes with how you approach a particular enemy. Two of Castlevania’s most prominent drivers of this – the axe knights and the skull cannons, both of which force crouching – fall apart when pitted against Simon’s new crouch-walk, and it keeps the popcorn enemies they throw out alongside these from limiting the player at all. Stages that actually do play with this, such as 6-2 and its rainbow clouds that bounce around the screen until killed, are few and far between. An increased focus on platforming and verticality could have helped here, but the game’s reluctance to pair these with strategic enemy placement turn these into boring cycle memorization. These become even less impressive when they don’t activate until you’ve already walked past or can’t reach Simon when he’s crouch-walking, both of which plague spike hazards in areas like Stage 8. When the team decides to show off their Mode 7 prowess, the areas become bereft of virtually any life at all, especially in the famous rotating room, which mostly consists of idly waiting for the room to turn while you hang from a hook. Even the bosses can’t help but devolve into forgettable DPS races, and by the time they move into more complex patterns in the final boss rush, the game is practically over.

This area of 6-2 has one of the game’s few solid enemy combinations, with these rainbow clouds bouncing around the screen with an axe knight throwing projectiles at you. Still, you can kill the rainbow clouds easily given their predictable trajectory, and this axe knight is height-offset such that it only really threatens when it throws a crouching axe. It doesn’t help that this area looks garish as well.

Given that the game’s impressive whip physics were coded by legendary Treasure director Yaiman, it’s a shame that they never revisited the mechanic in one of their own games; it’s remarkably flexible, and the damage drop-off once it starts dangling helps balance it out. With a denser set of bats, Medusa heads, and other minor enemies that can be stalled out with whip shenanigans, a cool game built around that particular mechanic could exist. This is assuming Treasure could have lent their detail-oriented, cartoon-y visual chops to such a game, as Super Castlevania IV desperately needed attention in those areas. Like many other early Super Nintendo games, the vast on-screen color count led to art direction that favored detail and palette variety over style and cohesion, resulting in a dull complexion with little direction. Giant green blocks against normal gray stone, a treasury filled with gold that resembles something more like mac and cheese, gears in the clock tower with uncannily lit notches against dark teeth, rock structures that can’t hide their tessellation behind the gormless, overarticulated patterns etched into them… for the occasional areas that do hit, such as an early brook that pushes Simon along the current through a forest, there’s multiple others that overcomplicate their look without defining it adequately. Really hard to find a way that this isn’t a step down over its predecessors.