Super Castlevania IV Review by Diplo

n the same way that The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, or Contra 3, came onto the Super Nintendo as beefier variations of their birth-titles on the original Nintendo, Super Castlevania 4 is a game that unabashedly references the first entry in its series. Instead of adding to the storyline, SCV4 is content with retelling Simon's stand against Dracula, and in spite of this, is often upheld as a series highlight. And it's easy to see why. Konami gave the traditional mechanics a welcome injection of updates, combined memorable stage design and creatures with graphics that still intrigue today, understood how to make everything flow, and hired a talented duo to compose a surprising, uncommon soundtrack.

From the start, you'll notice that Simon is the most easily manipulated Belmont yet, speaking in a historic sense. Players can, to an extent, control how he moves after a jump, and also have him drop down from steps, instead of being glued once you've decided to ascend or descend. Most notable is the ability to whip in eight directions and brandish the Vampire Killer for quick, but weaker, damage. Certain stages have hooks you can grapple onto and swing from to bypass obstructions or gaps. The application of subweapons has been moved to the shoulder buttons: especially helpful when you're on the stairs and needn't hold up on the D-pad and the attack button (potentially moving you upward when you didn't want to move upward in earlier titles).

Relatively, SCV4 is not a hard Castlevania game, in part due to Simon's lesser stoicism, and this isn't really a complaint. The stage design is so enjoyable, crunchy, and smart that the lack of ever-present, here-to-make-life-harder punishment shouldn't be an issue even among the most "retro" of fans. But the difficulty is a subtle thing. If you remain concentrated and get into the groove of knowing your movements' limitations, you'll be fine. Slip out of that attentiveness and you'll be sputtering about. Bosses, however, tend to be dumb slugfests where you stand on one side of the screen, whip the ghastly tech-demos like mad, and win in no time at all (not unlike…Symphony of the Night?).

The theme of having a Belmont fight their way through natural stages before arriving at the Castle, as introduced by Castlevania 3 (and Simon's Quest, sort of (not exactly)), returns in Castlevania 4, but without the option to select alternate pathways. The tradeoff is that the architecture here is so much better than 3's, which was no longer about immediate happenings, but about a longer journey, complicated further by the grating difficulty. SCV4 just feels more conscious, more constructed in a way to promote pacing and give the player constant, filling satisfaction. It doesn't have floating, impossible-to-get-to platforms thrown in. It doesn't have annoying-as-hell successions of staircases. It rarely has space for the love of space. After Bloodlines, it has the most consistently enjoyable setpieces of the "classic" series, each level endowed with separate, but similar, dynamics, from the swinging chandeliers of the main hall to the loose gears in the clock tower.

Dracula's Curse, making the comparison again, had dialogue between characters as they met and perhaps teamed up, in addition to epilogue text. It's interesting, then, and fitting, that Castlevania 4 is silent. You will only get a preamble if you let the title screen sit for a while. In the end, when Dracula has been defeated, a ray of light shines into the chamber and his body splits into a host of weary bats. Outside, Simon watches the castle sink into itself on a cliff beside the ocean, and that's it. The game's designers were respectful of the first Castlevania's direction, and, through a combination of visuals and music, made SCV4 tell an iconic hero's story through its aesthetics.

The artistic direction itself is unrepeated. Super Castlevania 4's world is older than time, weirdly claustrophobic, brought up from the bowels of the Earth, muddy and cold. As Symphony was romantic in a Neo-Classical way, Castlevania 4 is very much in love with creaks and dinginess. Much of the visuals are built up in a peculiar fashion – that is, elements, often isolated, became curious abstractions. SCV4 is in a league of its own weirdness. As any good locations in a game will do, Castlevania 4's locales murmur for reinvestigation and stir in the player a desire to break into the backdrops and explore what cannot be explored. Stages are wonderfully layered with architectural and natural oddities, sometimes recalling the moodiness of German Expressionism, other times referencing the gaudy formal qualities of classic horror.

The first level sets you in front of a drawbridge. Cliffs in the background resemble a skull, and bats escape from one of the "sockets" as you advance forward. Once you've entered the gates, fences rise up from the ground, shivering with vines, and dark buildings slumber in the background. The highest point exhibits a view of the surrounding forest and lake, all with luscious parallax scrolling, and the latter portion has you exploring a ghostly barnyard. Skeletal horses stir in the pastures, and clouds advance past the moon in shards. This specific detail almost never lets up (things do get a bit drab in the dungeon), showing that the developers knew the import of atmosphere with the product they were making. Sprites themselves, thickly designed and varied, have character and weight. Symphony of the Night figured they were good enough to borrow, and there was no artistic gap when, for example, Death's subordinates, Slogra and Gaibon, were pitted against the bestiary of the 1997 release.

Perfectly complimenting what you see is what you hear. Souji Tarou and Masanori Oodachi composed the soundtrack, a double-take-inducing score that disregards Castlevania's previous tendency of having clear, popping songs. In the place of that is a morose, heavy ambience that extends into foggy gullets. Even the tracks that approach that familiar catchiness, such as "Theme of Simon" (a piece that leaves "Vampire Killer" and "Bloody Tears" in the dust), are allowed doses of murkiness to ingrain them in SCV4's land. There's nothing else in the series quite like it. Castlevania 64 has the darkness, but little of the inventiveness, and though Harmony of Dissonance has the curious harmonic shifts, it expresses a very different feeling, in part because of its sound quality. The music's impressiveness is furthered when you consider 4's release date – just a year after Super Mario World, and it sounds worlds better. Few Super Nintendo titles can match the technical or artistic workings of Castlevania 4's OST.

In the end, Super Castlevania 4 gets it all pretty much right. It is available without being mindless. It accommodates different mindsets, appealing in both its setting, sound, and architecture. If you play it once, you will get a hankering for it at a point later in time, maybe during a windy autumn night or a rain-drenched spring afternoon. Despite its strengths, CV4 may not hit hard immediately. It is not as shimmering as Rondo of Blood. Yet it affects, regardless, creeps up and wedges its way in, and from then on it's an affecting connection as you dig deeper into its melancholic texture. Super Castlevania 4 is water-sweet under its leather coating, and a very special entry in the Castlevania series.