What is a Castlevania game? A miserable little pile of secrets.
Yet enough talk. Haveatreview!
. . .
Yes.
The latest 2D Castlevania game is called Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. It’s by Konami, and it’s been available for almost a year now, for your Gameboy Advance. Konami’s been making a new Gameboy Castlevania game every year since the Gameboy Advance’s release in 2000, so chances are that this year they’ll release another one. They tend to come out in the summer, though no one really knows for sure. At E3, they may just debut another new Gameboy Castlevania game, and it’ll no doubt catch high wind from numerous respectable (heh) videogame news resources as "totally" "blowing" all the other Gameboy Advance Castlevania games “out of the water." The "water" image won’t have any significance, though, knowing the writers for some of these websites, they’ll sure pretend it’s there. And this is half of our problem.
What I’m going to address in this editorial, which I suppose we could call a "latereview," is the question of what makes a 2D Castlevania game historically unique. We’re then going to discuss why a Castlevania game should be unique, and, in the end, we’re going to determine how this uniqueness will carry most efficiently into the future.
Though my only previous Castlevania-themed article was rather tongue-in-cheeky, I’m going to be utterly serious about this one. this website has a history of serious and often wordy articles about Castlevania. Our own Eric-Jon is something of an expert in the series. Though I have not written an article about one of the games’ soundtracks, however, shouldn’t lead you to believe that I do not have more than a passing interest in the games. No, no. Like a trained "staff member" for a big "fan website," I’m going to open this with a proper anecdote:
When I was a kid, I played Castlevania.
And now, as mostly an adult, I still play Castlevania. It’s one of the few games I actually do play, to be honest. Whenever there are a lot of games hanging around, if one of them is a Castlevania, chances are I’ll play it. I’d be lying to you if I said that I didn’t spend most of last summer playing and replaying Dracula X for Saturn when I should have been looking for jobs. And I’m going to be completely honest when I say that, also, last year, I wrote six reviews of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for six magazines (without getting paid, yet) without playing the game more than five minutes at E3.
Now, however, I have played the game. I will avoid cracking at how most "journalists," really, despite disclaimers in their magazines or on their websites, don’t actually play through the games, either; they’re just in the profession for the free games, period, even if they never play them. I will not claim it makes me special, that I have played through this game and beaten it three times, between Seoul, Korea, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Tokyo, Japan. Rather, I’m going to just launch into bashing the ever-loving hell out of the game’s storyline with a sledgehammer, and then I’m going to get into something else. Or maybe I’ll do the something else first, I don’t know. If we can get Brandon Sheffield to play the game on his Gameboy Player and then write a review which focuses entirely on graphics, we’ll have something of a holy trinity of reviews, on this site. That’d really be something.
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