I want to play Castlevania online. That’s as simple as I can put my request.
I want to play it online because Aria of Sorrow has shown me a brief hint of a player-versus-player duel. Julius is like a high-level Vampire Hunter; Soma is a high-level Vampire. It’d be thrilling just to watch these kinds of battles from a ledge, perhaps as a low-level Thief -- maybe hanging from the ceiling like Castlevania III’s Grant Danasty.
People who read my unreview of this game way back when said that it’d never work. Well! I say that it would! Not only do I say that, I believe it, as well!
If truth be told, I like competition in games. I prefer beating them up or being beaten up by them, rather than by helping them beat up faceless, computer-controlled monsters. Most precisely, I’ve become thirsty for a Castlevania game that combines cooperation and competition. As Zelda: The Four Swords Plus illustrates, cooperation and competition can be intertwined nicely enough. It’s all about design. Levels have to be designed with attention to ingenuity. Maybe that thief character – the one who can climb walls – would be able to enter a room and hit a switch which opens a door and allows other players in. If Konami wanted to make this game for consoles, playable in multiplayer by a room full of players, they could make the whole game cooperative in this way. They could force one player to be a thief, one to be a wizard, one to be a vampire hunter, and one to be a vampire. A Danasty, a Belnades, a Belmont, and Alucard, so to speak.
What Zelda: The Four Swords does wrong, as far as I can see, is that it makes the players equal. At times – and we’ve had many such times – players will scream at each other to PLEASE FUCKING STOP BOMBING ME, just because one player has picked up the bombs, and is now different from everyone else. In Four Swords, the moment a player becomes different from his brothers, he is suddenly compelled to be a complete asshole, and this holds everyone up from completing the mission. Yet I do not worry about this. The game suffices. It gets along, after everyone’s throat is dry from screaming and one person steps forward and says, "Look, you stupid sons of bitches, we’re going to play this, and we’re going to play it right.". In a room full of people playing Four Swords, I am that person. As that person, I will review it later, probably later this week. I will be as technical as possible, and makes lots of gestures with my hands while I write it, and the piece will turn out to be a grave matter indeed.
For the moment, we’re talking about Castlevania. I’m saying I want to play it multiplayer. I can say that no one would have believed it, years ago, if you told them there’d be a four-player Zelda: A Link to the Past. Now, everyone’s all gawking and gasping at it. Well, let me be the first to say that a multiplayer Castlevania would work. It would more than work. It’d be sheer beauty. If you went the console route and, from the beginning, forced everyone to be a different character with a different, it’d have this bewildering effect of making no one act like an asshole: Biohazard: Outbreak, the new online Resident Evil title, does this effectively as well. Only one girl can unlock doors, for example, and you’re playing with seven other people, and you can’t see their faces, yet – somehow this compels you to not be a fucker-bastard and push the girl into some zombies. When you die, you awaken shortly, as a zombie, and you are then able to control yourself and go biting your fellow players. Hey – they can’t see your face or anything, and they can’t even chat with you, so you might as well. That game is about, more than any game I’ve probably ever played, truly playing the role of your character. It executes this play style boldly and very sloppily, yet it has a huge heart, and you can see its genius shining through, so it is forgiven. I say, Jack – that that ingenuity, and just throw it into a side-scrolling castle-exploration game.
It would work, because I have a vision. I won’t get into that vision, because it’d probably scare you. I’ll just say that the experience would move and feel right. Side-scrollers are a good game for IGA to fall back on when his 3D attempts (so far only one has been made, yes, though I take it there will soon be another) fail. This is because the side-scroller is a refined art.
So let’s refine it more.
In Aria of Sorrow, I am moved, more often than not, by loneliness. It’s a big castle. I feel alone. There are these other characters – Yoko, Mina, Arikado, Julius, and Graham – who serve tiny, miniscule, microscopic significance in the game’s storyline, and they pop in from time-to-time while I’m sitting on a bench in an airport in Korea, and I see Soma’s walk slow to that unnatural speed as he enters a room, and I feel warm, like, "Yeah, dialogue-time!" I’ve been fighting demons for a good hour and a half.
Then, when the game is done, the story falls into nothing. Once the Chaotic Realm is opened, you no longer come across any characters except Mina, who waits at the front gates. The Chaotic Realm itself is, as I have said, simply a rehash of other areas of the castle, in drab sepia graphics. Yet, all joined-together like that, with different monsters, it gives you the impression that a randomly-generated Castlevania dungeon like this might be kind of fun, with an adventuring party. The fighting is constant, and the enemies refresh. You can try out new weapons and special techniques. You can gain levels. The game tells you when you gain a level. "LEVEL UP!" it says, in really big letters, on the screen. Every time I see it, I feel lonely. Why am I increasing my level? What do I gain? How do I grow? I can now beat the final boss in fourteen hits instead of fifteen?
I can trade my excess soul powers to a friend, if I have a friend with a game and a link cable, though that’s about it. Maybe he can give me some souls I don’t have. I don’t have any friends with this game, so I haven’t experienced this feature. I have, however, a friend who has played this game, so I show him my level-67 Soma, and say, "look at that."
"Wow, he’s pretty strong. I was only on, like, level 38 when I beat the game. Your Soma could totally kill my Soma."
YET WE’LL NEVER KNOW
This guy is much, much better at videogames, in general, than I am. This is evidenced in the fact that he beat the game on level 38. Perhaps his level-38 character actually could beat my level-67?
My good friend Doug Jones is playing Final Fantasy XI lately. Him and the rest of the free world. The biggest complaint I hear is that combat is boring, and slow, and tedious, like . . . . well, like something out of a Final Fantasy game. Is this really the best kind of game to play with your friends? Diablo II compelled me to no end because the combat was idiotically fast and furious, with loud sound effects of my paladin’s scepter smacking demons on the head.
In Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, my maxxed-out character has 99 leather armors he received from enemies.
The pieces are coming together . . . .
Why did I fight so much, to earn 99 leather armors? (We will, for now, avoid the question of why so many enemies drop leather armors.) The short answer is that it was fun. The longer answer is that I wanted to try out my new skills. The most detailed answer is the bulk of this review itself.
The duel with Julius showed me the way. It made me think of the last time I’d had a real, honest, good opponent in a videogame where I understood all the rules, where I understood everything that happened and why it was happening. In Soul Calibur II, the movements of the characters – the dance of Maxi as he swings his nunchakus, Kilik’s falling-down when he swings his rod hard – are mysterious things, painstakingly crafted to look extravagant while, bizarrely, mattering very little. You hit an enemy, and he takes damage. You get hit, and you take damage.
Why did fighting games prosper in the first place? What did people want to see? They wanted to see large, fully-animated sprites hitting each other. This is what drove kids to line up behind Street Fighter II. When they were bored, and when Street Fighter III showed them more of the same, only with clearer animation, they found love in the arms of 3D. Sometimes those 3D fighters zoom back far, making the characters small. Though in the end, when the characters are punching each other in the face like men often do, they’re big, and alive, and in full-color.
WE LIKE BIG CHARACTERS
Or, at least, we used to. We used to love that shit.
I say, take one step back.
I say, the gaming world is now ready to raise the play onto that pedestal once reserved for giant characters and big voices.
I say -- Castlevania duels would be the greatest thing on the planet.
High-leveled characters could fight in dueling-only channels. The arenas could vary from dilapidated staircases to wide-open meadows with endlessly ceilings. We could have a radar on the screen, just for the hell of it. Vampire hunters could use their super-high jumps and aerial kicks to spar in the air above these meadows for hours on end. They could spar with weapons of their choosing while wearing armor, boots, hats, and accessories of their choosing. Their appearances would be customizable down to the details. Armor and weapons would be picked up from defeated enemies; mystically blest weapons might need to be identified in a town. Potions could be assigned to shoulder buttons (or, uh, number keys), and used when needed. It would be, well, kind of like Diablo II -- only with the player’s skill figuring in at a level above and beyond the level of his character.
There might be maybe one town in this game. Make it a big hub town, something like a city in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. Make the Castle itself trickier than tricky – maybe with whole, long, randomly-generated segments. Rather than make the game massively multiplayer, let’s make it like Diablo II, with a limit of, say, sixteen players per match.. As characters can advance in levels to, maybe, 999 (these level dynamics these days – it’s all Disgaea’s fault for making these crazy numbers popular with the kids; then again, who am I to complain?), you can set level caps on your games as well. Certain quests have to be completed to obtain certain items to allow you into certain areas of the castle, or – well, hell, let’s go ahead and say that, maybe, this wouldn’t be a Castlevania game. Imagine it’s a game I – me, right here – am making, and that I want to call it Tokyo Psychic University: Class of 1808, and that I want it to be about the time when, in 1808, demons overran Tokyo Psychic University, and it was up to a handful of European exchange students of various majors (demon-hunting, magic, thievery, and/or demonic arts) armed only with swords, train cards, and cellular phones (your buddy list, so to speak) to work things out. Maybe not all of the levels would have to take place inside of the castle. It could be about the energy of playing, fighting, and all that stuff. It would be, if nothing else, a fully enjoyable game. I can imagine the hordes of palette-swapped demon-zombies as I type this; I can imagine fighting them for hours so that I might level up before my friend signs on to duel, even though I’m probably not going to beat him, anyway.
I want to make this game I have outlined above. I’m serious. Jason Rubin empowered me with his speech a while back, about making games and getting them out there. So someone out there let me know if you’re interested. We’ll do this shit. Some assless son of a bitch, and a former employee of one of those companies that makes games targeted at old women who don’t know what else to buy fat little Jimmy, once told me that my game was a "fanboy’s dream," and that "no game company would ever take it seriously." Well, to that, I say: fuck you. Come on, people out there – let’s make something that no one can deny. This can be the next Ragnarok Online.
What I’m saying is – it’s time to take the power back, when it comes to the side-scroller. There’s obviously still a market for them, and there are still people who bitch and moan about 2D being better. I’m not one of the latter people; I am, however, one of the people who buy the former games. Now it’s time to take them to the next level. It’s time to show people how much fun it can be to play together. It is time to amend the flaw of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, that flaw that left me, in the end, carrying 99 leather armors, that flaw that left a "drop" menu off my inventory screen – that flaw that made it impossible for me to sell them off to someone.
The third game in the Gameboy Advance Castlevania series is called Aria of Sorrow. I’m going to review it in earnest now, beginning here: It has learned many things from its predecessors, and forgotten a few others. To wit: its main flaw is that it has a shop.
[next: yes, i’m going to talk about the shop for the duration of the review.]
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