Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Year: 1991
Genre: Platformer
System: SNES

I just did my regular playthrough of Super Castlevania IV for the Halloween season. This used to be a yearly tradition for me but it’s been a while since I’ve play it so it was nice to revisit it. This time I did it through the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, which includes a lot of the early games. I suspect that anything I say in this post has been repeated a billion times better by other folks but it’s still a lovely game. It’s always been one of my favorites in the series, with some of my favorite bits of it being the directional whipping and the jazzy soundtrack. Neither seems to really come up in later entries and that’s a shame. I know Mode 7 effects only make sense on a SNES but you know what? Later games should have had those too.

I’ve always been fascinated by this being a loose remake of the first game but still being labeled the fourth game of the series. It feels like something we probably wouldn’t see today with a lot of this stuff being more standardized. At the very least it feels different from how the industry does remakes today.

If I did have any complaints about the game, it’s that I personally feel like it starts to become a slog once you get to the castle. The game moves so quickly up until then and it has a wonderful variety of environments but then you get to the castle and the variety seems to drop and there’s a big difficulty spike. It remains this way for a few levels and then I think the level design becomes a lot more interesting again towards the end. It’s still a fantastic game though and the one I probably go to if I want to recommend a level-Castlevania game, partially because I haven’t played that many that aren’t on a Nintendo console.

Super Castlevania IV is part of the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, available on Switch, XBox, Playstation 4, and Windows.