After completing the Swamp Palace, or else just swiping the Glove and streaking past while flipping the finger to the palace’s true objective of returning the crystal to the statue at the end, you embark on what easily stands as one of Adventure of Link‘s strongest sequences: Death Mountain. The Death Mountain portion of the […]
Beyond the big jump that leads to the world beyond Link’s starting area, you’ll find another self-contained region housing another of the game’s palace dungeons. This area is largely submerged by swamps and overgrown by forests; the former are annoying to traverse as Link moves at half-speed on an overworld swamp tile, while random battles […]
I forgot to mention it before, but in this series (as in all these Anatomy articles) the overwhelming majority of images you see here have been provided courtesy of VGMuseum.com. Because Rey is rad. The more I play of Zelda II, the more I’m struck by the realization that Nintendo must have been heavily influenced […]
Say, did you know that the name of the palace around which this update revolves — Parapa — is one letter removed from the name of a popular PlayStation character? Yep. Glad we could get that out of the way. Despite what I wrote in the previous update about the opening screen of Zelda II […]
Welcome to the beginning of the latest chapter of Anatomy of a Game. You can read more musings on The Legend of Zelda‘s design at the Anatomy of a Game landing page, and thoughts on the NES Castlevania trilogy are also available for digestion both online and in a self-published book. And now, let’s dissect The […]
Looks like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Mirror of Fate: Superfluous Colons reviews have gone live across the Internet. A quick survey of scores shows surprisingly positive results. I won’t be reading any of them just yet — I’m finishing the game and posting a review to 1UP as a sort of send-off. After all, I got […]
The NES Castlevania remains a high point in my entirely too lengthy history of gaming, and I know many others feel that way. With luck, this series has provided some small amount of clarity on the qualities that have made this trio of titles so enduring. On a macro scale, the NES Castlevania titles feature […]
Edit: Hello, Metafilter users! Thanks for visiting. If you dig this series, check back around February 15, as I’ll be reprinting these articles as a book with expanded text and more detailed stage layouts. Also, please thanks a million to VG Museum for providing the vast majority of the screenshots I’ve used in this series. […]
After having worked your way up through the castle entrance and the adjacent dungeon, you reach the second of three blocks of Castlevania only to find yourself… outside? With a forest in the background? Block 9 of Dracula’s Curse is a strange one in terms of aesthetics. Although the level design corresponds neatly to the […]
Regardless of which route you selected to take through the core of Castlevania III, all roads eventually converge at the beginning of Block 8: Castlevania itself. And the scenery should look very familiar indeed. Yes, it’s Stage 1 of the original game, reproduced in wonderfully faithful form — all the way down to the […]
Here we are at last, at the end of Alucard’s route — and, by tragic happenstance, the worst stage in the game. Block 7 on the “main” route has the unfortunate distinction of being a genuinely poor piece of game design, entirely reliant on tedious waiting, extended pattern memorization, and flawless traversal of gimmicky stage […]
If you elected to take the lower route after recruiting (or not) Alucard, you’ll skip entirely over Block 5-07 and the castle foundations, instead traveling a roundabout course that takes you through a series of partially submerged Roman-era ruins at the outskirts of the castle. The idea of crumbling ruins outside of and predating Dracula’s […]