This game is widely, and with good cause, considered to be the greatest of the NES Castlevanias and one of the greatest NES games, period. IGN recently voted it 5th in its list of the Top 100 Nintendo Games of All Time. It’s easy to see why. This game took the series back to its level-based, side scrolling roots, then cranked that up to 11. If anything, this game is even harder than the original Castlevania; fortunately, as in Castlevania II, there are passwords to help ease the pain of failure. No longer did you have to leave your Nintendo turned on for hours to beat the game.
Instead you have to leave it turned on for hours to get through the punishing and lengthy stages. Whereas the original game had only six, Dracula’s Curse has nearly three times that many, depending on how you play the game, and they are all much, much longer than in Castlevania. Luckily, and here is where the series took another innovative turn, you don’t play through every level in every play through. After completing certain stages, you are given a choice of where to go next. This isn’t just a matter of picking which order you do the levels, like in Mega Man. By picking certain stages, you effectively block off others, and it might take as many as four times through to see all the game has to offer.
This story takes place 200 years before the original Castlevania and introduces a new member of the Belmont family, Trevor. You wouldn’t be able to tell that from looking at him, though. Trevor’s sprite is almost exactly like Simon’s from the original game. Back is the drab brown costume and brown hair, and back is the inability to jump worth a damn. But in Castlevania III you’re not limited to one character. Depending on which path through the game you choose, you might run into Syfa, a wizard, Grant, a high jumping pirate, or Alucard, the son of Dracula who would later appear in his own game, the classic Symphony of the Night for the PSX in 1997. Each of these companions had their own abilities to help make things a little easier, and since you could only have one with you at a time the feature offered even more incentive to play through the game multiple times.
And you’ll definitely want to play through the game multiple times. Everything is improved from the first game. The graphics are more intense (just check out the stained glass cathedral in the very first level) the bosses are bigger and more challenging, and the music is the best ever—so far. This is one of the most difficult games on the NES (out of the ones that are realistically possible to beat, anyway) and it took me years of trial and error to finally take down Dracula. (This time, you have to fight three of his forms!) What’s great about the NES Castlevanias is that no matter how punishingly difficult they can get, there always is a way out, and you’ll rarely feel cheated. There’re still those rare instances, of course, where you’ll throw the controller at the screen after an unavoidable bat slams you off a platform to your death.
Dracula’s Curse was a great swan song for series on the NES. It took the excellent platforming of the first game, mixed in a touch of the choose-your-own adventure feel of the second, and added a whole lot of little touches of its own to create a classic. Time would tell if the first game on Nintendo’s new Super Nintendo system could fill Castlevania III’s colossal boots.To be continued…
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