「RISINGSUPERBLOG」

Publisher: Konami
Developer: Konami
Release Date: August 27th, 2024
Version Played: Nintendo Switch

This article is the first of a four-part series on Castlevania Dominus Collection.

Click here to jump to Part II – Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
Click here to jump to Part III – Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
Click here to jump to Part IV – Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.

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Forgive me for griping about a massively first world problem, but flying from Tokyo to Montreal is a rough time for me. The flight duration is about 13 hours with another six hours of travel bookending the trip from door to door, plus having to overcome the miserable 13 hour time difference afterwards. Around hour 8 on the plane I’m practically begging for someone to crack a window. I’m sadly a terrible plane sleeper so I always have to prepare well for these extended trips, but thankfully video games are basically the perfect hobby for the issue at hand! On our recent flight to visit family in Canada I packed away Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth and Koumajou Remilia Scarlet Symphony, eager to scratch the oft-itchy Castlevania urges. Both games are supposed to be pretty short, too- I could totally get through them on a two-week trip! On the first flight alone, I clocked in a few hours on each of the ‘vanias and polished off Famicom Detective Club: The Girl Who Stands Behind, so it was a strong start!

Unfortunately, Konami must have been spying on me or something, because they had the audacity to announce and release Castlevania Dominus Collection two days into the trip, completely ruining my ability to focus on the Castlevania alternatives I’d so optimistically brought along. This new release is developed by M2, a crack group of game remaster masters, so you know it’s gonna be good. Following up their work on 2021’s Castlevania Advance Collection, Dominus Collection features all three Nintendo DS titles, the intolerable Haunted Castle, and a surprise remake of Haunted Castle that actually makes it really good! It’s truly an excellent lineup no matter how you look at it. I happen to have a deep nostalgia for the DS titles, which were released across my later highschool years. Back then I had two daily hour-long bus rides to and from school, and I sure put it to use grinding these games out! Although my plans to zip through two little indie Castlevanias were totally dashed, I must admit that my credit card moved awfully fast when Dominus Collection was announced, so I was evidently not particularly upset with the circumstances either.

I recall my preferences for the DS games quite well. I always regarded Dawn of Sorrow as being not quite a worthy followup to its GBA predecessor. Portrait of Ruin was an okay title, if a bit forgettable. Lastly, Order of Ecclesia was something of a return to form, ditching the dull anime portraits that Dawn and Portrait had adopted and going back to a more serious looking Castlevania. I remember all three DS titles as generally very good games, sitting just below GBA’s Aria of Sorrow and far above GBA’s Harmony of Dissonance in my mental tier list. Although Circle of the Moon is usually balled into these comparisons, it was largely developed by different staff so I’m going to let it sit out of the comparisons here (though just to keep Circle on its feet, I assure you it would have not gone well). I revisited Order of Ecclesia on-stream a few years back, but to be honest, I don’t remember at all how I felt on that playthrough nearly as well as my aged teenage thoughts.

With all that said, I had a quick go at all of the games, finishing each one and not doing much more than that. To be frank, my memories weren’t always accurate to my new experience! By and large I think I liked the games more than I remembered, but with the one caveat. Order of Ecclesia is now distinctly my least favourite of the three by a wide margin. Nonetheless, as a short buyer’s guide of sorts, you’ll quickly find that the collection provides easily dozens of hours of high quality platforming action.

In terms of presentation, I’m sure you’ve noticed in the screenshots that I’ve included that there are three screens displayed at once! It’s a really odd layout that you absolutely get used to very quickly, and the breadth of information available at a glance is extremely handy. In the DS versions, you would have the game screen and either the map or status info screen, toggled via the Select button, so having both at once is also actually a new feature that wasn’t previously available! Cool stuff!

The game window renders at a much higher resolution than the DS screen’s 256×192, but the aspect ratio is maintained perfectly. What this means is that all the pixel art is perfectly preserved, but the 3D elements that all the DS titles incorporated for backgrounds, enemies, and visual effects now run at a high resolution. I was really impressed at how well they held up given the DS had such limited memory for textures, but I do wish there was an option to toggle the 3D rendering back to a scaled version of the original resolution.

Lastly, touch mechanics were a big thing. Each of the three games features touch mechanics to varying degrees, with Ecclesia mostly bucking them. The emulator offers a serviceable on-screen pointer with three toggleable speeds, which is nice, but on Switch you can also just use the touch screen. I assume this also applies to Steam Deck, and PC players can probably use their mouse, but I haven’t confirmed this at all. Do your research!

The collection also offers a new set of (mostly simple) in-game achievements for each game, if that’s your jam. There are also little art galleries for each of the DS games, fully unlocked from the start! Though they’re no replacement for a proper art book, there are a lot of nice assets, manual scans, and even old special illustrations and webcomics that’ll make DS Castlevania fans super nostalgic.

An odd little curio that the set also includes is the Compendium- an emulator level encyclopedia of all skills, critters, and items in each game visible at any time. It mirrors equivalent ones contained within the games but with updated presentation and the ability to quickly jump around to enemy drops and such. Everything is unlocked and visible in them by default, so beware of spoilers if you flip through it too early. Flip through the next images in the article to have a look at how the Compendium compares to Order of Ecclesia’s Enemies menu.

Beyond just completing the three games, there’s a lot more to be done in pursuit of 100% completion. Each game also features awesome alternate play modes with new playable characters, adding more playthrough options to the pile. If you’re wondering about the overall bang for your buck factor, you have nothing to worry about. The port quality is tremendous and the USD $25 asking price would already be more than fair for each of the DS games individually. All together with the pair of Haunted Mansion games, it’s a total steal.

tl;dr

A pristine collection of three DS classics with touch controls intact and optional, clever emulator tweaks onboard, and an surprise new (and great) Castlevania game added in.

Without further ado, let’s get to the individual games! First up, the Haunted Castle(s)!

Haunted Castle
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: December 26, 1987

In the past, I’ve only played a handful of Haunted Castle levels. For this writeup,I still have not bothered to finish the game. I’ve always hated playing this game and I think it’s very bad. It’s an arcade game that aimed to siphon away quarters with at least as much ferocity as Dracula would drink blood, and that makes for an awfully annoying play experience.

The game has always has a slightly infamous opening, where Simon has his wedding ruined by Dracula’s return. Drac snatches his bride-to-be, Selene, and Simon immediately leaps into action. It’s extremely goofy, and the scenario and Simon’s white suit appearance immediately recall the first part of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Phantom Blood, which was running in Shonen Jump up until two months before Haunted Castle first released in Japanese arcades. I can’t help but suspect the manga played a part in shaping Haunted Castle’s story!

Once you get past the admittedly dope opening, you’re thrust into a terrible world of skeletons, violent bats, floaty jumps, an oversized player character, and absolutely oppressive quantities of enemies. So much just feels so bad when it comes to actually playing Haunted Castle. Defeating enemies in unsatisfying, environmental traps are lame and can feel unfair with how suddenly they appear. With the game’s characters being so big alongside Simon being centered on the narrow screen, you have extremely little time to react to oncoming danger and I’m positive that you’ll find yourself taking many cheap hits as a result. Game difficulty is quite high, and you’ll likely find it necessary to pump in a few extra fake quarters just to get through the first stage. Difficulty only gets worse from there, I assure you. With unremarkable bosses and a generally unsatisfying feeling to the whole game, I find that there’s very little to compliment here. The pixel art is kind of nice, I guess.

Perhaps one silver lining is that the collection offers you infinite free continues, so if you were compelled to do so, I guess you could finish the game without going broke. I say it that way because I honestly don’t even want to. Haunted Castle is a pretty bad Castlevania game, and I don’t feel that infinite continues improves things much at all given it just makes it simultaneously very difficult and extremely toothless. Ultimately I’m not giving Haunted Castle a fair shake and you can’t make me do it.

Haunted Castle Revisited
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: August 27th, 2024

Developed by M2, makers of the Dominus Collection itself, Haunted Castle Revisited is a complete reimagining of Haunted Castle. This remake follows in the footsteps of 2009’s Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth, also developed by M2, which sought to perform the same sort of overhaul on the infamously troubled Game Boy launch title Castlevania: The Adventure. I’m happy to say that just like Adventure Rebirth, Haunted Castle Revisited is a huge success.

First and foremost, the kooky story is still here and it looks better than ever. There’s genuinely a lot of cool animation and effect work that they layered on top of it, in addition to redoing all the sprite and sound work. It really gives you a good idea what sort of upgrade you’re looking at.

Jumping into the gameplay, it’s impossible to understate how much the team understood the assignment. Everything feels like a proper Castlevania all of a sudden. Whipping enemies is satisfying and punchy, the jump maintains a floatiness (but not to the absurd level of Haunted Castle) that grants more usability, and Simon’s excessively large sprite- arguably one of Haunted Castle’s signature traits- is actually maintained but feels dramatically better in an era of widescreen standardization.

Bosses also receive massive glow ups, with the Stained Glass Knight in particular looking and fighting almost completely differently from its original incarnation. Bosses were truly awful in Haunted Castle. Their movesets and capabilities are altogether too simple and largely undercooked, so it’s awesome that these new versions feel like they just stepped out of Super Castlevania IV or Castlevania: Bloodlines.

As you’d hope from any Castlevania game, the back to back boss fight finale is also absolutely on-point. Not to spoil too much, but the original game’s last boss was kind of silly in a bad way (fight a big monochrome dracula head, but not in a cool way). Even that idea was maintained, and like the rest of the collection it was given a lot of thought and transformed into a finale truly befitting the endless Belmont/Dracula rivalry. I really like to see that sort of creativity in game development, where when revisiting old ideas you don’t just throw out what didn’t work, but you rethink it until it does. Really good stuff on M2’s part.

By and large, I actually think that’s a really good way to describe this game. They took an old clunker (bad) and made it feel like the old clunkers (good) that we already like, then finished it off with a bunch of modern polish. The game features a generous continue system, a strong level select (with granular scene specific options), and many modern visual effects that break free from the strict limitations of older console’s low resolution pixel art (see the glow effects on the torches, and the Stained Glass Knight’s swords, for example).

Probably the only negative thing I can say about this game is that it doesn’t have the sort of replay value you might hope for from a game that clocks in around only an hour. Though Dominus Collection features newly added in-game achievements for the DS titles, neither Haunted Castle game supports them, which is a shame. A little bit of extrinsic motivation could have gone a long way to encourage repeat plays, but hey.

17/12/2024 EDIT: A new update for the collection released recently that added an unlockable (or Konami-code-able) Boss Rush mode to Haunted Castle Revisited! The mode does not automatically heal you between battles, though healing items have now been placed within boss stages that you can try to grab. It’s a straightforward implementation, but I think it’ll scratch the replay itch for some!

If you’re a fan of the non-RPG Castlevania games, you owe it to yourself to try out Haunted Castle Revisited. Though the game is short, it’s chock full of classic Castlevania whimsy and gamefeel, and I guarantee you’ll have a good time over the hourlong runtime. I feel a bit sad that Revisited had to exist stapled to the side of three DS classics and not on its own merits, but I can’t deny that marketing a one hour long Castlevania game in this day and age seems tough if you’re not planning to sell the game for a fiver. They made the right call in packaging the game the way they did, but make no mistake, Haunted Castle Revisited is an adventure to remember!

tl;dr

A pristine collection of three DS classics with touch controls intact and optional, clever emulator tweaks onboard, and a surprise new (great) Castlevania game added in.

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This article is the first of a four-part series on Castlevania Dominus Collection.

Click here to jump to Part II – Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow.
Click here to jump to Part III – Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
Click here to jump to Part IV – Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia.