When I started playing “Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse”, it became apparent to me and many fans of the series that it didn’t exactly ‘feel’ like the Castlevania games we’ve played before. However one decides to interpret this as a good or bad thing is up to them, but the most tactile way to describe this feeling is through its ‘game feel.’ That being all, the aspects that contribute to the experience of the players tactile playing of the game.
Every game has a game feel. It’s there in racing games when you hold the shoulder or A button to accelerate a car. Or in adventure games where you gently hold a direction on the joystick for a brisk walk, before pushing it against the rim hard to start sprinting. Maybe there’s another button you have to hold to speed up your movement. Or maybe there’s only one speed option, making the player move throughout the game at a consistent pace. Maybe the animation that plays makes the player feel like they’re moving fast, even if they really aren’t. Everything matters to the game feel.
Castlevania was all about the constant buildup and release of tension. The original is known for its simple yet addictive gameplay, as basic actions like moving, jumping, and attacking are all synergized to create the iconic experience. In the 1986 NES classic, moving from left to right was slow, your attack animation stopped ground movement entirely, your jump and attack animations had a millisecond delay from button press to action execution and conclusion, and you couldn’t even change directions after a jump.
This made every action feel weighty and important. The fact that you need to wait before and after jumps and attacks to start moving again was terrifying. Enemies would constantly come walking, running, or flying across the screen, and you had to be ready to attack. See them approach, choose your response, and in the nick of time, take out the enemy with a single strike. This applies doubly so when jumping from platform to platform, whether the air above or the platforms themselves were infested with diabolically placed enemies. With a shorter animation than the jump, you were able to attack in the air mid jump, rapidly flinging your whip in front of you giving you a frantic form of defense and offense as you braved the passageways of Dracula’s Castle.
After many iterations on the formula, this tension based loop of gameplay has become synonymous with the difficult games of the ’80s, while at the same time changes were being done for the foundations of later games. 1993’s “Castlevania: Rondo of Blood”, you could turn around mid attack, as well as perform more complex movement options. But when 1997’s “Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” was released, things drastically changed.
Being a game more about fighting and jumping in an interconnected map (like Nintendo’s “Super Metroid”), rather than a linear list of stages (like the rest of the Castlevania franchise at that point), things needed to be changed. Players had a jump that lingered longer in the air, the ability to turn around and attack with two different equipped weapons, a backdash for increased speed that was easy to rapidly press, and a fast acting attack animation with special inputs for weapon specific techniques. Castlevania has flipped the formula upside down. Now it was all about speed and player expression, as well as precision and tension. The power of the PlayStation 1 let the developers create many beautiful animations that made the player and enemies much easier to understand which actions they are doing, and what can be done in response.
From then on, most 2D Castlevania games would move away from the old formula completely, keeping to most of the foundational mechanics in “Symphony of the Night”. There would be variations on weapons and movement options, but the bones they were built on top of were mostly the same.
Now, after 18 years since the last Castlevania game built on top of “Symphony of the Nights” DNA, a new mainline game has entered the market. And it immediately feels different, for multiple reasons that cannot be avoided and many that were an active choice. The most obvious one is that this is not the same team that developed the many sequels to “Symphony of the Night”. Konami, the original developers and publishers of the Castlevania franchise, hired indie developers Motion Twin and Evil Empire to make the game, and with that brings stylistic choices that come straight from them that have a domino-like chain of effects.
Motion Twin and Evil Empire are best known for their prolific rogue-like MetroidVania game, “Dead Cells.” It’s a fast paced 2D action platformer with buttery smooth 3D looking pixel animations, a large variety of weapons, and a notable high difficulty level. This doesn’t mean “Belmont’s Curse” is exactly like “Dead Cells,” but it doesn’t mean that they do not share obvious DNA. For one, “Dead Cells” is based on the genre of games inspired by “Symphony of the Night” and “Super Metroid,” so they share that aspect of exploration and unlocking more of the map already. But what makes them tied at the hip is the animation.
“Belmont’s Curse” uses smooth hand drawn animations for … well, everything. Characters, enemies, environments, and hazards are all given care and detailed attention for each player interaction and animation loop. This is what makes “Dead Cells” stand out from many other games, and is the notable sign of Motion Twin and Evil Empires work. However, this has an effect on the gameplay as well. Attacks have more flowy and smooth animations, showing the windup of the player character actually attacking before the attack is actually made. This was always the case with Castlevania games, even since “Symphony of the Night,” but these animations seem to disrupt the flow of combat for some.
Sometimes that timing itself is mixed up within the platforming challenges, as timing a grapple whip wrong because of the animation’s long startup is a common occurrence and easy to mess up. This and other aspects of the style make the gameplay feel more sluggish and clunky in combat, actively making the game not ‘feel like’ Castlevania.
However, that is obviously not the case. As mentioned before, Castlevania was always about being careful with moving and attacking at the same time, and this style of animation leads itself to focus more on the timing of combating enemies, similar to the old ‘Classicvania’ formula, while placing it within the interconnected maps the ‘MetroidVania’ formula. And I think it succeeds at making a new experience that still feels like Castlevania, without conforming to the style of what is expected. It’s a mix of the old and new. While still using aspects of its own style, the player is able to express their skills in ways that old Castlevania games can only dream of.
