“Simon’s Anti-Adventure: The Hostile Brilliance of Castlevania II”

Castlevania began as a hard-won victory over classic movie monsters, their silly pretensions of epic darkness squashed by the confident stride of an orange sherbet-colored barbarian. So it was an understandable shock for players to be severed from that unique catharsis by the fragmented world of Hitoshi Akamatsu’s hated sequel, Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest. His direction for the series was immediately abandoned and not revisited for a decade, but when Symphony of the Night brought questing dynamics and broad world maps back to the series, it recontextualized what Simon’s Quest had tried to do. Yet by reprioritizing accessibility over dread for a more “perfect” experience, partitioned by conveniences, Symphony of the Night and the games modeled from it lack something vital that Akamatsu brought to the series back in 1987 when the world wasn’t ready for it. After all this time, the brokenness of Castlevania II remains the key to the craft of its brilliant hostility. It’s not perfect, but nightmares never are.

Though Dracula was defeated in Castlevania, the people of Transylvania still live in cursed squalor and whisper their plights in cryptic melancholy. Some believe they’re doomed and it’s Simon’s fault; others don’t seem to care either way. Some tell him to leave while others barter with him. Some offer him advice while others lie. Some are men of the church, shuffling back and forth in their sanctuaries while the world crumbles. Some are wizened shopkeepers walled into their homes, awaiting the inevitable. “After Castlevania, I warned you not to return,” one villager scolds. It’s cheeky but dread-inducing to realize that the first adventure was, in retrospect, only a small piece of a scary world. He’s saying that it’s impossible to capitalize on victory in a world that wears out its heroes beyond recognition. Every conquest has a cost. In this case, the cost is Castlevania II.

These people allegedly guide the player through Simon’s Quest, but they rarely act responsible for a player’s needs. They’re the exact opposite of the villagers in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (“Look! Isn’t this view pretty? Change your viewpoint with ‘up arrow’ so you can look around the forest with ’control stick’”). That kind of NPC, helpful but lobotomized, has become the desirable norm while the denizens of Simon’s Quest have been banished for withholding the comforts of a game world that seems designed for the player’s benefit. Instead, the world of Castlevania II sprawls in contempt of comprehension, and they’re the mouthpieces for that contempt. They barely recognize Simon as the protagonist, as though they believe in victory so little that they’re resigned to an unbeaten game. The fate of most players is to wander, wailing through cursed nights and cryptic hints, and give up.

Despite this, Castlevania II isn’t as random a departure for the series as it first seemed to NES owners. In retrospect, it seems to hope to combine two parallel groups of fans: those of the conventional action-platforming of the NES Castlevania and those of the puzzle-oriented release on MSX2 called Vampire Killer in the West (in Japan, both were simply called “Akamajou Dracula” or “Demon Castle Dracula,” confirming that they were both equally intended to be “Castlevania”). The result is a sequel that seems to bait the simple pleasures of console gaming while swamping itself in a tangle of PC mechanics. The NPCs sit somewhere in the difference. Yet, their one-sentence existences are effectively eerie most of all because they aren’t that helpful. They don’t feel like the “1s” and “0s” of the normal tutorial slaves. The modern criticisms of their functionality are not incorrect, but the impression they add to the game is like the real dread of being lost in a scary world.

All games create an illusion to some extent that the player’s input is “needed” to reach a programmed victory state. Simon’s Quest takes this job a step further than most games by removing clarified forward paths altogether. It doesn’t even feature challenging tests of action, which are the go-to design choice to factor player input into the victory equation. In this game, a difficult jump or powerful boss rarely, if ever, obstructs the forward path. The true test is acquiring the right equipment and bringing it to the right place in the right sequence. Hearsay, wandering, and hand-drawn maps are the player’s tools in place of conventional skills. This is why guidebooks seem essential when only a random action can activate progression, yet they also ruin the modern player’s experience by circumventing the game’s purposeful uncertainty. Overused guides force players to turn the game’s intended challenges into formalities by fast-tracking to the simple combat scenarios that were never intended to be the focus of the experience. Players are right to feel unsatisfied by this experience, but they don’t realize how the allure of accessibility tricked them into creating it for themselves.

Without a guide, the game offers no clear path to feelings of empowerment. Infinite enemies produce a feeling that victory is pointless just as infinite lives reduce defeat to an insulting obstacle, an inevitable factor of persistence in a scary world. The mansions aren’t designed like game levels, with cunning enemies challenging the player’s arsenal. They’re diffuse, dilapidated spaces. They’re anti-levels. Long climbs can lead to dead ends or false floors. Even when the occasional boss slinks out in the form of Dracula’s two generals, Carmilla and Death, the player isn’t obliged to fight them. Even when defeated, they respawn like any enemy. The paths in the overworld seem like tangled labyrinths, with towns that offer some respite but barely any clarity. Only the occasional successful item acquirement offers any clues forward or any hint of empowerment in an otherwise weighty world.

The result of these mechanics, intended or not, is a feeling of crushing adversity. Bosses that respawn deny the player the feeling of conquering them. Floors that fall without warning deny them the ability to feel sure of walking anywhere. Even after being “beaten,” the mansions seem to go on in their broken squalor, enemies pacing the halls without caring whether another hero wanders in, someday. The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask used the clock to create a similar feeling that the world is no different after the player’s heroics than it was before, except for the fact that it can continue. The NPCs in Dark Souls often tribute the villagers in Simon’s Quest by contextualizing this fear in narratively explicit terms (“Fate of the undead, right? Well, you’re not the first. But there’s no salvation here …”). Or consider the quote, now attributed to Akamatsu himself: “In a truly peaceful age, Dracula would not exist.” It should be no surprise then that he still exists after the game, as much as before.

Without the conventional mechanics of what makes most games “hard” or “easy,” Castlevania II encourages players to embrace and overcome hopelessness. Yet in the quest to explain the flaws of Castlevania II, its community has lost the ability to engage with it on its own terms. It’s so habitually misunderstood, especially on YouTube, that rankings of the series fail to even acknowledge its stylistic triumphs. Its atmosphere is haunting and desolate, with the rooms normally reserved for bosses occupied instead by eerie orbs shining on pedestals as the tattered remains of Dracula’s servants hang from the ceilings by their bony necks as sacrifices to his revival – an unforgettable image from childhood gaming. Kenichi Matsubara’s music leaves a vital impression of haunted adventurousness, giving the series its best track in “Bloody Tears.” The game’s locations are styled with varied significance, taking the player on a journey paced by mood through its dark forests, behind cold mountains, across poisonous marshes, and into the depths of broken mansions. The palette is often cold and dark, with Simon’s muted tunic fading into obscurity in comparison to the heroic sprite of the first game. This has often been viewed critically, without recognizing that the beautiful palette could have had a vibrant hero if it wanted to. He fades, as the player’s confidence fades, into an Autumntime world that doesn’t even recognize him as a hero.

Many have never finished Castlevania II, so they’ve never witnessed its most unnerving moment. After collecting all of Dracula’s pieces, Simon wanders past the towns to the haunted graveyard and from there to the ruins of the castle from the first game. Instead of a trial of skill from this final level, besting massive foes that scale with intensity until a glorious final confrontation with the game’s nemesis, Simon’s Quest offers derelict ruins with no enemies. Descending broken staircases and shrouded windows to the base of the rubble, Simon finds an altar. The five pieces of Dracula become his shadowy form, which must be defeated as a formality rather than a test of skill. The weakened Count falls easily, as the ending screen describes his curse spreading over Transylvania in the wake of his death. Simon dies from his mortal wounds at his arch-enemy’s grave, leaving a legacy of horror for his descendants to fight in future adventures (there are several variations of this ending, depending on completion time). This game is incorrectly called “Castlevania II” because a sequel implies an equivalent or improved version of the first iteration’s pleasures, a justified expectation that was partly to blame for the game’s confused reception. It has always been more of an epilogue.

Castlevania II never empowers its players, no matter how far they make it. Since its adventure is not a test of normal action-platforming skills, it even lacks the simple catharsis of beating a challenge. The game is frequently unfathomable, encouraging the impression that it was designed accidentally. Players are right to feel conflicted, to be frustrated at its least well-communicated progression points, and to realize that the game doesn’t intend to empower them. But the same team that defined the Castlevania formula and revamped it with Castlevania III did not suffer a sudden lapse of skill when they made Simon’s Quest. Compared to games that are broken by bad design, Castlevania II is a masterpiece of fragmentation, a game that challenges players to reinterpret the limitations of an interactive medium that often relies on forced compliance more than intuition.

Unfortunately, Castlevania II’s development is shrouded in another kind of curse: that of 80s Konami’s casual reduction of its artists to uncredited laborers. Gaming historians did not even know that a single dev team created the NES Castlevania trilogy until confirmed by Masahiro Ueno, the director of Super Castlevania IV, in Retro Gamer (Issue 119). And until recently confirmed by a fellow Konami employee, Sonna Yuumi, whose tweets about the Castlevania days were translated and compiled by shmupulations, Akamatsu had not been definitively established as the director behind that team. Since he has never been tracked down by gaming journalists, there’s little primary source information about his intent for the games outside of these statements by other artists, such as the suggestion that Akamatsu thought of the games as a film trilogy and may have based the progression of his vision on his love of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, hence the whip, among other things. According to Yuumi, “respect the visual frame” was a phrase he used a lot.

Whether or not Akamatsu intended it, Castlevania II crushed the heroic hearts of its players and replaced their confidence with a feeling of adversity not dissimilar to the childlike menace of the anti-heroic rituals that made Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hated in a prophetically similar way. Like Spielberg, avoiding the curse of predictability (or perhaps invoking the curse of anti-empowerment) resulted in Akamatsu being reviewed as a failure to satisfy the conventions of accessibility rather than a success in revealing the playful contradictions of those conventions. Castlevania II conjured up a harsh world governed by confusion, where even the bravest players wander helplessly through fragmented mechanics without even the comfort of a clear challenge to keep them happy. In 1987, that vision couldn’t survive a gaming public that believed that adversity had to prove something. Maybe it was because we were kids and we expected everything to end in a prize, but maybe that’s just because we hadn’t lived through much, yet. Back then, we couldn’t handle an anti-adventure. We still thought it was unique.

M.C. Myers spends his days ghostwriting other people’s blogs, but he’s never far off from giving it all up for a full-time existence playing Spelunky. He writes his film thoughts at FilmObjective and on Twitter @filmobjective. He suspects he thinks about game design too much but secretly hopes it will be useful someday.