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Castlevania Chronicles
  PS1PlatformerUC  
  opened by paleface at 19:00:08 05/03/23  
  last modified by paleface at 12:27:18 03/05/24  
  paleface [sys=PS1; cat=Platformer; reg=NA]
           
Gonna get some screens in.
 
  paleface 12:09:56 05/05/23
           
About 90 minutes to get through the first half of the game (Arrange - Easy), 45 of that stuck in stage 15, a long tower climb (see CVIII) checkpoint before a boss, filled with such delights as gears that fall out of the background onto your head and rolling around the platforms, looking exactly like the background, and tilting platforms and fireball turrets.
 
(Before that last checkpoint was more tower climb including a stained glass enemy distinctly--from Young Sherlock Holmes (1985)?--"the first fully computer-generated photorealistic animated character" - Wikipedia -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MnRH4oNz1k )
 
That boss tripped me up for a while because at first they just dash back and forth at lightning speed, seemingly too fast to hit--while throwing rocks at you. Then they start ripping numbers off the huge BG clock face to throw at you--and I realized it was the real first scripted boss sequence I'd hit in a Castlevania and that maybe I just had to try to dodge those until they ran out--and indeed, after that they resort to wielding a hand of the clock--but it's shorter than the whip, so...
 
Silly. But I was finally through and on to a collapsing bridge section, mirrored from Rondo of Blood and another tower climb--vs princess and clown dolls? Oh Demon Castle Dracula, how low you have fallen. Draccy is rolling in his coffin. Then a hall of mirrors where smaller mirrors fall out of the BG and onto your head. ; | Ending in a doppelganger fight (hello again CV3) except the AI is maybe smarter this time and has mastered for instance this game's downward whip move. So we'll see how long it takes me to cheese my way out of that somehow.
 
Also I gotta switch to the original X68000 Roland GS soundtrack--the Arrange soundtrack during that heckish tower climb was somehow remixed into carnival music ; P
 
  paleface 13:46:24 05/05/23
           
Cheesed that unlucky boss on the next try by hiding behind/under a platform.
 
Some nice-looking set-pieces but also increasingly cheap gameplay relying on ambushes that you're just not going to avoid getting hit by until you memorize the level.
 
Was just trying to kill myself off to get to the save screen so I could quit for the night but trundled all the way to getting killed at the final boss area, with the encounter recycled from Rondo of Blood but the main sprite art redrawn--for this Arrange mode version--along the lines of Ayami Kojima's Symphony of the Night designs.
 
Oh jeepers I'm an idiot, I hadn't realized Ayami Kojima is female. Well, that rules. Here she is in a ridiculously over-the-top drawing session in Monte Carlo a few months ago:
 

 
Hopefully I'll also remember now to look at the unlocked art gallery of her stuff once I get through all the stages; it's low-res and lossy but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that just maybe there's some work of hers in there that I haven't found yet on the internet. ( https://selectbutton.net/t/illustrations-of-game/13003/73 )
 
Back to the game itself, on the plus side there are only two elements that jumped out at me as egregiously breaking the original Castlevania's Gothic romance theme: the princess/clown dolls from the previous session and the ninja maids. As breaks from the theme they're worse but much less frequent than the stuff in Castlevania III, which seemed not to be aware that there had been a theme at all, really.
 
There are also the bone jump-ropes but those are just silly.
 
  paleface 23:11:36 05/06/23
           

 
Reloads right before the final boss, whoa!
 
Final boss fight took me longer than it should have to realize how to slice his cheese. ^ _^ And I kept falling off the last staircase. ]_] Good SFX. The Ayami Kojima-style redrawn Dracula sprite in the Arrange mode is all right; the other, X68000 one looks a lot less cool than the similar fight in Rondo. (BUT Rondo came out 4 months AFTER the X68K version of which this is a port, so it wasn't a rip off as I wrongly said at least once.)
 
A Time Attack mode unlocks but didn't really call to me.
 
The playthrough unlocked all the Ayami Kojima gallery art, nothing I hadn't seen on the web though I don't think.
    
downloads:
· 00_intro.jpg
· 01_title.jpg
· 02_x68k_intro.jpg
· 03_orig_start.jpg
· 04_orig_title.jpg
· 05_sound_test.jpg
· 06_config.jpg
· 07_orig_start.jpg
· 08_orig_lightn.jpg
· 09_orig_rubens.jpg
· 10_orig_monks.jpg
· 11_orig_fish.jpg
· 12_xtra_opts.jpg
· 13_arrange_opts.jpg
· 14_for_fans.jpg
· 15_special_opts.jpg
· 16_gallery1.jpg
· 17_iga_int1.jpg
· 18_iga_int2.jpg
· 19_free_blocks.jpg
· 20_arr_start.jpg
· 21_arr_bloom.jpg
· 22_snd_modules.jpg
· 23_arr_map.jpg
· 24_arr_slime.jpg
· 25_arr_demons.jpg
· 26_bone_drag.jpg
· 27_stained.jpg
· 28_foreground.jpg
· 29_tilty.jpg
· 30_fast_clocker.jpg
· 31_throw_iiiv.jpg
· 32_clocked.jpg
· 33_rondo_bridge.jpg
· 34_dolls.jpg
· 35_mirrors.jpg
· 36_dobble_down.jpg
· 37_bone_jump.jpg
· 38_frank.jpg
· 39_argh.jpg
· 40_death.jpg
· 41_extendo.jpg
· 42_fuego.jpg
· 43_ninja_maid.jpg
· 44_hidden_puma.jpg
· 45_end_cin.jpg
 
references:
· Akumajou Dracula (NES)
· Demoniac Castle Dracula X: Metempsychosis of Blood (PCCD)

 
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