Castlevania: Bloodlines was released by Konami on the Sega Genesis in 1994. It is also known as Castlevania: The New Generation in Europe, and as Vampire Killer in Japan. It's 1 of only 2 Castlevania games ever released on a Sega system. The other being Symphony of the Night on Saturn. Bloodlines was 1 of 3 Castlevania games being developed simultaneously at the time, along with Castlevania for the Sharp X68000 (AKA Chronicles) and Rondo of Blood for the PCE, and it was the last of the 3 to be released. Bloodlines was originally meant to be a side story, and was referred to as a Castlevania gaiden on the back of the Japanese Rondo of Blood guide, but it was later made a pretty important part of the series thanks to its ties to Jonathan Morris, Richter Belmont, and Alucard.
Contrary to what the English opening sequence of Symphony of the Night suggests, Bloodlines does not take place before SotN. The story of Castlevania Bloodlines starts in 1897, exactly 100 years after SotN. That’s the last time Dracula came back and was killed by Quincy Morris, John Morris’ father and wielder of the Vampire Killer at the time. Young John Morris and his childhood friend, Eric Lecarde, watched Quincy kill Dracula from the shadows, and were inspired to become Vampire Hunters themselves. Bloodlines takes place in 1917, around 55 years after Order of Ecclesia and 27 years before Portrait of Ruin. Dracula’s niece and Vampire, Elizabeth Bartley, has been resurrected by a witch named Drolta Tzuentes. They then start World War I by orchestrating the assassination of the Austrian Prince and performing a ritual to resurrect Dracula with the souls of humans who died in WWI. They need the help of other monsters too, so they travel from Castlevania in Romania to 5 other castles around Europe, recruiting monsters. John and Eric then follow them all over Europe, cleaning up after them, and trying to stop yet another resurrection of Dracula. Spoilers, they fail and we fight Dracula at the end anyway. It’s kind of a crazy story, but it’s important in the Castlevania lore, and it retroactively becomes more interesting after playing Portrait of Ruin.
Bloodlines is structured most similarly to Castlevanias like I, Chronicles, and IV. You play each level in order and there is no stage select or exploration. There are 6 levels, and each is split up into several blocks. There's a mid boss around the middle of the level and another boss at the end. There are branching paths in a couple of levels, but you can only take one path depending on which character you're playing as. There are areas which only John can go through by swinging with his whip, and places which only Eric can get to with his high jump. These branching paths lead you to character exclusive areas, but they always lead to the same bosses, and there are no alternate levels, like in Rondo of Blood.
Like Rondo of Blood, Bloodlines has 2 playable characters, John Morris and Eric Lecarde. However, you don’t have to unlock either one here, and even though Eric is easier to play, his game is not an easy mode, like playing as Maria Renard. They both play fairly similarly. Both characters can do the basic Castlevania attacks, but each has their own unique attacks and platforming abilities.
John Morris is the son of Quincy Morris. He was born in Texas, USA, is the current owner of the Vampire Killer whip, and is the father of Jonathan Morris from Portrait of Ruin. John plays a lot like a Belmont. More specifically, he plays like an NES Belmont with a few more moves. John can whip upwards diagonally and downwards while jumping, and he can use his whip to grapple onto stone blocks and swing across chasms, kind of like Simon in SCIV. This whip swing also works as an attack. John’s attack and platforming abilities are a bit limited when compared to Eric’s, but I guess his strength is having more familiar Castlevania gameplay.
Eric Lecarde is John’s childhood friend. The Lecardes are also descendants of the Belmonts, and hold the key to unlocking the Vampire Killer's full power. He was born in Segovia, Spain, he's the wielder of the Alucard Spear (not Alcarde, like the game spells it), and is the father of Stella and Loretta from Portrait of Ruin. Eric’s girlfriend was turned into a Vampire and he's looking for a way to save her, but hasn't told John about this. Eric can attack upwards and upwards diagonally while on the ground, downwards while jumping, and do a spinning spear attack by holding the attack button after a side or up attack and pressing either left or right on the d-pad. He can also do a high jump by pressing the jump button while crouching, which can also be used as an attack. Eric flashes while crouching, like in Super Mario Bros 2, but you don’t have to charge to do the high jump. Eric’s attacks are easier to land and he has much more mobility, thanks to his high jump, so playing as him felt a bit easier than John, especially during boss battles.
Overall, the game feels a lot like an NES Castlevania, but faster. It has a few things in common with Rondo of Blood, like being able to jump on and off stairs and the item crash move, but you don't have any air control besides being able to change directions mid jump.
Bloodlines brings back subweapons, but there’s only 3 real subweapons in the game. There is an item that gives you the max upgrade for weapon and lets you shoot magic, but it only lasts for a short while. The throwing axe and holy water return, and there’s a new boomerang that looks like a real boomerang, and not a cross, too. You can do item crash moves, and they are more powerful than regular subweapon attacks, but they’re nowhere near as flashy as the ones in Rondo of Blood. On a weird side note, Bloodlines uses rubies as the resource for subweapons instead of hearts, and a winged metallic item that looks like it's straight out of Contra for weapon upgrades. The subweapons feel very limited in terms of both selection and usefulness. I never felt like I needed them for boss fights, and they only came in handy a few times while playing through the levels.
Bloodlines has no battery backup, so you can't save at all, but it does have an icon-based password system similar to other Castlevanias, which you can use to continue your games. The game gives you 3 lives and 2 extra continues by default, but there is a cheat code you can use to set it to 9 lives in the options, and there's another trick you can do to get unlimited continues by simply resetting the system and picking the same character again after running out of continues. The checkpoint system is also very forgiving, and restarts you at the same block, or at the one before the one you died in, even when continuing. This game isn't anywhere near as punishing as some other Castlevanias, which send you all the way back to the beginning of a level.
For a Castlevania, Bloodlines has some pretty unique settings for levels. They’re not all the usual Castlevania stuff. You get a quick tour of Dracula's castle, there’s a clocktower in another level, a few castle halls, and some cathedrals with stained glass windows, but it feels like they really tried to do some new stuff. There’s a shrine to Atlantis in Greece where you have to outrun the water flooding the level, a level in the Leaning Tower of Pisa with all sorts of rotating sections inside and around the tower, a giant overgrown rose garden in front of a palace in France, and weirdest of all, a munitions factory in Germany with oil drums, steel beams, conveyor belts, chain link fences, and skeletons wearing army helmets.
The graphics in Bloodlines have that sort of Mega Man 8 thing going on. They're kind of weird. The designs of a lot of the enemies are very different from what they usually look like. The Mermen look more serpent-like, the wolf boss looks more like a hellhound with its fur burnt off, and the zombies are missing their usual tattered robes, for example. Sometimes the floor has that Mega Man 8, tilted camera perspective where you can see the floor, and sometimes it has a normal perspective. It's very inconsistent. There’s a lot of rotation effects used on the bosses and the levels, but none of them look especially good, because the animations don't have a lot of frames in them. It looks like they wanted to do polygon graphics for some of these effects, but weren’t able to on the Genesis. The colors look very plain and lack variety when compared to the other 16-bit Castlevanias. Backgrounds don’t use a lot of colors and gradients are more like pixelated transitions between two colors than actual gradients. There are also no real transparencies on fog or clouds. Instead, we get a dithering effect that deletes some of the pixels, so you can see what's behind them. It looks fine for a Genesis game, but it’s the worst looking of the 16-bit Castlevanias. At least the framerate is smooth most of the time, unlike in SCIV.
The sound quality of the Genesis leaves a lot to be desired, but the actual soundtrack is pretty awesome. This was the first Castlevania soundtrack Michiru Yamane worked on. It has awesome new renditions of Simon Belmont’s Theme, Bloody Tears, Beginning, and Vampire Killer, and this is where classics, like Sinking Old Sanctuary and Iron Blue Intention, made their debut.
As far as ClassicVanias go, this is a pretty good one. I like playing as both characters, the level designs are creative, and the soundtrack is awesome. The game is challenging, but not as punishing as other ClassicVanias, thanks to how continues work. It's a real shame Konami has never re-released this. This would be great to have on one of the Genesis collections, or even a Castlevania collection. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Chrono Trigger was originally released on the SNES in 1995 by Squaresoft, about a year after Final Fantasy VI. It's an RPG created by a dream team of some of the most popular videogame and manga creators of all time; Final Fantasy creator, Hironobu Sakaguchi; Dragon Quest creator, Yuji Horii; and Dragon Quest character designer and creator of the Dragon Ball series, Akira Toriyama. It also features a soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda and Nobuo Uematsu. The credits read like a SquareEnix hall of fame looking at it today.
Chrono Trigger follows the story of a teenage boy named Crono and his group of friends as they travel through time to prevent the apocalyptic future they see in the year 2300 AD. A Lovecraftian monstrosity known as Lavos has been incubating underground, feeding on the planet's energy since the days of the dinosaurs, and will rise out of the earth and wipe out nearly all life in the year 1999 if it is not stopped. It's a dark, Terminator-like premise, but the game is just as light-hearted as a Dragon Quest game.
Chrono Trigger is also like modern Dragon Quest games in how the individual town (or in CT's case, time period) stories tie into the overarching story. Each Era you travel to has its own problems you have to deal with, characters that will join your party, and for the most part, a totally unique look to the world and its people, but everything always ties back to Lavos. Whether it's the aftermath of the Day of Lavos in the apocalyptic future of 2300 AD, Lavos’ arrival in 65,000,000 BC, or everything surrounding Magus, Frog, and the consequences of their actions in the present, it all ties back to Lavos somehow.
What makes CT’s story so engaging is the fantastic cast of characters. Crono himself doesn't have much of a personality. He's your typical Goku looking silent DQ protagonist, but with orange hair. The characters that join your party are bursting with personality, though. The first one you're introduced to is Crono's childhood friend, Lucca. She's an inventor who loves tinkering and technology. So much so that she becomes great friends with Robo, a robot from 2300 AD, who might retroactively be based on Lucca's work from 1000 AD. My favorite has to be Frog. He's a chivalrous knight from 600 AD with a tragic backstory that resulted in him being turned into a humanoid frog. Frog wields the legendary sword, Masamune, and is loyal to Queen Leene, who is the ancestor of Marle, the princess in 1000 AD who joins Crono without telling him that she's the princess. Everyone's story ties into someone else's somehow. Everyone feels like they have purpose. There's no random tagalongs or joke characters, and everyone is important to the story.
Time travel in Chrono Trigger is more than a storytelling device, it's a big part of the gameplay, too. Each time period is sort of like a town in other RPGs, but it’s not like you never go back after you’re done there. Every time period has at least 2 scenarios to play through and many quests require you to travel back and forth through time to complete them. People have been scattered through time, some zones are only available in certain time periods, and sometimes, things just take time. For example, Robo’s special item questline near the end of the game requires you to leave him in 600 AD and come back to get him in 1000 AD so he has time to reforest a desert area. You can also go to the last dungeon in all time periods after it appears and even go to fight Lavos from multiple time periods. The game gives you a lot more freedom to explore and do quests in the order of your choosing than the usual FF or DQ.
One of the main things that made me fall in love with Chrono Trigger when I first played it on SNES was the lack of random battles. There are no random battles in the zones or on the overworld. I don't know if it was the first JRPG to do this, but it was the first time I saw it. All the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games had random battles back then. You can usually see enemies in the field in CT. There are enemy ambushes, but they're not random. You will always be attacked if you run over certain spots and haven't killed those monsters yet. You also never go into some totally different looking place during battles. All battles take place right where you run into the monsters, they look exactly the same, and there are no flashy transitions or loading screens between battles and exploration.
The battle system in Chrono Trigger was also pretty different from most JRPGs of the time. In CT enemies don't just step forward to attack and then jump back in formation, they run around the field to attack and stop in different places. Their position in relation to other enemies and your party members affects how many of them you can hit with certain magic spells and abilities. For example, some of your abilities might hit everything within a circle, so if you cast them on an enemy with more enemies close to it, you'll hit them too. CT also has team up attacks, or “Techs”, as the game calls them. As characters gain experience battling together, they start learning different techniques that only they can do as a team. For example, Lucca can throw fire on Crono's sword and then he can perform a flaming spinning sword attack, and since Frog has a multi heal spell and Marle has powerful single target heals, they can perform a Tech that heals everyone to max HP at once. Every character also has some kind of magic affinity, and combining 2 or 3 schools of magic (or the same 1) with Techs can result in some devastating attacks. Group composition is much more interesting than just thinking about DPS and heals.
Chrono Trigger also uses the Active Time Battle system introduced in Final Fantasy IV. Everyone calls these command battle RPGs turn-based, but you don't take turns attacking with ATB. There is no constant order in which characters must perform actions. In ATB, your speed stat determines how often you attack. Chrono Trigger takes full advantage of ATB. Combining ATB with RPG mechanics, like elemental weaknesses and status effects, adds an element of timing and reactionary gameplay to CT's battles. Some boss battles are almost like playing a fighting game with commands. Sometimes you want to wait to attack and sometimes you want to wait for the enemy's attack. The game really made me think about strategy every time I faced a new boss. It's not enough to simply have the best equipment.
Chrono Trigger has been ported to many systems since the SNES days. This most recent PC version is a port of the mobile version, which is a port of the DS version. It includes new stuff from the DS version, like the new localization and new dungeons, but not the bestiary or the Pokemon-like online mode. The new content from the DS version includes some new dungeons and a new town with some quests. The Dimensional Vortex dungeon that appears after you beat the game is just reused areas from the main game, so it's not very interesting. Finishing the 3 different versions of the Dimensional Vortex will permanently upgrade some of your characters, like the special character quests. The Lost Sanctum is a new town that exists in 65,000,000 BC and 2300 AD that has a few areas attached to it and some quests that will send you traveling all over the game. The Lost Sanctum is unique, but reuses graphics from old areas. Finishing quests in the Lost Sanctum will reward you with money, gear, and upgrade items.
This version also includes the animated cutscenes, which first appeared in the PS1 version. They look a bit low res, but they're really cool. They actually look like an Akira Toriyama anime, unlike the old Chrono Trigger OVA. You can also unlock galleries with all the anime, music, art, and endings you've unlocked after you beat the game.
This PC version had the potential to be the new definitive version, but sadly, it's pretty far from that. The 2 main issues with this port are the graphics and the frequent crashes. This version is in 16:9, but it only fills the screen when there is existing art to fill the screen with. For example, towns and the overworld use adjacent areas to fill the screen, while areas that were small to begin with, like the inside of houses, are surrounded by even more black emptiness. That's all well and good, but the art is sometimes cropped vertically and always stretched horizontally, like it's on a CRT, so all the characters look wider and all the circles look like ovals, which is very noticeable in a game where you're constantly going through circular portals to travel through time and half of your magic spells are scaling multicolored circles. The overworld graphics are both squished vertically and stretched horizontally. The framerate frequently stutters and skips frames, especially in the stitched together widescreen areas. This version also has big problems with mouse support. The game frequently crashes if you move the mouse during the anime cutscene that plays when you launch the game, the mouse cursor is always visible, even when using a controller, so you have to keep moving it to the right edge of the screen to hide it, and the game randomly crashes when you right click on the mouse during gameplay. This is kind of a big problem to have for a PC game. The game also randomly crashes if you try to play it while extending your desktop to a 2nd monitor.
The actual sprites in Chrono Trigger still look great, though. This is one of the best looking games on SNES. Akira Toriyama's art style looks great in both the characters and the environments. The dome cities, mountains, dinosaurs, machine and robot designs, Garlic Jr looking monsters, the hair. It's all here. I don't think even DQVI depicted Toriyama's style as well as CT. All your party members have exaggerated expressions, cute victory poses, and unique walking animations, which add yet another layer to their personalities and let you know how they're feeling without even reading their dialogue. CT is a beautiful looking game all around.
This game has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. Yasunori Mitsuda famously worked himself into the hospital while working on this soundtrack, and Nobuo Uematsu stepped in to finish it. Each Era has its own songs, and they all fit perfectly with the look and theme of each one. The music of 65,000,000 BC sounds like jungle conga drum music, Zeal's theme is like some kind of new age meditation music, and the music of 2300 AD is more like a slow pulsing wave of sound with a few scattered piano keys than actual music. Half of your party members also get their own themes. Robo's sounds weirdly familiar.
This is a pretty bad port of an amazing game. Sadly, we don't have a lot of great options for playing this game on modern platforms outside of emulation. The DS version is probably the best version, but it's slowly but surely going up in price. You can't buy Wii VC games anymore, the PlayStation Classics version has super long and annoying load times, even on PS3, and the mobile versions are worse looking versions of this one. If you can overlook the problems with this version; though, this is still one of the best RPGs ever made.
13. Bayonetta 2 - This is a game I played in 2014 on Wii U, but it did come out in 2018 on Switch, and it is awesome. It improves upon the original in every way, except for the story and new characters. I felt like the combat flowed so much better than in the original. Once I had all the moves unlocked, I always felt like I had the right move to keep my combos going.
12. Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection - I feel like this belongs in every fighting game fan’s collection. It’s all the pre-SF4 Street Fighter arcade games in one place, and it’s the first time we’ve gotten the real arcade versions of most of these at home, too.
11. Mega Man Legacy Collection 2 - This is actually the game I played the most of in 2018. I think it’s the best of the 4 Mega Man Legacy Collections released on Switch, since it displays the game without CRT stretch and doesn’t have the input lag that MMLC1 does. It also has the best OG series Mega Man game ever, Mega Man 7.
10. Iconoclasts - This is a bit of a different take on the genre. It’s a more story and character driven game with more mature themes than the usual Metroidvania. It has great boss battles and gets a ton of mileage out of its weapons by giving you the ability to combine them in different ways to solve puzzles. It has some nice really nice sprite work, too. One of the most overlooked games of 2018.
9. Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion - It’s an all-new single player campaign that introduces the Octolings as playable characters in Splatoon 2. It has a bunch of new, super challenging, puzzle platforming levels in the style of the original Splatoon 2 campaign. In a world where we might never get a Portal 3, this is the next best thing.
8. Mega Man 11 - This game is what the series needed. Mega Man 9 and 10 were fine games, but they were steps backwards for the series. This feels like the true sequel to Mega Man 8. This isn’t just a greatest hits of Mega Man. The gear system felt like a fresh new addition to the classic gameplay, the level design was a good mix of old and new obstacles and enemies, and the story was interesting and cute. I thought the soundtrack was a bit lacking, but graphics looked pretty nice, and aside from Mega Man’s English VO, the voice acting was pretty good.
7. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate - I felt like this was missing some of that Nintendo history flavor without the trophy gallery, but as far as gameplay goes, this is the best Smash Bros ever. Everyone is here! It’s has every character and stage that has ever been in the series, more options than ever, and pretty much everything I could ever want to set up any dream videogame character battle. Now, I just need Ryu Hayabusa, Alucard, Tails, Zero, and Waluigi in it.
6. Dragon Ball FighterZ - I know ASW makes great fighting games, but I didn’t get DBFZ right away, because I had not been into Dragon Ball for a while. I watched the first run of DBZ on Cartoon Network up to the end of the Cell saga, and then I kind of didn’t watch any Dragon Ball for almost 20 years. Then this game came along and Dan and Jeff from GB started doing the All Systems Goku podcast. I got back into Dragon Ball thanks to the podcast, watched all of DBZ over again, including the Buu saga, and then I got this game. This game is kind of like the Dragon Ball action figures I never had. I can have any dream match that doesn’t involve Mr Satan with it. It’s also the best playing Dragon Ball game I’ve ever played. I know I’m not the only person who had been waiting for a Dragon Ball game that played as well as a Street Fighter or DarkStalkers. I always hoped for a Capcom VS Dragon Ball game, but this will do just fine.
5. Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! - Let’s Go has a lot of things I don't like, like the catching minigame and the 3DS in HD graphics, but I had a lot of fun with it. I love how it doesn't bog you down with tons of cutscenes and tutorials, like Sun and Moon. I love how much freedom you have to explore, and I especially love that they finally got rid of random encounters. This game really takes me back to when the GB games first came to the US, the anime was first airing on TV, and Pokemon was just a crazy Japanese fad that gave people seizures. I hope Gen 8 takes a few hints from Let’s Go and gets back to the basics of what made Pokemon fun in the first place; catching ‘em all and being the very best, like no one ever was!
4. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon - What a debut for the Bloodstained series. This game really took me by surprise. After playing Mighty Gunvolt, I expected a sort of okay Castlevania throwback, and then I got an amazing Castlevania throwback. This game is like Castlevania III, Ninja Gaiden, and Rondo of Blood rolled into one and packed into an NES game. It’s so much fun, has so much replay value, and gets the Classicavania style of gameplay so right. I want this style of Bloodstained to become its own separate series.
3. Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom - This could have easily fallen flat on its face while trying to chase the glory of the originals, but instead, it turned out to be one of the best games in the series. It isn’t just a game paying tribute to the classics, it’s a gigantic, all-new adventure that tries new things and moves the series forward. It has fun and challenging gameplay, beautiful graphics, and an incredible soundtrack. This is the best new Metroidvania I've played since Shantae and the Pirate's Curse.
2. Monster Hunter World - I really admire what Capcom did with MHW. They could have easily kept building on things they made in the PS2 era, and kept making MH games like the ones they made for 3DS, but they decided to shake things up instead, and it paid off bigtime. This game improves on and gets rid of so many dumb things that have been lingering in the series for way too long, and I love it for that. It could really use more monsters, but what’s there is so fun and addicting. It’s one of my most played games of 2018 and I can’t wait for the expansion.
1. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age - DQXI is both familiar and new. It is all the great things of SNES RPGs, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, with the amazing graphics UE4 allows. I loved all the individual town stories that tie into the overarching one, the endearing characters, the sense of exploration and adventure, the Toriyama style character enemy designs, the battle system, and the amazing looking 3D world. It’s a new high bar for the series and old-school RPGs.
