“It was not by my hand that I am once again given flesh. I was called here by humans who wish to pay me tribute.” Castlevania fans, like me, have been asking for this for a long time. I honestly didn't think it would happen any time soon only a few months ago. Not with Iga gone and Konami focusing on gyms and pachinko machines. Yet here it is, a Castlevania collection by the masters of retro releases, M2. They're the ones behind Sega Ages, a few Virtual Console emulators, and the upcoming Sega Genesis Mini. This collection includes Castlevania 1-4, Castlevania: The Adventure and Belmont's Revenge for Game Boy, the first ever re-release of Castlevania: Bloodlines, and an English version of the previously Japan only Castlevania parody spin-off, Kid Dracula. It also includes a small ebook featuring an interview with Michiru Yamane, design documents, and concept art. I played it on Switch for this review, but it's also available on Steam, PS4, and XBO for $19.99.
I think the most important thing to consider when looking at these retro game collections is whether or not the games run well. Options and art galleries are nice, but stuff like input lag and accuracy is much more important to me. I played these versions back to back with the 3DS VC and NES/SNES Classic versions, and I was pretty impressed. These games feel just as responsive and run just as accurately as on Nintendo's emulators, flickering and slowdown included. The biggest difference I noticed was a brighter and slightly warmer color palette on the NES games in the Anniversary Collection. If you are worried about performance after some of those Mega Man collections, don’t be. These are great versions of these games.
Your options are as empty as your soul! Sadly, this collection is lacking in terms of options and features. You only get 1 save state per game, there is no button remapping outside of the in-game options in Super Castlevania IV and Bloodlines, there's only 2 border frames for all the games, there is no rewind, no CPU overclocking, and the display options leave a lot to be desired. There is a Save Replay feature, which is pretty cool, though. It allows you to save a video of your current game starting from the last save state you made or from when you booted the game up. That means you don't have to hit record before you start playing, you just hit Save Replay after you've done something you want a video of. You'll still need a capture device to get the video off the system, though. This is nice for speedrunners and people making walkthrough videos.
There are some annoying issues with the display options for the NES and SNES games. The “Pixel Perfect” aspect ratio option in Castlevania 1-3, Kid Dracula, and Super Castlevania IV makes things wider than the 4:3 aspect ratio instead of narrower (8:7) when docked. The Pixel Perfect option is displayed correctly when undocked, though. Bloodlines always looks how it should in every setting. It should look wider in Pixel Perfect than in Original because that’s how Genesis games were made.
Besides Original and Pixel Perfect display options, we also have 4:3 Scanlines, Pixel Perfect Scanlines, 16:9, and 16:9 Scanlines. 16:9 stretches the image both vertically and horizontally to fill the entire screen, and 16:9 Scanlines does the same, but with scanlines. 4:3 Scanlines gives you a 4:3 aspect ratio scaled unevenly to fill the screen vertically with scanlines while docked and undocked. Pixel Perfect Scanlines is too wide on the NES games and Super Castlevania while docked, just like regular Pixel Perfect, and stays evenly scaled for whatever reason.
Another weird thing is that game automatically scales from 1080p to 720p when switching to handheld from docked, but it will not scale to 720p while docked, even if you manually switch to 720p in the system settings. A 240p image scaled to 3 times its original size fits evenly into 720p (like on the NES and SNES Classics), so it would cover a little more of the screen than a 240p image scaled to 4 times its original size in 1080p, like it is in this collection.
The 2 Game Boy games have completely different display options. While docked, “Original” gives you a Super Game Boy black & white palette with an unevenly scaled image that fills the screen vertically. “Pixel Perfect” gives you the same black & white color palette with an image evenly scaled to 6 times its original size. The “Dot Matrix” option gives you a 6x scaled image with the original Game Boy green color palette and a filter that emulates the look of the original Game Boy's dot matrix screen. It's cool for a bit, but it makes everything look like it has giant pixels that don’t connect to each other.
There's also 3 options that use the default Super Game Boy color palette, which is 2 shades of orange with black outlines and purple shadows on a light orange background; Color Filter, Color Filter (Pixel Perfect), and Scanlines. Color Filter and Color Filter (Pixel Perfect) are just like Original and Pixel Perfect, but with the SGB color palette, and “Scanlines” is the same as Color Filter, but with scanlines. I guess it makes sense to put scanlines on a Super Game Boy game since you played it on a TV, but I would have rather had another SGB color palette there instead. The only difference between playing docked and undocked is that all display options are scaled evenly to 5x and fill the screen vertically while undocked because the GB's vertical resolution of 144p x 5 = 720p, which is the same as the Switch's screen. That means you have 2 options that do exactly the same thing as 2 other options in handheld. I wish they would have used better color palettes. The orange SGB color palette is okay, but I wish they would have used the palette from the GBC/SGB enhanced versions of the games they released in the Konami GB Collections, or even GB green without the dot matrix screen effect.
The border frame options in this collection are just pathetic. There are only 2 borders and the option to turn them off and play with black borders, which is what I did because these borders are lame. There's one with a thick red oil painting texture and one with a thick brown oil painting texture on one side and the original Castlevania artwork that was used on the cover on the other side. The original artwork with Simon Belmont in front of the castle is awesome, but the oil painting texture is not so cool that it should cover a whole side of the screen or be its own border. I could have made better borders with some boxart and 20 minutes in Photoshop.
This collection did not have button mapping when I originally wrote this review, but it has been patched in now. (See the 6/18/19 Patch Update section below)
The lack of button mapping is not a big deal to me, but I know some people prefer the Y + B configuration for NES and GB over B + A or X + A. All the NES and GB games use the same button configuration; B and X are whip, and A and Y are jump. It's exactly the same as when using a 4 face button controller on the NES Classic. You can't whip with Y and jump with B, like on the SNES games, but I think X + A is fine, too. But then again, I don't have a problem with B + A either. Bloodlines and Super Castlevania have in-game button configuration options, so there shouldn't be too many issues there. Bloodlines maps the 3 button Genesis controller's buttons as A to Y, B to B and X, and C to A, so you can play with 3 buttons in a sort of arc or in the more SNES-like way.
Having only 1 save state is a real bummer. The NES and SNES Classics give you 4 save state slots per game. Wii U and 3DS Virtual Consoles gave you 1 save state and a suspend feature, so you could switch games and come back to the same spot later without even making a save state, essentially giving you 2 save states. If you switch games in this collection, you lose your progress unless you made a save state. Thankfully, all the old codes and passwords work here, even the Bloodlines infinite continues trick that requires you to reset the system, so getting back to a specific level isn't a problem in 6 out of the 8 games. Nobody actually wants to play Castlevania: The Adventure; though, so this is really only a problem with Castlevania 1.
The book is pretty small and half of it is filler, but it does have some interesting stuff in it. It has old design documents for all the games in English, and interviews with Adi Shankar, executive producer of the animated series on Netflix, and Michiru Yamane, composer on Bloodlines, SotN, and many other Castlevanias. It also has the 1 page manuals made for the collection, a chronology of the games in the collection, a Belmont family tree, and some weird articles about knockback, stairs, and why the holy water is the best weapon in Castlevania 1. The design docs are the best part. Did you know that Simon Belmont was originally called Peter Dante? No relation.
This book is kind of hard to navigate, though. I don't like how the zoom controls are so sensitive. It feels like it zooms in preset amounts because it does so really fast and doesn't let you make small adjustments. It also doesn't have any touchscreen support at all, which would have been nice. Just give me a PDF I can put on my tablet or something.
6/18/19 Patch Update
With this patch, Konami has added the Japanese versions of every game included, except Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest, and button mapping to all the games, except Castlevania: Bloodlines, to this collection. I’m guessing the lack of Japanese Simon’s Quest is due to the fact that the game was originally released on the Famicom Disk System and Konami not being able to emulate the game without infringing on Nintendo’s FDS BIOS copyrights. The Japanese version of Castlevania I they’ve added is also not the 1986 Famicom Disk System original, and is instead the 1993 Famicom cartridge re-release version. So we still don’t have versions of Castlevania I and II with save files, and all we’re really getting with these Japanese versions are uncensored and unedited versions of some of the games, button mapping for all but 1 of the games, and Castlevania III’s real soundtrack. They still have not fixed the Pixel Perfect display option while docked for the NES and SNES games.
What is a Castlevania Anniversary Collection? A miserable little pile of ROMs! But enough talk… Have at you! This collection is lacking in options, and some of the options that are there are buggy, but 6 out of the 8 games are good, and the emulation is on par with Nintendo's own. It's only $20, too. Finally having a re-release of Bloodlines and an official English version of Kid Dracula is worth that at least. I question the inclusion of the GB games over Chronicles, Rebirth, and Rondo of Blood, but I guess those will be in the second collection.
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening was originally released in 1993 on the Game Boy. It started development as an after-hours Game Boy hardware experiment and then a GB port of A Link to the Past before finally going into full-fledged development as an original Zelda game for the Game Boy. That's probably why it shares so many similarities with A Link to the Past. It was re-released as The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX in 1998 for the Game Boy Color with enhanced color graphics, Game Boy Printer support, and a new color dungeon. Link's Awakening DX is also available on the 3DS Virtual Console.
If there's one Zelda game I would call the Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) of Zelda games, it's definitely The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. It's not the black sheep of the series (that's Zelda II), but it does take place in a dream, and it's more influential within the series than it gets credit for. It was the first Zelda game to break away from the usual Zelda, Ganon, and Triforce stuff. It doesn't even take place in Hyrule. It also had the first fishing minigame in the series, the first item trading quest chain, it introduced the hint (Owl/Sheikah) stones, and it introduced characters like the Owl, Tarin, Marin, and the Luigi counterpart, all who were later reimagined as Kaepora Gaebora, Talon, Malon, and Ingo in OoT, and have become recurring characters in the series. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask in particular would have probably been very different if Link's Awakening wasn't made before them.
According to the latest Zelda timeline revision, Link's Awakening takes place in the “Hero is Defeated” (best) timeline, after LttP and before the Oracle games. It was placed after the Oracle games in Hyrule Hystoria, but was put back after LttP in the Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia. Some time after Link’s adventures in A Link to the Past, Link leaves Hyrule on a sailboat to go train somewhere. I guess Link is like Goku or something, always looking to get stronger. Link gets caught in a thunderstorm at sea, his boat is hit by lightning, and the next thing we see is Marin finding Link washed ashore on Koholint Island. As you play through the game, you find out that you're in the dream of a being called the Wind Fish, and the only way to leave the island is to collect the “Instruments of the Sirens”, play the “Ballad of the Wind Fish”, and wake the Wind Fish.
Link’s Awakening plays like a downgraded LttP, so for me, it’s the setting and characters that make it stand out. Koholint Island is like LttP's Hyrule as imagined by someone who has heard of it, but never actually been there. It’s almost like a parody of Hyrule. The Mysterious Woods are located right above Mabe Village, like the Lost Woods North of Kakariko Village, there's a Death Mountain-like mountain range to the North, and a castle that looks a lot like Hyrule Castle near the center of the map. The similarities probably go right over the heads of people who have not played LttP, but they make LA the perfect follow up to it because it feels so familiar.
The exploration and quests you do in between dungeons are my favorite part of the game, and the inhabitants of Koholint Island play a big role in that. You always have to find a key or get some item to open a dungeon, and this usually involves doing something for an NPC. You have to get the mushroom from the Mysterious Woods and take it to the Witch’s hut to get her to make the magic powder so you can sprinkle it on the racoon in the woods to get the key to the first dungeon, for example. Another pre-dungeon quest involves taking a Chain Chomp out for a walk, like a dog, so it can clear the plants blocking the 2nd dungeon’s entrance. These quests take you all over the map, have you playing through mini dungeons, and lots of colorful characters show up in them, like Marin and Tarin, a chicken farmer who looks like Luigi, Wart from SMB2, and Prince Richard from the Japan only GB game, For the Frog the Bell Tolls. You can see how these quests influenced design elements in future games, like Majora's Mask, Minish Cap, Skyward Sword, and Breath of the Wild.
Link's Awakening plays a lot like LttP, but I feel like it’s trying to do too much with the few buttons available on the Game Boy. You’d think they’d want to make the controls simpler, but they actually tried to make things more complex instead. While LttP gave you dedicated buttons for the sword and items, Link’s Awakening lets you put any item on either A or B, including the sword and shield. Instead of having an automatic shield block available at all times, you actually have to equip the shield and press the button to block attacks. The shield is much more powerful in this game; though, since it blocks pretty much anything and enemies bounce off it. You also have to equip items like the Power Bracelet to lift things, and the Pegasus Boots to dash, both of which were context sensitive and mapped to the same button in LttP. At least you don't have to equip the flippers to swim. This 2 custom button system allows you to do things like use the Roc’s Feather and Pegasus Boots together to jump farther, or keep your shield up while shooting arrows.
Combining different items is cool, but you need your sword to fight off enemies, and there’s a different item specific obstacle in every other screen, so what you end up doing is going to the inventory screen to switch items like every 30 seconds. The inventory screen pops up quickly enough, but maybe they could have let you switch loadouts with Select or something. I know other Zelda games put all the inventory, save, and map screens on different tabs in the start menu. I wish they would have done something like that here to free up the Select button.
I like how Koholint Island's overworld is jam packed with stuff in every screen. There's something interesting in nearly every screen. There is very little wasted space, or space only used to make the world bigger. Navigating this overworld is more complicated than it should be, though. It’s even worse than LttP’s Dark World in that regard because it’s not just item specific obstacles blocking your way, there’s mountains, dirt walls, and trees blocking the border around a lot of areas. There are 4 warp points around the island, but they aren't enough to avoid all this running around. I hate the feeling of having to go around the long way when you know your destination is just on the other side of some trees.
Even though all the item switching gets annoying, I really like the dungeons in Link’s Awakening. There's a lot of new types of puzzles, obstacles, and minibosses, and they're harder than LttP's dungeons, for the most part. Their design feels like a mix of Zelda I and LttP dungeons. The multiple floor element from LttP is mostly gone, aside from 1 dungeon, but now there's sidescrolling underground tunnels that connect different parts of the dungeon, which look like the underground item rooms in Zelda 1. This is where all the Goombas and Piranha Plants hang out. There are hint stones all over the dungeons, but you don't have to talk to them. I think it's more fun to figure things out on your own. I don't mind checking every wall and pushing every block. Not all the bosses make you use a specific item, but the ones that do are cleverly done. LA does that even better than LttP.
I don't mind that the color dungeon is in the game, but it just doesn't live up to the standard set by the others. It's by far the worst dungeon in the game. The graphics don't set it apart, since the whole game is in color, it's really small, and the color puzzles are very easy. The last boss is also super annoying to fight. At least the tunic reward is nice, and it has a good remix of the Zelda I dungeon theme.
Link's Awakening is one of the nicest looking Game Boy games. Most GB games looked like NES games, but LA looks closer to a Super NES game. It doesn’t have as many cute animations as LttP, and even with the GBC color palette, it can’t match LttP’s colors, but the line art does a great job of translating LttP's style into 8-bit. Strangely enough, the framerate is much better than in LttP. LttP struggles with too many enemies (and too much grass cutting) on screen, but LA is smooth all the way through.
Link's Awakening has a fantastic soundtrack despite the GB's hardware. It kind of had to with the musical theme, I guess. The final version of the Ballad of the Wind Fish is one of the most beautiful and memorable songs in the series. There's just so much effort put into it from you as the player by the end if the game. How can it not mean something to you by then? It's like a grand musical recipe or magic spell. The new version of the Hyrule overworld theme and the Tal Tal Heights theme are also really good. There are a lot of great remixes and original songs in the game.
I wanted to do a review for Link's Awakening for 2 reasons; I wanted to replay it before the upcoming Switch remake came out, and I wanted to replay it with LttP fresh in my mind to compare. LA does a lot of great things with the story, setting, characters, bosses, and the in between dungeon questing, but the restrictive design of the overworld and the limitations of the Game Boy really hold it back. It's a great game, one of the best on the GB, but LttP is clearly the better game. I doubt that the remake is going to mess too much with the design of the overworld, but it will surely allow you to map more items to the buttons and cut down on all the trips to inventory screen. Maybe they'll add a few more warp points, too.
This is no Tetris platformer! Boxboy! + Boxgirl! is an all-new adventure in the puzzle platformer series from HAL Laboratory, creators of such games as Adventures of Lolo, Kabuki Quantum Fighter, the Kirby series, and the first 2 Super Smash Bros games. It features 270 stages across 3 campaigns, 3 playable characters, and for the first time in the series, co-op multiplayer. Boxboy! + Boxgirl! is available now on the Nintendo Switch eShop for $10.
I've never played more than the demo of the 3DS games, but apparently there's some kind of continuation of the story from those games. I'm pretty sure this is all a big joke, though. In Boxboy! + Boxgirl!, the Box family; Qbby, Qucy, and Qudy, are trying to save their cube planet from a huge asteroid headed straight towards it by solving its puzzle obstacle courses. Or something like that. There is no dialogue or narration in the cutscenes, so a lot is left up to your imagination. It's goofy, weird, and sort of dark in a way.
The Boxboy series reminds me of games like Portal, Donkey Kong (GB), and Splatoon’s single player campaigns. It’s a platformer, but it's more about solving puzzles than it is about Mario-like platforming. Qbby's running and jumping skills are very limited. You can't run very fast, you can only jump as high as one box, and if you time your jump perfectly, you might be able to jump across a two space gap. Qbby is far from the athlete Mario is.
The main ability you use to do everything in the game is the power to create boxes. You can spawn boxes from yourself in 3 directions around you, and then spawn more boxes out of those boxes in one of three other directions. You can also delete boxes you've set down with the X button if you need to. There is no limit to how many boxes you can make per stage, but each stage has a preset limit to how many boxes you can make at a time, and you can only have one group of boxes per player out in a stage at any time. You can't make a box, leave it on top of a switch, and then make another box to use as a platform, for example. The first box would just disappear as soon as you start making another box. You can make a group of boxes wide enough to put on top of a switch and be used as a platform at the same time, though. The amount of boxes you can make at a time varies from 2 to 9 depending on the stage and character you're playing as.
The rest of your base abilities all revolve around what you can do with boxes. You can use boxes as platforms, make stairs and bridges out of them, push them around, use them as shields (or umbrellas), carry them, and even throw them if you build them over your head. You can’t pick boxes up after you’ve set them down, though. Even more abilities and obstacle types are introduced as you play through each character’s campaigns.
There's 3 campaigns in the game, each split up into worlds with 5 to 8 stages in them. The single player campaign is called “A Tale for One”, and it has 16 worlds and 112 stages, making it the biggest campaign of the 3. In A Tale for One, you're introduced to 3 new abilities and a bunch of obstacle types that require you to use your boxes in different ways. You start with simple switches you have to hold down to open doors and electric rays you have to block. Then after every few worlds you beat, you unlock a new ability which you'll use in different way to deal with the new obstacles in the following worlds.
The first ability you unlock is the “up hook”. This ability allows you to use your boxes like a sort of grappling hook. You can make an upside-down L shape over your head, jump and grab onto a ledge with your boxes, and then pull yourself up to where the last box in the line landed, for example. You can also use this ability to dig through the dirt patch obstacle like a worm, and to get to places you wouldn't be able to get to by simply jumping, like maybe a 1 space opening on the side of a wall.
Other abilities include the hop, slide, and slam. The hop allows you to use box groups you haven't let go of as a sort of pogo stick. You can use this to hop on top of spikes or through electricity without dying. The slide allows you to push and slide boxes over ground and through the air. You can use this to throw boxes across large gaps or through electrictricity. The slam is basically a butt stomp, like Mario and Wario's. You can use the slam to drive boxes into the ground. This can be used to push underground switches, or maybe place a platform on the side of a wall over a pit.
There's a lot of clever ways to use your boxes, but I feel like the different obstacle types aren't mixed in with each other enough. Each world has its own gimmick, and all the stages in them only use a few of the same obstacle types. You don't see a lot of the gravity fields outside of world 14, for example. The last world is the only one that really mixes things up. There aren't a lot of obstacles that require much timing either. I feel like this game spends a lot of time introducing new ideas that it only uses a few times. A Tale for One ends up feeling a bit like the first half of a game that is not followed up on in the other campaigns. It ends just as it’s getting really challenging, too.
The co-op campaign is called “A Tale for Two”, and it has 11 worlds and 73 stages. You can play this either in co-op or in single player, and it's perfectly playable either way. If you play it by yourself, you switch between Qbby and Qucy by pressing ZL or ZR. This one is all about working as a team. You have to coordinate with the other player to put down the boxes you need in order to create the shapes or structures required. Both players have to reach the goal at the end, so no one can be left behind. You can carry each other, push each other, boost each other up with your boxes, combine each other's box structures, and even launch each other across pits by riding on each other's box slide. Some stages have different box limits for each character, and character specific switches, so you have to put some real thought into who does what, and in what order. This campaign was the easiest of the 3 for me, but I think it might have been the most fun. I really liked how I had to think about the order in which I did things, and how it had more puzzles that required good timing.
After beating A Tale for One, you unlock “A Tall Tale”, Qudy's campaign. Qudy kind of looks like a domino. He's as tall as 2 of Qbby's boxes, and so are the boxes he makes. That means he needs more spaces than Qbby to be able to make a single box by default. He also can't fit through some areas while walking upright, but thankfully, he can bend over by pressing ZL or ZR. This totally changes the game. Since he can bend over, Qudy has 2 box types; tall boxes and wide boxes. You can't mix and match tall and wide boxes, so choosing which box style to use adds even more complexity to the puzzles. Tall boxes are too tall for Qudy to jump on or use as stairs, since he can't jump any higher than Qbby, but since they are taller, they come in handy for reaching high platforms with the box hop or hitting switches that would normally require 2 boxes with just 1 box. And since his boxes are as wide as 2 boxes when bending over, he can make really long platforms. A Tall Tale starts off just as easy as the other campaigns, but ramps up more quickly, and ends up being the hardest of the 3. It's also the shortest of the 3, with 13 worlds and 69 stages.
Each stage has a few achievements, or as the game calls them, “targets”. There's crowns to collect in each stage, and 3 targets for using fewer boxes. You can also go for faster times to get better ranks. The better you do in each stage, the more in-game currency you get to buy stuff at the store with. You can buy Boxboy comics, balloon challenge stages, music, assist items, and clothing items. There's sunglasses, mustaches, hats, hairdos, and all kinds of goofy stuff, like zombie and Yoshi egg skins. The comics are not really funny, but they're cute. The assist items give you powers like extra boxes, increased speed, and increased jump height. I didn't use any items because this is a puzzle game, and I feel like cheating would be cheating myself out of the fun of the game, but they're there if you're really stuck on a stage, or just want to mess around. The balloon challenges are campaign specific stages in which you have to pop all the balloons within a time limit and with preset abilities. I didn't get too into these because they're not like the regular stages and they take your abilities away, but they're there if the other 254 stages left you wanting more.
This game has a cute style, but frankly, all the black and white gets a bit boring to look at after a while. There are some light colors in the backgrounds, but they're not enough to spice the look of the game up. This game does not run very well either. It was made on the Unity engine, and like most Unity games on Switch, there are very noticeable frame pacing and framerate issues. It seems like the problems either get worse in the later stages or just get worse the longer you keep the game running, too. Thankfully, these problems don't affect gameplay too much, since this is such a slow paced game.
I thought the music was pretty good. It was composed by Jun Ishikawa and Hirokazu Ando, who have worked on a ton of Kirby games and the other Boxboy games. It's very relaxing and trippy, and fits the game really well. Some of the instrumentation in the songs reminded me of Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and strangely enough, PS1 era SquareSoft games, like Chrono Cross. I also got a kick out of the sound effects. Especially the medal sound, which sounds kind of like someone washing dishes in a kitchen sink.
If you like puzzle games like Portal and Donkey Kong for Game Boy, you can't go wrong with Boxboy! + Boxgirl!. It has a ton of content for $10. You can certainly do worse for $10 on the Switch eShop.
