This Week In Retro: Castlevania: Bloodlines (Patreon)

March 17, 1994: Requiem for the Unsung Castlevania

by Diamond Feit

Amongst the many legends and superstitions in human history, I find vampires forever fascinating. They're just like us regular people except they drink our blood to live forever. Everything else about them is subject to interpretation; vampires can represent the decaying aristocracy of the old world or serve as minions of Hell. They can hail from literally any terrestrial nation or even from outer space if necessary.  Their strengths, their weaknesses, their appearance, and their customs all serve the whims of the author.

One vampire serves as the ultimate example of his species: Count Dracula. Like rank and file bloodsuckers, Dracula may take on many forms, but by value of name recognition he always gets top billing in any story. Thanks to the rights of public domain, no one owns the concept of vampires or even Dracula himself, meaning they can appear in literally any film, novel, video game, or commercial. To writers around the world, I ask you: Are you including Dracula in your next story? If not, why not? It costs you nothing.

The Count's status as a global icon—who also happens to have no brand manager—has allowed him to become a recurring character across all forms of media. Of particular relevance to these pages, Konami has employed Dracula as the primary antagonist of the Castlevania series since 1986, almost 100 years after Bram Stoker's original novel first made him a household name. Even as a child who preferred Saturday morning cartoons to gothic horror, I immediately recognized Dracula as a threat the moment I saw his face looming over his castle on the front of the NES cartridge.

Despite an abundance of supporting characters to draw from in the source material, Konami preferred to invent their own family of vampire hunters—the Belmonts—to pit against Dracula over and over again as the games progressed. Yet 30 years ago, when the series first appeared on Sega hardware, the company opted to combine their own canon and Stoker's. The resulting title, known as Castlevania: Bloodlines in the United States, remains an outlier of the franchise to this day.

The initial moments of Castlevania: Bloodlines play out like many earlier games in the series, as film perforations scroll along the edges of the screen to invoke the imagery of classic cinema in the viewer's imagination. We learn the year is 1917, making this the first Castlevania to take place during the 20th century. We also meet the antagonist, a woman named Elizabeth Bartley who wishes to resurrect Count Dracula—a similar motive to that of Shaft from 1993's Rondo of Blood.

Things change when Bloodlines introduces a pair of protagonists, John Morris and Eric Lecarde. One wields a whip and one wields a spear but neither man carries the name Belmont. Prior to this, every Castlevania game had focused on a heroic Belmont either slaying Dracula or working to prevent his return. Bloodlines circumvents this by suggesting John Morris descended from the Belmont family, hence his ability to use their famed Vampire Killer whip. The game also identifies Lecarde's weapon of choice as the Alcarde Spear—a misspelling of Alucard, Dracula's son as seen in Castlevania III.

Even before beginning our adventure, Bloodlines wants us to realize these new characters have a history to them. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Lucy has three young men courting her, including one Quincey Morris from Texas. Even though he dies unwed while fighting the Count, Bloodlines asserts he had a son named John.

Elizabeth Bartley, on the other hand, is described in the game's manual as Dracula's niece, a woman executed 300 years earlier for murder. Her backstory closely resembles that of Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a real person accused of torturing and killing scores of young women in the early 1600s. Since her death preceded Bram Stoker's birth by two centuries, Báthory had already inspired dramatizations of her crimes long before Stoker created his famous vampire, though no tangible link exists between her story and the Dracula novel.

Once players embark on their journey to extinguish the forces of darkness, they may choose to send John or Eric into the fray. John lashes the Vampire Killer just like his ancestors did, though he can also use it to grapple ceilings and swing himself back and forth. Eric's spear doesn't have the same flexibility, but he can perform a super jump by squatting for a second before leaping straight into the air. I don't know if I find either man easier to control than the other, although John's whip skills certainly make him the more agile of the two.

Castlevania: Bloodlines also includes sub-weapons for players to find, though there are only three options this time around. The axe arcs upwards, the boomerang flies straight out before looping back around, and holy water breaks on the ground to create flames that burn evil. In a twist, each sub-weapon has a special attack that costs more ammunition but also covers more of the screen, a toned-down version of Richter's item crashes from Rondo of Blood. Each hero also has a super attack that only unlocks when they collect three weapon augmentations; they deal extra damage in this state but taking any hits strips them of this power.

The events of Bloodlines take place across Europe, though it opens in the familiar ruins of Dracula's castle. This initial area compresses all the classic Castlevania locations into a single stage, with zombies prowling the corridors, fishmen leaping out of the watery depths, and a long staircase leading up to the master's chamber. Having the first stage mirror the look of past games fits the narrative of John and Eric seeking to stop Bartley's quest before it starts, only for them to arrive and find Dracula's remains missing and a different boss waiting in his former lair.

Each subsequent level of Bloodlines visits a different city with unique architecture, another departure from series norms. Greece features crumbling columns and a tide that rises and lowers throughout. Italy sends players up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Germany's munition factory includes helmet-clad skeletons tossing bones and bombs. France's famed Versailles Palace offers ornate hallways and overflowing fountains. Sega's 16-bit hardware might not match the power of the Super Nintendo, but the artists at Konami make the most out of every color and sprite they can fit on the screen.

Bloodlines plays well and looks great, but we really need to talk about its superlative soundtrack. Composer Michiru Yamane makes her series debut here and just knocks it out of the park, sonically speaking. She already had a couple of shipped titles under her belt since joining Konami in the late 80s, but when she heard she had to create music for a Castlevania game, she knew she had to step up.

In a 2016 interview Yamane said, "I was told to listen to the music from the previous games and the instruction I got was to follow the theme and not to break from this when composing the music." She added that other staffers would approach her and offer advice, but they also urged her to bring her A-game. Yamane said, "I didn’t feel less pressure from getting such comments, haha!"

Those of you listening to the audio version of this column already know what I'm talking about, but if anyone reading my words hasn't heard the Bloodlines soundtrack, don't deprive yourself of the privilege any longer. Yamane welcomes players to her first Castlevania with "Reincarnated Soul," an uptempo tune with a lively beat that kicks off the adventure with style. Things slow down a bit in "The Sinking Old Sanctuary," a stage soaked with water, before getting downright spooky with "The Discolored Wall" for the perilous climb up a teetering tower.

Yamane pumps up the jams again with "Iron Blue Intention," a jaunty, rocking tune that fits the industrial German stage perfectly. "The Prayer of a Tragic Queen" changes gears entirely, invoking classical themes for John and Eric's tour of Versailles Palace. For the sixth and final stage, set in Castle Proserpina in England, the music turns triumphant, raising players' spirits for the final confrontation with Elizabeth Bartley and—spoilers—Dracula himself. Yes, even though Bartley dies, Bloodlines doesn't end until players fight her famous uncle, which makes the ending message "The resurrection of Dracula has been averted" a bit perplexing, because it sure looks like he came back to our world long enough to raise hell one more time.

When Castlevania: Bloodlines launched worldwide in March of 1994, critics received the game well but it arrived rather late in the life cycle of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. New hardware would debut by year's end as the company would shift its attention towards the next generation of consoles. Compared to other Castlevania games of this era such as Super Castlevania IV or Rondo of Blood, Bloodlines left little lasting impression. By 1994, I had sold my Genesis for a Super Nintendo and while I remember seeing magazine coverage of Bloodlines, the tiny screenshots did not pique my curiosity.

Unlike their Belmont predecessors, John Morris and Eric Lecarde slipped into obscurity. The two were nowhere to be found in the next decade of Castlevania games as the series devoted multiple outings to Richter Belmont, Julius Belmont, and even Simon Belmont, the hero who started it all in 1986. John and Eric did resurface as supporting characters in Portrait of Ruin, a 2006 Nintendo DS release celebrating Castlevania's then-20th anniversary.

Around that same time, Konami saw fit to bring many titles in the series back to market via Virtual Console and retro re-releases, but never included Bloodlines in those plans. Even Rondo of Blood, a Japanese PC Engine exclusive, eventually made it to the US Wii Shopping Channel in its original, untranslated form. I remember this because the sudden appearance of a game I always wanted to play shocked me, while the absence of a game I never got around to slipped right past me. Jeremy Parish noticed, and wrote a piece for Polygon in 2018 lamenting Konami's dereliction of duty in denying players access to such a noteworthy title

Thankfully, Konami eventually saw the light and released an entire package of classic Dracula-hunting games in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection and this time, the company remembered to throw Bloodlines into the mix. The game also appeared on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive mini console in 2019. After 25 years of silence, fans new and old alike had their chance to enjoy a largely forgotten chapter of Dracula's history.

Having replayed Bloodlines for this, its 30th anniversary, I find it remarkably accessible and demanding at the same time. The game offers multiple difficulty settings and allows players to select the number of extra lives you get at the start. There's no timer counting down to force players to rush into danger either, rewarding a cautious approach in the game's more complicated stages. Things get very challenging in later areas though, particularly the final castle which turns into a gauntlet of boss fights with no health refills. Should Dracula prevail in the game's climax, players do respawn right outside his door, albeit with limited power-ups.

Today, Konami seems content to never create any more Castlevania games, but as noted in my introduction, no one owns the rights to vampires, Count Dracula, or any characters from Bram Stoker's famous novel. If you're a developer making a kick-ass action game, you're just as qualified as anybody to make Bloodlines Returns. Send Elizabeth Báthory—a deceased person who cannot sue you for defamation—to South America to revive Dracula, make the heroes June Morris and Erica Krystal, and the rest is entirely up to you. Oh, but one last suggestion: Go ahead and make June and Erica girlfriends because if there's anything the internet likes more than vampires, it's lesbians.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.