This Week In Retro (belated): Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge (Patreon)

July 12, 1991: Konami delivers unto Game Boy owners their New Messiah

by Diamond Feit

Subjectivity is a fact of life. We can discuss and analyze media all day and all night, but in the end, our opinions are just our personal feelings. There are games that I hate which have sold millions of copies. Does that mean I am "wrong"? Of course not, it's the masses who are misinformed.

I kid, I kid. My point is, the older I get, the more I come to terms with the inherent folly of quantifying quality. Everyone gets to enjoy what they choose to enjoy, and no amount of numerical scores or YouTube rants will alter that reality. It's a big reason why I dislike phrases like "guilty pleasure" because if I like it, why should I feel guilty about that? Shaolin Soccer is one of the greatest movies ever made and I am not ashamed to state that as fact.

This week, we are turning back the clock 30 years to visit a game I never played until just now. I don't have a good reason for that, because it's a sequel to a game I enjoyed a lot and played to completion many times over. I just never got around to playing any of its follow-ups, and I am learning that I made a huge mistake. It would appear I picked the wrong horse in the portable Castlevania catalog, for Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge is a much-improved version of the first Castlevania Game Boy game.

Konami had a Castlevania title ready for Nintendo's Game Boy within mere months of its 1989 launch, and my body was ready for it. Castlevania had been a hit on NES, and I adored Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, so the prospect of portable vampire hunting sold me right away. To this day I do not know if that first game is officially called Castlevania: The Adventure or The Castlevania Adventure, but the first few years of my Game Boy experience was spent steering Christopher Belmont through all four levels of Dracula's handheld lair and slaying the Count.

As a miniaturized incarnation of the already-popular series, Castlevania: The Adventure looks and sounds the part. Christopher has a whip, he destroys candles, kills monsters, and does it all while an excellent soundtrack plays in the background. The character sprites might be on the small side and the monochrome Game Boy cannot display any colors, but the action is proportional to the screen and the backgrounds impart genuine gloominess.

Aesthetically, Castlevania: The Adventure holds up beautifully, but not every element of the NES games survived the trip to players' pockets. Christopher cannot carry any sub-weapons, so he has no offensive options other than his whip. At full strength his whip can release a fireball for long-range damage, but should he take any hits, he loses that ability until he finds another power-up.

Unfortunately, Christopher will likely take a lot of hits because he moves with the speed and grace of a slug. Simon and Trevor Belmont were never the most agile heroes, but their games felt tailor-made to their movement limitations. Christopher must execute a series of precision jumps in Castlevania: The Adventure that he is ill-equipped to make, forcing players to time their button presses perfectly or watch Christopher fall to his doom.

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge is an improvement on its predecessor right from the start with the complete lack of ambiguity in its title: This is definitely the second Castlevania game on Game Boy and it stars a Belmont who wants revenge—for what, I could not say, since Christopher Belmont was the apparent victor in the first game. The instruction manual says Dracula has kidnapped Christopher's son Soliel, but wouldn't a hostage situation make this a "rescue" mission, not a "revenge" one?

Right off the bat (pun intended) I noticed that Belmont's Revenge looks similar to its predecessor but plays much faster. I suspect an additional two years of experience working with Nintendo's limited handheld technology gave Konami time to do their homework. The background layers are a bit less detailed than The Adventure, but the game is no less moody and it doesn't slam the brakes on the action as often, a sensible trade-off.

Belmont's Revenge retains the whip upgrade system from the last game but removes the downgrade penalty attached to taking damage. Better still, two classic Castlevania sub-weapons are added to Christopher's arsenal, allowing him to hit overhead enemies with an axe or light the ground aflame with holy water. Japanese Game Boy owners had access to the boomerang-like cross, but allegedly that was removed from the U.S. edition due to Nintendo of America's prudish content standards at the time. Where is the harm in depicting a man throwing a holy symbol at undead creatures and catching his sacred tool as it returns to him?

Belmont's Revenge expands on the first game in an unexpected yet welcome manner by offering players a choice of four castles to invade. While there are no perks for clearing out one castle over another (Christopher gains no new powers or defenses), this simple addition does add an illusionary sense of scale. Naturally, once all four initial castles are destroyed, a fifth castle appears belonging to the Count with more difficult challenges laid throughout.

Its expanded scale and scope makes Belmont's Revenge a more challenging game than the first handheld Castlevania, but since it runs better and Christopher can do more than he ever could before, it's actually a less frustrating game to play through despite the slight difficulty increase. There's even a welcome password system that allows players to continue their adventure even after powering off the system, a level of user-friendliness that I did not expect. Couple all this with a soundtrack that's just as exceptional as the last and recommending Belmont's Revenge over The Adventure is one of the easiest ranking decisions imaginable.

Playing a superior sequel to a game I've loved for 30 years was a pleasant surprise, and if you've never experienced Castlevania: The Adventure there's little reason to play it with Belmont's Revenge on the table. Both are included in the recent Castlevania Collection should you wish to compare and contrast the two games; there's no shame in using the save-state feature to help navigate either title.

Yet given that technology has advanced to the point that portable games no longer need to compromise graphics or sound to fit onto a smaller screen, we live in a reality where neither of these "handheld" Castlevania games compare favorably to their peers on the NES, and that aforementioned Castlevania Collection means that they are all equally portable now. A more cynical approach would be to dismiss all the monochromatic Castlevanias as "dated" in favor of just playing their bigger, better 8-bit cousins, but that's not how I approach video game recommendations.

Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge is a much better game than Castlevania: The Adventure, and the similarities between the two games makes it difficult to justify revisiting the lesser title. It's not easy for me to admit that, given how many decades I've felt such affection for The Adventure only to discover it was so thoroughly outclassed two years after its release. However, just as superior NES games do not invalidate Game Boy games, Belmont's Revenge does not erase Castlevania: The Adventure from existence or my precious memories. If you've never played either, try them: See for yourself how challenging it once was to convert popular video games to new platforms, and what changes had to be made. If nothing else, you'll get an earful of incredible chiptune after chiptune while Christopher Belmont shuffles from left to right.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch. These columns were disrupted by Diamond's recent vacation but xe's back home now; we thank you for your patience.