Why Is Dracula Weak Against Whips?
You all know who Dracula is. I’m talking about the vampire character, now, not the historical Wallachian voivode the vampire is based on. What are Dracula’s weaknesses? Everyone knows that he could be killed only by sunlight or by a wooden stake through the heart, and weakened by garlic as well as crosses and other holy items.
Except that’s not really true; in the Stoker novel, Dracula was stabbed to death with ordinary weapons. But PUTTING THAT TO ONE SIDE…
In Castlevania, for some reason, it was decided to make Dracula vulnerable to attacks from a whip. Later on it was retconned into the Vampire Killer, a mystical artifact with magical or blessed properties that gave it a particular power to harm vampires and other evil creatures. But the whip’s status as a unique weapon did not always seem to be the case; some of the pickups in Castlevania 1 were newer, better whips!
I think that the secret to Dracula’s whip weakness is the secret to gaming itself, as a medium. No, really. What is a game, anyway? A miserable little pile of secrets! No, wait. Sigh.
Ask some game designers (two come to mind – not naming any names but they rhyme with Camerican NcGee and Bennifer Ryanne Lights) and they will tell you that gaming is a storytelling medium – like books or television. The game exists to tell a story, and you the player are a character and active participant in that story. The game serves the story it tells, in other words.
But is it possible that games have merit in their own right – much like music? Music can tell a story, sure, but unlike, say, prose – which has to tell a story or at least explain something in order to make much sense – the story is completely optional. Music can be enjoyed in its own right. And it’s the same with games. Take a game like Tetris. Does Tetris have a story, per se? Sure it has goals – move and rotate the pieces so as to fill the width of the space they fall into – but is there a narrative there that captures some ineffable quality of the human condition and resonates within us? I don’t think so. Does that make Tetris less of a great game? Hell, no!
So if games don’t need story, why put story in games? The primary answer is to give context to the game’s goals. The goals being the arbitrary conditions you have to meet in order to win or at least advance. Notice I said arbitrary. There’s no intrinsic meaning to eating up the dots in the Pac-Man maze or claiming more than 75% of the board in Qix. These are just things you do to win the game. But with the addition of a story they become more meaningful. Reaching the end of Super Mario Bros. from a game perspective means simply that there’s no more levels to play. But rescuing Princess Peach gives context to the goal of clearing the last level, and makes it seem more worthwhile to the player. It makes the game more fun and playable. It gives us something we want to see, a reward to look forward to. In the days when Super Mario Bros. was new, there were no Let’s Plays, and no internet to even look up screen shots on. And Princess Peach’s portrait in the manual was replaced by a question mark. The chance to even see her provided motivation for the player to keep playing.
So here we have a situation where the story serves the game. The story is background material; it exists to give weight and meaning to the game’s goals, so that the player can make them his goals.
Okay, so, back to Castlevania. The whip is one of the most classic examples of giving priority to the game and crafting a story that serves the game, but at a smaller scale. Think about it: What’s the end goal of Castlevania? Kill Dracula. How do you do that? Well, er… The standard answer – a stake through the heart – probably wouldn’t generalize too well as a game mechanic. How would that be implemented? Would they give Simon a stake gun like Doctor Von Goosewing from Count Duckula? Maybe they could give him a sword or something?
Neither of these possibilities would suit the game’s tone, however. Castlevania had horror as a theme; and while this meant ripping monsters (including Drac himself) from time-worn horror movies, it also meant creating a profound sense of danger for the game’s main character, Simon Belmont. Simon moves slowly and his controls are a bit naff overall; for instance there is no jump aftertouch as in Mario so when he jumps he’s committed to whatever trajectory he started when he was on the ground. To make things worse, this character finds himself in a hostile environment mobbed by fast-moving enemies. The limitations of the NES meant that the game developers couldn’t rely on jump scares like Resident Evil or a looming sense of dread like Silent Hill, so they made the game punishingly challenging and put the character in a situation where he was constantly under threat, where bashing his way through as one might do in a beat-em-up was simply not an option. In Castlevania, you had to be mindful of your surroundings and think through how you approached enemies and when you hit them. Some really great horror games of the present day, like The Last of Us, follow these same principles. Minding your surroundings and planning each attack is critical in that game, just as it is in Castlevania.
To this end they gave Simon a weapon that needed some wind-up time, to discourage button mashing – but compensated for it with reach. Perhaps borrowing a cue from the Indiana Jones movies, that ended up being a whip. Each stroke of the whip has a split-second delay, leading to intentional control jank: you can’t hit an enemy when they’re right in front of you. You have to plan your hits ahead of time. But the flip side of that is the whip’s long reach, giving you the opportunity to hit enemies well ahead of when they actually get to you, and removing some of the need for precise timing while still compensating for that split-second delay.
The other good news is that the enemies move in a fashion that’s quite predictable (with some exceptions, freaking hunchbacks) so if you are careful and wise, overcoming them is possible.
So there you have it. Dracula is weak against whips because it serves the game for him to be weak against whips. The whip serves as your primary weapon throughout the rest of the game; given the severe limitations in controls, why would you not use it (or one of the game’s limited-use “sub-weapons”) against Dracula himself? This is one of the truly wonderful things about gaming: the developers of video games just didn’t give a shit about story or coherence with an established mythos if the game was better served by breaking tradition. These sorts of details – a vampire-slaying whip, an overalls-wearing plumber rescuing a mushroom princess – made early video games fuel for boundless imagination. And it’s all because some salaryman at a Japanese game company needed a story excuse for a fun mechanic.
One question lingers on my mind however: What would a game be like if it had Castlevania-like mechanics but wasn’t as well thought out as Castlevania? No, I’m not going to talk about Simon’s Quest. You can see the AVGN or Egoraptor videos about that one. I’m going to talk about Faxanadu.
Faxanadu was a brilliant but uneven side-scrolling open-world adventure. You could visit towns and shops, equip different weapons and armor, collect loot from slain enemies and rack up experience points. But it had a number of problems with the mechanics which made the game frustrating, and the frustrating bits overlapped significantly with the bits that made Castlevania so great. There was no jump aftertouch, so you were married to your jump arc as soon as you jumped. Using a weapon had a slight wind-up time which you had to compensate for. But Faxanadu wasn’t built around these shortcomings like Castlevania was: most of the weapons don’t have the reach that Simon’s whip has, meaning you have to let enemies get right up close to your face before you can hit them with a normal attack. And enemy movements are unpredictable and all over the place, so you’re bound to get hit when you least expect it. Some enemies like the little brown spiky things, you can’t hit at all with a weapon from the ground, at least not in the early stages of the game. So if you encounter one you have to jump over it or burn magic on a spell. But with no jump aftertouch, not only is it difficult to alter your trajectory in the air, it’s difficult to even leave the ground with the precision necessary to not get hit! This becomes a huge pain in the ass with the platforming sections, where you have to clear a gap to get across.
Contrast this with, say, Zelda II. Link has a modest jump (without the JUMP spell) but it still has the precision and aftertouch of, say, a Mario jump, allowing for limited platforming as well as a way to dodge low-to-the-ground enemies/attacks. The sword controls were responsive; sword strikes occurred just as soon as you pressed the button. But it was still challenging, often brutally so (Ironknuckles, argh!).
Hell, contrast it with a relatively recent Castlevania game, like Symphony of the Night. Not only are the jumping controls more platformy, but SotN mostly did away with the whip and its unique controls, giving Alucard a variety of swords, daggers, etc. to use instead. Many of these required you to get into an enemy’s face to hit them, but critically, Alucard has a move to compensate for this as well: the backdash. You don’t have to commit to attacking close-in in a manner that leaves you vulnerable; you can simply cancel the attack into a backdash and put some distance between yourself and the enemy. There’s also a tradeoff between the size and heft of a weapon (hence its windup time) and the damage it does, making choosing a weapon require deeper consideration than simply “what has the highest DMG?”.
So that’s another rant about Castlevania – one of the most specific game experiences of the early NES days or any days, really. An experience so critical to the enjoyment of the game, that they went balls out and changed the Dracula lore to accommodate it.
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