Hot Leaf Juice

For starters, you play as Nathan Graves. Implied heavily to be a descendant of the Belmonts, he is given the Vampire Killer whip by his master, Morris Baldwin. They arrive to Camilla who just freshly revived Dracula and they kidnap Morris to take his life force to bring Dracula back to full power. There is also a rivalry with Morris' son Hugh but aside from a few cutscenes, it's mostly just Hugh trying to save his dad before Nathan and fucking up at some points culminating in a fight between the two. There is VERY unique parallels to SotN because Hugh is a sword wielder like Alucard primarily was and Nathan having the whip like Richter so it's like a reverse fight with the possessed Richter which was neat, I liked it. You even fought in nearly the same room.

Which brings me to my next point, the map! The map is different which thank god ;w; Makes me look forward to the next line of GBA and DS titles. Nathan gets items that will help progress more and more of the map, you thankfully get two crucial movement upgrades early where he can dash and double jump. Nathan moves deliberately slow like this previous Castlevania protagonists. He also attacks like them because you cannot move while using the whip so you really gotta know when to attack and commit

The gameplay is not just the standard Castlevania games as this game adds a card system called the Dual Set-Up System. Essentially there is two sets of 10 cards with the top row changing the ability of what the bottom row gives. For example, the Mercury effects the whip and selecting the salamander changes it to a flaming whip, using MP with each attack. It's a cool system but unfortunately the only way to acquire is by random drops from enemies which requires a good amount of grind and know how to know which enemy gives which card (The Advanced Collection which I played does give an encyclopedia so you know which enemies have it thankfully). The cards really offer an advantage to a pretty difficult game

This brings me to my next point: The difficulty. Holy shit this game was hard. From the first half it's actually pretty manageable. You will notice how hard it is but it doesn't feel that brutal. Until the midpoint and you fight a boss called the Zombie Dragons ;-;

This is BY FAR, the hardest boss I fought in any of the Castlevania games I played. It's not even mechanically hard but it is brutal how hard they hit and there is two of them. EACH have 1500 HP and I was like level 27 so dealing like 30 damage, 18 minimum with the axe. and when one dies, the living one will eat the dead one to gain back 300 HP. This fight KILLED me. It took at minimum 50 resets and I ended up using a save state after killing one of the heads and that still took like an additional 10 ;-; This is where the game kinda started to lose me because the jump in difficulty from the midpoint to the end is insane. I think they expected me to be a higher level, I was level 45-47 towards the end, but that would mean doubling my play time probably which. yeah no ;w;

One final honorable mention: The game has an optional Battle Arena dungeon which I don't know who hurt the devs but it's basically a challenge mode with 14 rooms, each with different enemies. and I believe they scale the enemies to your level because enemies that died with one hit in the castle take multiple. It removes your ability to use the card system so it is pure whip and sub-weapon gameplay. That's not bad but the fact enemies are scaled to your level and there's A LOT of them is so unreasonably difficult. I just wanted to get the game over with after that point ;w;

The artwork and music for the first GBA title is great it was a delight to look and hear and play. But again: Once that Zombie Dragon fight hit, it just took the wind out of my sails

7.8/10