How to kill vampires and influence people.

Our ''How Can I Play It?'series lays out the best options for legitimately and legally playing the classic games we cover here at Retronauts, ideally on current platforms.

Yep, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night debuted in America 20 years ago. After I posted yesterday's piece about some of my experiences and memories of the game, several people asked for recommendations on how to play it on current systems. So, I've put together a list not only of the various ways you can play Symphony, but also its direct predecessor (predecessors?): Rondo of Blood and Dracula X. We live in dark times, but it's not all bad when these classics are so easy to come by for a reasonable price.

Castlevania: Dracula X was developed for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. While the plot is similar to Rondo of Blood and it uses many of that game's graphics, it features a different art style, redesigned levels, and altered gameplay elements (such as having only two alternate levels and Maria as a non-playable character). It was released on July 21, 1995 in Japan, in September 1995. Les comparto este juego inyectado y editado en formato WAD para Nintendo Wii, hablo de Castlevania: Rondo of Blood juego lanzado solo en Japon y conocido en esos territorios como Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo, es un videojuego de la saga Castlevania y siendo uno de los mejores el cual fue lanzado para la PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 con el sistema Super CD-ROM², respecto a este juego estilo.

The Nintendo Wii, also known simply as Wii, is a Nintendo console released in Winter 2006, competing with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. It has the particularity to detect movements thanks to the Wiimote, its wireless controller. The only Castlevania game released for the Nintendo Wii on disc format is the fighting game Castlevania Judgment. A reimagining of the first Game Boy. Castlevania: Simon's Destiny is a standalone non-profit GZDOOM based fan game born as a love letter to this legendary franchise. This mod aims to reinvent the very first NES title of the franchise with a nostalgic yet brand new first person gameplay.

Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

The 'lost' Castlevania. This version of the game took nearly 15 years to make its way to the U.S. Konami published it exclusively on the PC Engine CD-ROM^2, the Japanese equivalent of the Turbo CD. Since Konami never localized a single one of its PC Engine games for the west, it languished in Japan.

PC Engine CD-ROM^2

These days, the original import game disc will run you $150 on the low end, and the hardware that supports it sell for $300-500, easy. If you want the premium classic experience, it'll cost ya.

PSP/Vita/PlayStation TV: The Dracula X Chronicles

A far more economic option exists in the form of The Dracula X Chronicles, a PSP remake of Rondo of Blood that adds 2.5D graphics, new secrets, new bosses, and new story events. In addition to the new version, the original Rondo appears here as an unlockable item. The emulation on the unlockable isn't the best in the world, but for the price it's hard to complain. The Dracula X Chronicles's physical UMD version works on PSP only, while the digital version also runs on Vita. Finally, you can supposedly run this version on PlayStation TV by working around Sony's built-in restrictions.

Wii: Virtual Console

The best price and best-quality reproduction of Rondo can be found on Wii, though. For a measly 900 Wii points — that's nine bucks — you can own a great recreation of the game. It also works in Wii U's backward compatibility mode. The downside? This version of Rondowill no longer be available for purchase after January 2019. Caveat: Due to Nintendo's requirement that Virtual Console titles remain unadulterated from their original releases, this version contains Japanese text only.

Castlevania: Dracula X

Since Konami didn't muck around with localizing PC Engine games, America saw this take on Dracula X instead. Not quite a sequel, not quite a remake — it was called 'Dracula XX' in Japan — this Super NES game contains many of the elements seen in Rondo but completely rearranges them. It also drops things like the alternate stage routes, hidden endings, and voice-acted anime cut scenes. On the other hand, it's ludicrously difficult. So that's… something?

Super NES

A bare cartridge of Dracula X costs nearly as much as Rondo of Blood now. The collector's bubble is stupid. Don't pay $150 for this game. Especially when…

Wii U: Virtual Console

…you can get it on Wii U. Although this release was something of a disappointment when it showed up in 2014 (pretty much everyone saw the press release and thought it was about Rondo of Blood), given the high cost of the original game it's nice to be able to pick up a digital release for eight bucks.

New 3DS/New 2DS: Virtual Console

The 3DS Virtual Console also offers the Super NES Dracula X rather than Rondo. I'd recommend the Wii U version if you want the ability to play on a television, whereas this version is more portable and offers a slightly richer set of emulation features. (Both cost the same: $7.99.) As with all Super NES Virtual Console titles, these only work on New 3DS and New 2DS.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Unlike the Super NES game, this is definitely a sequel to Rondo of Blood. (Just ignore the fact that the U.S. prologue text tries to pawn it off as a sequel to Bloodlines for Genesis, which was set about 100 years after this game.) It's an all-time gaming classic, rich in detail and nearly as influential on metroidvania game design as Super Metroid. You need to own it.

PlayStation

Surprise, the PlayStation original has become hilariously expensive, regularly selling for $100 or more. You might be able to find a discount on the Greatest Hits reissue, since some people are real weenies about that green 'Greatest Hits' band Sony put on the cover of its budget reissues. If you're going to spend a ton of cash on this, though, I recommend the import version. Sure, you'll need to be able to play and read Japanese to appreciate it, but the Japanese release included a bonus soundtrack CD and a book full of original artwork and manga by illustrator Ayami Kojima.

SEGA Saturn

For novelty, consider hunting down a copy of the Japan-only Saturn remake of Symphony. It has a lot of issues, but it also contains some cool extras: Two new areas (including a completed version of the area the developers had intended to put beneath the first screen of the castle, which terminated in a dead-end shaft on PlayStation), new music, and a bonus mode to allow you to take on the castle with Maria Renard's combination of kung-fu and summoned monsters.

Castlevania Rondo Of Blood Wii Rom Download

Xbox 360/Xbox One

Backbone Entertainment put together a digital-only remake of Symphony of Xbox 360, including Achievements. Not only that, but the 360 version later showed up on the Konami Classics Vol. 1 retail disc. Both versions of the game play on Xbox One under backward compatibility mode. It's not a perfect remake, but it's the only way to play Symphony on a current-generation console.

PSP/PS3/Vita/PlayStation TV: PS1 Classics

Probably the best remake of the game, Konami released the PS1 version of Symphony of the Night as a PlayStation classics title for PlayStation 3 and PSP. While it won't run on PlayStation 4, it does work on Vita and PlayStation TV. (Which I guess arguably counts as a current-generation console, if you want to be all 'well, actually' about it.) Sony's PS1 Classics emulation is top-notch, so this is a nearly perfect way to revisit the game. Highly recommended — and it's cheap, too!

PSP/Vita/PlayStation TV: The Dracula X Chronicles

Finally, Symphony also appeared as an unlockable in The Dracula X Chronicles. The emulation on this version is good, but it's not quite on par with the PS1 Classics version. On the other hand, this version of Symphony includes a new English localization that lacks the schlocky awfulness of the original release (though it sounds incredibly stilted, which might be as bad). It also lets you play as Maria, though strangely her play mechanics are completely different than in the Saturn version.

Images courtesy of VG Museum

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I sometimes forget that I only became as good as I am at videogames because of the formative butt-kickings of my youth. Nowadays, I can blaze through most standard-length platformers in a single sitting—my blind playthrough of Mega Pony is proof enough of that—but every once in a while, I’ll be reminded of what it took to get this far. Such was the case with Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which started as a lazy Monday evening conquest and ended a full two weeks later.

On the surface, Rondo (I’ll call it Rondo, rather than RoB, to avoid confusion with Dracula’s other curse) is your typical classic-style (read: nothing like Metroid) Castlevania game. As Richter Belmont, descendant of whichever Belmont it was who passed down his hereditary robot legs, you’ll take on a resurrected Dracula and his army of monsters—gargoyles, bats, ghosts, golems, harpies, a minotaur, a sea serpent, even Death himself—who are terrorizing the populace out of contractual obligation. There is a castle. There might even be a vania somewhere. It’s hard to tell when the game is inconsiderate enough to speak a language not everyone on the planet can understand. The game’s not really named Castlevania: Rondo of Blood; that’s just what we call it in parts of the world where we can’t pronounce Akumajou Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (literally, “The Mojo of Dracula 10: Rondo of Chi”).

Evidently, this town buries its dead without pants.

The story is told primarily through Japanese voice-acted cutscenes, with a little bit of German thrown in (no doubt to cater to the “I want to feel doubly alienated by only speaking English and Spanish” crowd). Even without having a clue what anyone is saying, it’s obvious that Richter’s quest also includes rescuing a little girl, a nurse, a nun, and his girlfriend picking up chicks, as far as I can tell. There’s also a kindly ferryman who speaks in Japanese text, so I guess I have no basis for determining he’s kindly. Fortunately, the words “GAME OVER” are written in English, so the part of the story where you’re an utter failure will be clear enough.

Rondo is tough as nails in a coffin, but it is surprisingly fair: our less-than-nimble hero suffers from what I like to call “Richter mortis,” but quick reflexes aren’t the focus of the gameplay. The game is all about pattern recognition and good timing, with a dash of creative problem-solving—it’s a puzzle game that plays out like a platformer. Can’t move quickly enough to dodge projectiles? Try knocking them out of the air with your whip. Keep getting hit by an enemy with long reach? Try smacking them once and retreating instead of trying to take them down before they strike. There are no cheap deaths or impossible challenges, just a lack of practice and experimentation. Well, aside from in Stage 5′, which looks like one of the developers let their kid play with the level editor without telling them there were more challenges available than “long, boring hallway with the same enemy over and over” and “randomly generated enemies knock you into a hole every time you jump”.

More like Rondo of Blub.

Without realizing I had a wide array of moves and attacks at my fingertips, I started off playing the game as a moron. Mash buttons until it dies! Don’t avoid attacks until you see them coming! It shouldn’t have come as a shock that I had multiple playing sessions where I didn’t clear a single stage—I was so hung up on what Richter couldn’t do that I had a hard time working a strategy around what he could do. As soon as I started looking things up and understood the full scope of his strengths and limitations, the challenge became figuring out how best to approach each situation, instead of figuring out why Richter was so dumb.

So you’ve got your standard-issue 300-something-year-old whip, which your ancestors used to obviously not kill Dracula well enough. With a little bit of finesse when you strike, you can double-tap the control pad to extend the reach of your Drac-thwapper. Whipping candles and suspicious-looking walls will reveal everything from money (which can be used on the menu screen to purchase hint videos) to life-replenishing food (eating meat that’s sitting in the wall of a dank castle is obviously good for your health) to bright red hearts and the versatile sub-weapons they power. It’s the usual assortment of Castlevania armaments—a boomerang cross, a high-arcing axe, flammable gag-gift holy water that is a riot at baptisms, and so on—but unlike previous entries in the series, you’ve got a few moments’ grace period to recover your old sub-weapon after picking up that stupid stopwatch by accident a new one.

Richter is about to be fired, while the wyvern will soon be getting the axe. Castlevania: Portrait of Unemployment.

Sub-weapons consume a modest number of hearts with every use, but you can expend a…um…what’s the opposite of modest? A promiscuous number of hearts to execute an Item Crush attack. Richter unleashes a deluge of daggers, a barrier of Bibles, or a flagellation of flames, depending on what he’s got equipped, and these powerful attacks are great fun to watch. Rounding out his move set are a backflip, a duck (the crouching kind of duck; attacking with an animal would be silly), the option to hop up stairs or intentionally Gerald Ford his way off them, a moonwalk to keep him in attack position as he retreats from enemies like a smooth criminal, and a mild midair course correction that might make him the first Belmont in history to jump like a normal videogame character. Richter is an exemplar of archaic gameplay refined to its limit—anything more, and you lose that classic Castlevania feel; anything less, and you remember why you hate playing classic Castlevania.

Cross my heart and hope to…make everything else die?

Despite my aversion to patience and strategy as requirements for basic survival in a platformer, I soon embraced Richter’s style of gameplay, in large part because the level design makes it work brilliantly. Rondo features some of the most thoughtfully and deliberately crafted stages I’ve ever seen in a Castlevania game—and yes, I’ve played enough of them for that statement to mean anything.

There’s at least one good opportunity to use all of Richter’s moves and powers, including the stupid stopwatch. There’s a superb learning curve that starts you off fighting cannon-fodder recruits in otherwise child-safe locations, graduates you to basic platforming with slightly stronger and trickier enemies, and culminates in challenges such as an entire stage that’s nothing but boss battles, a race across a crumbling bridge with flying enemies constantly at your back, and a really long staircase that’s completely uneventful but looks terribly exhausting to climb. Checkpoints are well-placed, as are the various items you can get from whipping walls and candles—search hard enough, and you’ll almost always find enough health or the right kind of firepower to give you a fair shot at getting to the next checkpoint alive. The types and combinations of enemies and geographical features are diverse and appropriately challenging, too. Stage 5′ notwithstanding, the developers knew how to make kicking my butt an art.

Richter prepares for a whuppin’. Probably his own.

The gameplay alone would be enough to win me over, but Rondo also delivers a triple whammy of visual spectacle, audio bliss, and well-executed nostalgia. Throwbacks abound: familiar foes, locations, and musical themes return from previous games in the series, often with a neat twist to help keep them fresher than the rotting corpses they could so easily be. I appreciate the level of detail and quality in the graphics, the clarity of the voices, and the richness and texture of the soundtrack. Admittedly, most of the cutscenes look like they were drawn in MS Paint (albeit by someone with skill), but all the character sprites and backgrounds and animations are quite pretty, or at least as pretty as torture chambers and ghastly hands reaching out of the ground can be. The music is decidedly more ’90s pop/rock than creepy Gothic, but the energy of it makes the game fun, so my descent into insanity after a few weeks of being unable to get these tunes out of my head has been most enjoyable.

Welcome back to that town whose name you can’t remember from the game you want to forget. (Unless you like Castlevania II, in which case…yay Aljiba! … Which looks more like Jova.)

Further enhancing the experience is a satisfying amount of replay value, which I would’ve entirely missed if the menu screen hadn’t shown my completion status as far less than 100% after beating the game, left a blank spot for something on my options list, and had a picture of the one girl I rescued standing on a platform big enough for two or three other people. Rondo has secret rooms and multiple paths scattered throughout almost every stage, and some of the alternate routes lead to alternate bosses and alternate stages (hence Stage 5 and Stage 5′, with the apostrophe that looks like a typo). Fortunately, there’s a stage select option that allows completionists to easily go back and poke around for everything they missed; unfortunately, the only way to return to the menu screen to check your progress is to play through to the end or get a Game Over. Incidentally, you have infinite continues, but the game keeps track of how many times you use one; along with an end-of-stage point bonus if you take no damage, the perfectionist has just as many ways to measure their success as the completionist.

The women you can rescue are locked away in some of the aforementioned secret rooms, but the littlest of them all—Maria Renard—gives even the non-completionist a legitimate reason to save her (and no, it’s not some made-up reason like “altruism”). Not only does she give you a short cutscene like the others, but she joins you as a playable character. That’s right: a 12-year-old girl slaying zombies and succubi by…throwing cats at them. Her frilly pink dress hides the bloodstains well.

Looks like you brought a spear to a catfight, my friend.

Maria utterly demolishes the seriousness of the game, pecking her enemies to death with boomerang attack doves, recovering heath with ice cream and birthday cake instead of wall-turkey, and utilizing dragons, turtles, and the joy of music as sub-weapons. Her unique arsenal is just as good as Richter’s, if not better, and a secret move that unleashes her “darker side” can trim boss battles from minutes down to seconds. Due to the apparent squishiness of pre-adolescent vampire huntresses, she takes more damage than Richter does, but her agility more than makes up for this deficiency: faster movement, a double-jump, and a Mega Man-worthy slide give her significant advantages over Richter and her enemies alike. In the event these strengths still aren’t enough for you to prevail against the Lord of Shadow and his infernal minions, Maria departs this world with “GAME OVER” displayed in cutesy bubble letters and surrounded by happy flowers. It’s worth playing through once as Richter for the challenge and the atmosphere, but Maria is so incongruously ridiculous and powerful that I almost don’t want to play the game any other way.

Castlevania Rondo Of Blood Wiiware Wad Set

Congratulations! It’s a vampire slayer!

Castlevania Rondo Of Blood Wiiware Wad Walkthrough

If there’s anything holding the game back, it’s mostly a matter of personal preference. Well, aside from a few minor ways the otherwise flawlessly reliable controls could be streamlined, a handful of spots where a challenge continues to drag on after you’ve necessarily mastered it to get that far, and a few areas that are suspicious to the point where the game almost feels incomplete without…whatever was clearly supposed to be there. Everything else is a matter of personal preference, except for the one about exiting stages that’s also legitimate criticism but fits better in the next paragraph.

As alluded to before, I’m not a patient gamer when it comes to platformers; Maria can rush into most situations and improvise her way out, but Richter often needs to have a well-choreographed routine before standing any chance of survival, and that routine tends to involve some amount of waiting for things to happen. I’m generally not so keen on the undead, the occult, or anything traditionally horror-related in my entertainment—I realize that’s like saying Wizards & Warriors isn’t as good a game as it could’ve been because it has wizards and warriors, but there you have it. As a completionist, it’s a little annoying to have a stage select feature and a built-in way to track my progress to 100% but not the option to easily exit stages where I’ve already found all the secrets. As a gaijin (literally, “some word non-Japanese people use to describe themselves”), it’s hard for me to appreciate the story because of the language barrier, and that makes the datedness of the visuals in the cutscenes that much harder to ignore. Replace me with a Japanese-speaking diehard Castlevania fan, and suddenly this is one of the best games of its kind.

Toppling this entire tower with a dragon is a highlight, to be sure.

And, really, it is. Smart level design, fair challenges, an excellent learning curve, awesomely catchy music, generally good graphics with great animations, responsive controls, two unique playable characters with fun and varied abilities, a significant but manageable amount of replay value, just the right amount of nostalgia, a built-in optional hint system; heck, there’s even a partridge in a pear tree, or at least the opportunity to send an attack partridge into a pair of trees. Practically everything about the original Japanese PC Engine version is preserved in the Wii Virtual Console version; about the only notable differences are that the original German voiceover for the intro has been replaced with a more ominous German voiceover, and the werewolf boss’s post-transformation nudity has been censored by way of replacing his manhood with a big circle of nothing. I think the German dude got the better end of the deal.

Castlevania Rondo Of Blood Wii Wad

Maybe you’re into Castlevania; maybe you’ve tried other games in the series (perhaps Dracula X, Rondo‘s oft-derided SNES port that might as well be a different game entirely?) and hated them. I’ll give you the same conclusion either way: Castlevania: Rondo of Blood is a triumph both as a platformer and a sequel, and it comes highly recommended to anyone—fan of the series or not—who could use a good butt-kicking.