I played Castlevania: The Adventure on and off for a couple of weeks before finally finishing it today. Normally, I'd have driven at it harder and maybe beaten it faster, but most of my focus has been elsewhere in life lately. Also, this is a pretty hard game, so it wasn't bad to slowly take my time with it instead of making a mission out of the experience.

First things first: is this game as bad as so many people say? Of course not. On average, I'm not sure most gamers have played all that many games during their lives, and most of those games they do play will be highly acclaimed mainstream titles. Something like Castlevania: The Adventure will probably seem radioactive to those who have, knowingly or otherwise, been eating caviar and filet mignon the vast majority of their lives. It's a decently cooked hamburger with ordinary toppings and a surprisingly good seasoning (i.e. the soundtrack), but it's a cheaper beef and was made quickly because we're getting it on the go.

My early impressions still hold true. This is a microcosm of the original NES Castlevania experience, shrunken down and simplified for portability on the Game Boy. The game moves slowly and has some performance issues when too many objects are on screen which can sometimes affect play negatively. Attacks and jumps sometimes won't immediately come out on command, that kind of thing. Such is the challenge of being one of the first Game Boy games, when your programmers are still learning the platform. Some of the slowness feels intentional, though, since the original Castlevania isn't exactly a fast-paced game to begin with. There's also the accommodations made for the Game Boy's LCD screen, which had a kind of "ghosting" effect to its visuals when sprites were in motion. I wouldn't be surprised if the dev team kept the game speed a bit lower out of concern that the graphics would become too blurry during movement and screen scrolling on the LCD.

Some of the main popular complaints are that there are no sub-weapons, hitboxes suck, and jumping sucks. This game doesn't have the typical Castlevania sub-weapons, but it does have its own power-up system that the challenge is built around. Your whip has three levels of power: leather, chain, and chain with the ability to shoot fireballs from the end. Whenever you take damage in this game you lose a little health and also drop down one level of whip power. The game is considerably easier when you have a full-powered whip, so that's your incentive to play well, learn the levels, and figure out where secrets and power-up orbs are.

The hitboxes don't suck across the board. There's pretty much one enemy in the game with real hitbox issues and it's the ricocheting orb projectiles that the dinosaur head enemies spit out. The orbs have a hitbox that's noticeably larger than the actual sprite, so you will definitely get hit sometimes when it seems like they should be missing you. The orbs also have a somewhat random movement behavior because you won't know in most cases whether the orb will launch out with an upward or downward angle until it emerges. In a game where your character is naturally slower and needs to commit fully to their jumps and attacks, you can't always dodge or intercept the orbs with your whip. It's annoying, especially since the dinosaur heads and their orbs are plentiful in the final stage of the game.

Jumping doesn't suck so much as it's just very unforgiving. Most platformers give players a character with a fairly wide jumping arc, but Christopher Belmont has a narrow arc. You really need to be careful with positioning before making a jump when you're dealing with death pits because the developers want precision from you. It's not a mistake, they know what they're doing because platforming is about half of the game's challenge. In the back half of the game they really pressure you with moving walls of spikes, platforms that fall once you stand on them, etc.

Both Christopher's jump and the platforming hazards are consistent, though. No randomness, you just have to keep trying until you feel out the positioning (the first level goes out of its way to make you practice a bunch of precise jumping in a pretty safe way, too). The game has infinite continues, levels aren't that long (this is a Game Boy game, after all), and checkpoints exist, too. Some video games want to give players a lot of freedom for self-expression through gameplay and multiple ways to succeed. Others, like this one, want to funnel players toward learning and mastering a few specific skills that they are being tested on throughout the experience. Castlevania: The Adventure requires patience and methodical execution of its platforming and combat, simple as they are in presentation.

Performance drawbacks and a notable hitbox frustration are universal flaws, but the upgrading whip system replacing sub-weapons and the precision jumping complaints point toward a different implicit criticism: this is a hard game. In my experience, most people don't like challenging games and are quick to call them bad because they get pissed off by them. It's always easier to like something that is itself easy to engage with, and correspondingly easier to dislike something that makes you put in more effort. Castlevania: The Adventure is definitely a hard game. Being challenging isn't a flaw in and of itself, it just means the game's targeted appeal is focused on overcoming adversity. Many people aren't interested in doing that in video games. Many others are, though. I happened to get drawn in by this game partly because of the challenge here, and because I realized that the game itself wasn't bad like so many others have argued. I'd say this game actually pushes toward the above-average range, but it's held back from being a full on good game by the performance and hitbox issues.

The soundtrack is really well done and easily the strongest part of the game. I also dig the effort to create original bosses and enemies that I don't recognize from any Castlevanias prior to this one. There's a lot of thoughtfulness to this game's design. It's a slowed down (relative to other Castlevanias and 2D platformers) gauntlet of enemies and environmental obstacles that you're meant to learn the rhythm and choreography for through repeated attempts. Very standard 2D platformer stuff and philosophically in line with the other classic Castlevanias of the era. It's just not as polished, pretty, or in-depth as the others because it's a humble Game Boy game from 1989. It's still well made and not bad at all for a first portable Castlevania attempt.