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Born Twice, Die Once - Castlevania the Adventure: Rebirth By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Developing a game for the appropriate system is an essential, but sometimes overlooked component of making a good game. While real time strategy games such as Starcraft and Command and Conquer are very well designed, their console ports utterly fall apart to near unplayability due to the game being made with a mouse and keyboard in mind and not a standard gamepad. The same can be said about the GTA games on PSP that have been re-released for the Playstation 2. They’re great handheld games, but ultimately suffer from poor visuals and clunky controls when brought to the home console. Sadly, Konami’s most recent venture on Nintendo’s WiiWare suffers from the same fate. At its core, Castlevania the Adventure: Rebirth (Castlevania: Rebirth) is not a bad game. However, because Castlevania: Rebirth was released for the wrong system, a lot of the problems are amplified (with some showing up solely because the game’s been released on the wrong platform).
With its uninspired level design, heavily interpolated graphics, gaily inappropriate soundtrack, and lack of a suspend/save feature; Castlevania: Rebirth would have fared much better as DSiWare than WiiWare. If you can’t tell from the title, Castlevania the Adventure: Rebirth is a remake of the classic Gamboy game, Castlevania the Adventure. While Konami decided to change a lot of the in game aspects, such as: newly designed (yet near equally as stupid) levels, the addition of the Castlevania “sub-weapon” function and a total graphic and audio overhaul; the game still remains nearly as uninteresting as its Gameboy counterpart.
Stepping away from the Metroidvania style of other recent Castlevanias; Castlevania: Rebirth takes the series back to its more linear, arcade styled roots. You control Christopher Belmont, wielder of the infamous Vampire Killer whip which is handed down throughout his family because they apparently have no other marketable skills. As Christopher you’re to make your way through 6 levels filled with various environmental hazards and monsters, leading up to a fight against the dark lord, Dracula. Though game can essentially be beaten in a little under an hour, each of the levels has various paths and hidden routes that can add to the replayability. For a Castlevania game done in the classic style, the game is pretty lacking in difficulty. Though I can essentially get past the Medusa in Castlevania 1 with a single life, it took about 20 years of playing the game off and on to be able to do that. However, after playing Castlevania: Rebirth for only a couple sessions lasting less than an hour each, I was able to reach the mid-boss of level 4 using only 1-2 lives.
The lack of the save/suspend function also hurts the game in a way. Though I understand that it was omitted to give the game a more old school feel; it does make playthroughs somewhat frustrating when you know that you’ll have to devote about an hour playing the game to do anything that wouldn’t be considered just practice (then again this is also a contributing factor to me getting so good at the game so quickly). Had this been on DSiWare, I could have at least just closed my DS and left the game in sleep mode until I felt ready to play again. The graphics really suffer in this game. Not only is everything poorly designed, visual uninteresting or a recycled piece of pixel art, the graphics suffer from this strange blurry interpolation as if the game was made for a handheld system and expanded to fit the TV. Most of the graphics simply look stupid and a lot of the sprites seem totally out of place in this game due to their coloring. Some creatures have very poor contrast against the backgrounds (the mid-boss of stage one comes to mind here), while other stuff sharply stands out against the scenery like they were developed for a totally different game.
The music is also horrid in this game. Never have I heard more uninspired music from a Castlevania (which is surprising as the series is normally known for having great soundtracks). The music goes absolutely no where at times and when it is going somewhere, it still comes off as poorly composed and produced. The sound effects are also ridiculous and inappropriate. A lot of the folly sounds like it came straight from a Warner Bros. cartoon, where everything sounds very fake and exaggerated. From the laser gun sounds that the eyeballs make as they fall to the weird spring sounding “whoosh” the bone throwing skeletons make when they attack, the game’s sounds just simply don’t make sense at times. The way that the sound effect scheme was set, I would have honestly expected Belmont to make a cartoonish “boing” sound every time he jumped. I’m really mad that I got this game, when I could have just as well bought Zombies Ate My Neighbors, one of the SNES Star Wars games, or the Indiana Jones Trilogy for fewer points than this. I’m especially mad because I probably shouldn’t have even played this game, seeing as it should have ended up on the DSi and I don’t own/care to own one. While the game isn’t a bad game, it’s not a very good game either and no way near worth the $10 asking price. In a perfect world, I’d call all of us to rally together and boycott this game as a way to prove to Konami that they can’t just remake trash expecting us to lap it up like ice cream. However, I know many people out there stupidly love Castlevania so much that they’d buy an interactive novel called “Simon Takes a Shit” regardless of its perceived quality. So perhaps, we can make a point in some way and make this a low priority buy, especially since I really don’t think you’re going to be pleased with this game, fan of the series or not.
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