Beat 3 old-school Castlevania titles in a week.

First one I beat was Castlevania IV for SNES. It started out fun, wasn't bad, but near the end some of the more frustrating cheap shot kind of stuff started happening, and sort of soured it for me. But the mechanics were good, I liked the controls and the ability to attack in any direction.

Castlevania Bloodlines for Sega Genesis was okay. I didn't like it as much as Castlevania IV as it seemed to take a step back from IV on the controls, still being tied to a trajectory when you jump, and limited whipping directions. I also thought fighting robotic monsters near the end was kind of lame.

And I just finished Castlevania 2 for NES. A disclaimer, I did apply one ROM hack to it, and that is the ROM hack that does a better English translation and also eliminates the day/night messages so the transition is seamless without even missing a step. With that, and a simple guide (even back in the 80s and 90s people were buying magazines and strategy guides, so it's fair game :D) I rather enjoyed this title, more so than the other two because it tried to be more than just another platformer. I guess this was the first of the "Metroidvania" style Castlevania titles. But overall it's been my favorite so far, and one of my favorite games for the NES, which says a lot because there's not a heck of a lot of NES games I think all too fondly of.

I have been playing through SOTN, it's not bad either, but being stuck in the same castle with the same scenery the entire game just got boring for me.

Oh, and no save states or rewinds were used in the process of completing these games.

Castlevania II had some VERY good ideas, only marred by the atrocious translation and slow text crawl. I imagine Japanese players are more fond of it than we are. In either case, you did good using a fan translation.

SOTN's a nice enough game, but yeah, it can drag a bit if you're more used to the diverse environments of the traditional Castlevania games.

Just wait till you get to Castlevania I and III, those are some infuriating games. You might wanna go with the Japanese version of the third game (Akumajo Densetsu) with the Vice Translations English patch. The US version of III was made artificially harder to make it difficult to beat on a rental. Hell, play them both and feel the difference!

I think I may try a fan translation of 3 then. Honestly, early American gaming consoles like the NES, SNES, and Genesis were guilty of a lot of things that would straight up piss me off. A lot of it was arcade ports designed to steal quarters and as such, be virtually impossible to beat, and others couldn't understand the difference between challenging, and unfair. As you said, trying to make the game hard to beat on a rental may be a reason for that, but whatever the reason was, dick levels of unfairness designed to sell a game or steal quarters was a cancer to third and fourth gen consoles.

I think there's a reason Mario, and Sonic which were designed to be enjoyable first and foremost are rated so much higher than just about anything else. They were designed to sell consoles.

So I looked into Castlevania 3 and the changes they made and why. Disappointing that we got the version that we did because it seems like the game was not only made harder, but in doing so some of the layouts of stages and why certain enemies were placed where they were really throws off the flow of the game. I've been playing the patched Japanese version and Grant is so much more fun to play as he was originally intended.

Yep, just about. Same thing happened with Dynamite Headdy, IIRC. Either that one or Ristar, I forget which... But yeah, obnoxious difficulty was one thing I'm glad to see gone from gaming nowadays.

3rd and 4th gen consoles were such a mess. Sure, I look back on them with nostalgia, and there are a lot of legitimately good titles that are fun to play. But there's just so much crap. Too many arcade ports that were intentionally made nearly impossible to beat in order to eat quarters and earn money. Some games made intentionally hard to punish rentals. Some were made intentionally nearly impossible to beat as a means of adding replayability value to what is otherwise very light on actual content. Then of course you get games that are straight up broken, and in a desperate need for a patch that they just couldn't do back then. Like Castlevania II. Absolutely a fantastic game, once fixed. Unplayable with the default translation.