OK, cruise control out of the way, yeah, the second game as part of my Castlevania series was obviously, Castlevania 2: Simons Quest. This game is so bad it makes me want to cut off my own hands for having played it, it's a disaster of a game and was barely worth my time, but still, I couldn't say I did a proper go through of the series if I didn't play it.
Anyway, before I start talking about how awful this game is, lets go over some good things about this game, and surprisingly there are a few. First of all we have the day and night thing, which is surprisingly an awful thing and a good thing at the same time. See, it's a cool idea and it does a lot for building tension when your low HP and quite far from the nearest town to heal in, but it's so badly implemented it kind of just falls flat, but more on that later.
The other good thing is the soundtrack, most notably Bloody Tears. When ANYONE thinks of Castlevania, they think of that damn song and this is where it all began, as an overworld theme in the daytime segments of this shitty game
But unfortunately, that's about it for the good points behind this game, so time to dive headfirst into the shit. So yeah, back to that day and night shit. Sure, I said it's a cool concept, but the problem is that every time the game transitions between phases, EVERYTHING stops and you can't do shit for like a good 15 seconds. It's a pain in the ass and it really adds a lot of unneeded length to an already arse game.
Leading me onto my second point, GRINDING! Now I'm a bit of a glutton for the grind. I used to play the shit of World of Warcraft back in vanilla and Burning Crusade days and hell, I've even had my fair share of hours on those free Korean grindfests, but THIS is a pisstake. Basically you need hearts to buy important shit that you need to move on. However these hearts take fucking ages to get and the only thing you ever really want to do is walk back and forth between 2 sets of enemies hoping one of them drops a big heart so you don't have to grind as long. What's super double bullshit turbo is that if you die, you lose all your goddamn hearts, so you have to grind out those 4,000,000 skeletons AGAIN! fuck this game...
So when you do eventually get your shit together, you get to go questing in what is quite possibly the worst designed levels fucking ever. There are 4 mansions in this game, each housing a bit of dracula that you have to pick up. The first 2 don't even have a boss and you just have to fight your way through some easy mode skeletons and slimes or whatever. Then when you finally do hit a boss, it's so easy it may as well have not existed in the first place. But your worst enemy in this shitheap game, is the floor! Some of the blocks you just fall through and you either day or have to backtrack like 5 minutes to get to where you were, and by that point you're so angry you forget AGAIN and fall down AGAIN.
Writing about this game is actually giving me pretty much ever disease ever, so I'll wrap up with this last point, and that's the puzzles. Holy shit the puzzles. This is the most cryptic as shit game that you'll ever play, more cryptic than Z grade point and clickers from the 90's. Unless you have gamefaqs (which lol, you wouldn't have done if you played it new) or a copy of Nintendo Power (lol, enjoy spending more money, dickface) you were just fucked up the ass with a broomstick. There is NO WAY you would ever figure out from the hint "hit your head off the cliff" to go buy a red gem, and duck in front of it for 5 seconds, and that's just the most famous example. There is so cryptic shit in this game that it could take up a good 10+ entries on the "Thats some BULLSHIT" bit I'm doing.
So yeah, that's Castlevania 2, and if you're still interested after all that, here's one last thing to maybe put you off the game entirely. The final dungeon has no enemies or traps, and you can stunlock Dracula with fire until he dies.
Fuck this game, and fuck everyone associated with its development
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