Castlevania has changed a lot since its days on NES and SNES but whenever you talk about classic Castlevania with people the common opinion is that Super Castlevania 4 is the easiest in the series.
There are a lot of features in Super Castlevania 4 that basically all the other ones didn't have, including other SNES Castlevania games like Dracula X. These included an 8 way whip, the ability to crouch walk and a sub weapon mapped to it's own key rather than being up+whip. This made managing the games many challenges a lot easier to deal with compared to earlier games however what gets my back up is that people talk about Super Castlevania 4 as if its an easy game.
Despite all the advantages you get in this game compared to others there's still plenty of bullshit that will make you want to tear your hair out. For example any stage that scrolls up will have the bottom of the screen instantly kill you if you fall down rather than just scrolling back down to where you came from. This is especially annoying in some stages with tight platforming or a cheeky enemy that will smack you into a bit because you let your guard down for a second. However that's not the worst of it because once you get to stage 8 in this game things start to get really bullshit. One hit kill spikes fucking EVERYWHERE are the big offender and I do mean absolutely everywhere. Then there's the clock tower which has the aforementioned death drops but only this time with TONS of enemies that could potentially knock you into them. Then you get to stage A and there's fucking stairs that fall from underneath you that will sometimes not allow you get a proper footing on them and if you make it through that there's random floating platforms that will carry you up into more spikes if you are unlucky and aren't given another one to jump to.
This becomes all twice as hard if you're trying to speed run because not only do you have to worry about these traps but also things like health management so you can damage boost off basically everything to save time and making sure that you always have a triple shot cross.
If you really think Super Castlevania 4 is an easy game go and replay it right now, I think you'll be in for a little bit of a shock. Still though its a great game so it doesn't matter if you breeze through it or die an absolute shit ton, you'll have fun with it. If you've not played it before then what the fuck are you doing? Go play it right now
