30%PlayStation

looks lovely but way too cheaply difficult. had me missing SotN's breeze

60%PlayStation

Same issues as original, and coming from SotN was tough.

90%PlayStation 3

From Haunted Castle to Vampire Killer and Super Castlevania IV, there are so many alternate "first" Castlevania games that they can easily be mistaken for remakes by newcomers or casual fans. In most cases, they're merely retellings, and in the case of some, like Haunted Castle, they barely have anything to do with the rest of the series, let alone the first game. Amongst all these titles is Castlevania Chronicles, which is actually a port of a formerly Japan-exclusive game on the X68000 home computer, and the first actual remake of Castlevania. Featuring classic NES-style gameplay mechanics and revamped versions of levels from the original game alongside a slew of new ones, Chronicles is almost sure to please diehard fans of the NES entries.

Being a remake of the original title, you can hazard a pretty good guess as to what the plot is. Dracula has awakened from his century-long nap to wreak havoc and mayhem upon the land, and it's up to sprightly young member of the Belmont clan, Simon, to take him down. As I mentioned before, a few of the levels in this game are lifted almost directly from the original Castlevania, so you should be quite familiar with them if you've played the original before. There are only slight changes early on, but as you continue to stiffly strut your way towards the heart of Dracula's castle, you'll find that some of these levels have been tampered with almost sadistically. The set of stages before the battle with Death is already regarded as one of the most difficult parts of the original game, but playing through it in Chronicles is borderline masochistic. Despite my exaggerations, the difficulty is actually quite fair and manageable while still providing a challenge. Of course, by the standards of a more casual fan, it's still excruciating, but Castlevania fans will likely only find it a notch or two harder than what they're used to. There's also a welcome variety of new levels, some easy, some hard, naturally. None of them feel out-of-place or tonally inconsistent; I could easily imagine a few of them being included in the NES original with a few tweaks.

My only real complaint with the level design pertains solely to the last level in the game, the stages leading up to Dracula's lair. These stages employ one of my biggest level design pet peeves: pixel-perfect jumps, areas in a level where you have to carefully inch your character as far as they can make it off of a platform and then jumping in order to successfully reach the next platform. The game doesn't really give you any great visual cues as to how far Simon can stand off of an edge without falling. In many platformer games, you can stand on a ledge as long as you've got one foot on it, but here in Chronicles, Simon will be jettisoned to his doom before the tips of his toes even reach the end. You have to meticulously position him about halfway off of the platform, then jump. Thankfully, these amateurish design elements only show up two or three times in the game, and for at least one of those instances it isn't even a fatal mistake if you don't make the jump. However, it's still a bit of a blemish on a game with otherwise challenging yet fair levels.

I'm a bit rusty when it comes to Castlevania, but as far as I could tell, the controls certainly felt similar to the NES games. In any case, they were responsive and tight, as they should be. The game looks and sounds beautiful, as well. As per the norm, there are a few remixes of old favorites included, such as Bloody Tears and Theme of Simon, but a lot of the new songs are just as great as the classics. I have only played the Original mode so far, which is supposed to be a straight port of the original X68000 game, though I've heard there are a few subtle changes here and there. Either way, everybody I've seen talking about this game online says the Original mode is a fair bit harder. If you prefer a more easygoing Castlevania experience, the game also offers an allegedly more accessible and customizable Arrange mode, which features new sprites for Simon and Dracula, likely among other things. I don't know if the level layouts have been tweaked or if enemy behavior has been changed or anything like that, but I do plan to replay the game on Arrange mode sometime soon and find out. I would definitely recommend Original mode to fans of Castlevanias I and III, however. A lot of the moments in this game almost make you feel like you're playing Castlevania for the first time again... though I suppose it helps that I haven't played any Castlevania in months. Any way you slice it, Chronicles is definitely a solid entry in the series and a must-play for those who enjoy the classicvanias.

70%PlayStation

Arrange mode difficulty is decent, the original is awful. Arrange mode has cool techno music. The original music is great.Original mode difficutly is ridiculous.

80%Emulated

Game feel is somewhere between 1 & super 4.
First time the art direction has felt cohesive, but still has it's weird charm.
Everything from the Wolfman on was really cool. The haunted doll level, skeleton dragon, & ninja maids were all dope.
A lot of the bosses were pretty easy, but I could see in the end stretch how the original version of this has the reputation of being the hardest Castlevania.

80%PlayStation 3

The game itself has 2 modes: original mode and arranged mode, the arranged mode has different more "modern" music and is easier, mostly because the character moves faster. I played in original mode and while the 1st stages where kind of easy, soon the difficulty starts to get really punishing, this can be good or bad depending on the person. You can Save your file from the start of each stage which made things easier.

70%PlayStation

2001's Castlevania Chronicles is a gussied up port of a 1993 X68000 Castlevania game, which itself was a re-imagining of the original 1986 Castlevania. So if you're looking for oldschool Castlevania gameplay for your PS1, you'll find it right here. With pleasing graphics and an above average OST (especially in Arrange mode), Chronicles will satiate a classic gamer's senses. However the difficulty often ranges from irritating to infuriating, with overly long stages chock full of trolling enemy placement. As such, I can only recommend Castlevania Chronicles to devout fans of the franchise, as the backlash of this whip stings too often for its own good.

40%PlayStation

This game looks and plays like shit and isn't the original Castlevania. If you want to play something that still looks and plays like shit but was considered a classic for it's time, play the original.

60%PlayStation

Still Castlevania after all!

90%PlayStation

Very fun game. Looks great and plays great. The story doesn't seem to add anything worthwhile. This game gets really hard. The werewolf boss especially is very aggressive and unpredictable. I played Arrange mode on Hard, and it was pretty tough. I ran out of time on the level where you fight Death. You can do it with the herb subweapon.

50%PlayStation

I'm one of those folk that while I somewhat like the linear Castlevania titles like Dracula's Curse or Castlevania IV, I found that when the series went to semi-linear it only got better. This actually started with Simon's Quest, an overwhelmingly under-appreciated gem of a game and showed its power for Castlevania as a whole with Symphony of the Night. So playing Castlevania Chronicles feels very much like step backwards. It's kinda fun generally but like the linear ones it's brutally hard at times (although this is merely 'very hard', not 'I want to start punching holes in walls while screaming bloody murder' hard like, say, Dracula's Curse or the original). The music is cool and the updated graphics are good, although they're notably less smooth and nuanced than in Symphony of the Night, which goes to show you the central problem: Konami knew that this would be a minor footnote of a release, really for completion sake.

80%No Platform Specified

C'mon. Explain to me how I'm supposed to say a word against this game. It's freakin' Castlevania.

As such, fans of the series have probably long since bought this and played it to death, so I would like to speak here to those of you who know not of the Castlevanias of old. If you can't be bothered to do the truly right thing, purchase a stack of orphaned systems and play the four or five Castlevanias every self-respecting gamer ought to have enjoyed, grab Chronicles at its bargain price and find out what you were missing while you were still belting your kindergarten classmates upside the head. Hopefully my optimism holds true, and a good game is indeed eternal.