Castlevania Dracula X by Konami
Super Nintendo—September 1995
Words by Michael Crisman
couple of hours to finish until you get
really good at the game. And while Dracula X
uses the power of the SNES wisely, what is up
with that heart counter in the upper-right corner of
the screen, Konami? How about keeping it with
the rest of the life bars so we can keep track of all
the needed info in one place on the screen?
Winner: Dracula X. But only by a hair. Bloodlines
is a gorgeous-looking game with plenty going for it
in the graphics department, it's just hard to argue
with the SNES's expanded color palette, larger
monsters, and more robust animation.
Presentation: When it comes right down to it,
most Castlevanias are a retread of the same
formula: travel across a level from right-to-left (or
occasionally from left-to-right) whipping, stabbing,
frying and destroying everything your path. Both
games follow this 2D trend to the hilt, featuring
familiar areas as well as entirely new sequences
for your gaming pleasure, both games offer a
password feature to pick up where you left off, and
both are nice enough to even give you a
password after each successful stage completion
so you don't have to kill yourself to get one. And
both of them offer you a quest that will take you a
Bloodlines scores some major points for the awesomeness of its boss battles. As an example,
both games have an encounter with a
fire-breathing dog as their first major boss – in
Dracula X, you have the dog lunging at you,
jumping back after it takes a hit, and spitting a
fireball. In Bloodlines, you have a three-headed
Cerberus
monster
that
midway
through
the battle
howls
loudly
enough to
shatter
the
background windows in addition to all the
fire-spewing.
One game's clearly doing
something the other isn't.
The other place Bloodlines reigns supreme is level
design. Morris and Lecarde trek through some
extremely innovative places in their quest, including an overgrown Paris garden, the Leaning
Tower of Pisa, and a mirror room that wrecks
havoc with your perception in the game's final
level.
Winner: Bloodlines. While Dracula X's level
design is decent enough and follows the standard Castlevania formula to a T, Bloodlines
leapfrogs it with all the awesome things it
throws in on top of that formula: the swinging
blade in the torture chamber that destroys
enemies in addition to damaging you, crossing
a gap on the crumbling skeleton of a massive