What’s In a Jump?

Castlevania, first released in the US by Konami in 1987, wasn’t quite the massive cultural phenomenon that Mario was, but it was still another successful NES hit, and a genuine classic. The original Castlevania games are all great in their own way (yes even part two), but while they were more action based (whipping enemies, etc.), than Mario games were, they also still asked the player to do a fair deal of platform jumping. And that’s where we hit a snag.

As great, and wonderful, and classic as Castlevania is, with its fantastic monsters, and ambient level designs, and catchy soundtrack, the one thing that the game honestly did NOT pull off very well, was its jumping mechanics. Simply put, it’s slow, it’s awkward, it’s clunky, and cumbersome. It feels like Simon Belmont (the main character) weighs a ton, and your level of side-scrolling depth perception has to be FAR sharper than it would be for a Mario game. That isn’t to say that Castlevania sucks, nor that Mario is easy. Take it from a kid who cut his teeth dying in the later worlds and (literally) crying about it at a young age, SMB1 is no joke. It has some cut-throat platforming that it asks you to pull off at times, and you really have to get GOOD at it to beat the game.

And those same things can be said, to some extent, for Castlevania, except for this: the game wasn’t made for jumping. Mario was obviously crafted around the concept of running and jumping, so the developers put a lot of time into making those parts of the gameplay work super smoothly, which they did. With Castlevania, on the other hand, one could argue that the main gameplay mechanic is using your whip (or secondary weapons) to defeat monsters. And while jumping does factor heavily into some levels (especially that goddamn Clock Tower), it’s fairly obvious that the developers simply did not put as much time into making that work well. Or, it’s also entirely possible, that they were sick, sadistic bastards, and COULD have made the jumping work better, but left it clunky on purpose to up the challenge level.

The thing is, that second option might have a bit of validity, because come Castlevania 2 and 3, the jumping didn’t really get any better. Hell, it didn’t even get MUCH better in my favorite entry in the classic series, Super Castlevania IV on Super Nintendo. They didn’t get around to really improving the platforming aspects of CV games until Symphony of the Night on the Sony Playstation, which released in 1997, and even then there were still points where it could be trying.

Don’t get me wrong, the jumping in the old CV games isn’t completely hopeless, as I’ve certainly experienced worse (which I’ll get into later). It’s just that if I were to rattle off a list of side-scrolling games where the platforming part of the gameplay was actually FUN to perform, I would not list Castlevania among them. Having said that, let’s move on to a game where the platforming is, in its own ways, arguably worse…

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