Srsly I wish I could retcon your birth rugal.
OH TIME REVERSE!
@DoctaMario You should try the original Rondo of Blood for the PC-Engine, holy shit that game is sick.
Also you get them SotN feels paired with good old fashioned Castlevania frustration.
Game has aged really well in my opinion.
Edit: The more I play these old platformers, the more I realize the target audience were actually adults and not little kids. I cope so much better with these games now both in terms of not wanting to throw the controller at the wall and also at finishing them in a timely fashion.
Shit took me weeks as a kid now with 33 I blast through them in a couple of hours.
@ArtVandelayâ
dude. @DoctaMarioâ is like the biggest Rondo fan in here.
Wow, you are actually right about the stage being called âBloodlines.â I never noticed the colon after âFinal Stage.â I remember someone on the Dungeon saying that it was called Bloodlines because a CV game hadnât been released in the US SINCE Bloodlines. I learned something new.
I still marked you Off Topic for your LoS comment. You know youâll secretly be playing it in a year or so, quit being so coy. 
You are correct sir! 
I beat Lords of Shadow 1. I have the stupid collectorâs edition thinking it would be a good Castlevania game. God DAMN I was wrong about that.
I played the Mirror of Fat demo for about 5 minutes then deleted it from my 3DS.
Never touched nor will ever touch Lords of Shadow 2.
i remember bloodlines seemingly being impossible as a kid and then watching a speedrun 
I got lords of shadow but it is a GoW clone and didnt beat it yet. Castlevanie is meant to be 2d imo, i think thats why sotn is still so hailed
Having played through LoS1 2.5 times by now I find it a worthy addition to CV.
It is the best of the 3D games. It is ambitious in trying to reboot the whole story. In LoS1 the story is very satisfying. By LoS2 the world is just as convoluted as the IGA games ended, though, which sets the overall arc back.
I do like the LoS take on Dracula himself. Easily the most self-righteously justified version. Classic Drac ends up being emo in his reasons for his war on God. In LoS, God pretty much fucks Drac over and Drac is in a contest with Satan. He fits in with neither heaven nor hell. Very satisfying for the character.
Very much like the âSaint of All Killersâ from the Preacher comics, he is a third âwildcardâ force. It just feels like a better place for the character to tell stories from.
I wish there were more games in between with better ideas than Mirror of Fate.
It cracks me up that you shelled out for the Collectorâs Edition and you hate it so much. xD
But youâre right about LoS2. Iâm on the fence about playing it again or not. The modern day parts are boring for the most part and there are a lot of them.
You shut your whore mouth.
Bloodlines is a pretty tough game though, definitely harder than Castlevania IV for sure.
Every Castlevania is harder than Super Castlevania.
Good game, but the 8 directional Whip is like the FPS aiming and tranqs in MGS TTS. They didnât give the enemies any real way to deal with it so you sorta powered through shit.
My favorite 3D Castlevania is Loi but like many others i feel itâs a very incomplete game. There were a lot of rumors at the time that it was rushed due to budget etc and they actually released a 60% done product to get it to market. I wish we had seen what i could have been as a complete entity.
Hell i even like Curse of Darkness as a spin off similar to where i put Portrait of Ruin and Bloodlines. All fun but not exactly following the main focus of the Belmont clan.
LoS was really enjoyable, MoF was as well even if it also felt like a rushed product that could have been twice as long and a whole lot harder.
LoS2 while not a bad game, really places a beating on it being a âCastlevaniaâ game due to the great liberties taken with the cast more than the story.
I donât mind a retelling, but iâve never been a fan of retconning something just because, i realize the shitty hand held games really fucked the storyline up a ton but thatâs an easy fix.
Ignore them all as non cannon.
Iâm listening to the LoI OST right now. MAN some amazing pieces on this one! Yamane didnât always get it right but when she didâŚwhew!
I think part of the problem with a lot of the latter day pre-LoS releases was that theyâd pad out the levels to make the game SEEM longer. Everyone gets their panties in a wad over overall playtime, like if itâs anything less than 20 hours, the game isnât worth it, which it bullshit to me. CoD was a prime example. THat game would have been fantastic if theyâd have cut about 50% of each level out. As it is, the game has a lot of branching paths that go to the same place, the same setpieces over and over again, but at itâs core, itâs actually a pretty great game. Itâs just boring after awhile because youâre taking the LOOOOOOOOONNNNNGGGGGG way around and seeing the same stuff over and over.
I might have to do another MoF run. I only went through it once, but it was a pretty cool little title.
Iâm still on the fence about LoS2. The good parts were really good, but the bad parts were just awful. I donât know if I want to deal with that again.
I gotta say, I really like when Yamane mixes orchestral and electronic music like she did in Anti-Soul Mystery lab in LoIâs OST and Rainbow Cemetery in the SoTN soundtrack. Some of the best pieces sheâs written combine those elements IMO.
I had âFog Enshrouded Nightscapeâ on this morning and thatâs another favorite too. The movement in that harp-type part and the chord changes underneath itâŚ
At first I was like âYay PSP emulation is great now I can play SotN as Maria.â then I played a bit and realized PSP emulation is garbage.
Sticking with the PC Engine version of Rondo of Blood for now and gonna blow the dust of my PSX for SotN.
Fuck it.
Wish theyâd bring out an ultimate SotN-version in HD and shit, restoring and redesigning the Saturn levels for SotN and including the PC Engine version of Rondo of Blood.
I still donât get why Rondo wasnât ported properly till 2007. WTF? I mean itâs like the best 2D classic Castlevania ever made.
Edit: Also the redesigned levels in the Rondo remake piss me off hard at times. The flying eyeballs behave differently and they made the upper path in normal stage 4 retarded. Fucking armor knight atop a stair and shit. God-awful redesign, I enjoyed that part a lot in the original, in the remake I hate it.
Also they removed the penis from werewolf.
Oh and if I had 1 thing to criticize about the original Rondo, itâs the sound effects. Damn stuff sounds so bad when it dies.
Not all soundeffects are bad, but most.
Also can anyone confirm my suspicion that the death scream of Richter in Rondo of Blood, later got recycled for Metal Gear Solid? I swear sounds like Snake when he dies.
For some reason the PPSSPP emu on my iPhone emulates SoTN perfectly, and it did pretty well on the PC version too, but they broke it somewhere along the way. I still have my PSP, my PSX copy of SoTN, and my phone so between those three Iâm set. But thereâs a rumor going around that theyâre planning on porting SoTN to the PC at some point in the near future, soâŚ
The Rondo remake is arguably easier than the original. And they didnât really redesign much. The levels follow the same path, they just look different. And which armor knight are you talking about? The Bible is really the way to go in DXC, it hits multiple times sometimes, clears a path around you and there isnât anything that Iâm aware of thatâs immune to it. Stage 4 is one of my least favorite levels overall, but they made it really beautiful in DXC, so I can stomach it more there.
Konami recycled a lot of sound effects. Other companies do it too, I think Capcomâs used some of the same sound effects from Final Fight in Street Fighter games and such. Thereâs something about that era that Rondo came out in. Something about the graphics and sound effects really appeals to me. I loved the way that Nosferatu game on the SNES looked, I just wish it was a better game.
Was watching the AVGN Super Castlevania 4 video part II. I look at the comment section, andâŚ
Relentless.
Rugal owns LoS though. He actually admitted to it! I couldnât believe it!
My comment has a nice amount of likes.
Lords of Shadow is pretty bad as a Castlevania game, though.
And the music is TERRIBLE AND BORING.
#BRINGBACKYAMANE