Welcome to Castlevania Legends.
We’ll play on Standard Mode; the only difference that Light Mode makes is that your whip is always at full power and you don’t need to collect crystals to upgrade it. I’m using save states to avoid dying, so I won’t have to re-upgrade my whip anyway.
Having an actual story, especially on screen, is still a step beyond The Adventure.
There’s also a map. (Hmm, I wonder what that unconnected bit is? Perhaps…the hidden stage!)
You might have noticed that we’ve taken a big step backward from Belmont’s Revenge already: The stages are back to being linear. The password system lightens that a bit, but how much of the game you’re able to see is once again gated by your skill and patience.
The whip selection hasn’t changed, though the Vampire Killer actually seems smaller in Sonia’s hands than in Christopher’s. Small whip, chain whip, then fireball whip. They only downgrade when you die, as previously noted.
Fireball ghosts float lazily toward you and die in one hit.
Bats are as standard.
You collect hearts, but it’s not clear up front what they’re for. (In the first stage, nothing.)
Slugs creep along the ceiling and drop on you. Fortunately, they aren’t so short that you can’t whip them while crouching, as their sprites would seem to suggest.
Fireball whip, for illustration.
The first area is “outside the castle,” aka the forest, and the backgrounds are…okay? Given some of the art the other games pulled off, this is disappointing. (This is going to be a common theme in my complaints.)
Shadows dance diagonally towards you. They also die in one hit.
I feel like the graphics are a downgrade, overall, from Belmont’s Revenge. Look at that mockery of a rope! (Not pictured: There’s a Wall Meat here to restore any health you lost on the first screen.)
For the record, Sonia can still whip while climbing, which is nice. She can also still slide down ropes, as the manual noted.
Zombies take two fireballs or one direct hit. They otherwise just march slowly towards you.
This is an early crossroads.
Go left first to snag a 1up.
The true path is down.
Here’s the front gate, but it’s again unimpressive compared to the earlier games.
The graveyard is a straight line full of shadows and candles with hearts.
This candle is an amazingly dickish trap: If you hit it, the floor collapses and you’re dropped into a trap room full of respawning zombies.
If you eventually kill enough of them without dying, you can hit a candle that warps you back to this screen. There is no benefit to doing this, and you’ll probably just get hit a lot or die.
More graveyard. Skeleton Pokers start appearing. They walk back and forth wiggling their spears out in front of them. They take two real hits to kill.
Eventually, you reach another crossroads: Again, let’s ignore the rope at first.
This leads to some actual platforming.
Note that Sonia can jump a few pixels higher than Christopher and can reach platforms that feel a little too high if you’re used to the past two games.
At the end of the corridor we find an Axe. But we can’t do anything with it, it’s just a collectable.
Then we need to backtrack all the way to the rope and go up.
Hey, that candle looks a little different again!
It’s another bleeping trap room.
So head up, and then another long straight line of forest studded with monsters.
Then the bridge is a mess, so we have some more light platforming.
And we reach this big gate, which looks like a boss arena.
Man-Bat ("Creatures Bat") mostly hovers on one side of the screen, letting you either jump and whip him or hit him with fireballs.
Sometimes he’ll flap very fast, indicating that he’s going to pounce on you, so you should move.
When he explodes, Sonia gets a rose-ball and a tornado appears in the subweapon box. We’ll talk about that next time.