Got through
Master of Darkness, my other recent SMS grail. This game is 90% Castlevania, 9% From Hell, and 1% Ninja Gaiden. Nine out of ten experts can't distinguish a screencap of MoD and any classic Castlevania. The primary difference is the lead character: Dr. Ferdinand Social is no backwoods bare-legged Belmont, he's an English gentleman, a mystic, who only learns his country is beset by evil forces because his Ouija board gives him the clue. Oh, and there's also the matter of the exsanguinated bodies they keep finding.
Not content to sniff incense in his reading room, Social grabs his handy stabby dagger and heads to the Thames River in search of the culprit. His journey eventually takes him to a haunted wax museum, a cemetery overflowing with restless dead, the trap-filled castle of the mad Count Massen, a laboratory buried beneath an ancient forest, and finally, a dungeon in the depths of the Carpathian mountains, where Massen is revealed to be channeling the spirit of none other than Count Dracula.
Along the way, Social can stab thugs, bats, wolves, zombies, skeletons, cultists, animated wax sculptures, and Jack the Ripper, among other horrors. He can also stab
torches alabaster masks to find items better than his stabby knife, like a cane (the manual calls it a "stake"), a rapier, or an axe. He can also find limited-use subweapons including a silver bullet-shootin' gun, standard cartoon-style bombs, straight-up boomerangs, and stakes (the manual amusingly calls these "projectiles"). There's also point-giving stones, enemy-slaying gems, extra lives, and energy-refilling potions.
The game proceeds left to right in the standard Castlevania fashion, and Social even climbs stairs in the same way. Each stage has several sub-stages, between which Social gets a new life meter, and at the end, a boss which he must defeat.
If this were just another asleep-at-the-wheel Castlevania clone, it'd still be worth a look, but Master of Darkness feels less like a knock-off and more like a forgotten classic of Castlevania canon. Each level is tonally distinct - from the rolling waters of the Thames, to the poltergeist-beset halls of the wax museum, to the looping corridors of Dracula's castle. There's specific challenges unique to each set of levels, including a few that riff directly off of Castlevania (like a swinging pendulum as a platform), but others which feel fresh (like rooms where you must navigate a short platforming puzzle to stop infinitely respawning ghosts). There's lots of little hidden areas, and almost every screen has a minimum of two layers, with each providing different rewards and challenges.
The game is tough, of course, but there's plentiful life pickups and (I think) unlimited continues. I made it through the game in a couple hours worth of playtime, and I think I ate two credits on the way through. The ending bizarrely ties into Dracula, the novel, by off-handedly mentioning that none other than Jonathan Harker (never seen or heard from in any other part of the game) gave Social instructions on how to return to England, somehow, before he was teleported to Transylvania. Oh yeah, and there are fun little story vignettes between every stage...man, I could just go on and on.
It's a sweet morsel to sink your fangs into.
I realize that "SMS" stands for "Sega Master System" here, but I'm really kind of charmed by the idea of a side-scroller that you play by texting.
Surely,
surely, someone, somewhere, has programmed a game using SMS, or made a game where you have to text in your SMS to play it. Surely!