Right from the start, Super Castlevania 4's opening sets up a division between itself and the last Castlevania to be released on a console, Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse. CV3 heralded its arrival with a prologue that, through text, detailed the game's scenario. This was accompanied by illustrations (one showing the protagonist, Trevor Belmont, standing atop a cliff, facing Dracula's castle) and a piece of music that stressed a grandeur previously unheard in the series' scores, moreso if a person were playing the Japanese version with its VRC6 chip. Scrolling spoke holes on either side of the screen framed all of this, augmenting the apparent cinematic aspirations and also recalling the horror movies that served as inspiration for the series. CV3 meant to make an immediate impact, and it wasted no time in surrounding itself with the fireworks of adrenalized spectacle.
By contrast, SCV4 opens by a shot that slowly pans up a wall of dead, thorny vines and irregular, corrugated bricks whose gaps house red-eyed spiders and across whose surface centipedes scurry. The music is an intermingling of two woodwinds and an upright bass; it's ominous, quiet, closer to jazz than anything else. Lightning flashes as the game's logo comes into view, and there's a glimpse of ascending bats' shadows upon the wall. Wait long enough, and the screen transitions to a tombstone in a cemetery. A new track (once again quiet) begins to play -- dismal bass tones clouded over by the low, dissonant chords of what I can only assume are strings. Day turns to night and, after a moment's pause, a lightning bolt pierces the tombstone, shattering it and releasing a glowing bat that flutters about, squeaking. This bat is Dracula, resurrected.
Following the bat's departure, a dense fog rolls onscreen, and wailing woodwinds bend into the music, supported by an organ's dry, sturdy pattern of notes. Although the track continues to build as setting-text scrolls up, it never abandons its type of restrained ominousness. This is portentous music that replaces the chunky adventurousness of CV3 with a sober, yet strange, realism. And there is no shot of our hero facing the castle on a cliff -- there is only a broken tombstone. Clearly, SCV4 retains a certain amount of cinematic aspirations, but what those aspirations are have changed dramatically from those of two years ago. In one way, however, this opening is exactly like CV3, because it sets the tone for the majority of the proceeding game. Players, upon starting CV3, witnessed Trevor praying before a radiating cross and, standing up, flinging his cape aside as lightning crashed and fanfare with a baroque flavor swelled; and were finally welcomed into the quest proper by this beast. And although the game had its slower parts, it averaged out at a crackling level of energy, due to its unrelenting challenge and bold, punchy visuals and music. You got what the prologue instituted.
In the case of SCV4, darkened natural and artificial masses stand against the small figure of Simon Belmont, complemented by an austere track that would be at home in the European renaissance. When control of Simon is granted, we find ourselves in a small "prepping" area (it is actually the path seen in the first screenshot below; Simon has just been set further back from the drawbridge) that repeats CV3's first block: several candles that hold small and large hearts, one that holds the first power-up for the whip, and another holding the knife subweapon; and the simple, isosceles-trapezoidal structure that introduces players to staircases. It is very worth mentioning here that SCV4 is the first Castlevania game to allow its avatar to adhere to stairs after a jump and to drop down from them. Before, to climb a staircase meant to be adhered to the structure until reaching its bottom or top, and this was a significant part of how the games built their challenges. What's more, Simon will now descend a staircase if it's at the edge of a surface and the player holds the relevant direction (left or right). This is another change from the mechanical standard wherein players had to hold down in the aforementioned context to not instantly fall into what might be an abyss. More will be said on these changes in follow-up articles.
It is hard to tell in the screenshot above that the reddish fleck to the left of the skull-like rock is a bat. It and another emerge from the "socket" and flap out of sight. The music has transitioned from the name entry tune to strings trading off two chords with a good deal of silence in between. We begin the quest among a suppressed moodiness, rather than an atmosphere of vigor. This will not be apparent until, probably, the second stage, but SCV4's representations of natural details and forms are often characterized by a peculiar rigidity. I only mention that now because hints of it can be detected in the (unusually, for the game) organic assemblage of rocks in the far background. Other things to be on the lookout for: conflicted palettes, muddling of layers' spatial
priority, haphazard detail, abrupt transitions, and
truncated distribution of tiles. Contrary
to what these features could suggest about appeal, let me clarify that there are few (if any) Super Nintendo games I enjoy looking at more than SCV4. As a very personal aside: the skeletal formations in the background and the adjacency of water have always, for me, endowed this place with the atmosphere of a pirate's cove.
Simon jumps upon the drawbridge, causing it to be raised. There is no return. Note that we are not yet within the castle. A landscape abandoned by humans, harboring monsters and deteriorating buildings, stands in our way.
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