SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV - Study No. 6

Here it is: the last outdoor stage. At its end waits Dracula's castle. True to what may be expected by now by readers and players, SCV4's castle lead-up is dramatically downplayed. Another traditionally designed title such as Rondo of Blood might see the player trudging under the mantle of a thunder storm and engaging in mini-boxing matches with axe armors to the lively tune of "Vampire Killer"; but SCV4 erects minimal resistance and continues its gray-headed sort of (as an acquaintance observed) "Slough of Despond" theme with a fertile yet depressed setting, and an initial musical piece that subsists on tromping drums and unadorned, premonitory woodwind/brass melodies.

Stage 5 has you first ascend several tiers of paths, away from the ground level of a swamp. The first monsters you're bound to run into are a claw (a floating, disembodied arm premiering in stage 2 that latches onto Simon and drains his hearts), a couple of gargoyles zooming down from an upper corner, and several bone pillars -- all obstacles in the most basic sense. A blue trail lined on one side by spiny tufts of animated grass and, on the other, by muck-green accretions leads the way. Around the middle/upper-middle of the stage's height is a large stone wall with recesses holding red, pulsing lights, neither flames nor explicitly supernatural. SCV4 has sporadic issues in a couple of stages with enemies disappearing if you retreat from a spot and then return, and stage 5 is such a stage. For example, the bone pillar in the above screenshot might be absent depending on how your navigation controls the screen-space.

Making this weirder is that stage 5 is where harpies carrying fleamen (a reference to Castlevania's fourth stage, although the carriers there were large birds) make their first and only appearance, and have the possibility of appearing not at all (their emergence seems to depend on slow and/or halting player-movement). Curiously, the fleaman sprite in all versions of SCV4 was drawn to reflect the appearance -- that of a vampiric rabbit -- of fleamen in the Japanese version of CV3. You can defeat the harpies and, as SCV4 calls them, gremlins at once if you whip the harpies before their unloading.

At the upper level, the overall route flattens out and becomes several straight paths punctuated by pits and platforms, which are nicely still contextualized by being attached to wooden rods. Like the rest of the stage's design, the platforming is more of a formality than a reflexive challenge, even with the couple of gargoyles and bone pillars in your way. Golden-brown leaves adorning the screen's top reinforce the autumnal flavor that's been hovering about in other stages. The harpies/gremlins can still appear, but, as before, they can pretty reliably be avoided by not stalling. A few of stage 2's details -- the purple-trunked trees, grass, and strata -- reappear in the background.

The soundtrack does something interesting in block two: it plays the opening to the prologue's, in fact Dracula's, theme, and then hooks it into the minimal piece that plays at stage 1's intro, allowing that to play until the timer runs out. This is a clever narrative move -- the replay of a fragment of Dracula's theme signals impending entry into the castle, while the stage 1 motif marks this stage as a sort of new journey and suggests that Simon, as a force for good, ultimately will override Dracula.

Whip skeletons, among the now-familiar bats and a skeletal knight, are introduced here. They're behaviorally identical to the skeletal knights, except that their whip has a longer reach. Aside from the music, block 5-2's most noteworthy assets are its environmental details, beginning with artificial and natural masses of stone veiled by gray, twitching ivy with purple, glowing pods at its extremities. Thick roots trail down from above, alongside brick columns, as the path shifts to a staircase. There's an air of discomfort, even grotesquery, in these details' denseness that's complemented by the snippet of Dracula's theme.

A line of robed statues atop pedestals leads the way following the staircase's end and our arrival onto the entry lane, free of enemies. Simon treks under the portico's hood, upheld by bizarre columns, and we see that the entrance's huge, wooden door is open -- as much an invitation as a challenge.

Despite being fairly uninteresting to write about, and one of the least demanding places in the game, stage 5's mood and tonal development, contrary to the usual fare and defined on its own glum terms, make it a respectable part of the experience. It's one of SCV4's moments that especially needs to be played, with the context of prior stages, because it is so dependent on its atmosphere's invocations. The deliberate, motivic use of music and the nonviolent stage's end make as good of a case as anything else might in the game that SCV4's developers were striving for a special, subdued sort of drama, and one that is worthy of acclaim, despite the mechanical and hard-design mismanagement.