SUPER CASTLEVANIA IV - Study No. 7

Replacing the map of the surrounding landscape is one of Dracula's castle, somewhat abstractly showing what the order of business will be, and accompanied by a turbulent keyboard (harpsichord or piano?) tune. Each large tile at the end of a path designates a boss, but the route in fact extends to the clocktower, bridge, and pinnacles to the upper right -- something that may have surprised a few players back when. Stage 6 is the classic entry halls, seen in the NES trilogy (albeit in a reduced form for CV2), most recognizable for their large gray columns and red tattered curtains. CV4 opts for discontinuing the pattern of having "Vampire Killer" play in this setting, and instead inserts an original courtly composition for organ and strings, bereft of any percussion or motor rhythms.

These entry halls retain a couple of the details from CV3's (block 8) -- sculptures of robed women set upon pedestals in arched recesses, and frame-like moldings with angled edges (not appearing until block 6-2). Returning, too, are the shuffling groups of zombies and bats, which now hang from upper walls and wait for Simon to get close enough before swooping down. A couple of zombie canines are also present, possibly as a stand-in for CV1's panthers. They'll crumple to the floor from a whip hit, but right themselves a few seconds later and continue running about. Simon's sprite here is taller relative to the surroundings than it is in CV1/3, but there is still a sense of scale gained from the retention of the columns whose capitals are obscured, making you wonder how far up they go.

The lower shot is from the Japanese version, and shows that the sculptures were partly nude before being made "decent" for the American/European versions. You can see differences between the HUDs, too: the Japanese version's text and numbers are darker and more dimensional. There are several other changes, like the game's logo, the Japanese version of which is shown crowning the map in this post's two first images. I prefer it to the English logo. The blood-dripping characters have a weapon-like malice, the purple-to-red color scheme is closer to evoking SCV4's weird palettes, and the castle silhouette is a sort of redundant touch, and funner for its excess than the plaque.

 

Axe Knights didn't show up until CV1's fifth and penultimate stage, and were rightfully treated as a higher level enemy for their resilience and ability to attack with projectile axes that could be thrown higher or lower, and returned, in magical-boomerang-like fashion, to their owners after a couple of seconds. Although they were still formidable in CV3, the Knights appeared earlier on in the adventure and in more than one stage, and their presence (not quantitatively) was somewhat lessened. One of these stages was the entry halls, and that's perhaps why the Knights are in SCV4's variant. They're certainly more interesting than most other carried-over enemies, just by virtue of intrinsically having more complexity than the typical Castlevania enemy, yet in many cases they're missing the particular challenges their patterns can bring. Simon can, as he could with the Bone Pillars, dangle the whip and nullify their axes; and, of course, he can attack from below structures. So, Axe Knights can't really function by themselves or even with architecture that, traditionally, might've been suited to the Knights' behavior -- to function, they need other enemies to come into the picture and complicate things. To the game's credit, it does attempt to do this with a smattering of platforms (atypically without supports) that limit ease of movement near the first two Knights and several adjacent bats. This would be a more exciting introduction if SCV4 had kept the classic steady stream of bats, fluttering in from either side of the screen, and not made them one-time threats.

Up a flight of steps, assumedly at the halls' upper limits, Simon needs to utilize massive swinging chandeliers and small (again unsupported) platforms to progress to the left, over a deadly drop. The void-like background hums between black and a dark red, and the candles' flames flicker and bend to match the chandeliers' swaying. Even if the hardest work to be done is some timed jumps to get across the chandeliers, it's a memorable section for its sparse but strange imagery and the way that this imagery introduces and augments the drama of the stage's spiny second theme.

On to a sort of grand hall, patrolled first of all by more Axe Knights, with shadowy aisles on the side for ghostly dining. Not for the first time do we see the game's love affair with purples and greens (for some reason, in this instance, I'm reminded of a few rooms from Aria of Sorrow's Castle Corridor). I'm fond of the columns' and walls' craggy, irregular textures; they're a neat contrast against the relatively elegant affects of the chandeliers, dining tables, candelabras, and the floor's trim stonework. You'll want to mind the chandeliers, since they fall when Simon is underneath them. This is an idea that would return for a segment of Bloodlines' fifth stage, the Palace of Versailles. One of the game's two most well hidden secrets is after the first two chandeliers, and I can't imagine anyone discovering it thanks to anything aside from sheer luck. To access it, you need to whip (no, none of the relics will do) a part of the floor that crumbles and reveals a staircase leading down.

Below we find a candle-lined chamber holding a bounty of items, including every relic and a potroast. What makes this spot exceptional is that it was used by the developers as an opportunity to flesh out the world, and is, as far as I can tell, the first example of a Castlevania game using one of its secrets to take some sort of narrative and atmospheric liberty. On top of having its own lengthy theme, by far the most lighthearted piece of the soundtrack, the room is patrolled by the ghosts of a man and his dog, which runs along the lower floor and weirdly rebounds off of its walls in arcing leaps. The only way to safely get to the bottom half is to attack the dog, since it hurts Simon -- but, once struck, the dog falls to the ground, prompting its owner to run to its side, kneel and sob with a hand to his face, and fade away. It's interesting to see the game attempt to foster a little empathic moment -- another case of an ostensibly kitschy action game deviating from expectations. Dawn of Sorrow brought the man and dog back as a persistent enemy called the Dead Mate in its Silenced Ruins area. This wasn't so memorable, aside from the novelty of seeing an obscurity resurrected.

If we're to return to the main path, Ectoplasms, flashing a variety of colors, intrude on the scene with "screensaver object" behavior -- bouncing off of the edges of the screen while adhering to a diagonal course -- and a group of reclining dead noblewomen take to the air, hovering about and homing in with surprising speed. Both of these enemies call upon the whip's new capabilities, or the axe subweapon, and their combined efforts make for a welcome and interestingly messy scuffle. I've always felt that the nobelwomen/men had a sort of unsettling appearance (as much as a sprite from a 90s videogame can be unsettling) for their lack of facial features, even if Simon is similarly lacking.

Messing up the quickness of your jumps in the first screenshot either means needing to repeat a part of the stage or death, since the spikes underlining the platforms are instant-killers. On the third floor, players are met with another nice moment of tension due to good, simple enemy placement: a skeleton advances towards Simon, right next to a pit of deadly spikes. Brave or Grave.

Right after, we have our first encounter with a possessed coffin. It stands upright and shudders, giving us reason to worry, but it can't be attacked -- not until it's passed by, at which point it will give chase at such a speed that turning around to retaliate is ill-advised, unless you're holding the cross subweapon and preemptively use its boomerang behavior to hit the coffin twice. This chase scene is very short, but it does make players contend with skeletons to get ahead unharmed. You'll notice that the screenshot is of the Japanese version; this is to show that the coffins have a cross symbol on their covers that was removed in the EU/USA versions. Konami's occidental division was apparently deathly afraid of any outrage from Christian denominations regarding imagery. But the game is so very full of potentially objectionable elements, such as promoting the lifestyle of skeletons, that the imagined battle could never have been won without revamping the game on a fundamental artistic level. The aforementioned mouldings from CV3's entry halls can also be seen here.

Red skeletons make their return in this hallway, felled by a snap of the whip but rising again soon after to resume their patrol. To avoid getting pincered by them and whip skeletons, you'll want to keep moving. Mostly I've included a screenshot of this section because I think it looks great, especially with those scrolled capitals, the gray wall's shading that bolsters the foreground arches' presence, and the recesses holding bony remains. The foreground is its own separately scrolling layer.

A thunderstorm can be seen illuminating the clouds outside windows on the fourth floor. This could be the strangest example of level design in the game. Ghoulish hands reach out of the wall, flexing their fingers, and each one is coupled with frozen, flickering skeletal knight. The idea here is that getting grabbed by the hands causes a knight to come to life and attack. This can be dealt with either by whipping the knight before its sword's strike can land or by crouch-walking under the hands, thus circumventing getting grabbed. To me this is strange because the interactive terms are very vaguely expressed, most of all because you don't know what's going on with the skeletal knights when you first see them -- why aren't they moving? will they hurt me if I touch them? is the game glitching? I assume most players will crouch-walk their way through.

A rotating circle of coffins (note that the cross symbol is replaced by a rectangular impression) show the developers having a bit of fun, sort of in the same vein as stage 4's rotating room. The fifth floor is where the stage's most exciting action happens. I suppose it's meant to be a mishmash of a dining and dance hall. Details from the entrance return with new accents and inclusions that make for a more grandiose effect, like the coffered ceiling and the closer columns that appear to have detached shafts. As Simon advances, ghostly couples materialize and dance around the chamber -- a vivid concept (with apparently a lot of appeal, judging by fan projects) that wouldn't reappear until Aria of Sorrow. Simultaneously, possessed dining tables obstruct Simon's way, but they can be destroyed before they flip out if they're whipped from a certain distance. The trick here is to balance a need to keep walking, dodging, and attacking with having to occasionally stop to get the tables out of the way.

It's fairly doable to not get hit by the stage's boss, the Dancing Spectres, but this is, in my opinion, actually one of the game's most successful bosses. Besides serving as a kind of climax to the theme of waltzing spirits, the Spectres' behavior -- twirling about, thrusting forward with a rapier, and causing a trio of possessed arrows to appear -- necessitates full use of the arena. They flash in and out of sight, making the tracking of their movement more difficult than it would otherwise be. This fight is as much about getting your hits in as it is about staying a step ahead via the platforms (and after several prior cases of floating platforms, it's cool to see these blocks so nicely contextualized). Of course, the cross subweapon, as usual, is -- if you have it -- a tool of destruction, but I find it hard to get worked up about What-Ifs when the fight in this case is so fundamentally sound and thematically germane.

Next time, we'll be exploring a favorite stage of mine, the Unliving Quarters, or library.