MLGG: Pop Culture News, Reviews & Interviews

I’ve recently been reacquainting myself with the Castlevania games as part of the research for an article on Retro Dodo – and what’s struck me is just how timeless so many of them feel.

After going back to them, I’m currently on a mission to play through the Game Boy Advance trilogy, starting with Circle of the Moon; the Konami Castlevania Advance Collection is a great way to play them all again on modern hardware – they’re smooth conversions with plenty of excellent concessions to modern game design, such as rewind and save states. It makes the games – which initially suffered from being on non-illuminated Game Boy Advance screens, making them difficult to play in anything other than very bright lighting conditions too – so much more accessible and much more forgiving for players who can only play in short bursts.

They’re also a great reminder of just how timeless the Castlevania titles are – and how depressing it is that Konami have seemingly lost all interest in producing new games; Castlevania is only one franchise of many now gathering dust, due to the publisher now focusing on pachinko and other licensing opportunities without the creation of any new games.

Castlevania Advance Collection is a reasonably priced compilation, coming in at less than sixteen quid for the trilogy at full price on Switch, PlayStation and Xbox. There’s even the bonus inclusion of highly regarded but reasonably rare PC Engine title, Dracula X – which series milestone Symphony of the Night was a direct sequel to.

I did end up writing that article on the very best Castlevania games published (see here) – and all three of those GBA titles make the cut. To see what others I included (with an incredibly unsurprising number one!), you’ll have to take a look at the article itself!

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