A playthrough of Konami's 1988 horror-theme arcade platforming game, Haunted Castle.

Played through on the default settings.

Haunted Castle, or Akumajou Dracula as it was called in Japan, was a pseudo-adaptation of the original Castlevania for the coin-op audience. Though many of the stages are similarly themed to their NES counterparts, Haunted Castle represents a pretty dramatic overhaul of the entire experience.

And for some reason, it now includes the intro sequence from Ghosts 'n Goblins. Weird.

The stages have been shortened by quite a bit, but they are generally far harder than what the NES game posed. The enemies are often positioned perfectly to hit you into other enemies or bottomless pits, there are no health power-ups, and there are a couple of brutally hard auto-scroll segments. I really enjoyed the simplicity and the challenge of Haunted Castle, but it does take a good amount of patience to get through it. You can't just credit spam your way to the end - the game limits you to four continues before it boots you back to the beginning, regardless of how many credits are lined up.

The graphics and the sound are great by 1988 standards. Simon looks far less like a metal band reject here than he did Castlevania Chronicles, and the sprites are huge and well detailed. The levels end up feeling a bit claustrophobic because of how over-sized Simon is, but the game thankfully restrains itself from filling the screen with unavoidable obstacles (usually), so it's not generally an issue from a gameplay standpoint. The music is excellent, and is probably one of my all-time favorite Castlevania soundtracks - it was composed by Kenichi Matubara, also responsible for the music in Simon's Quest - and you can certainly hear the influence. They're tunes are all catchy, and they all make far heavier use of (relatively) high quality samples than you'd expect for a thirty year old game.

Does anyone else hear Bald Bull laughing when Dracula kidnaps Simon's woman in the intro?

It still seems odd to me that Konami wouldn't have called this Castlevania in order to capitalize on the popularity of the NES games when it was released in the US.

But overall, Haunted Castle / Castlevania Arcade / Akumajou Dracula / 悪魔城ドラキュラ / whatever else you want to call it is a super-demanding, super-fun horror platformer that marks a novel first in the lost-lasting franchise. If you're a fan of the series, this is certainly one to check out.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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