Welcome to Switch Funday!
For today's game i wanted to try out the Game Boy game Castlevania Legends from Konami. it's a relatively late release on Game Boy coming out from 1997 but it's not one i remember. I didn't get into Game Boy until the Game Boy Color and Pokémon. but i am familiar with the Castlevania series and i was curious as to how such a game would work on Game Boy.
I was pleasantly surprised how faithful to the early Castlevania games it felt like. the team at Konami did a great job bringing the series over the Game Boy. Every enemy looks distinct and clear, the backgrounds are slight but work. even the music is great. But that difficulty is too much.
all the monsters move faster than your character and the controls seem sluggish, too. often i felt like i was inputting commands but it wasn't happening on screen. This game also suffers from respawning monsters, something i'm not a fan of. I tried out the game on the regular difficulty, so perhaps on "Light" mode things will be toned down. I speculated in the video that maybe it's hard because the game is short. looking at the map, it did seem like there weren't many areas in the game.
Another issue, like with many of these old games on Switch, is the lack of a manual. this game comes from a time where the manuals explained so much of the game, maybe even provided backstory and more. here we just have the game and itself has no in-game tutorial. so more than once i felt like i wasn't fully understanding what i can do, what i needed to do, for example i never worked out how to use the Soul Weapons!
I was surprised that the game uses a password feature. i initially expected all Game Boy games by this point to come with internal batteries for save files, but thinking about it it's possible that this late into the Game Boy and a game that wasn't expected to sell a lot meant they decided against it for cost reasons. Maybe it was more of a Budget Release when it came out.
