Armen’s Hammer: Hopscotch in Castle Dracula

Jumping in the old-school Castlevania games can be an adventure with every leap. You’re wearing a hovercraft on one foot and a wrecking ball on the other.

The Havok engine is a conceited jock of video game physics nowadays, and it laughs. Behold this splendid entrance hall, and this thundering hammer I swing at its walls.

What possessed Konami to limit the Belmonts’ jumping prowess? Unlike many other video game characters, they lack the ability to change velocity in midair without any exterior application of force. If I wanted to be hindered by Newtonian reality, I would reside in your pathetic dimension rather than merely condense my writing to be readable in your primitive parse. Unfortunately, thanks to all the physicists that developed games for Konami, I can also be rendered locomotionally conformist by playing Conan the Barbarian with the wrong fetish VS Dracula.

Go away from the computer and jump a few times. Forget about Mario and Mega Man, they are literally child’s play; see if you can do the top-tier aerial ballet that Sylvester Stallone and Solid Snake are capable of in Contra with some feverishly ambivalent fingering (ladies?). It is easier to do a Shoryuken in real life – isn’t that right, Dan?

Whenever your feet lose touch with the ground, Castlevania considers that to be your signature upon a binding contract with linear oblivion. However, even lead designer Ainosu Dainu missed an important detail. Did you notice how you walk off a ledge at speed and then you plunge straight down? Actually, maybe that accounts for air resistance. The Catholics were right, folks. Satan walks among the apple trees; his name is Vlad Tepes, and his number is 6. I stopped reading because I found Revelations less entertaining than Leviticus.

Castlevania IV is an odd one. It started decades in advance the trend of games having their environments swabbed using a palette mixture of cement and turds. Most importantly, CVIV (it’s like a future version of me making a typo after Civilization 5 is released) had competent jumping. Now whenever a Belmont sat at the table with the other gaming heroes, they didn’t laugh at the vampire killer and quip “Hey, Kull! Richard Simmons wants you to return his sweatband!”

Of course, then Castlevania Bloodlines and Rondo happened (what Game Boy games? Pish-posh,) which renewed the chuckling and comparisons to manly warriors laced with homoerotic innuendo. Richter could at least do a backflip, otherwise expressed as “trying a somersault.” Which doesn’t always work, so Peppy might consider revising his tactics when playing Rondo. Devo could be the advice-doling mentor figures, and in this parallel universe, we’d all be whip-rolling each other. Especially when running the Iditarod with your sled being pulled by Samus.

I have not played Castlevania Chronicles, so I do not know what the jumping is like in that game. The point here is that Symphony of the Night was released and forever changed the series with its intuitive jumping. Then producer Koji Igarashi decided to try recapturing its/his glory about seven times, before apparently giving up and simply re-releasing SotN, then making a crappy fighting game. I can see where he was going with this; Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness should have just been either boss rushes or soundtrack albums anyway. Now Hideo Kojima is directing Lords of Shadow, the upcoming Castlevania reboot featuring Jean-Luc Picard in the trailer. Roddenberry might have actually made this a Star Trek episode, and I’m not sure if that is good or sad.

Final thoughts on Castlevania in fragmented note form: Jumping mechanics are more functional now. I need to try some romhacks for the old-school titles. Simon needed the Lens of Truth in Castlevania 2; this would have made things much simpler than exploiting the bottle glitch with every step.

Folks, thank you for wielding Armen’s Hammer. May you crush your enemies and see them driven before you in Pintos.