Friend Code - Looking Back at Castlevania II

I really enjoyed the focus of this Friend Code and the one on one discussion between you, Damiani, and Brad. It was very intricate and I enjoyed how you were able to connect it with potential futures for Konami and the Castlevania franchise. I hope these can become a regular thing even once news gears up again and/or the pandemic lockdown ends. Thank you for your hard work and opinions!

As someone who missed a lot of early NES/SNES games, I love retrospective discussions like this.

Cloisterance

First a quick story... Once when I was young I excitedly rented Castlevania II from the video store, this was in the early 90's... I was pumped to play a new Castlevania game because I had loved & played the original. So when I saw Castlevania II just sitting on the rental shelf, I thought "Oh sweet, this is going to be great." It was not great, it in fact sucked. After trying to play the game for an hour or two, and getting absolutely no where; I explained to my father what was going on, then proceeded to explain and show how the game was so frustrating. He agreed, drove me back to the video store, and convinced the store employee to let me rent a different game. Years later I would go back to complete Castlevania II but only with online guides and "game genie". In the end I realized the best thing about the game was actually the story, and I decided it could make a great movie, or anime ( I was in high school by that time). The greatest truth to this game however is this, Castlevania II (C2) is a bad game with some really good ideas... or rather a game with great concepts, but terrible execution. In a lot of ways C2 was ahead of its time with things like the "open world", day/night sequel, and gaining special items by defeating bosses for character improvement. But so much of the connecting gameplay elements to those cool features were poorly crafted, unnecessarily vague and just plain frustrating. However the silver lining to C2 is that a lot of lessons learned would help define the series in future installments.

Tegan Combatti

This indie dev is making a Simon's Quest inspired game. Worth a look! https://twitter.com/Programancer

Raven Perez

Fun episode! I'm all for more of these deep dives

Simon's Quest had such a special atmosphere, very mysterious/enigmatic and incredibly epic music. I think going back can be tricky though, especially when you never played it originally. Viewing it with modern eyes that understand more about how games work and so on to me feels a bit like dragging it in the daylight and looking behind the curtain. Some universally praised old games can stand that scrutiny but I think many of us have a handful of games that we love in spite of them beeing a bit weird, quirky, clunky or in any other way flawed only because we fell in love with them at a time when we experienced games in another way. In that same sense that many From Software fans love the first soulsborne game they played the most and keep advocating why that is the best one. Sorry for the long rant, am an old man and we often talk to long ;) L&R

triphide

“What a terrible night to post a podcast.” Seriously, just as I’m going to bed 😂 but something to look forward to tomorrow