Castlevania Dungeon Forums
The Castlevania Dungeon Forums => General Castlevania Discussion => Classic Castlevania Threads => Topic started by: RichterB on September 04, 2013, 08:54:38 PM
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Tonight, after at least a decade of tries, and after taking a break for I believe several years, I have finally beaten Castlevania: The Adventure for Game Boy via the Gamecube's Game Boy Player! Took me forever to figure out how to counter Dracula's forms, but I finally did it with just the level 2 whip (no fireball). This has to be one of the hardest Draculas due to the lack of player control. Almost every move you make has to be perfect. I was wondering how many others have gotten through the whole thing WITHOUT any save states or cheats. I'll cast the first vote.
By the way, I was surprised that the game starts over after you beat it, but Level 1 is called Level 5. Weird. Any changes I should know about? I didn't have the time to keep going.
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I owned a real copy back in the day so I beat it several times. It was awesome having a portable CV game at that time!
Adventure is just like any of the other classic games. Once you know what to do and when, it almost becomes easy.
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I was having and still have a real copy of the game and i have beaten it 5 times in a row, took me 2 and a half hours to do that. The fifth time you are 1 hit from every enemy to die. But that was like 18 years ago......now i can still beat it, but not 5 times in a row, with out seeing game over. :P
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I play through the game every so often, on a cartridge. At this point I've adapted to the quirks of the geriatric pace and the general demand for near-perfect performance, so I rarely have to leave a run half-finished. Both of Christopher's Dracula encounters are very rigid in their construction, too; rote pattern memorization eventually wins the day every time.
Stage 3 is pretty great.
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HELL YEAH!! That game was a real pisser when I first played it. All those times of swearing and cussing due to the frustrations the game relentlessly brought upon me. It took me around two weeks or so because I kept going at it so obsessively. But I managed to complete it. And the more play-throughs I did the easier it became. I don't know if it's true now since I haven't play The Adventure in years.
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Oh yes -- I've beaten it several times now, along with a few of the harder versions, in all legitimacy. Just as I've done, in fact, with almost every classic Castlevania game. You're rewarded with such an extraordinary sense of satisfaction once you've managed, at last, to complete them -- it's such a remarkable emotion that I couldn't finish a game without it.
Yet Adventure was a very particular challenge. Christopher moved so ridiculously slowly that he became extremely difficult to master. From that perspective, the game was in fact rather flawed.
I was having and still have a real copy of the game and i have beaten it 5 times in a row, took me 2 and a half hours to do that. The fifth time you are 1 hit from every enemy to die.
Just as a curiosity, how high can the difficulty be scaled? Successively, I've only played through the game three times.
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Should we tell him the game has four more loops?
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I could beat it once, but not the second loop.
It has 5 loops?
I imagine in the last one you die with one hit!
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It has 5 LOOPS?! Wow, big congrats to those who accomplished that feat! I don't know that I'd have the patience. I can see how it might be done, though. For, as challenging as The Adventure can be, and as flawed as its controls are, I'd noticed by playing it in concentration that almost every screen of the game has a very careful method in mind. (Like, there's one screen near the end of Stage 4 where you're on a rope and a Zeldo is waiting for you. You basically have a SECOND to jump off that rope, duck, and then jump over his returning sickle. If you stay on the rope or try to climb upward, he will automatically hit you, and you'll lose precious whip power).
But really, one of the keys to beating the game the first time is not to sweat losing whip power. You've got to power ahead with confidence. In nearly all cases, I had to rely on a level 1 whip for part or all of a boss battle.
Speaking of which, the unique bosses of this game are really cool. As a whole, I really like the uniqueness of this game's enemy set and level design. Those knights that come to life in Dracula's castle are possibly the best animated knights in 8-bit Castlevania. If this game had better controls, you could have a bit more fun exploring the game and seeing its sights. On the whole, The Adventure is equally frustrating and charming.
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I got pass the spikes and that's a day for me :P But in all seriousness I am getting closer and closer to beating adventure.
Edit @ RichterB. You're like a grass ninja here and not here :P :)
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Hold the phone. Did you know there are SECRET ROOMS in this game?! Mind blown. I just watched a partial playthrough to see how someone else would tackle some of the stage obstacles, and I saw 5 secret rooms (one is considered only semi-secret). I have had suspicions (and faint hopes) that such things might exist after I found the semi-secret room in Level 2 by different rope climbing combinations, but dismissed further secrets as wishful thinking, as I didn't want to ruin my level runs by jumping to my potential doom. Well, if I had taken the risk and tested my theories, I probably would have found two more of the rooms, the one in Level 3 and the other one in Level 2. But Level 1's never crossed my mind, and Level 4 even more so was totally lost on me. I've also read a statement that if you skip the first candle in Level 1, that the 11th candle yields a secret 1-up. Don't know if that's true or not, but there might be more secrets in this game than these rooms.
Wow. This is so cool. This would have made the game a little easier. There were moments where I said to myself, "I wish there was a hidden item here or there I could find by breaking a wall," but I ultimately thought something along those lines would be too much effort for the designers of an early Gameboy game with just 4 levels. Was I wrong! This just boosted the game's credit for me. And it also reveals a deeper history for invisible platforming in the franchise. (Super Castlevania IV, CV64, and (I believe) Simon's Quest also have such things). LINK: The four secret rooms in Castlevania Adventure - plus all stage themes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpK7fWm26vk#)
Edit @ RichterB. You're like a grass ninja here and not here :P :)
I'm flattered. Is there an award for that? :-p
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I found out about those secret rooms AFTER I had finished the game. If I had known about them before had I would have taken advantage of them every single time just to beat it. The same is true for Belmont's Revenge. Every stage has a secret room or rooms that will give you lots of goodies.
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Secret rooms? I feel like an idiot...never knew about those.
I think I've only beat the game once...possibly twice. I can't remember if I made it all the way through on my first playthrough. Didn't have as much trouble with that one as I did with Haunted Castle...I've only beat that game once, and I'm sure I got lucky in a few spots.
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Secret rooms in Game Boy? :o
That's really surprising! PANT PANT!
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Secret rooms in Game Boy? :o
That's really surprising! PANT PANT!
It has 5 loops?
I imagine in the last one you die with one hit!
Correct!!! Every stage has one secret room and some a secret candle and yes, at fifth loop you are one hit, but fifth loop is not the last one, you can go on as much loops as you like, i have gotten to 6 loops, hoping that there will be a secret ending, but nah.......
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SIX LOOPS? YOU DID 6 LOOPS???!!!??? :o :o :o
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Anyone who does more then one loop in Adventure must have some form of masochistic tendencies. But I'm also guilty of that too ;D
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No I give up at the second level. :'(
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I popped the game cart into my GBA handheld yesterday to try out the game with the secret rooms for the first time. I'll tell you what, the secret rooms take off some of the pressure of being perfect. They almost balance out the game, in fact. I think I got to Level 4 with 7 continues. And I actually beat the game for the second time in this quick playthrough. (I think my method of beating Dracula Form 1 by jumping forward over his diagonal fireballs and whipping, then retreating a repeating, is different than what most players use). As has been said, once you know about the patterns and adjust to the control speed, it's very doable. (I have found a similar experience with Dracula X SNES, which a lot of people say is very hard, but I find it largely a breeze and one of my favorite pick up and play titles. Even Dracula, who used to give me fits, is very beatable w/ the axes). Anyway, I found playing The Adventure on a portable system like GBA made me feel a little more in control than using the Gamecube controller on the GBA Player.
After beating it again, I popped in Castlevania II: Belmont's Revenge to get a better comparison, and found three things I never fully knew or realized:
1.) A lot of the level design ideas in Belmont's Revenge are take piecemeal from The Adventure. The contracting spike walls, the destroyable large screw that causes spike ceilings to go up and down, the pike platforms that shoot out of the walls, the mad moles that come out of the background, the exploding eyeballs that take out long bridges, etc. Belmont's Revenge was actively seeking to refine what The Adventure did rather than starting over from scratch. Meaning, without The Adventure, Belmont's Revenge wouldn't be all that special. (As if wanting to balance the whip power-down, they made the Punigachi's the only enemy capable of lowering your whip's power, but slowed down their projectile speeds). I saw these things before, but never made the connection in my mind beyond the eyeballs and the ropes.
2.) Because so many elements that were so tricky in The Adventure reappear in Belmont's Revenge, you see that a good chunk of the challenge in The Adventure comes from the clunky controls. If The Adventure had Belmont's Revenge's controls, it would be regarded completely differently, I feel. Belmont's Revenge basically proves that the level design concepts of The Adventure are very well done.
3.) There are also secret rooms in this second game, as someone here informed us, but I don't know if they're quite as well hidden or useful as those in The Adventure. Then again, I didn't find them before I was told, so they were hidden well enough!!!
That leads me to a final thought. I wonder what the original perception of The Adventure was coming off of Simon's Quest. I never quite realized that it was the 3rd official overseas release of Castlevania. When you just had The Adventure, CV1, and Simon's Quest, I imagine it would make for some interesting opinions.
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One loop, one time, back like in 2.006, was enough.
It was my first and only time.
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It was my first Castlevania experience, and I invested a lot of time playing it.
Much to no one's surprise I favor Belmont's Revenge more, but its predecessor will always have a special place in my heart. :)
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I beat it around the time my Grandpa died. It was one of only three Game Boy games I had- the other two were Tetris and Final Fantasy Legend, and I didn't quite grasp the concept of Tetris at that age. So I sort of beat it out of not having much else to do and eventually memorizing and mastering the crappy controls.
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Using a patch so we could move faster and doesnt lose power ups counts as a cheat right?
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Using a patch so we could move faster and doesnt lose power ups counts as a cheat right?
Yeah, I'm afraid so. :)
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Ok, voted. :)
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I own the cartridge and played it pretty competently enough to get to Dracula every time but never could beat him. I only could get to him twice and by then maybe I only had one life each encounter so it wasn't ever enough to really memorize his patterns... I would've played more but with the frustrating controls and all, it just really dampened my urge to master the game when the series has a lot more to offer in the other titles. Maybe someday, it's been at least 10 years or so since last I tried.
This isn't to say I'm a pansy when it comes to the other more renowned classic-vanias. I've beaten pretty much 95% of all the other games in the series to date. I'll always give a beat down Belmont style (I'm so frikkin' corny) with the original NES Castlevania, Castlevania Chronicles (X68000) and Belmont's Revenge for example. I'm very certain I beat Dracula's Curse but it was so long ago I can't remember if I could only do it with Grant or Alucard. Might need to go down that path again soon just for fun :)