With an active history of more than two decades and so many titles under it's belt, Castlevania is a series with it's fair share of games not given their fair shake by the general public. This has happened for a variety of reasons, from popular misconceptions about a title or merely obscurity or rarity of a particular game. So what entries in the series do you feel are unfairly overlooked or even condemned by the public at large, and why do you think they were/are?
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For me, as most people could probably guess, the answer is Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness and Castlevania Legends. LoD is about as close to a Classicvania as you could get in 3D without becoming overly frustrating or running into common problems associated with that dimensional jump. It's got a great story, great characters, terrific art direction and smooth controls. Even today it's visually appealing with a great deal of variety and replay value. It's just a gorgeous game in all respects in my opinion, and one of the best on the N64.
I like the story of Legends, the Belmonts being descended from Dracula is just a great concept to my mind. It extends the fascinating motif found in SOTN to all of the Belmonts after Sonia. That the eternal struggle between good and evil is between sire and offspring; the sins of the father and the eternal struggle to overcome the faults of one's progenitors while recognizing and being empowered by the positive (and powerful) things inherited from them. The gameplay wasn't bad, it was a solid Castlevania game. A step down from Belmont's Revenge but I blame most of that on the fact that the dev team was forced to add in Super Gameboy "enhancements". Not to mention they were developing for a system that was fairly outdated in 1997, but which Konami was I suppose newly interested in with the explosion in popularity of Pokemon that rocketed the little grey brick back into the popular consciousness.
Both of these games had the misfortune to follow Symphony of the Night, which for many in the general public was Castlevania. I feel they were both unfairly hated because they were Classicvania when most of said gaming public were expecting 3D and hand-held SOTN respectively. And the sense I get is that many reviewers seemed to feel that anything that was not Metroidvania for the series was a step backwards/in the the wrong direction. Which reinforced a negative perception of these games that lasts to this day. Added to this was that both games were released in somewhat limited quantities in North America and are now rare, and that many consumers who would have liked LoD were already burned by the, let's face it, incomplete experience of CV64.
PS - CV64 itself seems to have gotten a new wave of flack after a factually inaccurate review by the Angry Video Game Nerd a few years ago, which I'm sure you've all seen. But eh it's the AVGN, complaining about it would be like fussing at the weather, it does what it does.