Castlevania: Bloodlines

Love the level design and bosses. Very creative. Spear guy too stronk with his invincible frame on his down jump special and more angle attacks. Only complain about is prob the last level with the bs mirror and upside down gimmic.

There's a lot of cool levels that play with vertical mobility and platforming that goes beyond walking up stairs and the visual flair that accompanies this is beautiful. The enemy design compliments this verticality, often controlling far more space than the player can which creates interesting decisions with the player's movement options. Also, it just had really cool gimmicks in general like the Versailles level and the directional whipping.

This game is terrible. You can choose either 1 of the 2 characters. It has a difficulty setting from easy to normal. Password system & only 2 continues. You can choose up to 5 lives. Here's where the game is trash. Usually when you beat stages the password they give you it resets the lives to the max...Not this game. If you had the 1 life while you got this password it will not reset & you'll start at that 1 life that was saved. Plus the game is not that easy. Even on easy mode.

I liked the quicker pace and looser controls, and the enemy designs were usually great. The more practical version of the item crash is also a good gameplay addition. All Castlevania games have good music, so moving on....this game is better than IV because you can jump on stairs.

Decent Castlevania challenge with plenty of midbosses and gimmick levels (flooding, the Leaning Tower, whatever that "illusion" toward the end is, etc.)