I'd jam this cart into an 8-track player and hope for the best.

The music in this game remains ear-meltingly awesome and it's a nice challenging platforming action playthrough too. This was where the potential in the proof of concept that was the rough original NES Castlevania was truly achieved and honestly it could be pretty strongly argued to still be my favorite non-Metroidvania Castlevania nearly thirty years on.

best controls yet. the first few stages are wonderful. You feel super powerful and can one hit enemies, but as the game progresses you require an extra hit for all enemies and it became a chore. And finally the most pain in the ass and ruin most of the fun is back: Instant death. So anything that revolves around instant death mechanic sucks really bad. Pit falls, spikes, knock backs, stairs. Stairs are still really bad. The toughest enemies are the levels. Bosses are easy till the final two.

I really don't like the whip gimmick. Can't jump on stairs. Decent levels.

Played the first level, was quite boring. Movement is slow, controls are clunky, don't give you enough freedom of movement, enemy movements is often irritating, especially given the restricted player movement. Enemies also do too much damage, and you can sometimes fall into impossible situations were you get trapped and die.

So fun for its era! Great music, fun as it gets. Hard af though.

This game really learned from the shortcomings of former titles and made a large, playable world mixed with good story elements.

A good but insanely overrated game. While the game doesn't feel as sluggish and clunky as its NES counterpart, the 8 the way whip (as cool as it is) makes the old NES level design into a joke and is overly abusable. Aesthetically the game is far more boring compared to other CV games despite the technical polish, even games like CV3 are better. The level design just doesn't work with the game's mobility, overly linear and thoughtless enemy It's basically toothless CV1/CV3.