Clearly designed as an attempt to create an online, cooperative Castlevania game with as small a budget as possible, it consists almost entirely of recycled material drawn from across the entire franchise, smashed together with little regard for consistency or cohesion. Harmony of Despair is a case of the latter. Sometimes, practical constraints can suffocate the life from a game but every once in a while, they work to its benefit. Harmony of Despair (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360, 2010) Simon appears as a huge, hulking protagonist whose whip spans nearly the entire screen once powered up to compensate, the action here moves far more slowly than in previous games and tends to be decidedly lower on difficulty.Ī killer soundtrack, a corny haunted house atmosphere and lots of interesting Super NES-specific effects make for a memorable journey, but the underlying gameplay suffers from the awkwardness of being, somehow, a dramatic reinvention of the Castlevania concept tied slavishly to existing mechanics. As an attempt to rework the 8-bit Castlevania concept for 16-bit hardware, Super Castlevania IV plays like no other chapter of the series. Super Castlevania IV recounted Simon Belmont’s journey through the original game in an expanded format that owes a great deal to Castlevania III’s expanded journey to Dracula’s castle. This, the purported inspiration for Lords of Shadow, was a reboot of its own in many respects.

List of castlevania games by genre