I know the series is good infact I'm right now playing the first game through rom. Its always about the Belmonts slaying the vampire I mean how is it great actually?

It was a sidescroller about exploring a big castle full of monsters and gothic stuff, with a name that brought exactly that into your mind. Prior to that, it hadn't happened.

To be honest usually when novels or movies are out, the games made based on them don't sell well either because of gameplay or the fact that the movie has a better feel than the game. But in Castlevania's case it worked the opposite.

But it still doesn't explain how the series became great does it?

Well there's the story. Also remember that this game was really popular during the NES days. So the mindset of what is a great is a bit different for people during the 1980s. Also, the Castlevania has been done quite a few ways. Simon's Quest was a bit of a departure with the night and day feature. It's been done in 3D a few times. The story and legacy of the story does make you interested. I mean who doesn't like killing Dracula or his legions. Also as far as sidescrollers go, it's solid. The gameplay is great.

Is there something about Castlevania that you don't feel is great?

To be honest usually when novels or movies are out, the games made based on them don't sell well either because of gameplay or the fact that the movie has a better feel than the game. But in Castlevania's case it worked the opposite.

Castlevania wasn't based on any one book or movie. It's not a movie-based game that typically sucks. It was based on characters like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Death, etc. all of which had been done in books and in film, and all of which were characters in the game. But as Alpha_ProgDes said, Castlevania has its own story and continuity.


What are we discussing here?

I'm trying to say that its too hard that only a few gamers can master the game. Also Isn't the book dracula the same thing like castlevania?

Also Isn't the book dracula the same thing like castlevania?

No.

I'm trying to say that its too hard that only a few gamers can master the game. Also Isn't the book dracula the same thing like castlevania?

The first Castlevania games, as Alpha_ProgDes said, were made during a different time. Players had different ideas about what constituted a fun and challenging game. In those days, it was quite common to play a game that required you to die and continue many times before you could proceed. A lot of the ideas we have now, regarding accessibility and elimination of frustration, hadn't yet been fleshed out by that point. Game design, even for the newfangled home consoles, was still very much influenced by the arcade paragidm, where the point of a game was to keep you feeding quarters into the machine. If Castlevania were created now, it would be an entirely different experience from what it was then.

Bram Stoker's Dracula sort of formalized our idea of the Eastern European vampire legend, and provided the backdrop of myth against which Castlevania and a great many other games were set, but Castlevania was its own "thing" and not just the video game to go with the book, so to speak.

So you're saying that even though castlevania has elements of that book, its still different from it? Like in what sense?

Elements of bad-assery, for the most part. I've read Bram Stoker's Dracula probably half a dozen times as a kid, and while I like it very much, I wouldn't call any of the characters "bad-asses". A solicitor and a professor. (Modern re-imaginings of van Helsing make him out to be a bad-ass, but in the book he wasn't really.) Heroic, perhaps, but in the end they were just people doing what they had to do. But the Belmonts, now... Bad-assery is their family stock-in-trade.

Castlevania is based on Bram Stoker's vampire legend in much the same way that Vampire: The Masquerade is, or that the Ravenloft setting is, or pretty much any dark Gothic fantasy. That is, they share many characteristics of plot and setting, but each adds their own twists. Sort of like how Tolkien inspired hundreds and hundreds of high fantasy settings involving elves and orcs and dwarves.