Sidenote: I still haven’t sorted out what the difference is between the three-button and six-button controllers.

I didn’t have a Genesis as a kid so I only occasionally got to use them.

I still find it weird how Vampire Survivors got away with using art assets that look very like official Castlevania assets.

Both DoS and OoE have that, in different ways, but as a completionist I found myself more frustrated with PoR, for having too many things to do in order to complete the game.

I feel that DoS has the best gameplay variety of the three DS entries, but also the weakest plot and least impressive soundtrack. PoR has a more involved plot, though it can be kinda sprawling with its many areas and extra features. OoE is the “tightest” game by comparison, with a strong plot to drive the experience, excellent sense of atmosphere and aesthetics, and gameplay challenge, with arguably the least amount of “filler”.

But they’re all good. Just a matter of how good; depending on the aspect, some are good while others are really awesome.

Great writeup! I read the whole thing haha.

Technically not quite every Castlevania game, but I don’t know how many people are going to care about Vampire Killer for MSX or Order of Shadows for mobile phones or the Tiger Handheld game lol. There’s also stuff like Grimoire of Souls and Harmony of Despair but others have pointed those out already.

I didn’t know the Lords of Shadow subseries had a metroidvania entry. Thanks for the info.

As someone else pointed out, Circle of the Moon was not an IGA game. Not that that really matters, though. Also, it’s fun (albeit unimportant) to point out that Konami wanted to go all in on the 3D games during the N64 era and SotN was a side project, until the N64 games flopped but SotN became a hit.

Dracula X for SNES has a variety of names – just Dracula X, Castlevania Dracula X, Dracula XX, Vampire’s Kiss. The “Dracula X” title indicates its connection to SotN, which was named “Dracula X: Nocturne in the Moonlight” in Japan; it received a Sega Saturn version that fans usually exclusively refer to with that latter name, and this version has an exclusive character and two exclusive areas. Unfortunately it wasn’t ported that well.

The other games all have different names in Japan (“Castlevania” being known as “Akumajou Dracula” generally), but no one will actually care to say “Concerto of the Midnight Sun”.

It may be fun to observe that Harmony of Dissonance and Symphony of the Night are the only two games to have a certain quirk to their maps that no other game has. (Maybe Bloodstained, depending on how you rule on a technicality.) To explain with minimal spoilers, I’d say that you get to experience the map twice.

Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia may seem superficially similar in that they have the main castle plus other areas, but narratively they handle this feature very differently. PoR has you exploring the castle and then finding the portraits as secondary areas. OoE instead has you explore the countryside area by area before going to the castle (its presence almost feels like a spoiler), building up to it as a climax. IMO it’s much more organically done, and I regard OoE as presenting the most polished experience of the three DS games, or heck, of all seven metroidvanias.

I’d say any of the metroidvanias, except maybe Circle, are a fair entry point, frankly. In fact, I might even say that playing Symphony first may make the others feel like a letdown, simply because SotN is just that darned good, even with its flaws.

Ooh, they knew to put the joystick on the left.

The way Mario seems to teleport when turning around in the water seems to say something about the way hitboxes worked in the original DKC1.

Super Kong World