I have to finish the seemingly endless Angband, which is now actively boring me It was a product of my occasional (roughly every five entries) tendency to randomize my list of abandoned and rejected games and give a try to whatever comes up. Like most console games of the era, the music is repetitive, relentless, and impossible to turn off independently of the sound, so I can't say anything about the sound effects.įor those readers wondering why I played it at all The game lasted a defensible number of hours, had some good visuals, and was easy to master in terms of controls. Overall, aside from having to get help from walkthroughs when the puzzles were too obscure, I didn't find anything to be terribly upset about. I missed a few cluebooks hidden in walls, none of which would have helped me that much, and I ended the game two levels below the maximum. You can only hold four of them at a time, and I guess there's an NPC who gives you a bag that allows you to double that, but I didn't find him.
![list of castlevania games by year list of castlevania games by year](https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/castlevania-rondo-of-blood.jpg)
I missed some items, including a useful weapon called a "sacred flame." There are a couple of places in the game where you can buy laurels, which temporarily render you invincible and are necessary to cross long stretches of deadly swamp. I won in about seven hours using walkthroughs to get me past a few difficult parts. A few of the mansions can't be explored until you find certain items, and there are parts of the game where you need to have a particular item to progress. The ultimate goal is to explore five mansions, recover Dracula's rib, eye, ring, heart, and nail, and toss those items into a pyre in Dracula's castle. Much of the world is theoretically "open" as you begin the game, but the value of that is dubious when there is such an obvious order imposed by enemy difficulty and plot. I printed it and made annotations on it and found myself wondering why I don't do that more often for computer RPGs. It wasn't a lot of help, particularly since it suggests a two-dimensional surface whereas the reality of the game is one-dimensional "on the ground." Nonetheless, it helped keep me a little oriented.
![list of castlevania games by year list of castlevania games by year](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/tOBzM488NbYS_o-3wLmeoOPWu1w=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13316507/judgment.jpg)
Apparently, the English version of the game didn't have a map, but the Japanese version did, so I allowed myself to use it. There are a little over 40 areas in the game.
![list of castlevania games by year list of castlevania games by year](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/cf/Castlevania_SOTN_PAL.jpg)
Each area scrolls for about three or four screens horizontally and up to two or three screens vertically before making a hard transition to a new area. The game is divided into screens and areas.