Let's Play! ChuLip 9

I have no idea why I didn't post this earlier, but here it is anyways. Watch us kiss garbage can men and attempt to make money.

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Let's Play! ChuLip 8

More progress! The Railroad Incident is taken care of!

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Let's Play! ChuLip 7

Our first video where we really make any progress. Yep... pretty exciting.

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The OTHER Playstation Castlevania

First off, what the hell is Castlevania Chronicles? That's actually a fairly complicated question, but I'll try to answer it to the best of my (and Wikipedia's) ability. First off, I'll say what I'm sure of with my experience. If you have played the NES version of Castlevania, a lot of this game is going to be familiar to you. Essentially, this version is like an "extended edition" of Castlevania, or to use more video game terms, it's like Castlevania with an expansion pack. Well, that's my take; let's delve into the more technical aspects. Castlevania Chronicles has two game modes: "Original mode" and "Arrange mode." The Original mode is that of a version of Castlevania that was only released in Japan on the Sharp X68000 home computer. The Arrange mode, however is *All New! (*- This version is nearly identical to the original version with the exception of a new sprite design for Simon and a decrease in difficulty.)

I started this game by playing through the Original mode. This game is tough... I mean really tough. You get four hits. No if's, and's, or but's, you get four hits. A bat running into you is the same amount of damage as Death's scythe slicing through you. (To be fair, that's not entirely true... at the start of the game, you get more than 4 hits, but at the start of the game, it's pretty simple, so that doesn't stick out in my mind.) While I found this to be illogical, the Arrange mode isn't necessarily any more logical. At the start of the game, everything only does one piece of damage from the life gauge. While I don't know how many hits that allows you exactly, I'm pretty sure it's over 10. By the end of the game, however, each hit takes 3 pieces from your life gauge allowing for a total of 6 hits. In other words, all enemies/objects do the same amount of damage, that damage just changes as the game goes on.

Anyways, seeing how technical this has already gotten, I'll try to keep it simple. Certain aspects of the game are absolutely ridiculous with only 4 hits. The doppleganger has no clear pattern, so the only way I was able to beat him was to just whip like a crazy mofo and hope he died before I did. Compared to this and other aspects of the game, I actually found Dracula to be a relief since he has a very consistent pattern (identical to his NES one.) To put into perspective how much of a difference the 2 hits make, however, I used 18 or more continues (it doesn't record the last few) in Original mode, whereas I only used 3 or more continues in Arrange mode. Granted, I played Original mode first, but the big challenges like Death, I had already seen in the NES version, so only a few of those continues can be attributed to learning the game.

Like all challenging games, it's very rewarding to finally beat this one. If you're not in the mood for a brutal beating, and would instead prefer a light spanking, just go with the Arrange mode. It's all of the gameplay of the original mode and 2/3 of the difficulty. One last thing I realized was that this was the 2nd of the only 2 Castlevania games on the Playstation. I sure as hell hope there isn't anyone who bought this game because they loved Symphony of the Night. If they were expecting the same style of gameplay, they must've been disappointed. If you know what you're getting into though and are a fan of classic Castlevania, Castlevania Chronicles is a fun "enhanced remake" of the original game.