Snorb wrote:Hukos wrote:I'm going to have to bring out some controversial opinions here, but I honestly don't think Castlevania on the NES is all that difficult. Once a player has a decent amount of experience with the game under his/her belt, I think it's pretty tame in terms of difficulty.
All in all, it's a pretty unbalanced game. Holy Water absolutely wrecks any sense of challenge the game has, the dagger is worthless and the axe only is useful for one boss and that's it. The cross is the only other subweapon worth a damn, but the Holy Water is easily more broken (One can murder death before his scythes appear!)
Castlevania III on the other hand, is a much more difficult game. I'll elaborate more on that if anyone's interested in my thoughts on that game.
I believe you and I are going to have some interesting differences of opinions on the throwing dagger and the holy water in Castlevania, Hukos. =p
(Then again, I always thought the subweapons usefulness was, in order Boomerang > Throwing Dagger > Axe > Holy Water > Pocketwatch, but Castlevania IV is my favorite pre-SOTN Castlevania game, so make of that what you will.)
Oh don't get me wrong, CV4 is my favorite Castlevania game period. I'm just saying, once you realize how absurdly broken the Holy Water is, CV1's difficulty takes a significant blow.
The dagger to me doesn't really find a usefulness until Symphony and that's merely a niche it fills (It's cheap and spammable) than it being extremely useful. Subweapon spamming can't really be done in the classic CV games, so the dagger is obviously nowhere as good in the classic games. Though there IS the Wind Book + Dagger combination in Harmony of Dissonance that's practically broken beyond all belief, but Harmony of Dissonance kind of sucks so there's that.
CV3 is a different case from CV1 since the game is a lot more balanced. Holy Water essentially freezes any enemy it touches while dealing touch damage. CV3 includes a lot more flying enemies or ones that the holy water doesn't deal with very well. It's still useful in a lot of situations, just not EVERY situation like in CV1. CV3 also has the abilities of the extra partners to take into consideration with it's balance. CV3 is really hard, but it's the good kind of hard where the game expects you to think about what you're doing.
CV4 has the limp whip which does somewhat trivialize the use of subweapons, but they're still far from useless. Cross is undoubtedly the best subweapon in that game, however.
Rondo of Blood is kind of weird in it's design. It's got a lot more vertical sections and flying enemies than any other Castlevania game does (Most likely due to it's non-linear nature with extra paths and all), so the axe ends up being the best subweapon in that game.
Bloodlines, the dagger doesn't even exist (thankfully!) and the boomerang goes from a cross to well, a real boomerang! I find it's consistently the most useful but it does have more than enough vertical spots that the axe is pretty good too. Though the Holy Water is nerfed to hell and back in both Rondo/Bloodlines, for whatever reason. I guess they were trying to make up for it's brokenness in CV1.