I’ve already spent more than three hours playing the freshly released WiiWare game Castlevania: the Adventure Rebirth this afternoon, and I’ve come away with some really distinct impressions I’d like to share. While the game does a whole heap of things right for Castlevania fans, I’m concerned that there are some pretty distressing design decisions in the software that really disappoint me.

I’ll start with the good.

The game looks great. While it’s unlikely to turn any heads among new gamers, the graphical level is right out of the franchise’s pinnacle of popularity. I’d place it at around the level of the PlayStation, or maybe the GBA with Aria of Sorrow. While there are some effects here that are clearly above either platform, most notably in lighting, I wouldn’t say it’s quite as pretty as something like Order of Ecclesia.

The sound is very much like a MIDI version of what we heard in Bloodlines, right down to the musical track behind the first stage, Reincarnated Soul. Other stages have familiar songs from other games in the series, like Rondo of Blood, and there are some I don’t recognize that sound fine too. The pickup sound effects are also lifted straight from Bloodlines, which is a fun acknowledgment of that great game’s legacy.

The enemy variety is pretty good, especially when compared to the original game. You’ll find the bats, blobs, scythe wielding nuisances, and eyeballs of course, but you’ll also find peeping eyes (or bugbears, or whatever you want to call them) and far more fire-breathing dragon skulls than you’d ever ask for.

Some of the control advancements we’ve seen over time are included, and some are omitted. For example, being able to control your jumps in midair (something that you can turn off after unlocking the option) is here, but whipping in any direction but left or right is out, as expected.

There are some great options in the menu system to change how many lives you start with (something I wish I’d noticed before beginning the game) as well as adjusting the difficulty level. I didn’t encounter any challenge in the game until Stage 3 on the normal difficulty.

Then there’s the problems. Let’s just come right out with it: there’s no save system, no password system, no suspend and resume… nothing. You have to play the whole game in one sitting, and while that could theoretically be done rather quickly once you’ve mastered the enemy placement and timing, it’s very much a throwback to a simpler time that I can’t see anyone being happy about.

Look at it this way: Castlevania is an old brand, and most of its real fans are also pretty old. We have families and other lives, and can sometimes only play for 30 minutes or less in one sitting. Without any way to pull this off, apart from pausing the game and keeping the console on, we’re out of luck. In more than three hours of play, I had reached the mid-level boss on Stage 4, and didn’t want to stop playing because I knew I would have to start over at the beginning. I’m off this week, but if I wasn’t, spending three hours in the one game would be impossible. It seems like a ridiculous design decision.

The other thing that annoys the heck out of me is the game was made in 4:3 mode only. Playing it on a widescreen TV gives you black borders, unless you go into the options and stretch the image. While I liked being able to tweak the position and scale the image to 104% in both directions to fill the screen a little better, as well as moving elements of the HUD around so they wouldn’t be cut off, I am unwilling to stretch it out horizontally and make it look squished.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll complete the game at some point this week and have a thorough review.

[This article originated on Castlemaniablog]