Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Welcome back, bone daddy.

With a string of Konami’s epic classic franchises getting the Rebirth treatment, we all figured it was just a matter of time before the company got around to Castlevania. I can tell you it was worth the wait. It’s beautiful, very finely tuned, and boasts a number of great improvements over the earlier sidescrollers in the franchise. On the other hand, it has some stunning feature omissions that could easily be dealbreakers for those who aren’t as mad about the brand as I am. Then there are the bugs. Have a look inside for the big picture.

Big eyeballs. Blue skeletons. Birds of prey are easier to hit this time around.

Castlevania: the Adventure Rebirth is not only a classic-styled Castlevania, it’s a reimagining of Konami’s first Game Boy title, Castlevania: the Adventure. The game bears very little resemblance to the original of course, but there are some consistencies between the two. There’s the star, Christopher Belmont. There’s the rolling eyeball enemies found throughout the game. There’s the mini reapers. There are ropes, but they’re only for skeletons to climb on, as our hero gets to use stairs instead. Honestly, that’s about it. I didn’t see anything in the game that made me think of the original beyond these. There are six stages instead of four in the original game, but the sixth stage is just the showdown against Dracula, complete with a small amount of cheesy spoken dialog.

Christopher can sling fireballs as long as that yellow meter isn't empty.

Whip upgrades are done similarly to Adventure. Pick up a bright blue glowing ball and your leather whip becomes a chain with a ball on the end. Grab another one and Christopher will send fireballs from the end of it a short distance. In Adventure, your whip would shoot fireballs only if it were fully upgraded and you were at full life. Once you took a hit, you lost all your whip upgrades and were stuck like that until you found another upgrade. In Rebirth, you upgrade from the chain to a chain that shoots fireballs for thirty seconds, until a special meter runs out. You keep all upgrades until you lose a life, which is much more consistent with the rest of the series.

This beefy spear knight can be taken out easily by a falling chandelier.

There are refinements here that I need to point out. Collision detection, for example, is excellent. The hit boxes on enemies are very fair. The bat company boss can sail past you and its wing will pass right over you, while its body does damage. Spears coming out of the walls will only hurt you if you touch the tip of the sharp part. Barely grazing an enemy will not harm you, it needs to be a real, solid hit. Enemies are hurt by environmental hazards, as well. A spear can take out a bat for example, and often it will. Giant swinging blades will shatter skeletons, just like in Bloodlines. So will falling chandeliers, and only some of them need your help to tumble onto an enemy. Such refined balance means deaths usually don’t feel terribly cheap.

The other thing that’s just like Bloodlines here is the music. The opening stage’s music, Reincarnated Soul, is lifted right from that game. It set that feeling and it never disappeared. The quality of the audio could have been much higher, but instead this really feels a lot like a Genesis game. Most of the other songs in the game were taken from other Castlevania games, except perhaps for Stage 2′s music, which I didn’t recognize. The sound effects in this game deserve special mention. While there seems to be a preponderance of thrown item noises that sound like dogs barking, there also seems to be a distinct sound for just about everything in the game. This means anything from a jump to the death of a gorgon head (oh, I hate those things) is likely to sound different and special.

The axe subweapon is a godsend against many of the bosses.I suppose you could use it on these things instead if you prefer.

Christopher isn’t the acrobat we had in Simon in Super Castlevania IV, but he’s close. While you can’t whip in eight directions or move while crouching, you can adjust your jump in mid-air (or, if you’d prefer, turn this off in the options menu and go even older school.) Jumps are digital though, so you can’t do little hops or longer deals, it’s one height fits all. You also can’t jump onto or off of stairs, which is a disappointment for those of us in a hurry.

An interesting mechanic that found its way in was a key system. Keys are hidden in various places, and grabbing one as a subweapon allows you to open any locked door. Locked doors can lead to alternate areas, small rooms with bonus items like points or 1up figures, and more. Keys were present in Rondo of Blood as well, but we’re not rescuing damsels here, just looting the place. One of the great things about this game is the volume of secrets and hidden area. There are false walls you can just walk through, break-away walls that you can find by accident, and even large alternate routes through stages. Again, very reminiscent of Rondo of Blood, and lots of fun.

Stage 3's miniboss is a pumped up white dragon. He's kind of a pushover.

Each of the five main stages has a miniboss in the middle. The challenge on these varies widely. The one in the middle of Stage 4 can be really, really hard, while the one in the middle of 5 only killed me twice, and both times I had almost no life when I faced it. It’s a good thing these were put into the game, because they really break things up nicely. With five bosses plus Dracula, I would have been pretty disappointed. Now, 10 bosses is more like it, even if many of them are very easy.

The options menu is pretty robust, but it’s also broken. While you can choose from several different control configurations and then remap the button functions however you see fit, the rumble option for the Gamecube controller does not work, even if you turn it on. The option isn’t even given if you’re using the Wii Remote turned sideways as a controller, so no rumble there either. You have the option of setting the X and Y scaling of the screen and adjusting the position of the HUD, but there is no widescreen mode, so you’re either stretching your image or looking at black bars. You can set the difficulty level, which is nice, and you can even set the number of lives you begin the game with to a maximum of nine.

All nine are replenished every time you continue, and you’re given infinite continues. However, there is no way to suspend and resume. There are no game saves, there are no passwords… nothing. This is the single most significant problem with the entire game, and it drives me insane. Eventually I realized I wouldn’t get through the game unless I just left the thing paused, just like we all did with our NES consoles as kids when playing the original Castlevania. That’s right, the first one, back in 1987. That was the last Castlevania that didn’t have at least a password system. Even Adventure had one!

This guy is my arch nemesis, thanks to some sloppy coding.

Beyond the broken rumble feature, I encountered a couple of other frustrations. One was the time limit on the stages. While it was generally much more than I needed, in the instance of the level 4 final boss, it’s in need of some tuning. If you lose against that boss, you restart outside the boss room, but you only have 2:30 on the clock, which is barely enough time to collect the hearts and subweapon from the candles and take the boss down. As frustrating as this was, I had one instance where beating the boss failed to net me the stage-ending crystal. As a result, I was stuck watching the last four minutes of my time count down to nothing, then stuck trying to do it all again in two and a half minutes. Surprisingly, I found the battles against the Stage 5 boss and Dracula himself easier and far less frustrating than that one because of those two issues.

Thrill as an entire enemy and a flying bone are completely obscured by the stopwatch overlay.

Another major nuisance is the stopwatch subweapon. If you use it, a gigantic overlay of a clock appears on the screen, obscuring your view. While the enemies aren’t moving anymore, environmental hazards are, and they can both still hurt you. That means if you can’t see a section of the screen, it can still kill you quite effectively. Sure, it looks cool. Is it a good idea? No, not really.

So what we’ve been given is a new Castlevania game, styled to look approximately like a PlayStation 1 level Castlevania. It most resembles Bloodlines of all the classic games, in no way more than the audio in the game. Mastery of the game will mean you can breeze through the whole thing in well under two hours. There are no alternate modes, but you can pump up the difficulty in a couple of different ways. Naturally, you could fight for the best score, but with no online leaderboards, there’s hardly a point. The omission of a save function and some issues at the end of Stage 4 are a serious pain in the ass.

I give Castlevania: the Adventure Rebirth four out of five. With a save function, I would have gone higher.

Check out other Wii reviews at Test Freaks.

[This article originated on Castlemaniablog]