90% of this game's challenge would be gone if the screen scrolled down when you fell and let you land on the floor below
>>11487164its already too damn easy. castlevania 1 and 3 are unironically the only games in the series you NEED to play.
>>11487169>easy games can't possibly be funcringeworthy 1999 gamefaqs opinion desucv1 is one of the easiest in the series btw
>>11487169>its already too damn easy.It's fun, who cares. Castlevania 1 is also easy
It's heartwarming to see people rightfully acknowledging the fact that Castlevania 1 is a easy game ITT. Looks like the AVGN brainwashing has warn off.
>>11487181People have been saying this on /vr/ for a while, no?
Can we acknowledge that the Dracula fight in CV4 is one of the lamest in the series and is only saved by the kinographe of Simon's theme kicking in in the final phase of it?Also Slogra's stupid instant beak lunges and the randomly vanishing bridge in the dungeon level are bullshit
>>11487208>the randomly vanishing bridge in the dungeon level are bullshitThis one fucked me up so much, it made me hate Stage 8 in particular. I knew how to get through the entire level without taking a single hit, but I still had to restart it multiple times because I slightly misjudged the timing on the bridge.
>>11487164Maybe the Metroidvanias are more your speed, no bottomless pits.>>11487181CV1 is harder but also much shorter, and once you know the levels by memory it's a fun flow but mostly autopilot, still requires a level of 2D dexterity most people today lack, though.CV4 gives the illusion of being easier, but it's not really any easier than the other 16bit games.>>11487208I think it's fine. Definitely elevated by the music and the way it's utilized. The fight itself is mostly the same old 1st phase but with a twist with the energy balls that explode if jumped over, and the 1.5 phase with the phantom fire faces, the way they work is interesting and I think they influenced the first Shaft battle in Rondo.2nd phase is actually cool, the way the count reveals his real face. I understand most people will expect a giant monster transformation (even though according to the lost lore, cookie monster was a different entity altogether than Dracula), but I think a more traditional face to face with Dracula is also a great finale for a classic Castlevania game. The 2nd phase itself is just a more difficult take on Dracula's teleportation hide-and-seek, simple but again, this part gets elevated by the music and the flashing visual effects. It's a well done final fight, even if the fight itself is not some JRPG-tier crazy final boss, it's classy and feels like a good culmination to a long adventure.
>>11487230It's not fine. It's a stupidly designed fight and as a cheap solution to their bad design, he drops huge healing meats during the fight so it's nearly impossible to lose.
>>11487235What's stupid about it?>solutionIt's funny that he does that but really none of the dracula fights in 16bit is much of a challenge. I remember Death also dropping meat during the card roulette.Stop getting mad at the game giving you health. Avoid getting it if it bothers you, I don't think that's a real problem.
>>11487164Yeah, and 90 percent of Mario's challenge would be gone if Mario didn't get killed by mushrooms and turtles who don't even attack youMaybe like 30 percent of Sonice challenge would be gone if he could swim! Amazing stuff
>>11487263Personally, I think all games should have had save and rewind functions to remove the challenge.
>>11487164>the game would be easy if it were easyIrrelevant inconsequential opst>>11487169Idiot zoomer opinion that incorrectly conflates "difficulty" and "playing"
>>11487181Anyone that spends any amount of time whatsoever thinking about ecelebs or eceleb minions should eat a lead pellet.Same for people who think a game's difficulty is a measure of its quality.
>>11487164Correct>>11487214>slightly misjudged the timingYou didn't misjudge anything, you got unlucky. There are ways to play the Frankenstein bridge well but you can do everything right and still get fucked by RNG patterns. It is bar none the single most dogshit piece of design in the entire franchise and automatically disqualifies SC4 from being the best imo.
>>11487290The bridge can be done if you watch the blocks. It's RNG but they still respect a specific amount of time before disappearing, and they start flickering before disappearing. It can be done with just a bit of attention.
>>11487181how do you get past the fucking medusa heads
>>11487284I noticed zoomers have a real hatred of content creators, and I figured out why.....zoomers don't create anything artistically, just watch youtube poops and tiktok
>>11487181I still can’t make it to death without save states, desu. That whole stage is brutal. Almost clashes with the rest of the game’s reasonable difficulty, imo.
>>11487350you literally just have to sit still and wait for them to come to youthey have the exact same pattern, unchanging, every time and they spawn according to your position.>>11487419You're making shit up, right? How long have you been playing Castlevania 1?
>>11487294>can be doneOf course it can be done. It just can't be done with 100% consistency because of the RNG. You can end up in a position where the platform underneath you is about to disappear and there are no viable platforms within jumping distance, and that has nothing to do with paying attention, that's just getting fucked by bad spawn timing.
>>11487181calling it 'easy' is faggotry. there's several pretty tough bosses and the game has at least one sheer difficulty spike. It's not especially hard sure but not easy.
>>11487164>everyone saying cv1 is easy>the farthest boss I ever reached was the mummies before getting hopelessly filteredfeels bad man
>>11487350>durrr sine wave hard
>>11487476CV's true biggest challenge is patience. It's like Ninja Gaiden where it's all about memorizing every single enemy placement and movement and knowing just when to jump, move, strike, etc.....only for some people CV is actually harder because everything moves slow. Most of the times I died in any of these games is cause I reacted too quickly, since other games taught me to be swift, but in this game it's more like you need to wait for everything
>>11487476I mean, IV is probably easier if you want to try that.
>>11487164Lmao.
>>11487181>all of these replies>no one pointed out the fact anon wrote "warn off" instead of "worn off"
Great game in the series, but it might honestly be the most overrated game on the system. Hard to say since it IS the SNES, but man, people forgive a fuckton of jank for nostalgia and/or the "sanctioned" opinion. The vertical scrolling issue aside, if you had any form of visual impairment half the game was fucking unplayable. The 8 directional whipping was amazing, but it still carried over the worst aspects of the gamefeel of the NES games. The deliberately clunky argument (which was valid for 1-3) gets thrown out the fucking window with that one improvement alone. They could have reinvented the feel of the game like later entries did, but settled for the one big change and some minor QoL, disrupting their own design philosophy. Again, still great, but I honestly put it toward the lower half of the franchise. Then again I can find merit in CoM so maybe my opinion doesn't matter.
>>11489304...what
>>11489304dunno what "clunk" you're talking about in any of these games. there's some stupid parts of 3 and 4 (alucard level 7 and the vanishing bridge in level 8 respectively) and 2 has poor enemy/level design compared to the others but they all play well, it's not like the controls are fucked up. you want a clunky castlevania game, go play the adventure on gameboy.
>>11489549By clunk I meant the intentional design around things like the delay of the whip, lack of air control, not being able to jump on stairs, absurd falling acceleration, etc. They were intentional designs in the NES castlevanias and they often make the games better for it. They add a lot of deliberateness and planning to almost every action, and its very consistent throughout. Directional whipping feels out of place when put against those design choices, so to me it always felt like they should have either embraced QoL or stuck with the original design, instead of kinda half stepping it in 4, if that makes sense.>>11489350If you mean about the vision comment, the mode seven sections, some of the fore/background effects like the fence in the first stage, and a lot of the palette choices were terrible for visibility. Apparently someone made a higher contrast romhack a few years ago that makes a lot more maps have better contrast, I should probably give it a try and see if it helps.
>>11489554idk i guess i could see it, like it doesn't add much as opposed to in the nes games. but i don't think it hurts much either except in the clock tower, which is a level that really takes more advantage of the snes and those sections with the conveyor belt hooks are more annoying than they probably intended. also the last level with the stairs and the sawblade chasing you but i could've swore there's some direction you hold to do that every time.
Holy fucking shit, who designed this level? This is the worst thing I've ever fucking played.
>>11489579Stage 8 is way fucking worse. So much of it is just testing your patience waiting for wonky hittbox 1HKO spkes to move out of the fucking way and then the shitty vegas bridge with randomly vanishing blocks at the very end of the level even spreedrunners can't consistently clear just to fuck you overThat part you posted isn't even that bad. Like just climb the stairs bro, it's not hard. The shitty part of that level is the rising platforms with the spakes above you at the end.
>>11487169>its already too damn easy.>>11487172>cv1 is one of the easiest in the series>>11487181>It's heartwarming to see people rightfully acknowledging the fact that Castlevania 1 is a easy game ITTAnyone who boosts about how easy a game is are tryhard faggots. What people actually care about are games that are memorable and rewarding to playthrough. If difficulty is the sole measure of greatness, then kaiso Mario games would be rated the greatest things ever.Also, going on about how easy a game is just means you're boring and haven't got anything interesting to say about gaming as a whole. In fact you're better off stop playing games and do something really challenging like climbing a dangerous mountain. Those of the feats that are impressive.
>>11489579Use the stair mechanic (press up), you may have gotten too used to being able to jump while on stairs from later entries>>11490059That's just how it's always been. As soon as Castlevania 1's Stage 2 you have instakill spikes. Nothing wonky about the hitboxes, just don't get hit.
>>11490104Stopwatch stopped the spiked platform’s movementThe stopwatch doesn’t do that in 4 for some reason
>>11489304>but it might honestly be the most overrated game on the systemsecret of manamegaman x3dbz super butouden 2
>>11490093I'm not trying to be some kind of tryhard, but the matter of the fact is that Castlevania 1's difficulty has been wildly overrated due to AVGN propaganda.
>>11490467You say that with only your on skill level to measure it with. The only metric of difficulty should be the ratio between people who bought the game vs complete the game. If the average of completion is lower than 50% then it's fair to say that it has above average difficulty (unless there's an issue with the quality of the game, i:e. boring to play).
Castlevania 1 is hard for a first time player. Becomes easy once you know the game Castlevania 4 is normal difficulty for beginners (not really easy, as most first time players will meet their first game over at stage 3, and will probably get stuck in game over hell at stage 8), and stays in the se range of difficulty even if you know the game.4 is harder to 1cc than CV1.4 is also widely acknowledged as the hardest CV to speedrun.
>>11490093in that same post i also said the difficulty level of a game doesn't affect the fun of it, it's at least top 3 for me (well only counting classicvanias). just tired of the contrarian retards shitting on the later games because they're "too easy".
CV4 >Early StagesBoring and not very challenging>Late stagesBetter level design and starting to be more challengingBosses also stop being pushovers
>>11490479Interesting metric, yet how the hell would you expect to measure that? NTA, but personally my metric for difficulty is a combination of requirements between mechanical and strategic skill, and intuitiveness of both gameplay and adversity solutions. Everything from timing and speed required to how obvious/obtuse developer intended solutions all play a role in the concept, and it minimizes (though can never truly remove) the subjective aspect in gauging it. Other aspects can apply, and the weight of each aspect can vary depending on genre or even just design philosophy, but in general those factors are usually going to relate to any given person's answer on the topic. Something I've definitely learned trying to develop awesome-yet-esoteric mechanics myself, they can be both pointless and extremely overpowered simultaneously. It all depends on whether the player picks up what is being put down, and how obvious those breadcrumbs are.
>>11490530>Interesting metric, yet how the hell would you expect to measure that?Consoles already do it and have for a good while.
>>11490463SoM was absolutely overrated, but anyone who played it multiplayer back in the day knew how much credit it deserved for the time. Its biggest detractor is that SD3 later did the same multiplayer aspect in a much better game. While SoE was a better game imo, SoM was still better regarding multiplayer.Super Butouden 2 was one of the only good DBZ games we had for a while, and its gameplay actually lent pretty well to even online multiplayer at the time. It also had a decent amount of mechanics in an era where SNES fighting games might barely even have special moves. I also find it hard to be overrated when most people only know about it from a historical standpoint, while the ones who rate it highly tend to be the ones who again were playing it online in the late 90's/early 00's.Megaman X3 is hard to consider overrated when its criticisms have always been well discussed. It was a great game and had a lot of flaws, and thats always kinda been the agreed upon stance with it. You're hard pressed to find anyone say its the best of the 3 on the system. The only way you could consider it the most overrated game on the system would be to say its dogshit and the number of mixed opinions on it aren't negative enough. The reason I single out SC4 for the spot is because the majority of opinions on the game are entirely surface level, some amalgamation of "its AVGN's favorite one," "Its one of the most popular games on the system," Its one of the first really good cross generational 'remakes' we've had" on top of the usual nostalgia skewed perceptions. People generally feel compelled to rate it higher than they would (based on its own merits alone) due to outside influences. Again, its still a great game, but I feel it is one of the best examples of a game's reaction being influenced by more than the person giving said opinion's personal experience. Its a game where people feel like they're not alowed to dislike or even criticise its shortcomings.
>>11490535Consoles can tell you the completion % ratio of games made before that data was collected? or are you implying that the Steam version of Comix Zone is somehow an accurate measurement for its overall completion ratio, let alone its difficulty?
>>11490565>butoden 2 is the only good onewut just because it has an online community doesn't mean shit
C4 gets hard once you reach the castle, I remember the level with spikes and frankenstein boss being a nightmareeverything before the castle is pretty forgettable tbqhwy
>>11490571>Consoles can tell you the completion % ratio of games made before that data was collected?That's not what I claimed and you know it. In the past they used to have playtesters from the public to try out the games and find bugs. I saw this for myself on an episode of Bad Influence in the 90's, plus it is well known game's journalists have throughout their existence have done game testing for publishers.
>>11490574You forgot the "one of" part. DBZHD was also extremely good, only really limited by its slowdown issues and SSJ focused roster. Considering you seem to be familiar with kusoge, you DO know that nobody has it on the pinnacle of games like SF2 or KI, right? Most people who rate it highly do so because it was generally rated lower than it should have been, even in the zbattle days there were a lot of people who thought it was jank garbage and played HD or other games like GWED instead. It has always been a game that people received as equal parts jank and quality, and their reception was based on how much they weighed the two.
>>11490587Yes, playtesting has always existed, so I don't know what that has to do with your claim? it has absolutely nothing to do with completion ratios, which was what I was talking about. You can take those ratios in a controlled setting but the sample size is going to be wildly different from a post release userbase. Fighting games especially have always had balance issues slip through the cracks constantly because that one autist in korea or japan hasn't been able to discover tech that completely destroys the developers expectations. The only way results based measurements are accurate is when every single factor has been both discovered and accounted for, which will be exponentially less common the smaller your sample size is. Someone finds new tech 15 years later and your definition changes wildly.
>>11490614>Yes, playtesting has always existed, so I don't know what that has to do with your claim?Are you unable to read or something? I said in the past they used to have playtesters from the public to try out the games AND find bugs. They were not staff, they were randoms such as kids to find out how they got along completing their up and coming game. Tons of rows of children being monitored on how they progressed on how easy or how difficult they found the game. Do you understand now?
>>11490059>That part you posted isn't even that bad. Like just climb the stairs bro, it's not hard. The shitty part of that level is the rising platforms with the spakes above you at the end.I used that picture to represent the level generally, the raising platforms is what gave me the most trouble.
>>11490059>One of the best levelsThis is one of my favorite levels in the game
>>11490621Yeah, I excluded that distinction because it doesn't fucking matter. Whether playtersters are on payroll or not, they make zero difference if they aren't able to find every single detail of a game that will impact its difficulty. People find shit for games years after their release, and old games didn't get dlc patches to fix their fuckups (the most you would get are patched versions of games while they're still being produced.) Like I said, the chances of that happen grow exponentially with your sample size, because you have zero way of knowing what can be discovered after you archive the code. A lot of games have had their perception of difficulty change drastically over time because people figure out unintended techniques or strategies that were missed through all of those stages of development and testing. You still see it today with shit like the souls games, where many would argue strategy is a bigger aspect of their difficultt than actual mechanical skill. As people have "downloaded" those games, their difficulty is considered much lower than it was at launch, even when there were exploits yet been patched out (since nobody knew them yet, they didn't have any relevance at the time.)That also, again, has nothing to do with completion percentages. Even in your original suggestion you admitted that other aspects like engagement already muddy the waters, while your answer to that is somehow... secret shopper playtesters?
>>11490642>they make zero difference if they aren't able to find every single detail of a game that will impact its difficultyYes they do matter otherwise developers wouldn't get them to play their unreleased games.
>>11490646Are you fucking retarded? I was talking in relation to your point you keep trying to disassociate yourself with. Yes Playtesters find bugs, but every bug that they miss is a timebomb waiting to happen. If every playtester found every bug ever then bugs in release products wouldn't fucking exist.
>>11490648I'm not talking about random people like children being brought in to look for bugs, that's literally the job of the developers. I'm talking specifically about people coming in like children ONLY to test the completion rate of their up and coming games. I have pretty much said this enough times already, but you have a stick up your arse about it because those same difficulty testers would have been used to spot gaming bugs.
>>11490659You keep saying it but I keep telling you that you're talking about something completely unrelated to your own point. Let's just leave it at "your idea that completion ratios is a good measure for a game's difficulty is fucking stupid" since you keep getting so caught up on this playtester autism.
>>11490669No anon, you've just got a stick up your arse about research methods. Of course having everyone's experience recorded will give the developers an idea on how difficult the playerbase finds it, but that im-fucking-possible before the game is released and pointless long after a game has released and in people's hands. The only thing it is good for is to use it as a benchmark for future installments, but me saying that would be me being Captain Fucking Obvious.
90% of this game's challenge would be gone if you could sustain 5 hits per life
>>11490716We were talking about difficulty determination, not things to learn from with future development. While it certainly bleeds into that, you were talking about things like completion ratios being a true determination of difficulty as opposed to the subjective nature of one person basing difficulty on their own personal experience. I'm saying that regardless of whether it is more accurate than a sample size of 1, it is still a poor metric for such a thing when there are too many variables it does not account for, even by your own initial admission. It also similarly loses the sample size argument as the product's release (absolutely should) be larger than even verbose testing allocation. There's a reason early release shit has been such a thing for years, they want to get as large of a sample size as possible to make sure they don't end up getting surprised by shit that needs to be fixed to maintain their expected difficulty/balance metric. Fixing that shit after the fact fucking sucks, let alone back in the days when it wasn't even really possible.
>>11490717I never stopped to really notice the Contra 3 box art has a similar composition as the Super Castlevania 4 box art. Probably the same artist, and it works because it's cool as fuck.
>>11490752I give up. Talking to you is like talking to a wall and expecting it to listen.
>>11487181Eh, you're kinda right, but not really. Cv1 is easy if you know all its tricks, but it definitely has a learning curve, and its forgivable to suck ass at it during your first go. Still sucking after more than three decades is less understandable. Cv4, on the other hand, is just plain easy, the whip just beats everything with ease.
Do you guys use the secret before fighting Dracula? Is it really cheating?
>>11490914no real difference between that and just going up and down the stairs to grind a triple shot cross and hearts. i mean you probably won't have 99 but you probably also won't need all of them anyway.
>>11490914Yes, although I once accidentally walked off the edge of it. Like another anon said, it just saves you time, definitely not cheating.
>>11490527The only truly bad, or rather bland level in castlevania IV is the caves one.
>>11490941>just going up and down the stairs to grind a triple shot cross and heartsI sometimes wonder if this was an intended part of the first game or not. It does make him easier.
>>11487208It's at least better than rondo.
>>11490502>4 is harder to 1cc than CV14 is like three times longer than cv1
>>11487164What challenge? I used to 1cc flip this game when I was a teen.
>>11487164>90% of this game's challenge>challenge Lmao, lel even
>>11487164
>>11487181Death is a cunt destroyer without using sub weapons
well i just beat dracula x for the first time just now and i don't wanna say it was also easier than most people say it is but like, it was. at least two bosses (stage 2 and stage 6 respectively) i was surprised that was it and that in the former case it wasn't a midboss and in the latter case there wasn't a second phase. there was some frustrating stuff occasionally too sure but overall idk why people say this is one of the hardest desu.to be fair though i may have gotten lucky, instead of facing level 3's boss i got knocked into a pit and sent to a secret level 4 which was pretty simple. well the boss of that stage was kinda stupid, it was stunlock with the knife on a platform or be stunlocked by his electric orbs of slowness. speaking of stupid bosses dracula was pretty stupid. his first phase was really tedious and easy and the second one was basically just damage tanking all of my health by ducking until he moves so as not to fall in the pit.
>>11495773oh and also i think they fucked up the spear knight ai or something because sometimes even when you're going up or down a staircase they still will continue approaching you and you have to go under them to reverse them which makes some parts pretty tedious. especially in the last level where there are no staircases in this elevator like sequence and you have to platform over to them.
>>11487172Castlevania 1 is piss easy once you've played it enough times and figured out the tactics. In fact most Classicvanias are like that. I think the major exception is Chronicles which is brutal on every playthrough.
>>11497360>I think the major exception is Chronicles which is brutal on every playthrough.The werewolf boss fight is the only part of chronicles that's really brutal because of how difficult it is to master.
>>11487164Classic "artificial difficulty," huh? Oh sure, let’s just GIVE everyone a safety net... why not a parachute while we’re at it? "Wahh, I fell, let me climb back up!" NO. The screen doesn’t scroll down because that’s the POINT... the stakes, the tension, the GAME. Without that? You’re just playing a glorified staircase simulator."But it’s UNFAIR!" No, it’s not... it’s CALLED punishment for failure. "Git gud," as the kids say. You miss the jump? Guess what, buddy: consequences EXIST. Removing that challenge just makes it a platformer for TODDLERS.This is why modern games handhold so much—because of people like YOU. Let me guess, next you’ll want to add checkpoints every five steps and a rewind button. BAKA.
>>11498083I dunno, Death and Dracula are pretty hard too. I'm thinking of the original mode.
>>11498115Both can be mastered, the werewolf is one hell of a wall.
>>11487169fpwp>>11487181tbf the us versions were beefed up in difficulty weren't they? and his complaints were mostly about bullshit elements like the platform knockback
>>11487164this is the only classicvania i beat on my first trywaaaaaay too easy, especially for this series
>>11498902Castlevania 1 US difficulty is exactly the same as Castlevania 1 JP. >bullshit elements like platform knockbackWhat is bullshit about it exactly?>I got hit in a perfectly avoidable way in which the game gave me plenty of time to react and this is unfair because... it just IS... ok???
a bit off topic but I just got through the forest on hard on honestly it was one of the hardest castlevania parts I've ever done among the classics what the fuck
>>11499660Careful there Anon. The mods will get you for even the slightest mention of a non-retro game. You will be banned in 3 hours.
>>11487164Castlevania is only hard because you suck. Literally all of them are easy except for 2 because Simon's Quest was never properly translated. >>11490093>Those of the feats that are impressiveLol cope. I think the word you're looking for is boast too buddy. I can point out easy games and still enjoy them. In fact it becomes a challenge when you play them over and over again to see how far you can get before dying. Any game can be challenging if you come up with your own achievements.
