OH HAI Podcast Listeners and welcome back to the Giraffe Feels Podcast. Please get in touch if you like the podcast or have ideas or comments. Social media coordinates can be found at the end of the episode. Listeners can also email the podcast at giraffexofeels@gmail.com; we can be found online at giraffefeels.net Also we are now on iTunes!, Stitcher, and Google Play. There should be a link in the show notes if you want to subscribe. Please rate the podcast and give it a review too. Whether it is Rondo of Blood, Dracula X, or the more recent Dracula X Chronicles, this game is absolutely incredible. No matter which version, this has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. The music and atmosphere are so good. As we discussed in our episode on Castlevania III, I am a huge fan of this series. This game continues that tradition in the 16 bit era after the excellent Super Castlevania. By the time we got it here in the states in late 1995, its aesethic was already a little old school, which was fine by me. In the past few years before that I had gotten heavily into anime during my middle school years and was still consistenly playing SNES games. Dracula X, as it was called when we got the game here, has a style that is more in line with 1980s anime like Project Ako, Macross, or Dirty Pair than something more, um, 20 years ago, modern series like Neon Genesis Evangelion. That was something which drew me to the game because I love eighties anime after growing up with series like Robotech and then becoming deeply inspired as a teenager by vampire inspired works like Vampire Hunter D and Vampire Princess Miyu. The game also merged a lot of what I liked about individual Castlevania games of the past. It is a bit non-linear like Castlevania III is, but not quite an open world like II. When I first played the game on the SNES, a lot of the action reminded me of the first game in the series. It had the right combination of being a game in my beloved 16 bit era, having an amazing soundtrack, the right combination of the styles of previous Castlevania games, and a noticable anime influence. According to the world wide web, Dracula X came out in September 1995. I must have played through it sometime that winter or spring. Around this time I was playing through Earthbound and then, later that year, Super Mario RPG, so I was renting other SNES games as I ran into them in stores. I remember seeing this in a store in the next town over from us and being surprised because I had heard very little about a game called "Dracula X" before this. I had read about Rondo of Blood in magazines, but did not immediately make the connection between them. A friend of mine and I took the game home and he left to go find another friend of ours and pick us up subs at the sandwich shop in the main part of our town. I sat down and began playing and quickly became deeply immersed in a playthrough. I made pretty quick, again like with FF4 surprising myself, progress with the game and was at least a few stages into it by the time they came back with our dinner. After eating we settled in and kept forging ahead through the game and by the end of the rental cycle I had beaten it. I remember being very surprised at how simplistic the final boss battle was...as long as you have an axe, you can lob them at Dracula and just dodge his occasional attacks. The brutal fights with Dracula in earlier games were replaced by something a bit more straight forward. I suppose the one tricky aspect was staying on a pillar. I never have enough patience to just wait for a boss to come to me, so this fight does add that complication because I always want to rush into fights... It's funny at the time I remember being bummed out on how quickly I had gone through it and ended up doing a run through Simon's Quest in my sparetime away from Earthbound to, in my mind, make up for it. At the time, Dracula X seemed a bit inferior to be honest. I did not get to actually play Rondo of Blood until college. A friend had a copy and I played it at his house. I even owned a copy for awhile after a girlfriend showed me this new website called eBay, but I sold a lot of that stuff at various points. I don't remember a lot about that playthrough specifically to comment about it though unfortunately. I wouldn't play it again until the Dracula X Chronicles came out... The Castlevania Dracula X Chronicles collections puts together Rondo of Blood with Symphony of the Night, the classic playstation Castlevania game. I don't know if we will ever do a SOTN episode because....and I understand this is blasphemous...I'm not a big fan of the game....I remember actively disliking it back then after renting the game and I still do not like it that much....the "metroidvania" style just isn't really for me. I always end up getting bored, or frustrated, and stop playing the game. I've also not played much of Bloodlines on the Genesis, but am going to look into that during the winter. Sadly, every Castlevania game I have played since then has been mediorce or didn't even feel like a Castlevania game to me. My most recent playthroughs of this game have been using Dracula X on the SNES and then Rondo of Blood on the Vita. Dracula X was much harder than I remember it being. I had thought I would blow through it, but I had a lot of problems especially with bosses. I got through eventually, but I have a lot more respect for the difficulty of the game. While nowadays I understand that the version of Final Fantasy 4 we received here in the US was the easy type version, which was how I blew right through it, Dracula X is very hard. I just got lucky and got into the zone I guess. One of the biggest problems with Dracula X is the lack of recovery time when taking damage. It is very easy, especially when cornered by a boss, to take a ton of hits in a very short amount of time. This caused a lot of frustration for me at the end of a few levels. While the PC engine version has the definitive version of the soundtrack, the SNES version is quite good as well. I am such a sucker for a series like this where classic tracks are redone over and over for newer games. I mark out so hard when a new version of Vampire Killer or Bloody Tears comes on when I enter a stage. Last year I bought the Dracula X Chronicles for my Vita when it was on sale for like $3. I began doing a playthrough of Rondo of Blood during the spring and ended up playing it almost every morning at breakfast for awhile. Rondo of Blood is a tough game, but what I especially love about it is that I can keep going back to it because it is so fun to play. I'm not asverse to a challenge, but what is lost in many modern games is the joy playing a game that is, at the end of the day, focused on fun and replay value. In a modern sense, This is what makes a game like Dragons Dogma much more interesting to me than say Dark Souls. I got stuck on level 4, but then found Marie and began wrecking the next few levels. Many bosses are mini puzzles that you need to figure out. Once you have the pattern down, like in a Mega Man game, they are much easier to approach. I am also grateful for all the gamers who have put up videos on Youtube, which greatly aided me in defeating a few bosses. I appreciated the lack of a clock, so I could go slowly and explore the game. According to my Vita, I still have a bit to go through but I will definitely need a guide for that. I have many other gaming obligations right now, but I could definitely see jumping back into this game during the summer when I have a lot more time. After aawhile I got to the end of the game, defeated, Dracula, and felt pretty good about it. I can still picjk the game up and wander around in various levels having a lot of fun trying to find new secrets. There is still some stuff I need to unlock in the game and I love that I can pick it up on my Vita for 20 minutes at a time. Having games on a portable system really adds to the replay value for me. A good majority of my gaming time is spent on the Vita or 3DS these days. Like a lot of the other games we have discussed on this podcast, I listen to this soundtrack all the time at work. At least a few days of the week, I don't teach until the late morning, so I will go in a few hours early to do work. I grade papers while listening to this game's, either version, soundtrack a lot. Again, the Giraffe Feels podcast is written, edited, produced, and performed by William Wend. Giraffefeelspod is the user name to follow on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. We have a Youtube page that is linked on the website. Subscribe via RSS, Soundcloud, or on iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher. Links are on the website. Make sure you rate and review the podcast. Here is a preview of our next episode..