Koji Igarashi and Toru Hagihara looked at games like Bloodlines and Rondo and thought Gee, these games are just too hard! Their carefully designed, intentionally strict gameplay really doesn’t sell well! We should make a game anyone can get through just by grinding! This sounds like angry gamer projection, but you can find actual interviews, IIRC circa Harmony of Dissonance, in which Igarashi states this bluntly.

I’m not looking to gatekeep people out of Castlevania, like several of them have difficulty settings and I have no problem with that, but the joy in a classic Vania (a la Mega Man) is in using the curated toolset at your disposal (limited jumps, restricted default attack, sub weapons) to overcome challenges that are made for that toolset. Igarashi’s Castlevania has none of that of course: Alucard is so incredibly overpowered that it isn’t even funny. He can swap weapons for different attack ranges, damage values, hit rate and more. He’s got sub weapons, he has shield powers, he has familiars, he has ridiculous superjumps and stuff. Enemies in Symphony and the subsequent games just cannot respond to your vast pool of attacks in any meaningful way. What’s stupid too is that the Headhunter boss from Aria shows you how Igavania enemies could be more Megaman X-esque to accomodate your new attacks, but the majority of enemies are annoyingly inert if not just recycled from Rondo again.

Even if Alucard didn’t have sixteen billion methods of obliterating anything in his path though, nothing beats just grabbing a shortsword and wailing on stuff real fast, DPS-ing. It became dominant strategy for me honestly, because nothing can challenge you like this. Why experiment? Not only have enemies not been adjusted to account for your ridiculous arsenal, but you can also just gain xp and increase your attack power. There’s now no enemy, bosses included, that cannot be defeated by grinding and just wailing on it. There is no “I can’t do enough damage to it fast enough” anymore, and so zero strategy in combat. Theoretically you could use backstepping to dodge some attacks, like the old spear knights… but you have refillable health now, and potions are plentiful to buy, so why bother? Especially if you’re going somewhere, just tank the hits and chug, I mean why not? It’s similar to Moongrass in Demon’s Souls, functionally infinite and barely gated. Level up enough and those hits just become scratch damage anyway. Fighting outside of boss rooms is more like an annoyance than any kind of fun, tough encounter.

I assume there were a lot of complaints about the “stiff” control in the older games, reflecting early-2010s “discourse” about Castlevania, because Alucard has totally fluid control on the ground and in mid-air. The moon-gravity doesn’t feel pleasant like in Sonic Adventure, say, but it does work. Alucard’s base movement is so jacked though, that there are very few enemies you cannot answer by simply jumping over them, particularly with the double jump, and stuff like the bat power just makes things silly. The movement contributes to enemies feeling really pathetic; in Castlevania 1, the only enemies you can ever jump over are basically bats, jaguars and medusa heads. By contrast I struggle to think of an Igavania enemy that does not get jumped over eventually. Maybe the lady-plants…?

Trouble is that enemies have to be ignorable, basically, by design. The open-ended map means nobody would enjoy backtracking through levels designed like classic Castlevania, purpose-built to bust the ass of your fixed jump arc and horizontal-only whip. By contrast, platforms and enemies are just kind of splattered around in an Igavania, always trying to strike a balance between “engaging combat and platforming” and “traversal”, which do not gel IMO. The best examples I can think of are the Chapel area in Symphony and the Eternal Corridor in Circle. It’s sad how bad level design has become in this game: the Clock Tower area is back from the classics, but the gears aren’t hard anymore because jumping is easy, so the game resorts to throwing like five medusa heads at you at once, with some that petrify Alucard. That’s the best they can do. My general solution in this game became to just whack anything that was in my path, unless it took more than three hits, at which point I’d jump it. Coincidentally this also results in you constantly being overlevelled ad destroying bosses… or maybe I just got that gud?