Here’s a little oddity, groundbreaking in a few ways. It represents big publishers trying to get into the mobile phone game market, Konami collaborating with Westerners for one of their big franchises, and a hybrid of the two types of Castlevania gameplay. Too bad it’s not very good. Ok, ok, with the heavy disclaimer “for a mobile game” it’s fine.

Although this would normally be played in a narrow portrait view, using my java phone emulator I was able to expand the screen space, which really helped with visibility of enemies even if the UI ended up a little odd. Unfortunately I had other problems with my controller, apart from the regular control issues on mobile phones (only accepting one input at a time, button combos with overlapping functions, sketchy diagonal jumps). It looks decent for what it is, but you must toggle between music and sound effects; whatever midi rendering my emulator had made the SFX very unsuited so I kept the music, which was fine.

But let’s talk about how the game works, because it’s an interesting experiment. You have a slightly explorable world but broken up into stage-like bits. Progress gives you new abilities and you will loop back at one point, and you find sub-weapons that are permanently collected and switchable through the menu (but most of them are useless; either comparable to the whip but using hearts, or with more range but too weak). Desmond levels up with experience and can find usable health items and spells. So it’s a light Metroidvania in fact, albeit cut down for the platform, poorly executed and nowhere near as satisfying as its contemporaries. It didn’t really need the RPG elements and backtracking, especially as a mobile game.

At least we have a plot with cutscenes. Desmond is the Belmont of the day, and his sisters Dolores and Zoe pop up for exposition and to give you new abilities, such as alchemy (this and other plot elements tie it loosely to the PS2 game Lament of Innocence). It’s not really unique in Castlevania, except having multiple Belmonts, and it’s very brief. The game is over very quickly; I beat it in a bit over an hour without much trouble. Respawning in the same room on death helps.

So I don’t want this game to be overlooked; it’s not up to the standard set by many other Castlevania games, but it’s short and not difficult so as long as you can wrangle a mobile phone emulator, a fan of the series should give it a go. And I do push back against it being written off as non-canon, as I did with Legends for Game Boy, or the N64 games; I like being inclusive like that. Random trivia fact: the game’s designer went on to found indie publisher Nicalis very soon after this.