Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness – Cane and Rinse No.705

... The original version reviewed okay, decent, 81% from all its press reviews. Then less than a year later, when the legacy of darkness version came out, it reviewed slightly less well, 73%. ...

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walls and included more significant polish to combat and platforming. So even if you're talking about the original game, your mileage may vary as to how much of a pleasurable experience you find it. And then, yes, then the legacy of darkness version overhauls things more substantially. Although, Chris, you said that you actually think that, I mean, the camera. We'll talk more about this in gameplay. The camera was ambitious for the time and bear in mind that these kind of games hadn't been around for that long,…

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proto John Marston of characters. There's no having fun times underwater in this one, which is probably true of previous Castlevania's thinking about it. It's one of the things that they smoothed out. I think legacy of darkness is how you grab onto those platforms because it's pretty brutal in the original. I mean, you've got to line it up just right and then you've got to make sure you're holding the stick over and then you've got to push up, whereas it's all just a little bit more smooth in legacy of darkness. ...

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that I was going to get on pretty well with these early 3D Castlevanias. So I did, I played before Christmas, I played through both characters on OG Castlevania 64, using an advocate on original hardware on a CRT with the original controller. And I played Legacy of Darkness 64. Now I am just joking there with the 64. I know it's not legacy of darkness. I played through legacy of darkness in the same way. So on original hardware using the advocate. And yeah, I'm looking forward to diving into why Reinhardt is…

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... So we covered this a little bit before, but worth mentioning again in respect to this game with Castlevania Legacy of Darkness was, of course, present within the series original chronology from its original release in 1999 until 2002 when a timeline published on the official Japanese Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance website omitted it, as well as several other Castlevania games from the series continuity. ...

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territory. And just because I kind of now was getting a little older, like, you know, you like these series, I kind of want to at least touch everything that had been there. And we are very lucky now to have the ability to kind of do that without too much resistance. So that's what I did. But I never, I had never touched the legacy of darkness version until preparing for this recording. So I'd played all of Castlevania 64, Castlevania 1999. But I hadn't touched legacy darkness until this recording. So in…

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predict or someone had predicted the end times. But anyway, and so the set the the original release of the game and the the the story that you can then play once you unlock the characters in legacy of darkness takes place in 1852. And that's Richter and Carrie, who is and that's just the more traditional, you know, Dracula's awoken, let's go and kick him in kind of situation. ...

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what's the word, valiant, ambitious first effort, taking both cartridges as one thing. I'd probably recommend that you would just play the Legacy of Darkness and unlock Reinhardt and play it that way because some of the some of the aspects of that original release are harder to go back to, as I say, so much so that I bounced off them at the time when expectations were different. But yeah, I absolutely think that whoever's responsible, Konami or Nintendo or both of them should make sure this, if nothing else,…

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ROM, slapped it in, played a little bit of the original version again, just to remind myself of Reinhardt's game and played through as Cornell in the main headline feature of the Legacy of Darkness game. And I've also played a little bit of Henry's game, which we'll talk about later, which is, I suppose, the equivalent of something like Hunk's game in Resident Evil 2, in that it's slightly different, takes a different form, has remix levels, and you have a different goal. It's like a time challenge. That's…

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... We haven't really mentioned it, but there's a level called the Dueling Tower, which is not that bad in the Cornell version in Legacy of Darkness. And they retain that remixed form in Carrie and Reinhardt's Legacy of Darkness playthrough. And that's because it's so bad in the original Castlevania 64. I spent hours on that level first time through, because the platforming is so rough. And then you're going from miniboss to miniboss. There is just something about it though. And I know, there are some games that I…

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I adored it nonetheless. The atmosphere, combat as carry, sound design, music and story were top notch in my opinion, although constantly leaping to my doom due to awful camera and jumping controls were almost certainly a precursor to premature grey hairs, which I have to this day, thank you, Tower of Sorcery. Legacy of Darkness sorted most of that, though, and added in some interesting areas such as the change to how sub-weapons work, different stages, characters, bosses and much needed improvements to jumping.…

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... So developers had stayed away from it. Also, I should say, yes, of course, our werewolf friend, the protagonist of Legacy of Darkness starts on a ship. I'm thinking as the opening area is the original release, which is the the forest, which becomes the I think the second area. Yeah. For for a for temporarily the ship's a better introduction on many levels than the forest. ...

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heal. Oh, that's not good. Okay. We've sort of been talking about the chopping and changing between the characters as you go along. Just again, just to be clear for the listener, maybe who hasn't played these games, if you buy the original Castlevania vanilla 64, you've got Reinhardt or Carrie. And that's it. And if you get the legacy of darkness game, you by default, you start as Cornell, then you unlock Henry and from there you unlock Reinhardt and Carrie. But a, well, there's some dispute over this. So there…

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... Am I right in thinking, Chris, you may have clocked this. When I briefly went back to the original release on emulation, it looked like they may have managed to improve the tech in the legacy of darkness to push out the fog ever so slightly. Push out the fog? ...

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... The mister cores? Yeah, they don't. So on retro arch, I had no problems, uh, saving and I mainly used save states only occasionally abusing them because the second game legacy of darkness is pretty generous with its, uh, save crystals and surprisingly so actually. Yeah. I think that was something they got feedback from, from the first game, but still I will, uh, I will concede that there were points where after a particularly, uh, sweaty period of platforming, I thought, I don't really want to have to do that…

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devil or Renan in demon form for your soul, which wasn't. With Cornell, I didn't find it to punishing a boss fight, which is actually true to segue into the bosses in Cornell's game in, obviously in legacy of darkness. I don't know if this was as a response to the reception of the previous release, but for the most part, the bosses were fairly trivial as Cornell, especially if you had a powered up attack. So his attack is basically like a swooshy swipe shot of some kind that once powered up does quite a lot of…

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... If you know what you're doing, it's short, but that did include a couple of skips. Yeah, I did it. Last weekend, I did the Reinhardt on Legacy of Darkness in about four and a half hours. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. And to be honest, by the time you've played through, I think that's probably my third time through his campaign. And I reckon by the time you've done that, you can just go through it because you know all the routes through the levels and it's easy enough. Yeah, of course. That's the way it goes.…

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of video games, while I can acknowledge all of its faults, but seeing it as for the definitive building blocks of what got us to now is why I'm there. And I saw a lot of that in Castlevania, Legacy of Darkness, and there was a lot of it I liked. But I also can't really disagree with anything Leah said either because some of the frustrations, some of the things that kind of tripped me up while playing the game were enough to make me think, have that conversation with myself, like, would I still be playing this…

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... Yeah, it feels to me like they've traded the atmosphere of Castlevania 64 for a more character driven plot and legacy of darkness. But I feel like in doing that they've, they've lost something there was something about just the skimpy scenario of 64 that just had enough there to drive you to Dracula. Whereas with legacy of darkness, they've tried to make it more of a narrative experience. And I think I think I think it comes off actually makes the game worse off as a result. ...

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[Music] Hello everybody and welcome to the Cana Rinse Podcast, volume 15, issue 705. Today we're going to talk about Castlevania, Legacy of Darkness. And joining me, Leon Cox, in this issue, Brian Edwards. ...

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... And in fact, this version that we're mainly focusing on, Legend of Cornell or Legacy of Darkness, was actually known as Castlevania special edition before it came out. So the original version simply called Castlevania in the West came out on a 96 megabit cartridge. ...

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