“This has some cool stuff in it, mostly the stuff about the first Castlevania. But the layout is a little weird, and some of the text is printed on dark purple backgrounds and is hard as hell to read. Also, in translating from web to book, there’s a few things that are repeated almost line-for-line, which is silly.
I’m trying to finish Castlevania 3, and this book DID show me that I took not only the wrong path, but the wrong-est path. The path that has some of the worst game design in the original trilogy. How did I pick this path? Half-remembered advice from Nintendo Power from like 1990-something. Good thinking, Pete. Dummy.
There’s a fun challenge, and then there’s stuff where you have to wonder whether the designers ever actually played certain parts. It’s not fun to go through several minutes of blocks stacking on top of each other, building a vertical path. It’s painstaking and stupid and I hate it, and even if you finish, the reward is a really hard staircase and a multi-boss gauntlet. C’mon, dudes. Nobody’s getting through this game without playing that shit a dozen times, and why are you forcing players to replay the worst part of the game over and over? “