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Every major series has its little hidden gem somewhere. When you've got a franchise that spans numerous consoles, five generations of development, and several territorial releases, there's always going to be at least one game that slipped through the cracks and wound up buried, no matter how popular its parent series was. There're lots of levels of this, of course, and it changes from place to place depending on where you look. The English-language release of Panzer Dragoon Saga is probably the pinnacle of the whole "great game that nobody got to play" thing, but that's only the English version; in Japan, tracking down a copy of Azel, as it's known, isn't particularly difficult or even expensive. But, in America, you had the combined force of a late release for the quickly-drowning Sega Saturn, practically no marketing, and the direct competition of a game that was genre-defining for most Americans, Final Fantasy VII; poor PDS never stood a chance over here. Depending on who you ask, there're only around 6,000 copies in existence, despite the fact that it's generally regarded as the best game for the Saturn and certainly one of the most creative and enjoyable RPG games ever. Let's put this in a modern perspective: Imagine if Grand Theft Auto III, exactly as you know it, was only published on the Dreamcast, never marketed, was hardly ever shown in any magazines, and was then pulled off store shelves a month after it came out. Because of this, instead of spawning two more sequels and going on to become one of the best-selling games ever, it languished on store shelves before drifting into obscurity. From there, it heads down the usual path: Rediscovery on the underground circuit, a healthy amount of sub-mainstream cult worship, and eventually a $200 price range on eBay that acts as a rite of passage for anyone trying to show off how good their taste in games is. Sound familiar? It's happened more than once to games just as polished. There's a myriad of reasons for it, but the big one is that until the mid-to-late 90's, the Western market was an incredibly tough nut to crack for Japanese developers. Far more often than not, it just wasn't seen as being worth the effort. For one thing, you had to compete with a firmly-entrenched Nintendo. Remember, this was smack in the middle of the Super Nintendo's glory days, when just the word "Nintendo" was common slang for videogames as a whole. At the time, there was a saying in the industry regarding the big N: "You just don't fuck with an eight hundred pound gorilla". It was true, too; Nintendo's aggressive (and in many cases illegal) strong-arm tactics back then made Microsoft look passive by comparison. The only other company that had any success at all in the west was Sega, and they had to fight tooth and nail for every dollar. If you were any other company, trying to tackle America would be like bringing an air rifle to a shotgun fight. To compound the problem, what flew for gaming in Japan at the time wasn't considered viable in the West, even within companies as established as Nintendo. Americans in particular were seen as being infuriatingly picky when it came to their games (a notion that still holds true today, to an extent). Because of the perceived risk, it wasn't uncommon for the Japanese developers to blindly micromanage their American subsidiaries straight into bankruptcy. Even the U.S. branch of Sega was plagued with internal problems stemming from a lack of communication with its Japanese parent, a malady that not only stunted its "cutting-edge" Genesis peripherals (Sega CD and 32X) but completely crippled the launch of the Saturn and even doomed the Dreamcast, despite a strong launch stateside. Thankfully, this kind of thing really doesn't happen anymore. Not only have Japanese developers been taking the West far more seriously in the past seven years, but the ever-declining price of hardware and the ever-growing internet fan community pretty much ensure that, if there's even the slightest chance a game sell in a given territory, it'll be released there. Sure, there are a few titles, even today, that get left behind or are hard to get a hold of, but by and large these games aren't very good to begin with, so you're really not missing much. Even games that are blatantly aimed at a niche market almost always see release outside of Japan (assuming they're good). Take a look at just these past two years worth of games: Ikaruga, Guilty Gear, Metal Slug, Otogi, even the ludicrously Japan-centric Katamari Damacy or the hedonistic Steel Battalion are only marginally more difficult to track down than a copy of the latest Madden game -- usually it just involves looking a shelf lower or higher at your local EB. On top of that, nowadays you usually wind up paying less for it than you would a more popular game, whereas it used to be very much the other way around. That means, for real treasure hunters, you've got to plumb deep into the past decade to get a hold of the good stuff that for one reason or another got lost in the tide. The truly great ones tend to be from an established series, meaning they had a sizeable budget and were able to attract top talent, but were then obscured for other reasons -- more often than not, it's something as simple as the game never being released outside of Japan. Typically these aren't too hard to track down, either through official channels (Square's re-release of Final Fantasy V) or unofficial (the ROM-hacked fan translation of Seiken Densetsu 3). Today, though, I'm going to dig up a real good one for you folks that, while you may have heard of it, you probably haven't gotten a chance to play it. You see this game crop up sometimes when a major magazine decides to do a retrospective on Castlevania, usually with some little blurb about how excellent it was and how you'll never get to play it, but little more than that and maybe a screenshot or two. Even on the internet, info on Rondo isn't as easy to come by as many other "lost" games, and much of the information out there is quite old. Rarely is it ever put in the context of the series, when in fact it's one of the few Castlevania games to not only have a fully ingrained plot, but it was also the game that pioneered many of the advancements that would be expounded on down the road by future installments. Obviously, there's a lot more here than meets the eye, and it's particularly interesting in retrospect because Rondo's direct sequel, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was an enormous smash hit stateside and went on to become of the most popular PlayStation 1 games ever. This makes the lack of a Western release even more notable, because in a lot of ways it's the "missing link" between the old games and the new style seen in the recent GameBoy Advance games like Aria of Sorrow. In America, the jump was pretty abrupt; the last major Castlevania game was the Genesis-only Bloodlines, released in 1994. Though and excellent game in its own right, was still very much of the old-school. You went from point A to point B, fighting off various minions of Dracula using whips, crucifixes and holy water, and tried not to get killed in the process. At the end, you'd fight a boss, collect one of those ubiquitous red orbs, and move on. Next thing you know, the "sequel" Symphony comes out three years later, and the gaming public does a collective double-take. Gone is the classic game structure, and in its place is a souped-up 2D action-RPG with a hefty chunk of plot, secrets galore, voice-overs, cutscenes, money, experience points, and an item count that spiraled well into the several hundred range. "What the..?" While it was a welcome change for most people, it was also sort of weird for such a popular series to suddenly shift gears so dramatically. On top of that, there were a few oddities in the U.S. release of Symphony that hinted that something was missing. While the game's main character, Alucard, had first shown up Castlevania III for the NES (which did come out in the states), the story revolved around someone named Richter Belmont and a young woman looking for him named Maria Renard. Other than a brief, vauge text crawl at the start of the game, there was no attempt to explain who these people were, they were just kind of there. To make matters even more confusing, Konami slightly altered the game's intro to try to artificially link Symphony to Bloodlines: At the onset, you re-play the final fight with Dracula in order to set the stage for the rest of the game. You also get a title header: "FINAL STAGE: Castlevania Bloodlines", and then proceed to play something that's completely different from the final stage of Bloodlines with unfamiliar characters who you've never seen before making references to something that, as far as gamers in the U.S. were concerned, had never happened before. Now, Bloodlines had been a personal favorite of mine back in '94-'95. I knew the game like the back of my hand, so this confused me a bit. Still, I didn't loose any sleep over it and it eventually slipped my mind altogether. It wouldn't be until a bit later when I got a hold of the Japanese version of Symphony and saw the unchanged title header in the intro that I would begin to wonder:
 "FINAL STAGE: The Rondo of Blood" Aha! In Japan, Bloodlines had simply been called "Vampire Killer", so I knew they weren't talking about the same game. Logical conclusion: We'd been gypped out of a Castlevania game, and Konami had tried, however slightly, to hide it. Now, this was in late 1997, so information wasn't quite as easy to obtain on this thing as I had thought it was going to be, but I eventually tracked it down and over the course of a rainy afternoon pieced together what had happened. Like most folks in the states, I didn't have a PC Engine in '97. In fact, I didn't even know that there was a Western counterpart of the console at all. This, of course, explains the lack of a U.S. release, and for the reasons I got into at the start of this article, there was zero chance of the game being ported to another, more popular console, which is what would almost certainly happen today. Konami had just decided to skip Rondo altogether, never porting the game to any other system,. Weird, considering not only its significance to fans of the series (especially in light of Symphony's multiregional popularity), but also the fact that they obviously put a lot of blood and sweat into this game. It's one of the things that you hear time and time again with "holy grail" games like this one: "Dude, it's totally the best game ever. It beats the crap out of [insert popular mainstream game here]". Well, having now finally had the chance to put Rondo through the paces, I'm not going to lie; Symphony is certainly the better game. On top of that, it's cheaper, easier to find, is in English, and you don't need an obscure console to play it. If Castlevania games aren't your thing, you're not going to really catch what all the fuss is about with Rondo of Blood. But there are a lot of Castlevania fans out there. When I ran an early, very brief version of this article on my blog, the fan response was insane. The page went from something like thirty hits a day to well over two hundred and fifty in a six hour period after I put it up. We're talking a completely unadvertised little blurb I wrote because I was happy I'd finally gotten to play it. The game definitely hits a nerve with anyone who's heard of it. It's one of those rare games that manages to have both serious underground appeal and a widespread attraction among mainstream gamers simultaneously -- I mean, who didn't play Castlevania back in the day? The game was also clearly a favorite of the developers, something that's readily apparent when you stick Rondo and Symphony side-by-side. Not only are many of the in-game sprites nearly identical, they kept the exact same art style, nearly every single enemy makes a reappearance, and they're the only two games in the series that are directly sequential; they only take place five years apart and star nearly the same cast, with Alucard as the only notable addition. The game's plot revolves around your usual Castlevania fare. An evil cult, led by the Dark Priest Shaft (yep) resurrects Dracula, who then goes tearing across the countryside, kidnapping four virginal maidens, including a 12-year-old Maria Renard, and imprisoning them for future snacking and/or vague sexual purposes (remember, this is Japan we're talking about). One of them is the girlfriend of Richter Belmont, whom Dracula is intentionally trying to lure into his castle, presumably for revenge. The other thing the CD space is used for to great effect is the music. In another first for the series (and another thing that would be copied and improved on for Symphony), all the music was played straight from the CD, giving the game high quality Redbook audio that was leaps and bounds ahead of the MIDI tunes that had so far made up the soundtrack for the series. Fan favorites like "Vampire Killer" and "Bloody Tears" made the cut, as well as a good number of tunes that, I believe, have yet to be recycled in any of the other games in the series. As for the gameplay itself, Rondo is a blast of pure Castlevania goodness from start to finish. It stands as a shining example of how to take a relatively simple concept -- move forward and attack things -- and make it seem fresh, intense, and wonderfully quick-paced. The introduction, where Richter races his carriage through a midnight storm and is accosted by Death himself, sets the breakneck pace for the rest of the game. There are very few moments here when the game isn't throwing something entirely new at you. The levels are greatly varied, never sending you through the same area twice and often introducing gimmicks or level-specific challenges that force you to think on your feet: Falling on a raft that rides down a waterfall is a good example. Controls are the same as we've come to expect, though it must be said that Richter is a bit less mobile than some of the other Castlevania protagonists (though he can jump on and off of stairs, which is a big deal in Castlevania). All the usual odds and ends make an appearance here, though Richter cannot power up his whip during the game. It remains at the same power level the entire time. To make up for this, Richter is given a new ability called "Item Crash". While the games have always had sub-weapons you could equip, Richter is by far the most powerful user of them in the series. Press select, and, in exchange for a healthy chunk of hearts (read: ammo), Richter will go into a screen-filling overdrive with whichever weapon is equipped. Instead of tossing one dagger, he tosses a hundred. Instead of tossing a vial of holy water, it begins to rain from the sky. Use it with the cross, and a huge crucifix appears on the screen and begins to fly around damaging enemies. Slightly religiously insensitive, perhaps, but still pretty cool looking. The set-pieces themselves are just as neat to play through as they are to look at, adding to the high aesthetical quality in the game. Often a single room will revolve around one particular enemy -- a sub-boss of sorts -- that can become almost puzzle-like. In one instance aboard a ghost ship (the same ship that makes a cameo in Aria of Sorrow, actually) a large painting on the wall will spring to life. If it touches Richter, he's suddenly trapped and crucified. Once you know not to touch the painting, it isn't particularly hard to dodge, but nine times out of ten the player will just jump right into it without thinking and get a nasty surprise. Admittedly, it's kind of cheap, but it's also an exception to the norm with Rondo. The game is weirdly fair for an old-school Castlevania game; cheap deaths are relatively few. While the game is challenging in spots, Konami hit a perfect balance by intercutting stretches of relative calm with the occasional brutal jack-in-the-box surprise to keep players on their toes. Of course, this game is still meant to be finished in a single sitting. It clocks in at a respectable eight stages of high-powered action gaming, and not a second of it is boring. But the real fun starts after you've finished your first playthrough. The first thing you're likely to notice on a repeat visit is that you're seeing things you didn't see the first time around. Most of the time, it's accidental, but the game is designed so that the first and second playthrough will almost certainly be different. Alternate paths you missed the first time around -- or, conversely, that you found the first time around and are now skipping -- open up completely new paths through the game, with new bosses and entirely different scenarios to fight through. All told, there are thirteen full-sized stages in the game, and almost all of them have some kind of dramatic secret in them, be it an alternate boss, a different route through, or a cutscene-triggering rescue of one of the four maidens Dracula has imprisoned. Often, they're locked behind doors that you first need to find a key for. All this is entirely optional, and in fact the game doesn't even hint at the fact that it's necessary. You pretty much have to figure it out as you go, and that alone nearly triples the replay value of the game as you realize just how substantial the game's secrets are. While most Castlevania games up to this point may have had a secret crawlspace here and there, this was the first where nearly half the game was a secret in and of itself. The only way to get the best ending is to find and rescue each of Dracula's prisoners, which is impossible in a single playthrough. Luckily, the game has full save support, complete with a progress counter and a map that gets updated each time you discover a new area. While it isn't nearly as open-ended as the later games in the series, it's here (in addition to the obvious graphical similarities) that you see the groundwork being laid for the upcoming switch to the full-on freeform exploration of Symphony of the Night. Interestingly, Rondo also sports many of the same ahead-of-the-times amenities, such as a "boss tactics" option where you can use accumulated points to purchase movies of an expert player beating each of the game's bosses. Eventually, and sometimes quite early, you'll stumble onto the game's biggest secret: When you rescue Maria, you'll find that a new option has been placed on the main menu that lets you actually play as her. That's right, a 12-year-old girl in a pink dress fighting off succubi, skeletons, golems, and even Dracula himself, using her pet doves as a weapon, no less. What's more, she absolutely kicks ass. If anyone wondered aloud while playing Symphony just how this leggy blonde girl was breezing her way through Dracula's Castle like it was no big deal, know you know: This girl has been whooping vampire ass since she was in the fourth grade. She's pretty hardcore. Now, as far as showing the style of the game, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here's sixty-eight thousand words worth of pictures. I've added commentary to the photos; leave your mouse cursor over a screenshot to read its caption. As far as I know, this is the largest collection of Rondo screenshots on the 'net, so enjoy: 
Also, just because, here's some gratuitous pictures of the game with Maria as the main character. While the actual game itself is nearly identical, Maria gets her own subweapons (which are shown here), as well as her own icons for health items, so instead of a big chunk of meat, she gets things like a birthday cake or an ice cream cone.
And that's pretty much that. Now, the real question is, after all that, should you get the game? Well, that depends. Bear in mind that it goes for upwards of $150 on eBay, so unless you're either a collector or a massive Castlevania fan, this game probably isn't worth the money for you. As excellent as it is, you have to have some kind of personal interest in the history of the series to really justify that kind of price. If you can find it for around $60 somewhere, I'd say snap it up without hesitation. Unfortunately, as of this writing, it looks like Konami scrapped their plans for a re-release of Rondo, so the only reliable way to play it is to shell out for the CD. It's a real shame, because this game just oozes quality. You'd figure they'd be more than happy to go the Nintendo route and repackage the thing with a few minor updates, but instead all we got was Castlevania Chronicles, which was a remake of the nowhere-near-as-good X68000 re-imagining of the original Castlevania that came out the same year as Rondo. If you do decide to go for this game, here are a few upsides. For one thing, a U.S. console (i.e. a Turbo Duo) will play this game with no regional modifications whatsoever. This was back during the early days of CD gaming, and there were no such things as territory lockouts on a disc. However, it's possible to play the game without a console at all: Magic Engine is a near-flawless PC-E Emulator that can run the game right on your computer, which is perfectly legal and saves you from having to shell out for yet another console to basically play one game. Bear in mind, you still need the actual game CD to do this, but it can still wind up saving you some money. All the screenshots above were taken using Magic Engine for clarity purposes (because I'm way too lazy to hook up my video capture card when such an easy alternative is right there). If you don't already have a PC-E but really, really want to give this game a shot anyway, I heartily recommend Magic Engine to do it. Everyone else, hopefully I've either piqued your interest in this unique little chunk of gaming history, or at least answered some questions for those who've already brushed up against it somewhere. Let's just hope someone at Konami sees the light and spits up a deluxe edition re-release somewhere down the road. This game is too good to leave buried. EXTRAS: I compiled these after the article was written, so they're getting tacked on at the end. Concerning the SNES version of
Dracula X: Apparently fairly commonplace in Europe, the game sailed well below the radar in the U.S. After tracking down a copy, I found out why: This game isn't Rondo of Blood, but a completely different title altogether. When Konami had announced a Super Nintendo version of Dracula X, and most people were expecting it to be a port of Rondo. Unfortunately, the finished game has almost nothing in common with its PC Engine counterpart except part of the name and a bunch of sprite rips. I'm not sure what happened here, but this game was quite obviously phoned in. The levels are lackluster and boring, the graphics (except for the first stage) are dull and extremely pixilated in spots, and the rapid pacing and countless little flourishes that make the PC-E version so special are all completely gone here. 
Konami seems perfectly happy to forget that this game even exists, and I don't really blame them. It's not offensively bad or anything, but quite clearly not a whole lot of work was put into this. Check it out as a curiosity if you like, but be aware that this isn't the same game as Rondo of Blood. Playing as Maria in Symphony of
the Night: I thought this was intriguing, but I eventually wound up forgetting about it for almost five years. In 2003, though, I stumbled across a pretty unique treasure: Symphony of the Night for the Sega Saturn. I found it because my PS1 disc was scratched to hell and back, so I'd hit up eBay to find a replacement and saw that someone was selling the Saturn version. The price wasn't too high (at the time, $35 -- it later inflated to $60) and the auction was set to end soon, so I bid on it. After winding up having to pay almost double what I'd wanted to for it, I started to look up stuff online to see why it was so expensive, and I found out a few things. For one, the game is pretty rare. Not Panzer Dragoon Saga only-around-5000-copies-in-existence rare, but rare enough that it remained expensive while most other Saturn games import or otherwise dropped well below the $20 range. Also, this was apparently the "Director's Cut" of sorts for Symphony. It had a good chunk of extra items, two extra levels, and Maria was a playable character, complete with her own unique moves, attacks, and so forth. Neat! I've had the game for a while now, and in case anyone is wondering, you're better off with the PS1 version unless you're a seriously hardcore Castlevania fan. The Saturn version does indeed have that extra stuff in it, but to be honest, the extra levels are both short and kind of mediocre. They're not bad or anything, but it's nothing you're really going to miss. Furthermore, the graphics are significantly worse in the Saturn version. The transparency effects, which were all over the place in the PS1 version, have all had to be removed here, and results are often not pretty. On top of that, you've got slowdown galore in some places as well as slight extra loading times. At the end of the day, I'm glad I have the Saturn version, but it's certaintly not better than the PS1 version, and anyone who just wants to play the game and not obsess over the details is much better off with the original version. However, to finally complete the cycle here, I tossed the disc in my Saturn and took some pictures. There's no way my Saturn is going to be untangled enough to be able to make it to my video capture card, so you're going to have to make due with TV screenshots taken with a digital camera as opposed to my nice clean PC-E shots. But, they get the job done.
Her game plays like sort of a weird cross between Metroid, Mega Man, and Castlevania. She also has a surprising amount of stuff she can do, with spells similar to the ones Alucard uses, plus all sorts of close-quarters tactics like an agressive slide and a few fighting-game-inspired tricks. She can also run and triple-jump right from the get-go, which makes it easier to move around the castle in any way you like. I'm pretty sure there are a few areas that are off-limits to her because she can't fly, and unlike Richter's game, she gets no added elevators placed here and there to compensate. Nonetheless, it's a cool little bonus that helps make up for the crappy port quality of the rest of the game.
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Dracula
X: Chi no Rondo is the Castlevania game that got away. Known
to the West as Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, it's a game for
the PC Engine Super CD-ROM attachment, a.k.a the Turbo Duo, NEC's
excellent little console that did brisk business in Japan and bombed
hideously in the States.
Thanks
to the miracle of CD-ROM technology, this was the first Castlevania
game to feature not only cutscenes, but cutscenes with full spoken
dialogue and even an early attempt at in-game cinematic animation.
It looks a little bizarre nowadays -- there's very little actual
"animation" to speak of, and when characters speak, only their mouths
move and it looks horribly weird at times -- but this was still
some pretty hot stuff back '93. The only other downside is that,
unless you're fluent in Japanese, a good chunk of the plot is going
to be completely lost on you, meaning you're stuck trying to make
sense of Dracula and Richter chatting it up for a surprisingly long
time at a few points in the game. Luckily, fan translations of the
script do exist (ask Google about them), so while it isn't perfect,
you can at least have something to read during the talky bits.
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