Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness is a worthwhile apology

destructoid.com:

Last time at the Destructoid Institute of Critiquing Kusoge, I looked at Castlevania for the N64. We’ve established that the Castlevania series has never been very good when it comes to its 3D titles, but the N64 games are likely the most worthwhile.

The second title on the N64, Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, is easily the worthwhile-est. That’s mostly because it’s essentially an apology for Castlevania 64. Love it or hate it, it’s hard to deny that Castlevania 64 had the signs of rushed development. This wasn’t anything overly major – most of its glaring problems today aren’t atypical for the time period it was released – but it comes down to a lack of polish. More notably, but less noticeably, Konami cut two characters of the planned four.

Legacy of Darkness reimplements one of these characters, adds a new one, then takes a polishing brush to the quests of the previous iteration’s main quests. The result is a title that’s perhaps closer to the developer’s original vision. However, it’s still the same game at its bones, with a lot of its content taken directly from Castlevania 64. If you played that one, it’ll be hard to sell you on Legacy of Darkness, and harder still if you, understandably, didn’t enjoy that game.

For me, however, this is the current apex of the 3D Castlevania mashed potato heap.

Let’s start where Legacy of Darkness does: selecting your resolution. Expansion pack owners may turn on the special, VIP-only “High” mode. Like most N64 high-resolution modes, this definitely does have an impact on the game’s visual quality. There’s really no getting past the N64’s aggressive blurriness, but shoving in some extra pixels does help.

However, I wouldn’t recommend it. I played through the entirety of the