Castlevania Anniversary Collection Reviews

[h2]Belmont's worst enemy - Konami[/h2] Impressive as a collection of some of the best Classicvanias, but as a way to actually play them? It frickin sucks. Just get an emulator and (legally, of course) obtain the roms. This collection lacks a ton of must-have QoL features. Starting with... an exit button. Yeah. You can't fucking exit the game. How did this even pass testing? I have no idea (it probably wasn’t tested at all, lmao). Savestates are here, but you can’t make multiple states per game. No rewind. No proper 4:3 without scanlines. No settings to tweak anything. The games run fine, mostly. But oh my god, the sound has a life of its own. It cracks, farts, and occasionally behaves - if it feels like it. But that’s rare. Achievements? No biggie. But where’s my achievement for completing every game in the collection? I’ve got game-specific ones for beating them, but the one for beating all of them is locked. Buggy. After trying the Dominus collection, I'm just dissapointed. Just how good this collection could've been if it got at least a fraction of the attention given to Dominus. But hey, they've learned their lesson, and next collections are actually worth to try.

i recommend this for Old Schoolers it has lots and lots of Classic Castlevania Games.

This collection would be great considering the excellent Castlevania games on it. But unfortuntately the games only are displayed in a tiny screen on the Steam Deck. No option to enlarge the tiny 4:3 (or whatever) picture. That even looked way better on the Nintendo Switch.

Castlevania IV has great music and is the best Castlevania game before the series got turned into the Metroidvania genre and focused more on exploration.

I had played most of these back in the day, but didn't have the system for Bloodlines, so it was a nice surprise to experience that one here for the first time after working back through the rest of the classics I knew. Bloodlines is a fantastic game, and very difficult in the best kind of infuriating way.

Incredibly bare-bones console port. No ability to rebind gamepad or keyboard controls and the display options are all awful with terrible 4:3 and pixel perfect modes. No rewinding or fast forwarding either. Even if you buy it, just find the ROMs online and emulate them instead of playing this. The only reason I bought them is so I can say I own them legally and emulate them without feeling bad. But it's Konami and the collection sucks, so if you wanted to pirate these games instead I wouldn't blame anyone for doing that.

i wish i could recommend this, since its some of the greatest action platformers of all time that all still hold up to this day. its worth it to play all of these.... but not in this collection. the emulation is shit, theres a strong lack of options, games r unstable(multiple crashes in an emulated NES game lmfao), n theres not even an option to exit the game. we need to alt+F4 to close lol.... get dominus collection. its much improved as a package. i only paid $4 usd for this so its no big deal to me... but i cant help but feel the $5 i spent on casltevania 1 alone on the virtual console years back was money better spent. lets get rondo of blood, SotN, n harmony of despair in a bundle next! hopefully the emulation will be more like the dominus collection n less like this joke of a collection.

Games play well, and its fun to have them all in one collection, but the sound is absolutely broken and awful with no in game audio settings. unfortunately ill probably have to return it because the sound makes it unplayable

Audio does not work well, games are partially not running normally, terrible non-remappable keyboard controls, etc. Clearly a 0-effort cashgrab - would have a much better experience just getting the originals running on emulator 🙄

I love Metroidvania games, and after watching the Castlevania show, I wanted to dive into the series and experience its origins. It's been an incredible journey. every game is fantastic in its own way. Some are unique, while others are more straightforward, but overall, this has been an absolute blast!