Castlevania: Rondo of Blood

The upcoming 2026 Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse game made me realise I have yet to explore many of the great and less great Classicvania games—the “subgenre” group of Castlevania games before Koji Igarashi pivoted to what could be called Igavania but Jeremy Parish coined metroidvania. Confusing semantics aside, getting hold of this particular instance, Rondo of Blood, without relying on the PSP remake, is a big challenge as well. The game, released in 1993, never made it to the west since Hudson realised their video game console was drowning in the Genesis Does What Nintendon’t fight. They pulled the plug in that same year in the West, leaving us hardcore gamers with only two options: the expensive import route, or later in the nineties, the emulation route. Precisely because of the complicated history of both the console and the game, Rondo of Blood enjoyed a mystical cult state of being one of the last superb Classicvanias. Playing hard to get worked, only not commercially. The game…