Castlevania: Bloodlines

As part of my ongoing quest to play a couple of Classicvania games that I somehow missed before the upcoming release of Belmont’s Curse, I find myself jumping 16-bit platforms and this time unexpectedly landing on the SEGA MegaDrive. Even stranger: the game was in fact released in the USA and Europe—and even more strange for a nineties console game: within the same month! What did we do to deserve this? Our family was a MegaDrive one yet in 1994 at the wee age of 7 I wasn’t aware of the genre and mostly called myself a PC/DOS gamer. Let’s see if I missed out on something significant. Castlevania: Bloodlines stands out for a few reasons. Besides the remarkable platform jump (that made it here a big year before Vampire’s Kiss did), Bloodlines takes place in a much later timespan, somewhere around the first World War. An evil countess seeks out to resurrect the Dark Lord (yet again??) and has our heroes hunt down the allied evil all over Europe. Yes, heroes is plural: you can choose…