Rondo of Blood Thread

[A Black Falcon]

In some ways SCIV is a study in how not to design a game,

The rest of your post gives zero actual reasons why you think this ridiculous statement is true.

even people who call it their favorite game of all time tell you that you just have to get past the first  three or four levels and then things pick up,

Most games start slowly.  SCIV and RoB aren't too different in that regard, and I wouldn't say that you need to get past the first three or four levels before things pick up in SCIV, no.

for the most part you will only have around 2 or 3 enemies on screen at once, you have far more on screen in Rondo of course,

SCIV was a very early SNES game.  Konami had not yet mastered how to get around the slow SNES CPU, so they had to have fewer enemies and it slows down anyway.  I wish that the SNES had gotten a second Castlevania game as good as its first one, but SNES Dracula X does show visual and speed improvements, at least.  But despite that, SCIV's good graphical design and very good level designs stand out, in addition to that fantastic music.

the main way you or at least most people die in SCIV from what Ive seen is from disappearing blocks and such, in Rondo its doing battle with enemies,

Enemies can kill you in SCIV too, particularly in the 'second quest' when the game gets a bit harder... while RoB doesn't have a harder setting, unless you count Richter as the hard mode.

enemy AI seems to be far superior In Rondo as well,

This is probably true.

SCIV gives you multi direction whip...incomparison Rondo gives you the ability to jump on and OFF stairs, multiple characters, different paths to choose, item crash, back flip, slide, tumble, double jump, money actually has a purpose, able to pick your secondary weapon back up, a lot of people might not know but if you keep your finger on the jump button your able to control your jump, and the turtle crash, your able to control where goes (up or down) with the direction pad.

The multi-direction whip is far more important, useful, and powerful than any of that stuff you listed that RoB has.  It's not that close (Maria + red birds is good, as long as your special weapon stock holds up, but still the multi-directional whip has fewer limitations.).  Those other moves in RoB are nice to have, though, for sure.  They do help make the game better.

Like I was saying before, here are some of the fx/animations that are still being used today, no other snes or genesis game can claim this. This is where Rondo of blood is the best of its generation.

Game on CD that has a lot more space to put a lot more animation in the game than any cartridge game could match uses that space well.  News at 11.  No, this isn't any kind of argument against SCIV.  If anything it's a good one the other way, showing how much they did with the small space of that cartridge!

[awack]

Most games start slowly.  SCIV and RoB aren't too different in that regard, and I wouldn't say that you need to get past the first three or four levels before things pick up in SCIV, no

I don't know too many people who would agree that they start out about the same, you said that you probably agree that rondo has better AI, in SCIV there is hardly ever more than a couple of enemies on screen with enemies that just walk back and forth combined with the long multi directional whip, makes disposing of them, way too easy, like the first boss(skeleton horse and rider) all you have to do is stand in one place and whip and in no time hes dead, Medusa is even worse. now take rondo, the green skeleton swordsman has a good level of AI, he will actually react to your moves such as by sliding under your whip, the blue knight in front of the bridge seems to pose more of a challenge to players than the first few bosses in SCIV,

This is before the more difficult platforming shows up later in the game, these are some reasons why myself and others make that statement about the first few levels.

but SNES Dracula X does show visual and speed improvements, at least.

Yes, it does show an improvement over SCIV like you say, but compared to rondo, its a different story, take the fight against death, there is half the amount of blood from death when hit onscreen , there is also half the number of cycles flying onscreen at  as well, at the same time every thing moves slower like death richter, they up the difficulty in Drac xx by shrinking the platform your fighting on and taking damage when ever you touch death.

The multi-direction whip is far more important, useful, and powerful than any of that stuff you listed that RoB has.  It's not that close (Maria + red birds is good, as long as your special weapon stock holds up, but still the multi-directional whip has fewer limitations.).  Those other moves in RoB are nice to have, though, for sure.  They do help make the game better.

In my opinion, the multi directional whip combined with the type of opposition you face makes for very unbalanced gameplay.

Game on CD that has a lot more space to put a lot more animation in the game than any cartridge game could match uses that space well.  News at 11.  No, this isn't any kind of argument against SCIV.  If anything it's a good one the other way, showing how much they did with the small space of that cartridge!

I completely agree, I don't use SCIV for comparison because its an early game and the fore sucks, I do it because I already have it done up for showing, for an 8 meg game, its pretty amazing, like they used some kind of awesome compression scheme.


Love your sprite rip work, from Bonknuts.

 Thank you so much, knowing all the details in a game makes me appreciate the game even more.

awack, I would be interested if you have more PCE sprite rips. I wonder what other games are as technically good as Rondo, but behind the scenes. HuCard rips of beautiful games like New Adventure Island and Twinbee, would be interesting too!

No other action game is even close to Rondo, the second most beautiful game when it comes to those type of sprites is Cotton for the PCE, and of course the snes cotton, which uses the same type of special fx doesn't even come close, ill post some comparison shots, believe it or not one of the best in my opinion is Demons crest for the snes, the Genesis can put a lot of stuff on screen at once (great CPU) it has one major problem in its low number of sub palettes, take rondo for example, a boss can be shooting a projectile at you, you can be pulling off a item crash, plus things bursting into flames, your putting an extra 20 to 40 colors onscreen at once, so things will lose a lot of flash due to that.

pce cotton


snes cotton,



Some more things about Rondo, it doesn't have a handful or a few dozen of background animations, it has hundreds, it doesn't have dozens of unique sound fx, it has hundreds, and of course it doesn't have hundreds of sprite frames, it has thousands.

[RyuHayabusa]

SNES Dracula X was 16 meg I believe, which is only 2 megabytes, nothing compared to a CD. Also, for whatever reason Konami chose to go a different route rather than make a straight port of Rondo. Looking at the sprites it's obvious that the SNES could've handled a straight port had they had the space. Rondo is not a game that couldn't have been done on the SNES had it had a CD attachment.

 Rondo is about 16-18megabits total (well, excluding cinemas). The SNES has enough space. Not only that, but the SNES has 128k of work ram; they could have been used for even better compression schemes because of its size. Space wasn't the issue.

I think you're waaaaay off here. Rondo has two data tracks on the disk apart from the audio tracks. Both of those data tracks are around 20 megaBYTES each. Not megaBITS, megaBYTES. So, you're comparing Castlevania IV and Dracula X SNES which are 1 and 2 megabytes to Rondo which is 40 megabytes. Yes, some of that is for cinemas but not that much. Rondo could NOT have been done on a 20 megabit huey minus the cinemas and music.

Look, I'm not trying to be an ass - but I actually looked into this game. And I'm the one that did the print and compression routines for it PCECD Dracula X translation project (including the title screen). I know bit about this game on a technical level. I was looking for secret stages in the ISO, based on all the CD read commands and tracked all the LBA/sector offsets (I found part of one, but not the rest of it). There is a lot of redundant data loaded each level. So while each level might load <2megabits, there's redundant data in those loads (tiles and sprites) across the level layouts. You can't simply look at data track/iso, and say that's what the game requires. There are huge gaps in the data track that aren't used (this is VERY common for PCECD games). And the second data track is there for redundant reasons ~only~. It's the same track

 I'm go by Bonknuts here, but I'm tomaitheous elsewhere (in relation to coding). If you don't want to take my word for it, then take a look for yourself in a debugger.

That's cool and all but that doesn't change the fact that being a Super CD game gave Rondo a huge advantage over CIV due to the sheer amount of space for frames of animation, different tiles, etc. If you look at CIV there is a lot of repetition when it comes to tiles used throughout each level. Less enemies, less frames of animation, etc. 1 megabyte will only hold so much. Even if the PCE can only load 256k into memory at one time it's loading from a much larger pool of sprite and tile data. Heck, 256k is 1/4th of the entire game of CIV. You might want to read awack's last post and his comparison of PCE and SNES Cotton, same situation as Rondo and SNES Drac X. Super CD equals faaaar more frames of animation, background animations, sound fx, etc. I mentioned Forgotten Worlds earlier before. PCE Forgotten World is a Super CD while FW Genesis is 4 megs. We all know how much better the PCE port is and the main reason for that is the CD format. Sure, the colors will always be a bit better on the PCE but other than that don't you think the Genesis port could've had better looking bosses, backgrounds, music, etc if it was on CD? And two player as well.

[Black Tiger]

Game on CD that has a lot more space to put a lot more animation in the game than any cartridge game could match uses that space well.  News at 11.

That's cool and all but that doesn't change the fact that being a Super CD game gave Rondo a huge advantage over CIV due to the sheer amount of space for frames of animation, different tiles, etc.

Heck, 256k is 1/4th of the entire game of CIV. You might want to read awack's last post and his comparison of PCE and SNES Cotton, same situation as Rondo and SNES Drac X. Super CD equals faaaar more frames of animation, background animations, sound fx, etc.

It's actually the opposite. CD-ROM is a storage format, but not all CD software platforms are identical. PC Engine CD2 and SCD games are extremely bottle-necked. Cart games can use assets from anywhere in the rom at any time. PCE CD games have to load a tiny amount and only do what they can with that. Bonknuts has said that the code alone can take up half the space that CD2 games get to use at a time. And again, each load is using duplicate code that could perhaps(?) be read from the same spot each time on cart.

The amount of space that CD discs have for storage doesn't mean anything when it comes to most genres. No PCE game ever comes close to denting the that space with anything other than CD and adpcm audio (News at 11!). Even the fmv heavy games aren't using much space for graphics.

The SNES however has a huge amount of ram for decompressing data off of carts. That's what so many SNES games are doing during their longer-than-PCE-CD-game-load-screens. Meanwhile a game like Drac X duplicates tiles for each boss fight and always loads duplicate sprites and code. A 6 stage HuCard version could be done at around 8 megs. It wouldn't have so much superfluous content, but would still be very impressive. When you account for all the duplication and count the loads, there's no way that a seemingly identical in-game experience described in a previous post wouldn't be around 16 megs.

The big disadvantage that the SNES has is the fact that it got saddled with sample-based audio by the time that CD audio had already become standard. So SNES games have to waste a bunch of space just to have sound.

Even if the PCE can only load 256k into memory at one time it's loading from a much larger pool of sprite and tile data.

Again, count the loads, do the addition and use common sense for how much gets reused. You still haven't accounted for the missing 295 loads you claim make up the actual game (even with that ignoring all the duplication). By your logic, Castlevania IV may be 40MB uncompressed. Or even more to what you're saying, there are SNES cart games which have huge storage on them, therefore SNES carts have huge pool to draw from, therefore Cvastlevania IV does.

We know what's in Dracula X. Bonknuts has taken apart countless PCE and misc games apart and is an expert (even though this is just common sense). He's even looked inside Dracula X and helped the translation get done.

Every PCE CD game is not a 4400 megabit cartridge.

I mentioned Forgotten Worlds earlier before. PCE Forgotten World is a Super CD while FW Genesis is 4 megs. We all know how much better the PCE port is and the main reason for that is the CD format. Sure, the colors will always be a bit better on the PCE but other than that don't you think the Genesis port could've had better looking bosses, backgrounds, music, etc if it was on CD? And two player as well.

If the Sega-CD got a port of Fortrgotten Worlds done the way that the PCE version was, then it would have likely sacrificed 2-player gameplay as well. The Sega-CD has 3 times the space of what Super CD games get to load into. But you're still thinking about it all wrong, there's no reason to bring up the Sega-CD. The PCE version's stages without bosses can't be more than <16 megs. It's obvious not only how much gets recycled, but how stages like the vertical ones aren't filling the 2 meg space. It's just another average sized 16-bit console game.

No, this isn't any kind of argument against SCIV.  If anything it's a good one the other way, showing how much they did with the small space of that cartridge!

Not when you compare it to games like the 6 meg Valis III for Genesis.

[Bonknuts]

That's cool and all but that doesn't change the fact that being a Super CD game gave Rondo a huge advantage over CIV due to the sheer amount of space for frames of animation, different tiles, etc. If you look at CIV there is a lot of repetition when it comes to tiles used throughout each level. Less enemies, less frames of animation, etc. 1 megabyte will only hold so much. Even if the PCE can only load 256k into memory at one time it's loading from a much larger pool of sprite and tile data. Heck, 256k is 1/4th of the entire game of CIV. You might want to read awack's last post and his comparison of PCE and SNES Cotton, same situation as Rondo and SNES Drac X. Super CD equals faaaar more frames of animation, background animations, sound fx, etc. I mentioned Forgotten Worlds earlier before. PCE Forgotten World is a Super CD while FW Genesis is 4 megs. We all know how much better the PCE port is and the main reason for that is the CD format. Sure, the colors will always be a bit better on the PCE but other than that don't you think the Genesis port could've had better looking bosses, backgrounds, music, etc if it was on CD? And two player as well.

 Ok... but what does any of that have to do with what I said? You stated Rondo couldn't be ported to the snes 'cause it was like 40 megabytes. I said the game, excluding cinemas and such, is around 18megabits. That's definitely doable with SNES cart space limitations. Did you reply to the wrong person?

[RyuHayabusa]

I'll admit I'm no expert with all the technical stuff. I'm just trying to understand how Rondo of Blood, with all it's extra stages, extra bosses, twice as many lesser enemies, tons more frames of animation, sound fx, etc would be the roughly the same size as SNES Dracula X at 16-18 meg, minus the cinemas and music tracks.

[Tatsujin]

by Pce being the superior hardware?

[awack]

I don't know why rondo stands out so much from other action games, heres an interesting fact.
take SCIV, bloodlines, Actraiser, Actraiser 2, the adventures of batman and robin for the genesis, and lightning force,  all of those combined, you just about equal rondo in sprite frames, most games use sprite flipping or color swaping for animation, rondo uses more but that's because it uses more of everything, but you have to take into consideration that the sprites in rondo are much larger than the other games.

[RyuHayabusa]

I don't know why rondo stands out so much from other action games, heres an interesting fact.
take SCIV, bloodlines, Actraiser, Actraiser 2, the adventures of batman and robin for the genesis, and lightning force,  all of those combined, you just about equal rondo in sprite frames, most games use sprite flipping or color swaping for animation, rondo uses more but that's because it uses more of everything, but you have to take into consideration that the sprites in rondo are much larger than the other games.

Interesting. Bonknuts is saying that Rondo of Blood would be roughly the same size as SNES Dracula X, minus the cinemas, but that doesn't make any sense considering how many more stages, bosses, frames of animation, sound fx, etc. that Rondo has. Have you looked at SNES Dracula X and compared the frames of animation between the two?

[Bonknuts]

I'll admit I'm no expert with all the technical stuff. I'm just trying to understand how Rondo of Blood, with all it's extra stages, extra bosses, twice as many lesser enemies, tons more frames of animation, sound fx, etc would be the roughly the same size as SNES Dracula X at 16-18 meg, minus the cinemas and music tracks.

 Not all the frames up animation in Rondo are pixel/bitmap frames. There's a lot of flipping sprites and subpalette animation, as well as what looks like real time composite animation (using few animated sprites moving around each other to create a lot more 'unique' frames of animation). That takes up a lot less than simply storing them as tiny bitmaps to be uploaded.

 Also, I didn't include Maria's animation and character in that size/figure - because she's not in the SNES port. I didn't include music, because that's Redbook. The SNES obviously is gonna need space for the samples and the music data itself. I don't know how much this takes up; you'll have to look into the snes rom and check for yourself. I also didn't include the ADPCM samples from Rondo, but SNES would have used lower frequency variant with added echo. And it already has its own ADPCM samples.

 The snes version appears to have a decent amount of non-tiled graphics for the background. As well as two or three tilemap layers. That'll eat up a little bit memory just for the extra tilemaps (compressed or not). And of course non-tiled detail takes up more space.

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
 
 Edit: Just popped the SNES rom into a tile viewer; there's a LOT of unused space in the SNES rom. It might be a 16megabit rom, but the game isn't using all 16megabits. There's a decent chunk of uncompressed sprites for the main character and weapons. That's pretty lazy of them, considering they had 128k of work ram to use. I.e. They could have decompressed the player sprites to work ram, and fetched from there. That would have saved some space.

[Black Tiger]

I don't know why rondo stands out so much from other action games, heres an interesting fact.
take SCIV, bloodlines, Actraiser, Actraiser 2, the adventures of batman and robin for the genesis, and lightning force,  all of those combined, you just about equal rondo in sprite frames, most games use sprite flipping or color swaping for animation, rondo uses more but that's because it uses more of everything, but you have to take into consideration that the sprites in rondo are much larger than the other games.

Interesting. Bonknuts is saying that Rondo of Blood would be roughly the same size as SNES Dracula X, minus the cinemas, but that doesn't make any sense considering how many more stages, bosses, frames of animation, sound fx, etc. that Rondo has. Have you looked at SNES Dracula X and compared the frames of animation between the two?

Many times.

The main difference is that Rondo is amazingly polished while DracXX was clearly a quick cash-in. Rondo's biggest asset is the quality. Just as the Sonic and DKC games were designed to make the most of the hardware, Rondo shows to those who can appreciate it, how the developers play tested the game to death and tweaked and designed it perfectly.

People like Black Falcon like to use checklists to understand games (even if his begins and ends with "-Nintendo or not?"). In other forums people trying to prove Castlevania IV's superiority have also tried the oblivious "8 directions are better than fewer!" whip gameplay argument. This only makes any sense to people who don't actually play or appreciate games. Those of us without a cabinet full of unused Mach 3 and Mach 4 razors understand that great gameplay involves so many variables which must be balanced together. An 8-way whip is only worth what you can and must do with it. Perhaps a Castlevania game could make proper use of it, but Castlevania IV doesn't justify its existence with complimentary stage and enemy design and control/collision. The potential as a general idea is almost wasted it's so unfulfilled.

Using checklist logic, Drac XX has the exact same gameplay as the PCE original. Anyone who can appreciate gameplay knew as soon as they tried DracXX how completely untrue that is. The main actions are there, but the response/timing is off. It's not simply different, it's broken to a degree. Separate from that, the stages and enemy placement/behavior were designed without any understanding or thought about what made the original so special or about making everything work in general. Just like how an original stage hacked into an existing game isn't automatically the same quality as the professionally designed ones. DracXX's all-round brokenness can lead to getting clipped at full health and being juggled around till death, without the player being able to control the situation at all.

All the warts of that game show how little care went into it. It just happens to be a remake of a game that received as much care as anything from that time. You can't just count the number of stages, or megs or anything else to quantify what makes Rondo of Blood so special or to compare it to similar titles. The aesthetics may have been fine tuned to maximize art, style, and quantity, but even if you strip away the aesthetics, the gameplay transcends the Castlevania series and brought it an entire knew level which has yet to be surpassed. Considering how bottlenecked the game is by aiming so high while at the same time honoring is roots so faithfully, it's all the more impressive and a testament to just how much the developers cared about the project, instead of just churning out a Castlevania game for "platform X".

Koji Igarashi appreciated all of this and that's why Symphony of the Night* came to be as it is and the rest of the great 2D Castlevanias which followed. Rondo is one of the greatest and most inspired game series reboots in history.

*People who don't get games just think SotN/NitM is Super Metroid + Castlevania -end of thought. Like Reese peanut butter cups. Unfortunately games (like films) are likely pitched this way today. Look at how Sonic 4 turned out. "It's got everything on our list of what looks like all the elements of Sonic games to us!"

[Tatsujin]

nothing much to add here, beside the interesting fun fact that rondo was konamis most expensive game developement at that time, which only confirms all the above written.

[awack]

Interesting. Bonknuts is saying that Rondo of Blood would be roughly the same size as SNES Dracula X, minus the cinemas, but that doesn't make any sense considering how many more stages, bosses, frames of animation, sound fx, etc. that Rondo has. Have you looked at SNES Dracula X and compared the frames of animation between the two?

Yes ive compared dracxx too rondo, look at the pic below, its of rondo sprites.



Dracula xx and rondo both use sprite flipping and palette cycling/swapping, of course rondo uses it more partly because many time more frames of animation to begin with, this stuff takes a lot less memory than actual frames, on the flip side take a look at the some of the biggest sprites in the game like rock golem, the big purple skull, bone golem boss, the horses, the giant flower, the painting, the cross, the dragon, the dead wyvern(dragon), Frankenstein, the two large skull attacks, the phenox, the green armor knight with ball and chain and the cat item crash, basically most of the largest sprites were done away with completely, and one of the bosses that was changed from the dragon to the three headed panther is much smaller than the rondo counter part, on top of that the dragon from rondo has almost two and a half more frames of real animation, plus the other large bosses in Draculaxx like the serpant boss and demon form Dracula are a bit smaller, plus, the big sprites that were kept far have far fewer frames of animation like the bull.

I just added up what Bonknuts is saying, dracxx memory includes music, soundfx, cutscenes, and a few other things, I think what he got from rondo Is just code and graphics, in theory, if  all of the adpcm memory was used each load in rondo that would be eleven and a half megs, taking all that into account, it would seem that rondo is the largest action game(shmups, platform shooters, hack n slash type games) released on the three major 16bit consoles

[fragmare]

Jesus titty-f*cking Christ, guys... this thread has degenerated into a pissing contest with people comparing megs, bits, and sprite frames as if they can somehow come up with a mathematical formula to determine which is the best game, based on those figures.

Sometimes a game is more than just the sum of its parts.  Sometimes a game is better because it's just more fun to play.  Is Rondo the most animated platformer of the 16-bit era?  Probably.  Is that why it's awesome?  No... it's awesome because the development team at Konami poured their heart and soul into that game, and it shows.  The artwork, the music, the level design, the attention to detail... all the subjective and intangible things is what Rondo got so very right.  But the real reason why Rondo is awesome is because once you start playing it you CAN'T f*ckING STOP.  It's like an addiction.  You have to know what's in the other path.  Where that last 10% of the game is.  The only other Castlevania games that I got that feeling from were 1 and 3 on the NES and SotN on the PSX.  *THAT*, my friends, is what makes Rondo amazing...

[lukester]

Sometimes a game is more than just the sum of its parts.  Sometimes a game is better because it's just more fun to play.  Is Rondo the most animated platformer of the 16-bit era?  Probably.  Is that why it's awesome?  No

This is a good point. Look at Earthworm Jim. It's much more well animated than Rondo, but plays rather sloppier. Animation frames don't make a game.

Hell, want to know why Legendary Axe is still one of the best Huey's? Sure, it may look a little dated, and environments can be repetitive. But, the way the Axe system is designed forces the player to be either calculative and strategic, and the build-up of power makes it oh so rewarding. Not to mention atmospheric music, and awesome enemies with smart AI.

And the final boss will never be forgotten...