Just when I was about to sit down and enjoy a scary movie for Halloween, I get a knock at the door, and who should it be? It's the Nintendo Switch Online update, of course, bringing three classic games to the subscription platform. These games include Castlevania Legends on Game Boy, and both Devil World and The Mysterious Murasame Castle on the Nintendo Entertainment System. That's great news, but are any of these games worth playing? To answer that question, I decided to flip through the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Nintendo Power and Computer & Video Games to see what the critics said back when these games first came out. I hope you have your Halloween costume on, because this is going to be a spooky episode of Nintendo Switch Online Review Crew.


Because games like Harmony of Dissonance and Dawn of Sorrow are so highly regarded on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS, we sometimes forget that the Castlevania series was all over Nintendo's first handheld – the Game Boy. The Adventure kicked things off in 1989 and was quickly followed by Belmont's Revenge in 1991. For years, it looked like these would be the only entries on the monochromatic system, but then Konami surprised everybody with Castlevania Legends, a new Game Boy entry released almost a full decade after the system came out. This comes at a weird time for the franchise, having just shaken up the formula with Symphony of the Night on PlayStation and dabbling in 3D entries on the Nintendo 64. Legends was very much a return to classic Castlevania, featuring a female vampire hunter named Sonia Belmont who is on the scent of the first incarnation of Count Dracula.

Unfortunately, the critics were not ready to wax nostalgic about Castlevania in 1998. It wasn't a whip and stake that ultimately defeated Dracula, but rather terrible reviews. Let's start with Electronic Gaming Monthly, which averaged a disappointing score of 4.75 out of 10. Shawn summed the game up in two words: “Short and easy. The game may give you a standard Castlevania-type adventure with its spooky levels, music and inventory system, but that's about where it ends. This installment in the Castlevania series is best suited as a training course for aspiring Castlevania gamers.” Crispin agreed, though liked the game a little more: “The Castlevania series has made huge strides on every console BUT the Game Boy. While this newest installment packs the basic Castlevania ingredients, it's too short and the control is often unforgiving. I died too many times simply because I missed what should have been a simple jump. At least you get a decent remix of the Castlevania theme, something I missed in Symphony of the Night.”

If you were thinking that maybe the critics across the pond would be kinder, guess again. Computer + Video Games was thoroughly disappointed with this side-scrolling action game, giving Legends a mere 2 out of 5. They argued that Legends is “not to be confused with the PlayStation game Symphony of the Night, although there are similarities. If you've played that game, then this is like playing a 10% finished version. Unfortunately, even by Game Boy standards, this is basic. Some of the first Game Boy titles were better than this in terms of graphics and collision detection. I've no doubt that the Game Boy could handle a decent Castlevania game, but this isn't it.”

The highest score I could find came from Nintendo Power, and even they weren't that impressed. They gave it a score of 6.4 out of 10, with Sonja calling it “too easy” and Scott saying that “it's like an old friend you haven't seen for ages.” They were ultimately disappointed in the gameplay, but praised Konami for recreating the classic Castlevania look and feel.

These days, Castlevania Legends has been largely forgotten. Fans speak fondly of the other two Game Boy entries, but this one tends to be left out of the conversation. Now you can see for yourself if this 1998 action game was a huge disappointment, a misunderstood classic or something in between.

Now here's a completely unexpected surprise. Back in the earliest days of the Famicom, Shigeru Miyamoto developed a sinister play on the maze genre called Devil World. Never heard of it? That's probably because it never came to the United States. It did come to Europe and Australia, but not America. Not even on the Virtual Console. That makes this one of the coolest releases on the Nintendo Switch Online service, and definitely a game you should check out. It's a horror-themed riff on Pac-Man, where we control a dragon who has to navigate the Devil's twisted maze. What makes this game tricky is that the play field is always in movement, with a force field around the left and right sides of the screen, keeping our hero trapped. The goal is to collect items, defeat the Devil's minions and survive through dozens of challenging levels. Yes, it's simple, but that's also what makes it so damn addictive. Unfortunately, there are no English-language reviews from the era, largely because it didn't come to America and few magazines were giving games proper reviews in 1984. But even without reviews, the prospect of possibly playing a Miyamoto game for the first time should be reason enough to give Devil World a chance.

And here we have another Nintendo game that was monumental for the Famicom, yet didn't get an American release at the time. The Mysterious Murasame Castle is an overhead action game in the vein of The Legend of Zelda, starring a samurai character named Takamuru. When an alien takes over the four lords, it's up to our hero to fight through the four neighboring castles to collect the four gems and defeat the alien once and for all. The emphasis here is on the action, and The Mysterious Murasame Castle has a lot of it. While it looks a lot like Zelda, this is a much faster and linear game that forces you to race through the levels before time runs out. There's no open world or adventuring, just fast-paced action and intense levels. Similar to Devil World, there were no reviews when this game was released. Sites like Nintendo Life and Bordersdown reviewed the game when it was re-released on Game Boy Advance and Nintendo 3DS and generally liked it, but this is a serious about classic magazine reviews, not internet reviews published in 2014. That said, Nintendo Life and Bordersdown are right, The Mysterious Murasame Castle is great fun and worth discovering on the Switch.