MrPopo wrote:Have you played Holy Diver? That's another one of the "seems like a Castlevania clone" games and I'd be curious what your take on it is.
I actually beat
Holy Diver this year. Let me see what I had to say about it, despite not being this guy called Exhuminator.
First take:
Holy Diver is bullcrap. Pure, unmitigated, bullcrap.
I can handle the first three stages reliably, and the fourth stage isn't too bad, either. I picked up with save states because I wanted to be able to quit when I wanted. It became necessary to abuse them when I hit the level four boss. That freakin' eyeball tower is ridiculously hard, since one wrong move sends you plummeting to your death. It's the worst of the sort of unfair bosses.
The rest of the game also hits you with a lot of unfair stuff, stuff that would take a lot more foreknowledge to really get through it relatively unscathed. I've watched someone go through, and he makes it look easy, but it's anything but, as most of us already know from other games.
My biggest problem with the game is that the whole game feels cheap and unfair, like a badly-balanced arcade title. It's hard in the worst way. Where something like
Battletoads, as difficult as it is, feels fair once you get things down, this felt anything but. I know I resorted to save states
far more often than in my practice
Battletoads runs. It's got too much randomness in it for a game that difficult.
I "beat" it, at any rate. Glad to be done with it. Don't torture yourself like I did.
EDIT: Going back and checking that video again, I had the right idea in some places, it just takes perfect execution to make it all work. I think I could
probably beat it legit if I beat my head against it enough (it does have unlimited continues), but I'll be darned if I'm going to do it now.
Second take after legit beaten:
...I've done it. I've beaten
Holy Diver legit.
Well, effectively. I was pounding away at levels 5 and 6 today, and managed to get through them legit. No joke! I've even got the horrible "grapes of wrath" section down to a science. I usually only lose a life or two, and I've generally got five or six when I get there because the rest of the stage has gotten a bit easy.
Of course, I knew not beating the stupid eyeball tower in a proper run would bug me like crazy, so I went back to the beginning, and pounded on him. Took me three stage runs, and I got there the last time, thought I didn't have enough life, but managed to put him down without losing any lives against him. The speedrun has the right strategy for sure, you just have to do some manic switching between triggering your Overdrive and blasting away. I had two segments down for a while without even realizing it, I was so into it. With that, I've legit finished every single stage, so I'm calling this one done. I have
zero doubts I could roll through levels 5 and 6 right now, but I'm absolutely exhausted putting that much effort into the game today.
My playthrough wasn't nearly as pretty, either. There are segments where I shine, but Funkdoc's got some amazing skills in the game, far more than I have achieved.
For the record? Game is
still BS.
And now, some additional thoughts:
The game really has a lot of cool ideas. It looks really solid, and the magic spells are pretty slick. I loved having access to time stopping, or freezing lava flows. Heck, even some of the music is catchy and really good. It's one of those games that, if it were balanced a little better, would have been an instant classic. There are also some absolutely ridiculous plot points in the game, but much like
Castlevania, they're completely superfluous to kicking butt.
If I didn't mention it, there's also some quirkiness in the jump physics. If you press a direction and jump at the same time, the game will often ignore your inputs. That
will get you killed. You really have to get used to moving slightly and then jumping, or jumping and then moving. It's got a lot more controllable physics than
Castlevania, so you can do that stuff. Most of the time, it feels really responsive, so to have it hitch up on you in those rare instances is definitely problematic.