I will never understand why Konami included the original version of the Adventure and not the EU/JP exclusive colour re-release as part of the Konami GB Collection Vol 1. Not only was it full colour, but had the slowdown removed entirely. Belmont's Revenge was included in Vol 4 also getting the full colour treatment along with the addition of the Cross sub-weapon instead of the Axe. They were far better versions than the default we ended up with.

We need a compilation of all the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS Castlevania titles

Bloodlines was such a fresh entry in the Castlevania franchise!

Bloodlines proved that a pointed stick was more effective at fighting Dracula and his minions than a whip.

I really wish they had Castlevania the Adventure Rebirth too. As it was pretty much its own game based on Castlevania the Adventure

Thanks John, so much detail in this! DF Retro just gets better and better

25:44 YES! Finally some love for Lamment of Innocense. Great game!

Mmmmm...that VRC6 Castlevania III soundtrack. It's really one of the best across the entire series, and even all of video games.

I collected videogames for 25 years! Sold most of it in the last 2-3years,because.....you know.....you get older and tired! First i wanted to sell everything,but im glad that i did hold to my CV/Akumajou Dracula Collection!

Nice one John, DF Retro delivers as always!

I am part of a minority, but I love Castlevania II. I remember watching my older brother playing the game around its release and enjoy playing it a lot too.

Another amazing video John! Thanks for all your hard work. DF Retro is my favorite series on all of KZfaq.

Great job as always, John!

Castlevania is my favorite series of all time, I've beaten 14 Castlevania games and I'm super stoked that this collection lives up to its potential and delivers some quality emulation. Thank you Digital Foundry for covering these greats.

The Castlevania IV soundtrack has been on my playlist since 1991. I still remember puzzling out how to connect the SNES to my Dad's Tape Deck to make it all work. Absolutely excellent!

Castlevania games always make me sing Whip it by Devo. "Whip it.... Whip it real good..."

Jesus bloodlines looks so damn good I need it!!! Beautiful video as always John keep it up :D

Bloodlines is the most underrated title in the series.

Thank you so much for noticing the high-pitched beep!! I kept seeing these reviews about the flawless emulation and I thought I was gonna go crazy. Also that crash-causing bug happened when I was fighting Dracula!! Aaaah!!! Still love the collection and the NES Switch controllers work with it!!

Discovered Belmont's Revenge not long ago and was so surprised by the quality. Both level design and especially music. Became one of my favorite Castlevania titles decades after the original release.

Amazing job bro!!! Your passion and hard work are much appreciated!!! I have zero idea why there would be a single dislike! Awesome job as always bro!!

This is the most thorough in depth review of the game there is in YT. Great job as always!

Castlevania 4 one of the best soundtrack for gaming ever

DF is my all life desired tv program.

Thanks for the excellent video John! Castlevania is one of my favorite franchises ever, and seeing the collection got me giddy.

Castlevania on NES. the music is amazing. mom used to love that game :D

Great vid 👍 soon as I get a chance going to pick this up to relive these classic

Df Retro is the shining star of this amazing channel! Great content as always.

7:41 The track is "Trascend both the Fear & the Despair" ("Calling from Heaven" is the Bloodlines OST name) by Dangerous Mezashi Cat. The album is Omega Catastrophe, but I can't find it anywhere to buy or listen to online other than tracks uploaded here on KZfaq.

One of the absolute best franchises in gaming. The classic styled Castlevania games in particular are just so masterfully designed.

I am in awe of the incredible detail of this video thank you. Keep up the good work. You have earned a subscriber.

Simon's Quest, suddenly AVGN comes to mind.

That lack of challenge in Super Castlevania IV is properly amended in the game's hard mode. As for subweapons they get more useful, cross in particular, when you power them up which is now possible by taking out enemies with them.

Wife: "Honey, why did you shatter all of our wine glasses? Me: A new digital foundry video is out.. John told me to do it!

Thanks for the entertaining rundown. Looks like another solid collection.

I think the real biggest difference between the Japanese and International versions of Cv3 was the difficulty adjustments.

Well I'm going to have to watch The AVGN Castlevania retrospective after this.

i would totally buy the DF Retro Music Player

I never noticed they blurred out the misspelled "Dracura" in the US release of Super.

The funniest part of IGA shattering the wine glass is it was for a spirtual successor to Castlevania: Bloodstained Ritual Of The Night! Still Great Job! :)

I love video games and was heavily into them as a Chile when all of these titles originally released. I still own most of them today. Castlevania is also one of my top favorite franchises in all of video games. The info you provide on background and technical aspects of picture, sound, and emulation of these games makes me love and appreciate them even more. Excellent work as always John and the DF team. I’ll definitely watch this again.

Super Castlevania has always been my favorite of them all.

Thank you for this thorough analisys of the games !

Really impressed at the sound emulation for Bloodlines! Sounds damn close to a VA3 - VA6. Most emulated Genesis/MD games re-releases fall short in that regard. Stellar episode again, John! Now have at you!

Just another amazing DF Retro, these videos are the best content on youtube.

Really had been hoping you would do a video for this, and you delivered as always!

Great video. I might end up buying this collection. Thanks!

You know what? I still haven't played a Castlevania game; might finally be time to give it a shot.

i wasn't originally going to buy Castlevania Anniversary Collection because i already have all the games in it but after watching this i changed my mind

I swear you guys upload videos just when the world needs them. This video is just in time to be my mundane 'washing dishes' background video, other times they've been uploaded in time for an unashamedly long toilet session or a dinner-time date for one with the TV. You guys are heroes.

If anyone is wondering, the cause of the beeps in Castlevania 1 is due to their emulator not knowing how to handle "Pitch 0" of the triangle channel correctly. If you listen to the original soundtrack (on hardware, or in an emulator that doesn't mask Pitch 0), you will hear some "clicks" or "pops" in the same places that you hear the loud, high-pitched beeps in the Anniversary Collection. This happens in only 4 specific places in the CV1 soundtrack (the two beeps shown in this video, and also two in the level clear jingle). It doesn't show up in CV2 or CV3 at all, which is why you don't encounter the beeping there. This can be considered a bug, so emulating it accurately isn't necessarily ideal. The devs likely wanted to remove or omit all instances of Pitch 0, as their placement is so random and minimal that it appears to be an accident and not a purposeful technique. The NSF player NSFPlay has an option called "Mute Triangle at Pitch 0", which would be a great thing for M2 to patch into their emulator. But otherwise, accuracy would also be much more welcome than the loud beeps we currently have. Fun fact: Early Capcom soundtracks on the NES are often riddled with Triangle Pitch 0s. If M2 tried loading up something like Mega Man 2 in their NES emulator, the problem would've been immediately noticeable because the soundtrack would've been spitting out those obnoxious beeps constantly.

This is a pretty well done video! Great information.

Fantastic work, thank you for this.

John, you sold me this collection, good quality video!

I had that Castlevania 1 sound bug happen in Castlevania 2 as well, though it happened more because of a combination of sounds/music going off at once as opposed to happening at the same point in the soundtrack like it does in 1.

Great work John!!! Thanx a lot!!!

Symphony of the night still game of my life!

I'm an old school Castlevania fanatic and i agree with you that i loved the simplicity of the first few installments compared to the exploration in the latter versions & this video content is great.

Sega 3D Classics releases on 3DS made me realize what an amazing job M2 does with their releases and I'm definitely going to support their efforts this time as well. Great work as always John. Have you by any chance tried the PC version of the Collection? I'd be curious as to how they handle stuff like resolutions beyond 1080p, ultrawide screens etc as these things often tend to cause problems with japanese releases.

"The Sinking Old Sanctuary", which you highlighted when talking about Yamane's work - pretty sure this is not only one of the best CV tracks (extremely high praise in itself) but one of the best pieces of video game music ever.

Now we just need metroidvania collection, thats something even i would buy. But great video again and as always, its fun to watch.

My favorite game series ever! Nice one John

Great video. 2:29 that Gameboy just came right from the factory :o

Good video John, I hope to see you do another DF retro video on the Contra anniversary Collection.

I honestly hope that they do a collection Volume 2 with Rondo of Blood (classic 2D and 2.5 versions), SOTN, Circle or the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance, and Aria of Sorrow.

Great video. as always!

I agree that an option to decouple scanline mode from bilinear filtering would be a good thing. But do you remember CRTs? Analog displays didn't have fixed horizontal pixels (the phoshor triplets are NOT pixels). Add the limited bandwidth of the TV standards of the day, and the result is horizontal blur.

Best channel on youtube reviewing one of the greatest game series of all time. Who brought the popcorn?

Bloodlines (or The New Generation as I know it) is one of my all-time fave games; the first thing I did when I got this collection was complete it (with Eric, obviously). Thanks for this video, John! :)

duuuuude!@#!@! Everything you said about the linear ones spoke directly to my heart. I loved the linear progression of the first half of the games!

Great video guys!

Great work as ever John. Oh what I’d do for a Goemon collection with translations of the second and third Super Famicom games! 😍😍😍🤞🤞🤞

Konami should release an arcade collection which includes the 1990 arcade game, Aliens. That game was really cool looking.

Whoever edits these videos is so good!

That's pretty nuts. Years ago I used to be a wannabe comic book artist and graphic designer and I made up some bizarro fanfiction that tied the ending of Castlevania 1 to be a starting point for Kid Dracula, and embellished it for a few classmates back in junior high school. Thankfully, the garbage was lost to time but seeing the title mentioned and released in this compilation really brought me down memory lane. Thanks for the nice roundup review!

Great video! I bought this day one for the Switch, but I still really enjoyed ur breakdown of the collection.

On sale in ps4 all the time. Just picked the collection of eight up for $5. Very happy

Ah, nothing like a do retro to watch while I enjoy my morning coffee

best video series atm for me, df retro!

Castlevania 3 was my first castlevania as a kid and still my favorite to this day, I've played each more times than i can count and still this collection was a great purchase.

lts be honest, its M2, their ports are basically GOLD

The music in Belmont's revenge is so good. Battle of the holy in adventure is really good too

OMG, the Castlevania 4 soundtrack still gives me goosebumps.

The flickering mountains on the Game Boy version was likely purposely changed as to not affect people with epilepsy. M2 always changes this in their games.

Disappointing that CV1 draws the short stick in terms of presentation, but I'm thrilled the rest of the collection is rock solid. I'll definitely be picking this collection up next payday. Thanks as always, Digital Foundry. You guys do a lot of great work making sure I don't buy crappy Switch ports... that often.

Castlevania sits on the Iron Throne of vidéo game music. Even Final Fantasy couldn’t keep up with it.

Bloodlines...I remember when it came out, made me want a Genesis.

This would've been the perfect collection if they added Rondo of Blood.

I don't mind the epilepsy quality of life changes to these classic games, but I wish they would add a setting to set them back to their original design. M2 does this on just about all of their releases. The Neo•Geo Station games on the PS3 also had some major changes, such as removing all of the animation from the neat looking League Bowling title screen. That was kind of disappointing when you paid nearly $10 for a single game.

I'm thrilled to see the gameboy versions included. They often get overlooked in these compilations.

I just started playing Super Castlevania IV thanks to this collection. Loving it so far.

Dude, what's up with the Lamment of Innocence soundtrack for the first Castlevania? Aside of that, neat video, you may have sold me on the collection (I'm a Castlevania fan but i was doubtful, since there was word out there thay it didn't live to M2's quality standards) I'm feeling the itch for some retro Castlevania with my Switch.

Imagine if M2 had brought Bloodlines to the 3DS back in the day... droooooool!

One of our favorite franchises, don’t think we could have clicked on a video faster

Bought this collection purely for IV and its brilliant. Glad to have it back in the collection.

Totally agree, excellent retrospective!!

Great work boys!

Castlevania 2 was the first of the series I ever owned. I actually like the adventure type of route they went. Being able to upgrade your whip permanently and buy/find subweapons to use when ever you want was a nice improvement from the 1st game. I'll admit though, I had to call a hotline back then to find out how to progress because the game really is cryptic, but not impossible, to figure out.

Hey John, been rewatching some DF Retro, and I think ROM sizes and how it affects *perceived* hardware limits would make for a great video. You could start with the official stuff, showcasing how ROM sizes typically increased over the course of each generation, and the leaps in visuals that happen within the same fixed hardware because of it. The interesting part would be finding examples of what hardware could do without ROM size limitations. Modern homebrew making use of plentiful flash memory/flash carts like the Titan Overdrive demos come to mind as fun ones. Longtime fan of DF retro, keep it up. :)

Top notch video!