Haunted Castle (video game)

The first arcade-only game in the Castlevania series. It is yet another retelling of Simon Belmont's original adventure against Dracula, but there are quite a few unusual features in this game that never got reused:
 * The subweapons are different.
 * The main weapons are different; you don't keep your whip but rather you upgrade through two other weapons in the course of the game.
 * Simon is actually out to save his Distressed Damsel wife, Serena, in this game, whereas he's just saving the world in general in the other versions of this story.

There's been a recent trend toward reusing the mostly unique music from this game in other Castlevania games--"Don't Wait Until Night" was featured (in a double remix) in Aria of Sorrow, "Underground Melody" in Dawn of Sorrow, and "Cross Your Heart" (labeled as "Crucifix Held Close") in Portrait of Ruin.

Haunted Castle provides examples of:

 * Awesome Yet Practical: The pocketwatch. In other Castlevania games, it typically costs a whopping five hearts to use. In this game, it costs two.
 * Cartoon Bomb: One of the subweapons.
 * Difficulty By Region: There were two variants of the game's overseas release. Version M is the most difficult, where are single bone throw by the skeleton enemies at the beginning of the first stage takes out half of the player's health gauge. Version O, a later release, fixed some of the cheapness from Version M, but is still considerably harder than the Japanese releases (Versions N and P).
 * Distressed Damsel: Simon's bride, Serena.
 * Early Installment Weirdness: For starters, subweapons appear far less frequently than any of the games that came before or after. Also, the first one you find is a Cartoon Bomb. It's functionally identical to the Holy Water but looks out of place in this series' setting.
 * Excuse Plot: Why the Distressed Damsel is there.
 * Haunted Castle: Not the Trope Namer, but obviously an example of one. Though less of the ominous scary kind, and more of just a platformer filled with all manners of monsters.
 * Lohengrin and Mendelssohn: Mendelssohn in the intro — but not for long.
 * Make My Monster Grow: Dracula's second form is to become so large that his head takes up a quarter of the screen. He doesn't even go One Winged Angel while doing it.
 * Nintendo Hard: Oddly for both the Castlevania series and arcade games in general, this game has limited continues. And that's without talking about the difficult-to-dodge obstacles and the frequent rate of death. The game is completely impossible without cheats or extreme patience.
 * Save the Princess
 * Visual Pun: The third stage's BGM is Bloody Tears. In the middle of the stage is a portrait of a woman crying bloody tears.
 * Wasted Song: The high score table BGM, which is unlikely to play completely. It was finally remixed and used prominently in the Wii Ware game Castlevania The Adventure Rebirth.
 * When It Rains It Pours
 * You Gotta Have Blue Hair: One of Simon's oddest looks to date.