Toziuha Night: Dracula’s Revenge

It's aight.
It is five stages of Arcade style Castlevania. Go left to right (and sometimes in other directions to collect keys), whip the things that pop up in front of you, use sub-weapons to cover your bases. It has pretty much every facet of the classic Arcade formula represented and it is all done serviceably.
Is it perfect? No. It is direly unpolished in a lot of places, and enemies are paced poorly. Most of them take one or two hits too many to kill, and there isn't enough variety, so you'll be slogging through the same foes throughout the game. The subweapons are of limited usefulness and the alchemy arts (item crashes) take far too much mana for what they do, so you'll be doing this largely by whip-whip-whipping.
By the end of the fifth (and final) stage my patience was already being tested, I don't think I could have done the harder difficulty which boasts even more enemy spawns.
But for what it was, it was worth $5.

Ignore my playtime and lack of achievements. I played this on a Retroid Pocket 5 via GameNative.

This is a classic Castlevania clone starring an alchemist called Xandria.

I started this about a year ago, and I kept bouncing on and off it. I think I got sick of running out of extra lives in Normal mode and having to replay large portions of the same level. I recently found out it has an easy mode thanks to a tooltip I didn’t notice previously. I tried it out and I finally stuck to it thanks to the infinite extra lives. The game was far too easy this way (obviously). If there was a way to play Normal and Hard difficulties with infinite lives, I’d give it a shot. Alas…

But yeah, the game is a classic Castlevania clone, like the NES games (not counting Simon’s Quest). It’s graphical style is heavily inspired by the GBA/DS Castlevanias as well, even including the rainbow glow effect on the whip at the end of the attack animation. The game looks and feels good to play, which is very important to me.

The sub-weapons are clones of the typical Castlevania sub-weapons, but they’re all blade/iron weapons. I guess to fit the theme of an “Iron Alchemist”. The holy water equivalent is a blade wheel that rolls around, it gets the job done but it’s not nearly as effective. The knife equivalent has an extremely good item crash of blades spinning around you. You can melt bosses HP with this. There’s also a health potion sub-weapon. I don’t know if it’s exclusive to easy mode, but I found it to be way too powerful. I had to force myself to not use it. Again, I wish I could have played Normal mode with infinite lives.

The music is forgettable, but it’s not bad. It just needed one or two banger tracks like Vampire Killer or Bloody Tears to make a good first impression. The story and dialog is written in a very amateurish way. Grammar errors everywhere. As an English teacher, I can’t ignore that. The CG art itself is also very amateurish, but it gets the job done. The achievement design is atrocious as usual, and once again I’m happy to not be collecting these anymore. It’s rare to see achievements done the right way, and it’s exhausting.

In conclusion, I feel like this is definitely a good game, but they could have gone further to add quality of life improvements. Yes, this game is inspired by the classics, but we’re not in the 1980s. Mario and Sonic did away with the extra lives system, we simply don’t need it anymore.

Still, I look forward to playing the sequel… when it goes on discount of course.

Toziuha night was surprisingly good for a classic vania style game, enemies had decent patterns that you could easily learn eventually, enemies all had a weakness of sorts for the most part to take advantage of with a bit of skill, bosses were the same but of course much more difficult and at times quite varied, I appreciate a lot of the more important bosses even having phases and unique attacks dood.

I'm not one for lives systems but this one balanced out fair pits and lives being decently easy to get a hold of, I came close to losing all of them because the game is a genuine challenge if you don't adapt but I was able to pull through with all the lives I managed to keep dood.

The whip is nice and snappy, you also have sub weapons which are interesting as they have the ability to have advanced versions be used if you hold up, with varying uses, I can't say I really used them, fights were fast enough and points were scarce enough that you didn't really want to use them unless you need to and they ended up very situational as the whip was more handy for immediate threats dood.

There's also a hard mode (good luck with that if you play this, no thanks for me! lol) and apparently a casual mode, not that I have any idea how to unlock that, normal I think is the perfect difficulty for it, the music and areas were all really nice too, the sprites were iffy if I'm honest but not terrible and the character art was actually pretty nice to look at dood.

I admit I saw the metroidvania sequel coming out and that's what got me to play this, the concept is a rather interesting mix of using the typical Vlad the impaler but also mixing in a few twists in there along with the idea of alchemy being a thing and part of your arsenal (sub weapons) dood.

If there's any flaw in this game I'd say it's losing your sub weapon on death, they always replace it with this annoying generic back and forth weapon that only was handy at the end of the game and on top they take away 5 sub weapon points, which honestly feels a little too punishing, otherwise I really can't say there's anything the game did wrong, could it be better? Of course but for what it is I think it's a fun game dood.

Welp that's it! If ya get the game I hope ya'all enjoy it, thanks for reading my review dood. ^-^

This game is definitely brutal. It's definitely on par with the NES era Castlevania games (for better and for worst). I ended up caving and decided to play on Easy. Though Easy mode is kinda too Easy ( I didn't run into any hiccups til the final boss fight). If you're only interested in the story (it's decent but kinda would have been nice to have more story), play on Easy. If you want to get Minecrafted a lot and like a challenge, play on normal or hard (though very few have probably beat it on hard). Definitely worth the $5 usd.

It seems like an extremely derivative Castlevania copycat at first, but if you progress through you will probably find that it definitely carves its own path while still pretty much being a competent Castlevania clone. The first few levels are just too similar, as the main character uses a whip, carries similar subweapons and fights similar enemies- including a giant bat as the first boss.
The final stage of the game totally redeems it. It's somewhat of a subversion of the Castlevania formula that includes a gauntlet of five separate boss fights in a row. The final boss is actually better designed than most of the final bosses in real Castlevania games. Once you beat the game on normal you unlock hard mode which is totally fun and seems modeled after Order of Ecclesia's hard mode in the sense that you have to deal with painful platforming sections with endlessly spawning bats. I got my adrenaline rush finishing hard mode and the scant other achievements were slightly difficult (Though made easier to unlock by simply doing them in the easy mode). I cleared it in nine hours and overall felt satisfied with the experience, even though it is really just an indie Castlevania clone with some obnoxious glitches.

Good feel and difficulty for this classic Castlevania style game :p

Amazing metroidvania style game. I enjoyed everything about it. Music was good, attention to details was good. Especially the lighting to the candles after you destroy them, the room gets a little bit dark but nothing drastic. Going to play number 2 soon. Can not wait to see what unfolds.