Castlevania Anniversary Collection

Let's make a deal, Konami. You release Symphony of the night on steam, and I'll buy that metal gear zombie game.

When a problem comes along, you must whip it

Coulda pirated it, but bought it just to pump up its sales number and convince Konami to start making games for this franchise again. I'm doing my part.

This collection is so fire. Only problem is at the end of every game when it says "Presented by Konami" I get so bummed every time, they really used to be the GOAT...

KONAMI START MAKING NEW GAMES CHALLENGE (impossible edition)

Good compliation of the early Castlevanias, however, it does not feature the PlayStation, N64 and Game Boy Advance titles (the GBA titles are in another compilation).
Grab it on a discount if you want to (re)experience the retro 'vanias and want Dracula to sniff some garlic.

While this is my first time playing the entire Castlevania saga, I can definitely recommend this collection. My aspect ratio preference for retro games is 4:3 and when I learned that you can't get that in this collection without scanlines, I was kinda annoyed. I have read people complaining about it and some of them told that they eventually got used to it, and that was my case as well. I would much rather play in 4:3 with scanlines than the "original" or "pixel perfect resolutions" that don’t cover the entire screen, vertically speaking. Now, some people also complain about only being able to close the game by pressing alt+f4 and getting into fullscreen mode by pressing alt+enter. Which, if you have played in emulators before, is pretty much the shortcuts they have always had. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t find it annoying at all. It’s what I’m used to. They also added the Famicom version of “Bloody Tears” from CV2 for the title screen, "Vampire Killer"from CV1 for the JP menu and a rearranged version of “Beginning” from CV3 for the main menu which sounds amazing, still keeping that chiptune feel but with more complex channels, kinda like a better version of the VRC6 chip in the Famicom. Speaking of the Famicom, they added a lot of the Japanese versions of the games (with the exception of the Japanese version of CV2: Simon’s Quest, I don’t know why). They didn’t need to add them but they still did it and I appreciate them for that. Finally, they added a bonus book which includes not only all the covers from all games, including the Japanese and European/American versions, but also instructions for every game with the controls for each game and a little description for each game, as well as some very interesting interviews, discussions about the games and concept art. It’s pretty much an entire book inside of the collection, I really liked it. You also have the big description when you select each game which gives you a great deal of backstory for each game. It really helped me understand the lore of each game as I was going through them and got me involved a lot more into beating the games. Also, you get the choice of using 1 quicksave per-game which is really helpful If you want to avoid repeating tedious sections again and again just because of a minor mistake, but that’s just personal preference. You can still do it the old-school way and not use it at all. Oh, you also get a “color filter” for the Gameboy games to make them look SIMILAR to their GB Color version, but it’s just a filter that adds some shades of orange, it doesn’t actually add the same colors to the games as the Gameboy Color versions. It’s a neat addition, but not impressive.
Some people are saying that you can’t change the controls. Now I don’t know if these are old reviews or reviews from people that barely played the games, but you can. Most of them have the option in the menu you get from pressing LT, and if they don’t have it (like CV4 or Bloodlines, for example) it’s because you can change it in the game, from the options menu at the beginning of the game. Same thing with the so called “random crashes” they probably updated it or something but in the 47 hours I played and beat all games and got all achievements, I didn’t get a single crash in any game. So don’t worry about either of those things.
This review went on and on as i reviewed each game from the collection, since it was the first time i played them ever, but steam said it was 10k characters too long, so i had to end it here, where at least i was able to say everything i wanted about the collection in itself. All i'll add is: just buy it and enjoy an amazing collection of gaming history.