Castlevania Advance Collection Officially Revealed
After numerous ratings organizations listed a product known as "Castlevania Advance Collection" on their sites, the collection of Castlevania games was finally revealed by Nintendo and Konami on Thursday. Nintendo featured the Castlevania collection within its Nintendo Direct presentation that was geared towards games releasing in at some point in Winter 2021 but was also expected to include some outliers as well. The Castlevania Advance Collection will release for the Nintendo Switch later on Thursday, but according to the leaked listings for it, it's also supposed to release for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC platforms.
As the name of the collection suggests, the Castlevania Advance Collection will consist of Castlevania games that were released for the Game Boy Advance. That means that Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow will be included in the collection, a trio of games confirmed by Nintendo during its presentation. However, as the ESRB rating suggested previously, the collection will actually include another game: Castlevania: Dracula X. This game was the SNES version of Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and wasn't released for the Game Boy Advance, but who's one to turn down another Castlevania game in an already beefy collection?
This isn't the first time that Konami's released a collection of Castlevania games like this before, so it's not hard to imagine that the company would want to do so again, especially considering how the games mentioned above are often regarded as some of the best Castlevania games to date. The Castlevania Anniversary Collection, for example, was released as part of Konami's 50th anniversary collection and comes packed with Castlevania, Castlevania II Simon's Quest, Castlevania III Dracula's Curse, Super Castlevania IV, Castlevania The Adventure, Castlevania II Belmont's Revenge, Castlevania Bloodlines, Kid Dracula, and History of Castlevania - Book of the Crescent Moon.
As one might've expected from a new collection of games like this one, there are some extra features present in Castlevania Advance Collection that have been added. Among those is a "rewind" function which allows players to backtrack a few seconds to correct any mistakes they might've made. While some may view things like that as cheats that compromise the experience, we've found they're helpful in older games that were pretty unforgiving in their own right whenever you're just trying to enjoy the nostalgia of a familiar experience
Castlevania Advance Collection releases for the Nintendo Switch on Thursday and is expected to come to other platforms, too.