Castlevania

Konami · Since 1986

Konami's gothic action franchise spanning the linear whip-and-sub-weapon NES originals through Symphony of the Night's Metroidvania revolution. The series gave its name to an entire genre of exploration-based action games.

Castlevania (1986) established a gothic action game template built around precise whip attacks, secondary weapons drawn from horror iconography (holy water, crucifixes, throwing axes), and a castle whose rooms were navigated stage by stage. The linear format was refined through Castlevania III (1989) and Super Castlevania IV (1991) before Koji Igarashi's Symphony of the Night (1997) on PlayStation transformed the series' structure into a free-roaming exploration game. The term "Metroidvania" — combining Metroid's open world structure with Castlevania's RPG elements — was coined to describe Symphony of the Night's design and has since become the genre descriptor for an entire category of games. The series maintained strong entries through Aria of Sorrow (2003) on Game Boy Advance, with the franchise's subsequent transition to 3D producing more mixed results.