Daily Dracula X: Opening
More going on here than a ritual murder to resurrect Dracula
The indulgent prologue video is a fancy full-screen animation narrated in German.1
This game was released for the PC Engine’s first-of-its-kind CD-ROM expansion. Lengthy animated intros, as well as CD-quality pre-recorded music, were major selling points for early CD games.2
After all, the biggest advantage for a CD game at this time was storage space: 700MB on a CD when most cartridge video games were 1-4MB in their entirety. (Today, 700MB isn’t enough for an hour-long TV episode, and 3MB is the size of a single photo off a smartphone.) Cartridge systems didn’t have room for intro videos this fancy! Extras like animated cutscenes were how early CD games gave big spenders— and keep in mind the PC Engine CD-ROM^2 attachment first retailed for $600— a premium experience.
It’s also worth noting that in the early 90s, Nintendo’s Super Nintendo console ran console video games with an iron fist. It’s often been whispered that the company strong-armed major publishers— such as Konami, the publishers of this game— out of selling their biggest hit titles on other platforms.3
The reason I bring all this history up is the dark subject matter of this intro: a human sacrifice as part of a demonic ritual to resurrect Dracula. Particularly outside of Japan, Nintendo was strict about keeping titles on their platforms family-friendly throughout most of the 80s and 90s4. Despite the Castlevania series’ obvious horror theme, serious blood and gore were off the table for the series on its main platforms. A graphic scene like this would have been downright unthinkable: Nintendo was reporting its competitors before the US Congress for much less.5
So given all that context, we can definitely interpret the choice to open with cultists ritually murdering an undressed woman, with a wave of blood spewing forth, as a sign of creators taking this opportunity to push every boundary they weren’t allowed to touch under Nintendo.
PC Engine games usually used their first cutscenes to either open with showoff spectacle or dump a large amount of backstory onto the player. Rondo of Blood uses the cold open simply to show the player something disturbing, to build dread. But the game itself doesn’t go anywhere nearly as dark as this opening, the only scene of genuine horror in all of Rondo of Blood.
Next time we’ll watch Richter Belmont’s dashing entrance and ride into Stage 0, the prologue. Dracula’s good friend Death challenges us to a light spar before the adventure begins. See you tomorrow, vampire killers!
It is not made clear where Dracula X takes place, outside of a non-specific “Europe”. The SNES version says the story takes place in Transylvania, but it is not canon. It’s likely that the German language was chosen for the voiceover solely because it sounded cool. Maybe the developers were really into Legend of the Galactic Heroes. ↩
The PC Engine ROM^2, capable of full-length animated and voiced cutscenes in 1989, built something of a reputation as the machine of choice for hardcore anime nerds. Major anime dating sim Tokimeki Memorial first appeared on the PCE; in fact, Dracula X staffer and future Symphony of the Night director Koji Igarashi wrote a lot of dialogue for that game and reportedly hated every minute of it. ↩
Konami was an A-list publisher for Nintendo and one of the few that got away with publishing for their competition as well. ↩
The 90s broke Nintendo’s stance on this over time: ultra-violent titles too popular to ignore— from Mortal Kombat, to Doom, to Resident Evil and on— soon became the mainstream face of video games. ↩
In 1993, the same year as Dracula X’s Japanese release, Nintendo was telling Congress that the rather mild Night Trap over on Sega CD was “unfit for society.” ↩
