On August 27, 2000, while we were still pondering the Shin Dracula X thing, The CastleVania Dungeon reported that Konami had announced a new CastleVania game for the upcoming Game Boy Advance. The following screenshot with a "G" was all we knew for a very long time:

Until more details, its title of Circle of the Moon, and
these pictures were revealed a month later:

And when Konami released an image strip containing
these Vampire Hunters, we were totally stumped:

Finally, the box scan was released...

...the ROM was made available,...

...and much to my delight, the Game Boy Advance emulator ran it.
No sound (aside from the Heart "bloop"), but the emulator ran it.
These are high times for CastleVania fans...
These are my findings.

Akumajou Dorakyura (Dracula) Circle of the Moon, a.k.a. CircleVania, developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo of Symphony fame, is one of the initial launch cards for the Game Boy Advance, out in Japan since March, but coming here in the near future, and if you know Konami like I do, you can surely expect big things from a group that usually goes all out when it comes to new games for a new system (Super CastleVania IV on the Super NES!).

According to me, my notes, and Jason Gaines, the Game Boy Advance is a 32 bit hardware, like a cart-run PlayStation, and when I buy the Japanese version of it, I will be able to chase down a Japanese shot of CircleVania with some US version F-Zero Advance action, then rock Solar Striker and Belmont's Revenge! The Advance WILL play your original Game Boy games in grayscale and your Game Boy Color games in color. The unit will also be able to be used as a controller for the Nintendo Game Cube on the horizon.

If you already knew all that; sorry, I don't really follow the game scene as much.

After pressing start, you are brought to the Gateway, a menu similar to SotN's, where you can select one of 7 save slots. After entering your name (I chose "DIGIRAP"), we start off with a small introduction.

Story:

We begin one gloomy, moon-bathed night in the year 1830, at a castle in Austria (originally, I thought the Japanese katakana read as "OSUTOREIRIA", for AUSTRALIA, at which point I went bouncing off the walls trying to figure out what the land downunda had to do with CastleVania).

Let's introduce the main characters who
are all part of the opening, anyway.
Print Screen doesn't work to capture screensnaps, so I've
drawn them freehand, spending 20 seconds on each one.

For professionalism's sake, I'll spare you all "Trav the Impaler" jokes just this once. Camilla, or Carmilla, known in Simon's Quest as Vampira or that big mask thing, looks like Elizabeth Bartley in this game and is very pretty. She revives evil by throwing her arms up in the air and breaking open the casket of....

Dracula, who retains his mighty healthy threads after the Symphony. He thanks Camilla for rescuing him from the mysteriously slim vertical box when suddenly...

Morris Balding--I mean, Baldwin runs in! He's accompanied by...

Hugh Baldwin! The Richter presence of the game. Isn't there an actor who goes by this name? and...

Nathan Graves! You play as him. At first, he makes Christopher Belmont in The CastleVania Adventure look like Sonic the Hedgehog.

After Morris chastises Dracula and Camilla, Dracula shoots a bat from his cape into the floor beneath Hugh and Nate, which crumbles away and sends the two plummeting into the abyss beneath the Castle. Five minutes later, Nate and Hugh land, and after saying something in Japanese, Hugh dashes off, leaving Nate behind.

Player Character and weaponry:

Okay, the first thing you notice off the bat is that Nate rockets 20 feet into the air when you press jump. The height can be adjusted by how long you press, and your man can change direction in mid-rocket. When Nate walks at first, you'd rather want to use Chris from The Adventure since he's much more punctual. Not too deep into the game you get the Dash Boots, so you can run by tapping forward twice. You'll also notice that Nate was DASHING into the room with his compadres at the start of the game.

Nate, you stupid idiot!

Also, the whip is always a chain, and get this! Keep your B-button down, and it'll start to twirl around, much like what Simon and Richter Belmont can do in their games!

But when it comes to the whip, that's not all!!! Tell them, Slogaibon!

"Yeah! There's also the Dual Select System!"

"Dual Select System? Is that the System which helps me Select which episode of Dual Parallel Trouble Adventure I can watch next?!"

"No, you mental cripple! I don't know what you're talking about! Just read on!"

The Dual Select System is about thirty times more innovative than CastleVania Legends' magic spells. What happens is you pick up cards along the way, and using the D.S.S. menu in your stats window, you can pair cards in the upper and lower rows and either use a new whip or improve your stats!

To activate the current D.S.S. combo, press the L button and Nate will pose as if doing a standing item crash, and then he'll glow, shifting from gold to normal colors. As you use your new whip, a blue bar, the D.S.S. meter below your energy line, will decrease. Depending on your D.S.S. pair, it will restore itself gradually as long as you're not whipping or otherwise using the D.S.S.. There are a total of 20 card slots to fill up, so that said, you'd have a total of 100 different attributes, all either whip types or stat modifiers, so you won't miss using a sword or other drop items in this game. You can deactivate the D.S.S. at any time by pressing L again.

More on D.S.S. pairing:

For example, if you combine the Mercury Card with the Salamander (SALAMANDER?!) Card you can use the classic Flame Whip. Using the Venus Card with the Salamander Card will emit a wierd and useless flash whenever you snap the whip. Using the Mercury Card with the Mandagora card gives you a really cool whip, which lashes out as a long stem of Roses which grow and wilt away. I'm serious.

Remember Lucas Goodman's game idea CastleVania Modern Nightmare? In it, he proposed to have over 15 whips in his game...and someone I believe Wanted 100... Now, I'm not smirking at Konami with my eyelids half closed, but... considering that Modern Nightmare was whipped up in 1997, and the other idea thought up long before even NU CastleVania was released...

This is not what Nate looks like when you power up using the D.S.S. system. This is what Nate looks like when he's bathed in flames. D'oh, that Nate! Will he never learn! "Heh heh! Burn, baby, burn!"

You also have a slide maneuver just like Richter, but you can't jumpkick the way he does. You gain items like hearts and such by wiping out candles and other furniture, and as far as I know, your traditional weaponry, Axes, Daggers, and 10-Second-Lasting Holy Waters are present. Whenever you take a bump, he takes it exactly as Alucard does; RIGHT IN THE FACE AND FLAT ON HIS BUM! Heh heh!

More game details:

Analysts of CastleVania like Joey V. are going to have an ABSOLUTE field day when they get their hands on CircleVania, since it's SO much like Symphony of the Night. You've got a Super Metroid-style map, for one thing, and the mathematics-ruled damage system and stats are also present. Little numbers pop up from the enemies as you're bashing them, and additionally, their names pop up in a little window on the lower right corner of the screen.

As noted before, you have a map to fill out, and what a map:

Since Camilla's Austrian abode is lacking a Master Librarian, you'll have to figure this one out on your own. There are save rooms. They consist of a pulsating orb in a golden chamber, and when you save, it illuminates to fill the screen in white light. Save rooms are marked as red squares on the map. I beleive there are also teleportation rooms as in Symphony, as seen marked as yellow squares. Additionally, Camilla's castle is divided into several relative areas, such as your starting line, the Catacombs, along with the Abyss Staircase, Victory Hallway, Audience Gallery, Outer Wall, and then some.

Graphics:

And speaking of Alpha Channel effects, the graphics are something else. The structural bits get a little repetitive and annoying in some areas like the veritical shafts, but otherwise, the graphics are great. The sprites are well-rendered. If there are any other special effects besides the melting text in the beginning and the save rooms lighting up, I'm not seeing them. The emulator can't do those just yet.

Enemies:

You know how I loooove monsters. Without monsters, you have...no monsters. As the enemies go, I'm pleased. You first run into bomb-hurling skeletons, and along the way you encounter Poison Worms, which look like the Viper Swarms of Super CastleVania 4, Dragon Skull Cannons called as 'Bone Head', an Earth Demon that will use brain power to drive up the ground beneath you, the classic Bats, Hoppers with bladed hands, Zombies, Spirits (Flame Ghosts), Will o' Wisps, and more! I can read katakana!

As for the bigger baddies, one you'll encounter is a REALLY nasty, laser weilding Cerberus, obviously a cut-and-paste from the Wargs of SotN. Another, an empty cloak in Necromancer, the Shaft/Zeldo presence in CircleVania, uses attacks similar to Shaft in CastleVania Dracula X (raising Zombies to attack, etc.). According to the map, Death is in this one. I can read katakana!

THE MUSIC!

The Music. Phil Sanders, who is like, the man of the hour, was good enough to stick his Game Boy Advance in front of a computer microphone to record some MP3s which debuted at the Dungeon on the 17th of April, a day that will live in glory for all CastleVania fans. The music is very reminiscent of The Triumph, Super CastleVania IV, style and technique wise. They're all MIDI sequences, of course, using good samples such as plucked harp strings and pounding drums, along with other special sound effects.

Among the many pieces of fine game music I'm expecting from CircleVania, there are also sweet remixes of CastleVania Bloodlines' sunken temples theme, CastleVania III's Clockwork, and the obligatory Vampire Killer theme which refuses to die. But among them, those tunes which REALLY smacked me upside the head that morning of the 17th, were Nightmare from CastleVania III and Super CastleVania IV's stage 4 themes.

Nightmare is handled expertly, and this is its first time being remixed for a CV game. Nightmare has been waiting patiently for the right time to return, and 11 years since Dracula's Curse, its time is now. A decade later, Super CastleVania's stage 4 theme also returns, and WHAT A RETURN! This one absolutely pummeled me that morning; also deserving and delivered a fine sounding remix, which includes the theme to the other half of the stage from the spinning room on.

Accompanying the remixes are some good original themes. I guarantee you'll be humming the VERY original lead-in theme for the Catacombs not long after you switch off the Advance, my fellow CastleVania fans.

Coming to America!

This is what the package is probably going to look like, courtesy both evil online gaming news army IGN, and benevolent world famous CastleVania site I play righthand man to, the Dungeon. As you can see, it's plastered with emblems, icons, Teen ratings..wait a minute... A TEEN RATING! YES! I doubt you guys will miss anything, then! There is some blood in the game, such as when Nate dies, but I have yet to see something so major it'll cause a kid to e-mail bomb threats to his school and run inside shooting a week later.

It should also be noted that the American CircleVania logo SUCKS. All they did was paste "CastleVania" from Symphony of the Night and typeset in the Old English font, "Circle of the Moon", then add, like, zero special effects to it. Shoot, I can do that! JASON CAN DO THAT! Japanese 6-year olds can do that, and so can their little sister!

Whoooo...that was fun. Well, CircleVania officially arrives on June 11, 2001! This, along with Game Boy Advance makes a great gift for your grade A achiever/Vampire Slayer/Gothic Kid, Mom and Dad!

How long can you wait?

Final rating: 8.5 out of 10.
Loses points ONLY because you can't play as Hugh...or can you?

(June 4, 2001)
FAN ART!

How appropriate of me to set things off. As usual. Anyway, it's been a while since the premiere of this pre-review, and since then I've run into a very primo CircleVania site, from which you're probably reading this pre-review if not here at DCTP. Thus, I know more about the game, so stay tuned for a possible follow-up review. Enjoy these CircleVania fan arts!

Andromelek- Extremely huge green goat boss which vies for the title that Slogra is not in CircleVania to accept; that long-sought after title of THE MAN. I have yet to fight Andromelek, put I can safely say he's one of the game's MAJOR highlights. Here, we see Slogra and Gaibon make an example of him. Nate's here, too!

Nate Dogg- A very cool drawing featuring Nate and a ghost you can summon through D.S.S.! DON'T MESS with big NATE DOGG!

Catacomb Buds- A far superior drawing of Bat, Hopper, Bone Head, and Bomb Skeleton. Perhaps he should throw that thing away...

Special Thanks to next Bill Gates, Jason Gaines, Dungeon site meister Kurt Kalata, Zophar's Doman for the emulators, and Green Stranger Phil Sanders for providing us audio samples.

Super Special Thanks to Konami for all artwork and all things CastleVania.
CastleVania CotM logo remix and CircleVania! logo by me.