Castlevania: The Adventure GAMEBOY

Castlevania: The Adventure is Konami’s 1989 Game Boy launch-window entry, the series’ first handheld outing. Playing as Christopher Belmont, an ancestor of series regular Simon, you whip your way through four stages toward Dracula’s castle on the original Game Boy’s monochrome hardware.

Squeezing Castlevania’s stiff, deliberate combat and platforming onto early Game Boy hardware came with real technical costs — noticeably slower character movement and flatter animation compared to its NES contemporaries — and it’s often remembered as one of the more difficult, less refined entries in the series’ handheld lineage as a result.