[luvcraft]

shit, you would post this just a scant few months after I finally broke down and threw away my awesome plan for Castlevania V (yes, I wrote it before SotN) that I wrote up when I was so very very young and full of dreams and ambition.

In it you played a modern-day female (OMG!) Belmont. Dracula's castle appears in the middle of City, the ghosts of former Belmont's tell you of your forgotten lineage (and test your might) and then you fight through the city for a while (including a subway).

THEN...

before going to Dracula's castle, you fight through a set of worlds in any order (a'la Megaman's robot masters), each based off of one of your alternate weapons (knife, holy water, boomerang, axe, watch). Beating each of these worlds gives you the power of that world's weapon, allowing you -- at the highest level -- to turn your whip into something else (like a sword via the knife power, or a halberd via the axe power) each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses.

After that, you tackle Dracula's castle. You start out on the castle grounds, and if you detour through the toolshed you go through an Evil Dead homage shortcut. You fight through the castle's dining halls and kitchen, and then up a tower where you fight King Kong, who is actually friendly but being controlled by an evil ringmaster. Or you can take the Rocky Horror homage shortcut from the kitchen freezer to a point later in the game. Once you defeat the ringmaster, Kong gives you a lift to the top of another tower, but Dracula observes his transgression and, using his total control over all creatures in his castle, turns Kong to dust in a matter of minutes. On top of the tower you fight a UFO, which crashes into the tower setting it on fire, and you have to make your way down the inside of the burning tower. Then you go through some more stuff, and climb to the top of another tower, where you fight a giant clockwork bat. At the end of the fight, you are riding the bat, and as you defeat him he nosedives into the middle of Dracula's inner courtyard. A split second before you and the bat meet firey doom, you activate the stopwatch, step off the bat mere inches from the ground, walk away, and then walk away while deactivating the stopwatch, and the bat slams into the ground behind you in a ball of beautiful orange action-movie flame.

You climb one more tower for your final fight with Dracula himself. For his final form, Dracula turns into a gigantic demonic bat creature and climbs to the top of the tower. By double-wall-jumping off of his hands as he tries to swipe at you, you can whip him in his face, and depending on what weapon you use to kill him the ending changes slightly. If you use the whip, time freezes at the last whipshot, and all of the Belmonts who have come before you appear in the air, whipping the same spot as you whipped one at a time, and creating (since there are five including you) a pentacle around him that obliterates him and seals away his evil power for another 100 years. If you use the arrows (which you get by beating the stopwatch world), then the last arrow pierces the dense black clouds overhead, letting in a ray of sunlight which quickly grows and overwhelms Dracula, reducing him to dust.

Then there are credits and you're encouraged to play again to see all the other endings and maybe take one of those neat shortcuts.
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