Castlevania Dominus Collection review: The peak of the Igavania mountain

I love a good chance to live up to my gimmicks. If you look at my bio (you can read the review and see it at the end!), saying nice things about Konami is part of my brand. That might sound like a hot take in our post-Kojima drama world, but I’m the kind of guy to get hyped up when Super Bomberman R launches with the Switch. I believe in giving credit where it’s due, and there’s no reasonable way to deny how much Konami has killed it in recent years with its Castlevania (and others) collections. From M2’s impeccable emulation to brand-new localizations and extensive museum materials, these things have been on point. Castlevania Dominus Collection is not only the best work yet in terms of presentation, it’s also arguably the top of the mountain in terms of quality games. A surprise banger of a bonus nobody saw coming is the cherry on top of what might be the best package in retro gaming.

Pound for pound, the best of Igavania

When Koji Igarashi was in charge of Castlevania, we ended up with the absolute best games in the “Metroidvania” space. Keep in mind that at the time, that phrase meant something a little different. Igarashi ushered in a new era for Castlevania, opting for the Metroid-style “Search Action” structure that traded lives and arcade difficulty for exploration and RPG elements. I love a good “Classicvania,” but there’s a certain magic these later titles have that we can see in today’s gaming landscape. Without games like Dawn of Sorrow or Order of Ecclesia, we probably wouldn’t have stuff like Hollow Knight. From the haunting vibes combining horror with mystery, combat that combines the classic one-button slashing of the originals with escalating magical gimmicks, and cool lore that rewards timeline wiki-curating Castlevania sickos (and later led to things like kickass anime projects), nothing hits like the Nintendo DS “Igavania” series.

And thanks to the emulation mastery of M2, which has mastered this space over the last two decades with its work for Konami, Sega, and others, this could be the ideal way to play these games. If you’re familiar with emulation at all, results can be mixed when bumping DS games up to higher resolutions. These games could not possibly look better in this collection, which seems to be the result of some partial porting on top of the emulation. M2 also does a ton of work with adapting the original platform’s dual screen hardware to single-screen gameplay, with the default view being a sort of triple screen hybrid that displays a ton of information without compromising legibility or forcing players to fumble with view-swapping buttons. The maps are even mostly legible on the Switch in handheld mode, although Lite owners might have the short end of the stick here.

Wait, why is Haunted Castle here? Oh man!

While the triple threat of Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin, and Order of Ecclesia are peak gaming, the Dominus collection doesn’t stop there. Each of the Castlevania collections of this modern era have thrown in bonuses, aside from the marquee titles, in order to truly build a complete Castlevania library. The original Anniversary Collection included a history-making Kid Dracula localization for example, while the Advance collection threw in the much less appealing Dracula X for funsies. Dominus gets Haunted Castle, the arcade precursor to the original Castlevania, in a move that seemed odd at first. Why would this be here, especially since it’s already included in Konami’s arcade collection? The answer is because M2 simply needed to cook in a way it hasn’t since the Nintendo Wii, with a brand new entry in the short–lived “ReBirth” series.

Haunted Castle Revisited is a nod back to the WiiWare era, during which M2 developed a trio of banger remakes including Gradius ReBirth, Contra ReBirth, and Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth. The latter was a remake of a pretty middling Game Boy game, turning it into one of the best Classicvania joints ever made. It’s a real shame that a ReBirth game hasn’t popped up in these sets yet, but Haunted Castle Revisited gives me hope that’s in the plan for a future collection. In the meantime, this is one of the coolest surprises from Konami yet, taking an arcade game that wasn’t great in the first place and turning it into an arcade-flavored tribute to old school Castlevania that nails it both as a tribute and something that’s a blast to play by itself. The final boss, a set of giant Dracula heads that shoot lasers at you, is the kind of schlock you’ll only get from a concept built on decades of video game history like this. It rules, quite simply.

The nerdy stuff is great too

As usual, Castlevania Dominus Collection includes museum content, something we’ve come to expect in retro compilations since Capcom and Digital Eclipse’s Mega Man Legacy Collection made art galleries cool again. The stuff you’d assume would be included is here, namely high resolution concept art, character profiles, and marketing materials. My personal favorite part encapsulates the era these games came out, in the form of a bunch of weird fluff I was surprised to see.

Remember in the early and mid-2000s, when game publishers would fill their websites with desktop wallpapers and goofy comics alongside the usual screenshots and trailers? If you forgot, Dominus Collection showed up to deliver a reminder. From silly four panel manga pages to absurd holiday-themed wallpapers and more, there’s a ton of additional context into how games at the time were marketed. The fact that, as these collections grow over time and publishers look to one-up themselves and each other, we end up with high-res images of demon-slaying Castlevania heroes dressed up like Santa Claus preserved in the same format as full instruction manual scans gives me renewed hope in official curation.

Over the past five years or so, Konami has become a standard-bearer in preserving and presenting video game history. There have been bumps along the road of course, but Castlevania Dominus Collection is not just a set of ROMs grouped together that benefits from comprising all-time greats. While those games are still obviously the main attraction, the amount of effort put into making these games look and play great, then supplementing them with absurdly high quality materials (including deep cuts even a degenerate like myself was shocked to see) is revitalizing. On top of that, giving M2 the resources to bring back its own long-lost remake series in such a surprising way pushes this collection straight to the top of my must-play list not just in 2024, but in gaming as a whole.

Castlevania Dominus Collection is available now for the PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X|S. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.