Known in Japan as “Akumajō Special: Boku Dracula-kun“, this cute and humorous Castlevania spin-off was initially released by Konami, in Japan only, in 1990, for the Nintendo Famicom. Numerous fan translations exist for the game, but it was also officially released in English for the first time – as “Kid Dracula” – in 2019, in the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. That’s the version I’m showing here.

Kid Dracula is basically a platform game with light shooting elements. You control Kid Dracula himself, who can jump, climb ladders, and can shoot what look like fireballs at enemies. He can shoot these directly upwards, as well as horizontally. Holding down the fire button powers-up bigger fireballs, and there are other weapon powers (like bombs, and spread shots) to be acquired with each passing stage.

The levels are quite simple, but do reflect (even satirise), those seen in the original Castlevania. The enemies, though, are completely different to those seen in Akumajō Dracula, and are kinda goofy representations of classic movie monsters (like Universal’s Frankenstein, and bunny-hopping Chinese vampires), plus the usual support creatures, such as bats, ghosts and skeletons.

The aim of Kid Dracula is to survive to reach the end of each level and defeat the various bosses – eventually reaching, and confronting, the final boss: Galamoth (actually called Garamoth in the game).

In-between levels you can play one of four different minigames (Roulette, Cancan, Garapon, and Jab’N Pop), if you manage to collect any coins in previous levels, that are chosen randomly by choosing a path on a sliding line puzzle.

Kid Dracula does unfortunately feature some pretty bad sprite tearing (where parts of sprites flicker or disappear, because the NES/Famicom can only display a limited number on any single horizontal line). To ‘fix’ this: if you play the game in BizHawk, you can go into NES > Graphics Settings (while the game is loaded), and tick the box that says “allow more than 8 sprites per scanline“. This is something that you cannot do on regular hardware.

Kid Dracula is a decent enough game. It’s playable and challenging enough, without being head-bangingly hard. The presentation is excellent, and Kid Dracula himself is cool and well-animated. It’s definitely worth a look if you like old NES/Famicom platformers, or are a Castlevania fan.

Kid Dracula was remade as a Game Boy game in 1993, and plays and looks very similarly to this version of the game (except without the scrolling backgrounds).

More: Kid Dracula on Wikipedia
More: Kid Dracula on romhacking.net
Steam: Castlevania Anniversary Collection on Steam