my interest in dragon’s dogma 2 and pacific drive rapidly waning, i’ve spent the last couple of days messing around with castlevania spin-off kid dracula for both the nintendo entertainment system and game boy. the two games are very similar despite the latter acting as a pseudo-sequel, but in going between them, i was treated to a special gag only present in the handheld version.

the first boss in both games is broken up into multiple stages where you battle a ghostly family known as the parent and child sorcerers or the spirits of halloween on nes and game boy respectively. as the name suggests, the console version of the fight ends after taking out the child-like boss and its guardian, whereas the sequel adds a third round where you face off against their elderly patriarch.

as you can see from the video above, “face off” is over-selling the encounter a little bit. while the old man ghost is impervious to all your attacks, he ends up losing his breath and collapsing after a few seconds before being dragged off my his spectral grandchild.

the kid dracula spin-offs don’t take themselves seriously despite sharing the gothic horror trappings of the rest of the castlevania franchise, and that’s part of what makes them such a joy. it’s a shame we never got more.