I swear I must be the only person ever that liked Dracula X better than Castlevania IV.

Look, I know that Dracula X is a very poor port of Rondo of Blood. But I didn't know that at the time.

At the time, I was just a guy that loved Castlevania and played every one on the NES and SNES.

I mean, I really liked CV4 when it came out. Easily better than the NES ones, but I was never really comfortable with the whipping, and I didn't really like the way the player's sprite was freakin gigantic. And I didn't really like the color palette of the game. Everything was all brownish and gray. It was all very bland, like CV2.

But most of all, I didn't like the music. There's only one original song in that game that's fantastic. Theme of Simon. There are other great themes, but they're remixes of songs from earlier games. Most of the original songs in the game sound awful to me. They're all this, like, free-form jazz played on a church organ. It's just, bleh.

Then Dracula X came out, and I was like, "Now THIS plays like classic Castlevania. The controls are tight, precise, Richter is a much smaller sprite, looks cooler, backflips." The graphics were sharp, and colorful. Just like CV1 and 3.

And the music was AMAZING. Sounded 10x better than CV4.

Yeah, the last boss battle was total BS, but other than that, I loved this game.

So yeah, Dracula X was my favorite Castlevania for a long time, until I played SotN.