Richter Belmont is the game’s fake final boss. Definitely a clever twist to make the last game’s hero as the new villain. Even though it was all a lie.

And I will be honest that I didn’t realize that there was a secret to his boss battle. He fights just like he’s supposed to be controlled when he was a playable character.

You can actually kill him and get the game’s bad ending. Which also results in you missing the best part of the game.

But you need a special and obscure item to actually see the thing that was controlling him.

And when you destroy that, we find out that Richter Belmont was being controlled by an evil dark magician named Shaft.

While I don’t see him helping at all after we save him, Richter and his sister-in-law Maria Renard are alive in the game’s best ending after Dracula has been defeated.

After you beat the game once you can actually play as Richter Belmont in a bonus mode. I wasn’t a big fan of this mode because they don’t really add the RPG elements like they do when you play as Alucard. Something they luckily fixed when it came to the Nintendo DS Metroidvanias.