Castlevania Legends is a game I’ve heard about for a long time, so I was kind of delighted to see it show up on the Nintendo Switch Online’s Game Boy catalog. I’ve never been the biggest fan of classic Castlevania, but I was cautiously optimistic that I might enjoy this one. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t in the cards.

This particular title features Sonia Belmont—one of the only times a Castlevania game puts a female Belmont front and center instead of a male. There’s even a fan theory that she got pregnant by Alucard, which would add an ironic twist to the Belmont bloodline being connected to Dracula. Sadly, I heard that Konami later made her story non-canon, which is kind of disappointing.

I know this is a Game Boy game, but even by those standards, the graphics aren’t exactly up to par. It controls a lot like the Castlevania games on the NES, with stiff movement and unforgiving mechanics.

There’s actually both a hard mode and an easy mode. Naturally, I chose the easier one—but even that is still pretty difficult. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by enemies or fall into pits and lose lives. Thankfully, the Nintendo Switch’s rewind feature helped ease the frustration of some of those cheap deaths.

Even on easy mode, the game is brutally tough. Sonia doesn’t have great range or mobility, and that really became obvious when I fell into the zombie pit. It felt like a boss battle—but it wasn’t.

I made it to the first boss, which looked like some kind of bat demon—and he absolutely destroyed me. I actually wanted to reach the parts involving Alucard, but I just couldn’t see that happening. So my time with this game was brief. While I’m sure there are fans who genuinely enjoy this one, for me it was just another reminder of why I never really liked the classic Castlevania games—especially the retro ones that offered no mercy to the ’80s and ’90s kids who played them back in the day.