The Anniversary Collection includes the first three home console games, of which the first (Castlevania) and third (Dracula's Curse) are incredible to play today despite their age. There's a real sense of place to the castle and surrounds that was unusual in the NES era, and the graphics and soundtrack are still brilliant. They can be tough, but the Collection affords some limited save states (one per game) to keep you from getting game over.

The second game, Simon's Quest, is a mess of interesting ideas and horrifically implemented exploration elements, and it's very hard to play today without a guide. A pair of Game Boy games, The Adventure and Belmont's Revenge, are similarly interesting because of their historical context, but they're tough to slog through.

Super Castlevania IV is perhaps the most playable title of the lot, reframing the story of the original game while leaning on every graphical trick the then brand-new Super Nintendo brought to the table. It's also amazing to see Bloodlines included here, as the darker, bloodier, excellent Sega Mega Drive title has been tough to find in any form besides the increasingly more expensive original copies on eBay. Both 16-bit games are fast and clean, looking and sounding like retro-style experiences that might have been released today.

Kid Dracula is also playable for the very first time outside Japan in this collection, which is a bit of a treat. It's a 1990 NES game that takes the stages, music and enemies of Castlevania and makes them extremely cute and jolly. You play as a child version of Dracula who has, for some reason, Mega Man's ability to shoot or charge up projectiles. This is a very different game to your standard Castlevania adventure, and it's also hard as hell.

Viewed strictly as a pile of standalone games, this collection comes very close to providing a complete history of the series prior to the turning point of Symphony of the Night, but it doesn't quite get there.

1993's Rondo of Blood is an important part of the puzzle, expanding on the gameplay of IV and Bloodlines and leading directly into Symphony from a narrative point of view. Its absence from the collection is disappointing, especially since the only way to play the original version without an old Japanese PC Engine console is to have bought it on the Wii Virtual Console before that shut down.

My only other criticism is that, outside of providing working versions of the games, Konami hasn't done much to tie the collection together. There are basic filter options to smooth out the games if you like, plus colour options for the Game Boy titles, and that's about it.

You can view a special ebook of tips and trivia, which is admittedly very cool, but game consoles aren't really suited for perusing the PDF-style format.

The publisher has also promised to add Japanese versions of some games to the collection post-release, which will hopefully mean the superior Famicom version of Dracula's Curse's music, as well as the reinstatement of various elements stripped from the US games for cultural sensitivity reasons (blood, nude statues, crucifixes).

All up, Castlevania Anniversary Collection is a fairly bare-bones omnibus. But when every single game on the list is beautiful and worth playing — and when half of them are stone cold classics that I'll happily come back to again and again — it's hard to complain that there's not enough extra stuff. These games show Konami at its old-school best, and having them to revisit on current platforms is almost enough to make me forget about Castlevania's neglect and mismanagement over the past 10 years. Here's hoping for a second volume and, eventually, maybe even some fresh blood.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection is out now on Switch (reviewed), PC, PS4 and Xbox One.