Ed Ranks Dracula's Missing Pieces from Castlevania II: Simon's Quest

The soundtrack to this game is amazing, BTW.

In the 1987 (1988 in the United States) video game Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, you (as vampire hunter Simon Belmont) must assemble five "missing pieces" of Dracula and put them back together. Why? Well, it turns out that despite the fact that Simon Belmont defeated Dracula in the first video game, it wasn't before Dracula put a curse on him. For some reason, Simon has to go and re-kill Dracula AGAIN to lift the curse. It's not explained all that well, but then again it doesn't have to be because it's a freaking amazing game. Dracula is cut apart and still cursing people. Reassemble him (his parts have been conveniently left in five different castles) and do the job right this time! Makes enough sense to me.

What exactly do you have to reassemble though? Thanks for asking!

5. Ring 

Okay. This one makes zero sense at all. First and foremost, as you will probably quickly realize (even if you are as bad of a biology student as I was in High School), a "ring" is not a part of the body.  All this video game had to do was name five body parts and they'd have gotten their mission accomplished. They couldn't though. They names four body parts and then a ring. That's just something that Dracula wore. Sure, I guess a ring could be cool and everything. Maybe it's a ring with powers and stuff. Maybe this powerful ring holds the key to the curse somehow! It would make sense, right? Well if you'd play this video game you'd know that as you find the five castles with Dracula's five parts, you'll learn that each of the parts has a special power if you "equip" it after finding it. COOL! So what is the special power of the ring?  Nothing. Equipping the ring does absolutely nothing.  Oh, the ring isn't 100% worthless. You have to find all five body parts to enter Dracula's (final) castle and beat the game. So you need it. But what can you do with it? Nothing.

• Location: Laruba Mansion, which sounds like a timeshare Dracula got tricked into buying.
• Power:  Jack Shit.
• What the Power Should Have Been: Anything, really! A magical ring should let you can spells at least. Make you invisible? Reduce the damage you take by half? I dunno. They could have justified almost any power with this ring. But they didn't.

4. Nail

Look at those... nails? No wait.

So this one is technically a body part... but... uhh... really? Again. The theme/plot is fairly straight forward. Somebody cut up Dracula into five pieces, hoping that would defeat his evil once and for all. It didn't work. Reassemble him. I could easily come up with five body parts off the top of my head, two of which actually made it into this game. Nail though? Like... finger nail or something? I hope so. I hope it's not a toenail. If it's a toenail, then Simon is probably only collecting it because he's one of those strange toe fetish guys. ANYWAY... looking at the image for the nail, it doesn't even look like a nail. It looks like a damn fang (like in the cat picture on the right). That's right, the image is of Vlad Tepes's bitey maxillary canine fang. You know, the stabbing for blood-sucking one. If it's a "nail" then Dracula must have talons like a bird rather than actual fingers. I looked at a lot of images of what Dracula looks like in the Castlevania series, and I gotta say it looks like this vampire dude just has normal human fingers. At least the nail has a power though. If you equip it, your whip can destroy certain blocks. But then again, if you're equipping Holy Water as your secondary magic item (which you should always do, by the way), then the nail is fairly useless.

• Location: Bodley Mansion, which is the Mansion where Dracula goes to get a ripped bod.
• Power: Your whip can destroy blocks like Holy Water.
• What the Power Should Have Been: If they called it a "fang" and it was related to sucking blood, it could have been related to Simon's health bar. Like maybe if you get it you can "level up" your health bar a little bit.

3. Heart

Pictured: Heart

The heart of Dracula is EXACTLY the type of body part you should put in this game, so I'm glad it's in here. If I were scripting a video game where you had to reassemble Dracula's dead body from five missing pieces, I would pick the heart as the first item on the "must" list.  So why is this ranked so low when it makes so much sense? Well, once again it's due to the limited power / use of equipping the heart. All the heart does is allow the Ferryman on the River of the Dead to Brahm's Mansion.  Otherwise, he won't! You HAVE to get to Brahm's Mansion to finish the game, so you've got to equip the Heart at least once. But it's really only a one-trick pony.

• Location: Rover Mansion, the mansion where Dracula keeps his pet dog.
• Power: Convinces Charon, Ferryman of the Dead that you should get a trip.
• What the Power Should Have Been:  There are other hearts that you collect throughout the game. They give you experience and are also "consumable" items (there are weapons and secondary items you can equip like knives and a sacred flame - and using them costs hearts). Linking Dracula's hearts to these hearts should be common sense, and maybe equipping this would make those heart-consumable items not consume hearts (or reduce consumption by half?).

2. Eye

I like "eye," although I would have personally called it "eyes." What is Dracula going to do with one eye? Come back as a pirate? As with the heart, this is one of the body parts I would have chosen myself to include in things you need to reassemble Dracula. It also serves a pretty cool purpose - equipping the eye allows you to see blocks in the game that has hidden items in them for you to collect. Remember how I said that the Nail allows you to break apart these hidden blocks? Well, it's the Eye that allows you to even see them in the first place to know where they are. It's either that or you just randomly smash endless bottles of Holy Water against random surfaces all over the place everywhere. Which is exactly what I did because I almost never equipped the eye.

• Location: Brahm's Mansion, where Dracula frequently enjoyed the works of the famed German composer and pianist.
• Power: See hidden items/breakable blocks.
• What the Power Should Have Been: No change from me here, as this one was right on and made perfect sense. Good work, game.

1. Rib Bone

Mmm, some smoked babyback Dracula!

Somewhat cryptically, the very first piece of Dracula's body you can equip is the rib, as it's found in Berkeley Mansion very early in the game. It's just one rib though. One. Rib. Not his "ribs." Only one rib. I dunno about you, but if I assembled one eye, one rib, a heart, a finger nail (or canine tooth) and a ring into a pile, I do not think it would resemble the completed and reassembled dead body of the Prince of Darkness. It would look like random leftovers. Odd. Also, the image of the rib used in the game absolutely looks like a femur. Not a rib. Still though, once you equip Dracula's rib, you essentially use it as a shield. When you stand still in the game, almost any projectile thrown at you will bounce off. Niiiiiiice! Although I'm imagining running around and using someone's rib bones as my shield. People would absolutely look at me like I was an insane sociopath serial killer.  Does that stop me from using the Rib though? Absolutely not. After I get it from the first castle, I generally keep it equipped for almost the entire game (absent the times I need to equip something else like the heart for a one-use trick).

• Location: Berkeley Mansion, where Vlad hangs out with his annoyingly over-liberal friends, but only to bum some weed from them.
• Power: Creates a Shield that Deflects Projectiles.
• What the Power Should Have Been: Eh, this is a perfectly find use because I use it all game long. Yet like I said, it's super weird that you're using someone's bone as a shield.