YMMV / Castlevania 64

• Awesome Music: The game did have some nice music, including Opposing Bloodlines, the lonely violin piece that welcomes you to the starting menu.
• Contested Sequel: Many long-time Castlevania fans dislike it for its camera and controls issues, as well as several frustrating levels. Others, however, find the game enjoyable, appreciate it for what it does well and don't believe it deserves all the hate.
• Critical Backlash: When it first came out, the game got hit with middling reviews and generally considered a failure in terms of bringing the series into 3D, with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's success guaranteeing that the future of the series would remain largely in 2D. Many years later, there are more people feeling the earlier hate directed towards it was overblown, praising its nice atmosphere and visuals, as well as its surprisingly decent performance for a 3D game of its time, playing at 30FPS a good amount of the time while many of its contemporaries couldn't even come close to that.
• Difficulty Spike: The nitro/mandragora escort business; before it, you are happily whipping or magic missiling enemies on your path, but now you have to carefully move a dangerous item along a hazardous path.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Grown-up Henry Oldrey with his six-shooter and suit of armor. Plenty of players would dearly love for him to have his full story mode instead of just being a bonus section.
• Fan Nickname: As noted in the main page, the game is properly named Castlevania, but it is more commonly known as Castlevania 64.
• Game-Breaker: Carrie's homing fireballs. Also, if you charge one up and then utilize her close-quarters ring attack, it hits with the fireball's strength.
• Game-Breaking Bug: There's a particularly nasty glitch where if you save in Castle Center while carrying nitro and then attempt to start a new game on the same file you saved, the new game is Unwinnable by Mistake because the game thinks your character is still carrying the nitro. This predictably leads to your character exploding on the first jump.
• Good Bad Bugs: It's possible to get a vampire to latch onto ''your character's crotch'' while they use their blood-suck move by simply standing on a chair. Showcased in this video.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Skeletons on motorcycles in an anachronistic setting? Years later, LEGO fans had a similar reaction when Ninjago was first unveiled; many fans initially expecting another theme set in feudal Japan (like the classic LEGO Ninja theme) were bemused when the villains were revealed to be skeletons riding motorcycles.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Actrise is a very bad mother. She murdered 100 children, including her own daughter, to gain Dracula's favor and eternal youth. She has no regrets for this crime.
  • Due to Broad Strokes continuity, this Dracula doesn't seem to care much about honoring his prior marriages (one of the few sympathetic qualities of his character) given he forcibly entraps Carrie into a binding marriage under his Malus guise if you get the bad ending for her.
• Narm:
  • A nearly-functional jump shock is spoiled because the vampire in question must have jumped straight out of a solid oak table in the middle of the room to attack the player from the angle he does. To conceal this, in the next shot, the table vanishes.
  • Reinhardt telling Rosa, whom he just met, not to commit Suicide by Sunlight because "God forbids it" is far more cheesy than heart-warming.
  • For one line, the dialogue reads "Darkness will rule!", but the way it's spoken aloud in the game, it sounds somewhere along the lines of "Darkness will row".
• Narm Charm: The fact that there are skeletons on motorcycles is kind of amazing.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Cornell's ability to turn into a werewolf. The damage boost it provides to regular attacks is minor, and using it drains gems which would be much better used for subweapons. It doesn't help either that it is easy to accidentally activate. Perhaps most damning is that once activated, the only way to turn back is to wait for your gems to run out!
• That One Attack: Fighting any vampire means you've got to keep them at safe distance, because getting bitten results in a Non-Standard Game Over if not cured of that Status Effect before midnight in-game. Obviously, this is problem when you encounter said enemy/boss during that time-frame. While Castlevania 64 tries to meet the player in the middle, so getting infected just before midnight mercifully gives you one more day, but being bitten just before 11 o'clock doesn't - you're pretty much screwed if a curing item isn't on-hand.
• That One Boss: The Behemoth in Castle Center. It has a lot of health and damaging charge and beam attacks. Fittingly, it shares a BGM with the True Final Boss.
• That One Level:
  • The game had a few reviled levels, thanks to sluggish movements and unhelpful camera angles. But the worst is the Castle Center, in which you had to carry an exploding gunpowder keg called Nitro, requiring you to make the whole trip without taking damage, jumping, or falling; doing any of those causes the Nitro to explode on you and, as the game says, "the story's over". ^note You have to do two runs with the Nitro, both of which have a Save Crystal in the room where you pick up the Nitro; one of the runs doesn't require much input or dealing with any enemies, as the place where you need to set the Nitro for that is only a few doors back from where you pick it up, but the other forces you to take a Nitro all the way down to the Behemoth's lair, which is near the starting point of the Castle Center. This one will force you to go through a falling ceiling room, outmaneuver several suits of armor, and deal with a precarious catwalk with lizardmen breathing fire on you and platforms that drop from under your feet, then you have to maneuver through some gears. You may have to do this twice if you accidentally blow the Nitro/Mandragora on that run's target wall up before breaking a seal over it. Thankfully, some vampires that you would normally meet along this path will not be there when you have the Nitro on hand to make this doable. The Mandragora doesn't have those drawbacks. This area also has the Behemoth itself in the giant room with the seal (no music plays in this room normally), and once you are able to break the wall the seal is guarding, you'll find the goal crystal that controls the elevator out of the center, along with a Save Crystal and Renon's Contract. Once you activate the elevator and step back into the arena, you'll be forced to fight the Behemoth to get out of the room, with a follow-up boss fight two rooms later against a Death-controlled Rosa or Carrie's cousin controlled by Actrise before you reach the end of the area.
  • Another contender for the title is the original version of Duel Tower, which they forgot to put save points in. You've got four were-mini-bosses, and a bunch of jumps, Medusa Heads, spinning spikes, ledges, and a giant acid pool at the bottom of the tower waiting to dissolve anyone who botches a jump or gets pushed off (plus the ceiling is descending in each of the mini-boss fights, and will straight out drop and crush you if you don't bail out fast enough after killing the Mini-Boss, or fail to kill the mini-boss fast enough). Even after defeating the last of the were-friends, you still have to ascend a few ledges and then make two very long jumps that will kill you if you fail them before you reach the exit. Lose anywhere along the way to the Tower of Execution (the next area, which has a Save Crystal right at the entrance), and you have to do it all over again.