Max Hit Points

Max Hit Points (Max HP) is a statistic found in all Castlevania games. It is an estimate of how much damage the player character can sustain before succumbing to death.
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==Overview==
In the classic games, the player character's Max HP is a much more limited pool and does not increase over the course of their journey. To make up for this, the games in question have a life system set in place. In metroidvania styled games, Max HP is increased each time the player character earns a Level Up or finds and makes use of HP Max Ups, but in return, the life system is absent.
Sometimes, obtaining a higher value of maximum health, while still effective, may pale in comparison to improving one's DEF in the facet of long-term survivability. This is seen to a greater extent in the harder difficulty settings that are present for some of the games, due to the fact that taking one hit inflicts a reasonably dangerous percentage of the character's maximum health at the time. Another reason for this is the fact that traps tend to do a fixed percentage of one's maximum health in damage. Therefore, as the character's HP maximum rises, so too does the damage they take from traps.
In some games, after gaining a level and increasing the player character's maximum HP, they will automatically gain the amount of HP that was extended, while in other games, only the maximum HP amount will increase but the player won't automatically gain that amount of HP. For example, in Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, gaining a level while having a full HP bar will leave the bar full after gaining the level, whereas in Circle of the Moon and Aria of Sorrow, gaining a level while having a full HP bar will produce a small empty gap at the end of the HP bar which the player has to fill up by any means at their disposal.
==Trivia==
*Because Julius Belmont cannot gain levels in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, his maximum HP cannot go higher than 800.
*In Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia, it is possible to collect HP Max ups as usable inventory items via cheats, unlike in any other games.
Category:Statistics