Alastor15243 Posted May 29, 2019 Share Posted May 29, 2019 (edited) In celebration of the (hopefully awesome) upcoming metroidvania revival Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, I have taken it upon myself to marathon every single one of the igavanias I have access to in the order I first played them in. That being: Dawn of Sorrow Portrait of Ruin Circle of the Moon Aria of Sorrow Harmony of Dissonance Symphony of the Night Order of Ecclesia (EDIT: Wound up doing Harmony of Dissonance ahead of schedule so I could play it with a friend) I recognize Circle of the Moon was not overseen by Koji Igarashi, but Metroidvania Castlevania is an absolute mouthful, so I'll be using the word Igavania to refer to all of the metroidvania-style Castlevania games. I will not be going for 100% completion on any of these, just the true endings of the main stories, just to make sure I have time to get to them all. And then upon completion, I'll post here to give my thoughts on each game. In addition, I'll be playing by a few house rules to avoid trivializing these games into oblivion, and since coming back to these I am probably used to a larger challenge than I was back in high school: 1: No using healing items while in a room with enemies still alive in it. 2: Play on the hardest difficulty available, and if there's a level cap for the hard mode, go for max level 50, the average endgame level. After I complete a game, I'll post here with my general thoughts about it, and then place it in a perpetually updated ranking from best to worst. ...Of course, it didn't occur to me to post my thoughts about them until I already completed the first two. So, I'll start this thread off with my reviews of them: Dawn of Sorrow Ahhh, Dawn of Sorrow, the first Castlevania game I ever played. I instantly fell in love with everything about the main character, from his design, to his animations, to his status as a sort of monster-slaying Megaman with the power to steal enemies souls and copy their abilities. A really fun concept, and one I adored, causing it to set the standard for protagonist gimmicks moving forward... a standard most other protagonists failed to live up to. It just stuck with me that much. I loved hunting for new souls and learning what cool attribute I'd be taking from all the crazy weird monsters I fought, though I will concede I didn't always get the part of them I was hoping to get. It was easily the best part of the game for me as a teenager. Playing it again, it's mostly as good as I remember, with tight controls to be expected of an Igavania. I really don't have too much to say about this one, as yet again, it's the baseline experience I'll be comparing all of the others to. I'll only discuss what was better or worse than I remember: 1: Hard mode is locked to new game plus, which now that I'm looking for bigger challenges... is kind of annoying. There is a way to get rid of all your souls at yoko's place, and sell and buy and sell until your equipment and funds are entirely gone, but it's really tedious, and I wasn't up for starting my experience with the first castlevania with that slog. So instead, as the game progressed and I got used to it, I made sure I was constantly equipping the best luck-boosting equipment and souls, even when it was horribly outdated in terms of all other stats, to make me more fragile. This worked, and it also gave me access to more souls, which was fun. 2: The eternal problem that I can't remember if a single Igavania with a shop ever fixed: your cash flow and the store prices are a big ol' garbage fire. You just don't get that many coins playing through the game, and even less if you use magic at all, since all those coins you find inside of lamps and light bulbs (the vast majority of the coins you find, to be clear) turn into MP-restoring hearts if your MP isn't full. Really, if you wanna buy anything good, such as the ludicrously overpriced soul eater ring I wanted to have for the purposes of playing around with more of the game's souls, you're going to have to find an enemy with a reasonably-common loot drop that sells for a few thousand dollars, and then keep grinding against those enemies until you get 9 of them and then sell them. I did this with the succubi, which I'm not sure is exactly the best strategy, but it was the fastest thing I could come up with on my own. This is one of my biggest complaints with the Igavanias in general, and if it turns out that one of them fixed this and I forgot, I will be a very happy man. 3: As a grown man with shit to do who has thoroughly become disillusioned with grind, I was not a fan of the fact that most souls got more powerful the more souls you got, peaking when you have 9 of the same soul. Through my general experimentation (in fairness, the game isn't quite as fresh in my memory as it was before I went on to PoR), I generally found most souls weren't all that great with just one copy, though there were a few exceptions, such as the Witch soul. I generally found melee combat to be the best strategy most of the time, and... 4: Incidentally, out of the wide, wide range of weapons this game gives you access to, my weapon of choice was the katana. While it's got an awkward cooldown when used on the ground, hopping and jump/dash canceling turned out to be amazingly useful to turn katanas into serious killing machines, and I had a lot of fun mastering the intricacies of timing attacks with them. Focusing on one weapon type also cut down on the grind of the soul fusion system. Speaking of which: 5: The soul fusion system is a cute idea, but for the most part isn't as fun as it could be. The idea is that you give up one of your monster souls to send one of your weapons up a tier. The soul needed depends on the specific weapon in question, but there isn't really any sort of logic to it, and with the exception of the ice brand and laevatein and a few others like the infamous valmanway, none of these weapons actually take on any characteristics of the monster whose soul you just crammed inside of it. It's mostly just a replacement for buying them in a shop (which, to be fair, given what I've said at point number 2, would have been much worse) or finding them in the castle like you usually do. But having played Portrait of Ruin just recently, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I much preferred finding weapons naturally in the castle, especially since it let me have fun with and experiment with a lot of different weapon types, which you can't really do with the soul fusion system since keeping multiple weapon types up to speed with your progress in the game has a personal cost here. It's a system that appears to add when in reality it unfortunately takes away. 6: The story's really nothing to write home about, though it isn't bad in any way. I am, however, in hindsight, kinda disappointed I played this game first in my youth, because it spoils Aria of Sorrow's much-superior story. All in all, at least when it comes to Dawn of Sorrow's implementation (jury's still out until I replay Aria of Sorrow), I feel like I was more enchanted by the concept of the soul system than the execution. It's still a pretty fun system, but it's no longer my favorite, at least going by my memories of one or two other games and their characters' gimmicks, owing to less-than ideal balance. But there are definitely worse offenders in that regard. I still had fun with this game, but if my memory of a certain other game still holds, the sorrow games were right to be dethroned as my favorite Igavanias. Portrait of Ruin Alright, the first one where I can start making active comparisons. I didn't like Jonathan Morris and Charlotte as much as Soma Cruz, and thus generally found this game to be the inferior of the first two DS games when I was younger, but I still played it obsessively back then due to its insane replay value and the fact that it was a goddamned Castlevania game. So, let's get into the major points I want to mention: 1: Hard mode without needing clear data, and with a customizable level cap. Thank goodness. And boy lemme tell ya; I thought Dawn of Sorrow while wearing a crappy lucky shirt was hard. I had no goddamned idea. I had never played this hard mode without clear data. In fact I mostly only touched hard mode in this game as a teenager to get the cool stat boost items to turn my characters into demigods. I remember abusing healing items and broken equipment a ton to get through that game on hard level 1 with no fuss. No such luck here. But of course I did it with a cap of 50, not 1. This... surprisingly didn't feel like much of a help at first. The game is brutal, with heavy-damage enemies, fast attack patterns... it's a network of brutal gauntlets of enemies connected by warp and save rooms and occasionally ending in bosses. I had to remember how to get good at this game FAST. The first real boss nearly ate me alive, with its insanely high damage and its attack patterns that before you could time your dodges, you had to figure out what the hell the opening to dodge was. Very satisfying and compact challenge for the first few stages of the game. Eventually the game let up on difficulty though, a combination of just not being as brutal compared to my level and equipment and also just the fact that I gradually acquired more and more means of healing myself between save points. All in all, very satisfying challenge, especially the boss fights. 2: The central gimmick of the game, the two-character team you play as and switch between, is fun, but a missed opportunity. Back when I originally played this game I mostly played as Charlotte due to a glaring flaw with Jonathan's subweapon system (one which I will get to in a moment) driving me away from him. Also, she's cute, I was in a mage phase at the time, and she's wearing my favorite color, and yes I could be that shallow sometimes. This time around, I wound up using Jonathan almost exclusively, owing to him having better defense, better reach, quicker special moves, and a more frequently updated "best weapon so far", all of which became far more important when playing hard mode. I mostly used Charlotte to recharge my MP faster during rest breaks, to heal up using the heal spell during rest breaks, to use the stat buffs on Jonathan, and to attack enemies resistant to physical attacks by using her books and spells. I also made heavy use of her in the first portrait world because her magic was very useful for taking out difficult enemies Jonathan lacked the skills to handle yet. I did enjoy the various fun minigames the early and mid game threw at me for how to make use of them to solve a puzzle or beat a boss, but I wish they didn't make it nearly impossible for them to both be equal. As it stands one is always going to wind up being better depending on your playstyle. 3: Jonathan Morris's weapon mastery system can fuck right off. The way it works is that, in contrast to Charlotte's spells she can charge up to two levels while holding still, Jonathan gets a bunch of weapons reminiscent of (and including) the classic subweapons from the older castlevania games, like the knives and cross boomerangs and bibles and holy water. Enemies give SP when defeated, which goes to whichever subweapon you attacked them with. The more SP a subweapon gets, the more powerful it becomes, until it caps and unlocks a new graphical update and an extra power boost. Awesome in theory. In practice it's utter garbage, because 1: nearly every subweapon starts off about as effective as spitballs, meaning it's an active chore that makes fighting enemies harder just to get the SP for them, and 2: it takes waaaaay too much SP to master subweapons. Until you grind up enough gold to buy a master ring (which isn't any less painful than it was in Dawn of Sorrow), it's an hour long chore to master a single one of the dozens of subweapons the game throws at you. Thankfully, very, very thankfully, one of the best subweapons in the whole game can be purchased for really cheap the second the shop opens, and takes less than a third of the average SP to master: the shuriken. I did some grinding against zombies for 15 minutes to half an hour to level this baby up, and by the time I did, I was essentially set for subweapons for the whole rest of the game. The thing went from utterly useless at 0 mastery to psychotically overpowered at 300 mastery, vastly dwarfing the damage output of all of my melee attacks until around halfway through the game, and still being my all-around best option for damage output until I got the vampire killer and mastered the cross boomerang for one of Wind's quests. The scaling for these things is all over the place, and that's another major problem, but the shuriken, with its lightning fast attack speed and high damage output, was instrumental in getting me through the early parts of the game, especially past the first boss. Having this thing is a major part of why I barely used Charlotte for the first half of the game until it started becoming more important to know when she was better (and those situations definitely started coming up more often later in the game). I'm really glad I got to enjoy using at least one subweapon, but I seriously wish they just let you use the damn things at properly-balanced and usable power levels from the start. I really can't stand this system, and it's easily my biggest complaint with the game. 4: I love the nest of evil, the bonus arena you unlock towards the end of the game. It's the sort of bonus endgame challenge that Dawn of Sorrow was sorely lacking, and I greatly appreciate its inclusion here. I didn't complete it, as I'm on somthing of a tight schedule, but the first half was a ton of fun, just as I remembered it being. Though holy shit, the double Creatures at one of the lower floors... I must have been playing the bonus modes on normal, because I refuse to believe I beat those damned things without chugging healing items back in high school. 5: Three extra bonus modes. Not one, not two, but three. And they aren't even hastily-cobbled-together nonsense either. Well, the jury's still out on Old Axe Armor. I'll need to figure out later how much of me liking it in high school was because it too was blue, because it seems like it qualifies for "hastily cobbled together". But two of them are every bit as fleshed out as Julius mode, and the sheer replay value that provides to a game that already has more content than Dawn of Sorrow is breathtaking. The requirement for unlocking Old Axe Armor mode can go to hell though. Killing a thousand old axe armors. Seriously! If I hadn't already needed to farm those things for the ancient armor to stand a chance against Dracula without healing, I don't know if I'd have bothered bringing my kill count that high to unlock it on my replacement cartridge again. 6: I found the music to be a step up from Dawn of Sorrow too, with a greater number of catchy, memorable tunes. Not to say Dawn of Sorrow's soundtrack was bad, I'm just comparing them. 7: The pacing in the second half is... unfortunate. For the first half or so of the game, it's a very tight challenge of adventuring through the castle to find portraits that contain bosses that unlock more exploration in the main castle. A pretty good system overall. But then after you get past the bad ending towards the rest of the game... the game just throws four more portrait worlds at you, at once, and basically says "here, do all of this before proceeding to the final boss", and it's like, they just throw all this shit at you in a heap, with only one real exploration upgrade between the four of them. The portrait worlds are just as good as the first four, to be clear, though the fact that they're recycled settings is a bit unfortunate, it's just... I kinda felt mentally exhausted at the prospect of doing them when they all hit me at once. Definitely one of the worst emotions the game got out of me, but I suppose I have to point out in its defense that I somehow completely forgot about that feeling by the end of the game, so clearly it was doing something right after that. THE LIST SO FAR Alright, having played them back to back, I can honestly say I had more fun playing Portrait of Ruin than with Dawn of Sorrow. A combination of a better hard mode, tighter challenges, and more content without sacrificing quality wound up winning out over nostalgia in the end, though I still prefer the Dawn of Sorrow framework. So that leaves the current score at: 1: Portrait of Ruin 2: Dawn of Sorrow Stay tuned to hear my thoughts about my teenage years' next stop on the Igavania train, Circle of the Moon for the GBA! Edited July 22, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Interdimensional Observer Posted May 29, 2019 Share Posted May 29, 2019 Good luck with this! I'd get burned out doing this myself, but I can see why someone would. Fortunately you can easily clear each game in 15 hours, less if you know what you're doing. I started with Dawn of Sorrow as well, after watching a trailer for it on a DVD for upcoming Nintendo releases I somehow got as a kid. For my personal rankings it's Spoiler Order of Ecclesia Symphony of the Night Dawn of Sorrow Aria of Sorrow Circle of the Moon Portrait of Ruin Harmony of Dissonance Although I do think the ranking is fluid, due to different games having different strengths and weaknesses. Ecclesia has plenty of difficulty and fun combat. It added new enemies to a series that had been rehashing things from Rondo of Blood for a little too long, and the aesthetic was nice. Its great weakness is a great lack of exploration due to the setup, but it was different to not be stuck in a castle for the entire game. Symphony of the Night turns real easy in the Inverted Castle and weapon variety is limited, but overall it is a fun game that was historically impactful and has held up. Dawn of Sorrow was a pretty uninspired recycling of stuff from Aria, and yeah its plot, never all that good in Castlevania, was on the weaker side. Where its strengths lay is in improving on the gameplay of Aria of Sorrow, particularly Soul variety, even if the rates are very low for obtaining them. Aria of Sorrow is roughly equal to Dawn. It has a better plot, and aesthetically if less detailed, is more vibrant that DoS. Overall, I like the game's feel and it plays well. Yet its weakness is that the Souls you get in this game have less variety I think that DoS's, and it still has a number of real useless Souls like DoS. Circle of Moon is drab, too many secret rooms, no shops, and the Dual Setup System requires RNG on enemies you'd have no idea had the cards to get anything other than the first two. Yet, I like the game, the DSS cards if you know how to get them are fun, and the alternate modes you unlock on completing the game each time are fun. Portrait of Ruin has boatloads of content this its strong point, even if OAA and Sisters Modes are shallow. I really dislike Nation of Fools and Burnt Paradise, even if the level layout is different; I prefer the abandoned school and not-London. Level rehash is to be expected of Igavanias: the Inverted Castle, Castle B, the short corridors one can only charitably call areas in Ecclesia Dawn of Sorrow. I mostly rank it this low because by this point, Igavania had become glut and PoR didn't bring enough fresh blood to the stagnant franchise, which I think Ecclesia did. One could easily rank this above CoM, but I didn't. Harmony of Dissonance is faster than Circle of the Moon, more colorful, with its spell books easier to find than the DSS Cards, and without the excessive breakable walls. Yet it suffers from trying to ape SotN, its music is atrocious, the colors are garish and gaudy, and the two-castle format wasn't well handled here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zapp Branniglenn Posted May 29, 2019 Share Posted May 29, 2019 Whoa, that's some marathon. And you've only got twenty days, woof. I've only finished Symphony of the Night myself. Though in my game hunts I picked up Dawn of Sorrow and Order of Eclessia. I'm a big fan of Metroid but Igavanias have always seemed a little drab to me outside of Symphony. But it's been nearly a decade since I've attempted any of them so my perspective could use an update. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted May 29, 2019 Author Share Posted May 29, 2019 15 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said: Good luck with this! I'd get burned out doing this myself, but I can see why someone would. Fortunately you can easily clear each game in 15 hours, less if you know what you're doing. I started with Dawn of Sorrow as well, after watching a trailer for it on a DVD for upcoming Nintendo releases I somehow got as a kid. For my personal rankings it's Reveal hidden contents Order of Ecclesia Symphony of the Night Dawn of Sorrow Aria of Sorrow Circle of the Moon Portrait of Ruin Harmony of Dissonance Although I do think the ranking is fluid, due to different games having different strengths and weaknesses. Ecclesia has plenty of difficulty and fun combat. It added new enemies to a series that had been rehashing things from Rondo of Blood for a little too long, and the aesthetic was nice. Its great weakness is a great lack of exploration due to the setup, but it was different to not be stuck in a castle for the entire game. Symphony of the Night turns real easy in the Inverted Castle and weapon variety is limited, but overall it is a fun game that was historically impactful and has held up. Dawn of Sorrow was a pretty uninspired recycling of stuff from Aria, and yeah its plot, never all that good in Castlevania, was on the weaker side. Where its strengths lay is in improving on the gameplay of Aria of Sorrow, particularly Soul variety, even if the rates are very low for obtaining them. Aria of Sorrow is roughly equal to Dawn. It has a better plot, and aesthetically if less detailed, is more vibrant that DoS. Overall, I like the game's feel and it plays well. Yet its weakness is that the Souls you get in this game have less variety I think that DoS's, and it still has a number of real useless Souls like DoS. Circle of Moon is drab, too many secret rooms, no shops, and the Dual Setup System requires RNG on enemies you'd have no idea had the cards to get anything other than the first two. Yet, I like the game, the DSS cards if you know how to get them are fun, and the alternate modes you unlock on completing the game each time are fun. Portrait of Ruin has boatloads of content this its strong point, even if OAA and Sisters Modes are shallow. I really dislike Nation of Fools and Burnt Paradise, even if the level layout is different; I prefer the abandoned school and not-London. Level rehash is to be expected of Igavanias: the Inverted Castle, Castle B, the short corridors one can only charitably call areas in Ecclesia Dawn of Sorrow. I mostly rank it this low because by this point, Igavania had become glut and PoR didn't bring enough fresh blood to the stagnant franchise, which I think Ecclesia did. One could easily rank this above CoM, but I didn't. Harmony of Dissonance is faster than Circle of the Moon, more colorful, with its spell books easier to find than the DSS Cards, and without the excessive breakable walls. Yet it suffers from trying to ape SotN, its music is atrocious, the colors are garish and gaudy, and the two-castle format wasn't well handled here. Oh shoot, you reminded me of another complaint I had about Portrait of Ruin that totally slipped my mind somehow in the final hours. Won't change my ranking, but I'll add it now. Thanks for the well wishes! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Interdimensional Observer Posted May 29, 2019 Share Posted May 29, 2019 5 minutes ago, Glennstavos said: I'm a big fan of Metroid but Igavanias have always seemed a little drab to me outside of Symphony. But it's been nearly a decade since I've attempted any of them so my perspective could use an update. You don't have to like them. Nothing wrong with not doing so. Metroid is action-adventure fun with I do think overall better design in SM/MF/MSR. Igavania is easier and converted to a simple Action RPG with far less platforming and other demands on reflexes (unless you do something like a level 1 Hard Ecclesia run). There are enough differences that I can see liking the one but not the other. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted May 30, 2019 Author Share Posted May 30, 2019 On 5/28/2019 at 11:08 PM, Interdimensional Observer said: You don't have to like them. Nothing wrong with not doing so. Metroid is action-adventure fun with I do think overall better design in SM/MF/MSR. Igavania is easier and converted to a simple Action RPG with far less platforming and other demands on reflexes (unless you do something like a level 1 Hard Ecclesia run). There are enough differences that I can see liking the one but not the other. Oh some of them still have some pretty fun platforming. I may have to get into that when I discuss Circle of the Moon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 1, 2019 Author Share Posted June 1, 2019 (edited) Circle of the Moon I was really looking forward to replaying this one, for several reasons. First and foremost, of all of the Castlevania castles, I had the most vivid and fond memories of exploring and navigating this one, owing largely to a combination of how absolutely gargantuan most of the rooms are, the ability to wall jump they give you after the third area, and the platforming hurdles they throw in your way to make use of the former two things. This is easily the most platformer-y of the Igavanias, something that really sets it apart in a game full of things that set it apart. Probably because, as I said in the OP, this wasn't actually headed by Iga. That definitely makes it weird in a lot of ways, but I remembered having a lot of fun with it. I loved the different take on bonus modes (though I always wished I could have played as Hugh in one of them), I remembered it being hard, and I remembered the DSS system being a lot of fun. While I still had a pretty fun time with this game, I can't say I enjoyed it as much as I remembered enjoying it. For this one and every one moving forward, I took copious notes while playing the game, jotting down anything that stuck out at me, good or bad, and I noticed a lot of things with this game that were pretty damned disappointing. Not enough to make me regret playing it, but enough to keep me from wanting to replay it any time soon. The Good Alright, let's start off with the good. When a competently-made game does things so drastically different from the other entries (half from not having the same developer and half from trying to get their bearings after a massive downgrade in hardware over the previous Igavania), naturally a few things are going to be better, or at least a refreshing change of pace. And there's a heck of a lot to love here. First off, one thing I found really refreshing was the complete and total lack of a "home base" that's present in most Castlevania games. That place, pretty much totally safe from monsters, with a save point and a warp point right next to each other, where you can go to talk to your allies, buy supplies, improve your gear, and maybe do some quests. None of that here. Not at all. Mostly because there are no NPCs in this game, and for the most part, the two allies your character has are only ever seen in cutscenes, and can't be interacted with in any way. There's no shop either, which means that whatever equipment and supplies Nathan's going to use are what he finds while exploring the castle. A lot of people complain about this, but given that both of the games I replayed before this had shops that were absolutely, infuriatingly useless, I say good riddance. I much prefer finding my stuff by adventuring than by grinding gold in ridiculously roundabout ways. And that sense of isolation, that feeling that, outside of save and warp rooms, there's no part of the castle where Nathan is really welcome... I like it. I can't really explain why, except that it kinda makes Nathan feel more badass, like behind the scenes he's become some sort of survivalist roughing it out in a totally hostile environment. But secondly, it makes Dracula's castle feel more like... well... Dracula's castle. That dreaded, nightmarish palace of death where not even the walls themselves are content to sit still for more than a few months. You get a real sense from the placement of the warp points and save rooms, without making things too annoying, that this castle wasn't built for your convenience, and you don't belong here. And I love it. I'm not sure if it'd work for every game, but I love it here. Another high point is DSS. This is actually a really cool way to introduce a magic system to a metroidvania. Between combinations of 10 action and 10 attribute cards, you have 100 different abilities. And that's the thing: by the time you've gotten all 20, you have 5 times as many abilities as you've collected cards, meaning there's an exponential increase of what you can do with each successive new card you add to your arsenal, and while there's a bit of a rocky start before you start building your collection, that drastically cuts back on the need to grind in the long run and greatly increases the excitement you're going to feel whenever you get a new toy. While I initially messed around with it more, by the time I got to the chapel tower and got a Mars card from those damned bloody swords I was fighting, I used Mars Mandragora, the Rose Sword, for most of the rest of the game. That isn't to say the others were bad though; I just had the most fun using Mars Mandragora because I liked the way it expanded the vertical reach of Nathan's hitbox, making it way easier to hit flying enemies. And while I'm on the subject, while I initially remembered horror stories of grinding for cards, with the exception of getting Serpent from the earth demon and Golem from the electric skeleton (which took 15 minutes and half an hour respectively), most of the grinding for the other audience room cards only took about 5 minutes or so, and I got the feeling while playing that I would have gotten all of them naturally through revisiting if I had given the game the chance. Because I got a surprising number of cards through simply fighting my way through the castle to go where I needed to go, or to explore places I couldn't get to before. I grinded for Serpent, Golem, Venus, Mandragora, and technically Griffin (it mostly constituted going back into a room full of skeleton athletes a second time), but I found Mercury, Salamander, Jupiter, Mars, Manticore, Cockatrice, Neptune and Thunderbird naturally during my first time through the areas their respective enemies were found in. Granted, I was wearing some 65 points in luck-boosting equipment, but that was something of a drop in the bucket compared to my overall stats in those areas so I'm confident my results wouldn't have been too different unless I'm misunderstanding the formulas. Also, while there are only two types of equipment you can find, body equipment and arm accessories, I liked the variety of effects the accessories could have. There were accessories to boost any of the four primary stats, and also some varieties that greatly boosted those stats at the cost of reducing others. But not only that, there were some fun things like armbands that changed different stats depending on which arm you put it on, or a set of gloves that gave you powerful stat bonuses, but only if you had two equipped, one on each hand (I only managed to find one of these, alas). In the end I wound up loading up on luck so I could see more of the drops in the game without grinding, as I gave up on grinding after the audience room. Which, of course, let me switch those out later in the game for two of the cursed rings I found in the chapel tower, so I could drastically improve my stats for crucial boss fights like I was Rock Lee taking off my training weights. It's a stupid, goofy sort of power trip, I know, but I often like when games let me do it. Also, while I would definitely prefer more series-standard movement controls, for the most part I was surprised at how natural double-tapping to run became. I didn't even have to think about it when making complex jumps during this game's numerous platforming segments. Which were a lot of fun, incidentally, largely due to probably my favorite mobility power up in the whole series: the kick boots, which let you do wall jumps. It's a bit clumsy, and I wish it let you keep your running jump momentum, but I love what having the ability to wall jump does for this game's exploration feel. It makes the massive rooms a lot of fun to climb around in. And while I'm on the subject of running, I did like the fact that, at least in terms of how the game feels, Nathan moves at the best speed of any Castlevania protagonist. Faster than nearly all of them, but still at a speed that's manageable. Never once during the whole run of the game did I wish for a speed-up power (which the game has, by the way). Also, while it was a weird and disorienting decision to map movement abilities to R and magic powers to L, this game thankfully has a config option that let me re-map them to the series standard of the other way around. So thumbs up there! I also liked how this game handles map filling and the placement of powerup-gated collectibles and areas. In the days before games let you mark your own maps to help you keep track of where to revisit later, it was an incredibly important part of metroidvania game design to make sure that your map is designed such that it's easy for the player to remember where they need to go back to, and what was the cause of each of those dead ends on their map. And for the most part, this game is very, very good at that. With the exception of the virtually identical roadblocks caused by stone blocks and wooden crates, the shape and direction of dead ends always made it obvious what stopped me from proceeding in each area, significantly shortening the time it takes to check every new place the latest powerup gave me access to. At first I was annoyed that not only were there stone and crate roadblocks, but also a bunch of green sarcophagi you have to destroy with a switch. But then I noticed that the stone and crate roadblocks were always part of a much larger room, while sarcophagi were always blocking one side of a single-screen room. Meaning that the former two were always marked by horizontal incomplete areas of room, while the latter were always marked by single rooms with one door not gone through. Even better, the map fill isn't very sensitive, and that combined with benevolent map design pretty much did away with exploration guesswork altogether. Basically, it means the game never lets you fill a room on your map until you've gained access to everything of value within it. Whenever an item is out of reach, it is far enough out of reach that you won't be able to fill up the part of the map it's in. This game doesn't pull the bullshit of dangling collectibles just baaaarely out of your reach, but close enough that the map is marked as filled, forcing you to try to remember where that damned ledge you couldn't jump to was once you get the ability to jump to it. All in all, amazingly ethical map design. Two big thumbs up there, easily the best design philosophy in that regard I've seen so far. I know there were instances of filling rooms with stuff still in them in PoR (there's a hat for Charlotte towards the top of Nation of Fools you need the frog morph spell to get through a tiny gap for), and I'm fairly certain there were a few in DoS too, but I can't think of specific examples for that game. There was only one exception to this, one single powerup, I'm pretty sure it was a heart powerup in the underground warehouse where you fight Death, where I couldn't get to it without the Roc Wing that wasn't obtainable until much later because there were platforms cutting off wall jumping attempts from either side of the wall below it, and only a gap in the middle to get through. But given this game's knack of hiding access to those things behind platforming puzzles, particularly in that area of the game, I'm not 100% confident that wasn't due to my failure to figure out the solution to some puzzle I never noticed was there. Which brings me to the platforming and puzzles. Like I said before, I liked them. The game's full of them, and while they're not particularly challenging, they were engaging, and like I said before, the wall jump made the platforming parts particularly fun, with a few exceptions (there was this thunder armor with heat-seeking electroballs guarding a ledge that can fuck right off. I wound up getting on that ledge through sheer luck when one of the balls knocked me out of the air onto the ledge, rather than away from it). I don't have much to say about them because they weren't very complicated, but some of the sliding crate puzzles were very reminiscent of Zelda, and again, wall jumping is fun. I just love doing it, whatever the game. Also, I liked how the puzzles didn't reset when you left the room, something that, given the age of the game and how rare the puzzles were in the series, I was concerned they might do. Also, quick little note I jotted down: I like how there's a stat that improves MP regen in this game, that being Intelligence. I wish more of the games in the series did that, rather than having it be a constant fixed rate that you can maybe improve with one or two specialized accessories. This seriously cuts down on the temptation to wait for MP to refill between serious battles, and lets you get away with using more powerful magic the later in the game you get, far better than simply increasing your MP pool does. Also, while I can't say if this is good or bad, I personally liked it, but I found the secret rooms were far more obvious, and I wound up discovering a much larger percent of them. The places where the breakable walls are just seem to scream "I can break" much more frequently. Places that seem to serve no purpose other than to have a hidden doorway to another room. And I think that's a good way to do that, have it reward the observant, kinda like korok seeds in BotW, rather than obscure secret bonus content for anyone with the ultra rare breakable wall detector powerup like in DoS and PoR. ...Well. That was a lot of praise I wound up having for the game. So why did I say I was disappointed? Well... it's a matter of the details. So let's move on to... The Bad It's funny how much my complaints about this game seemed to multiply upon this re-examination. Most of this stuff I barely noticed my first time around. But alas, a lot of my nostalgic memories were spoiled by a few realizations I had upon replaying the game. I'll go over them in reverse order of severity. First off, while the Battle Arena was a fun idea, and I wish every one of the Igavanias had lategame/postgame challenge content of some sort, I really dislike that the arena disables magic inside of it. The DSS is a core part of gameplay, and pretty much the only trick in Nathan's arsenal besides his whip and subweapon. You shouldn't force the player to adapt to a completely different, and less interesting, playstyle in order to test their skill. You should give them more difficult tests of the skills they've already been developing. Speaking of subweapons, I'm not a huge fan of them being in candles in Igavanias. For the most part it's inoffensive, especially since you rarely need any subweapon other than the cross you can find at the castle entrance, but when you have a more versatile taste in them, they can be a pain in the ass to find, and at times they can be a pain in the ass to keep. I lost count of how many times on those narrow platforms in the machine tower I accidentally hit a subweapon candle, watched my cross go flying off the platform I was on and all the way down to the floor of the room, and had to dive after it. Thankfully I managed to get it every time, but if I hadn't, the sheer annoyance of going back to the one and only place you can find it until the arena just to get it back would have been infuriating. I wish they had been more like how Jonathan handles them (just without the mastery). Once you find one, you should be able to select it from a menu at will. Moving on, and far more importantly, while for the most part I got used to them... the controls did eventually weigh the experience down. That one little thing, that double-tap to run that you have to do before the vast majority of your options to get from one place to another quickly, may not interfere much with the game's platforming, but it sure as hell gets in the way of its more advanced combat. For many enemies that take more than one hit to kill, if they have an attack, whether that be a big swing or a projectile, there's no realistic way to get out of the way it before it comes out when you're fighting them. For a good majority of enemy attacks, you have to know when they're going to do their next attack, and be out of their way ahead of time. And that really isn't fun. It's just overly-cautious tedium. But oftentimes you have to do it, because in some instances, especially with the elite elemental armors, there's literally no wind-up at all, and they'll stab their weapon out in literally one frame before even firing their elemental projectiles off, forcing you to maintain a specific distance from them in addition to other precautions, just so their frame one attacks don't send you flying. In fact, that's a recurring problem. Even when there is a wind-up, a lot of enemy attacks seem to have not been designed with the intent to be dodged reliably. Some enemy attack patterns, like the ice demon's ridiculous hailstorm and Phase 1 dracula's yellow bird attack, are just a ridiculous flurry of projectiles I can't see any reliable means of dodging besides flat-out tanking them with the Neptune card (which basically lets you take MP damage instead of HP damage whenever hit by the element used with it). I would be hard-pressed to dodge some of this nonsense even with the superior controls of the later games, it's just utterly absurd how bullet-hell-ish some of these attacks can be in a game without a control scheme that works for them. However, I do leave open the possibility that there are ways to reliably dodge these things that I never found out. While this was an unfortunate design factor in the early game, it really reared its ugly head in the late game once the stats of enemies (particularly HP) started drastically inflating. Around the time you reach the underground warehouse, enemies just start soaking up a ridiculous number of hits that start making them tedious to fight through. Tedious is the key word, especially since there was never any real danger of dying despite the enemies getting tougher and more annoying to dodge. It felt like a straight-up RPG at times, where I was facing a lot of hits I had no real opportunity to prevent, but I was tanking through them anyway through sheer raw stats, despite not grinding once after leaving the audience room. And unfortunately, this describes every boss in the series except for Dracula's final form. I died five times over the course of my playthrough. All of them were against Dracula's final form. Despite having vivid memories of getting my teeth kicked in by half the bosses, despite all of their attacks being tricky to annoying to impossible to dodge, and thus despite me taking tons of hits from every boss, I managed to beat them down with a combination of melee attacks and the cross boomerang before they had any realistic attempt to send me into a fail state for my, well... "failure" to dodge them properly. I wasn't doing a good job defending myself against these bosses, and I still won every time. And that's not even the worst part. Remember when I said I spent most of the game using luck-boosting equipment? Well... that included every boss fight before Hugh. I fought and defeated every single one of the bosses before that equipped with a silk robe, a luck ring, and a miracle arm band (later a left-handed star bracelet). After that I switched to Platinum armor and cursed rings for the boss fights. I pointlessly and effortlessly cruised through every single damned boss fight in the game... ...except Dracula phase 2. When shit finally, seriously got real. It was like getting hit by a truck. His attacks did insane amounts of damage, orders of magnitude beyond what I took from every other boss in the game, including his previous phase. Here there was no messing around. If I was going to win, I had to work out proper strategies. And I did. And it was fun. I timed the openings to throw cross boomerangs when his chest eye opened. I learned to tell the difference between the cues for his meteor attack and his poison spit attack. I kept Neptune Cockatrice on in defense of the former, the only attack I couldn't reliably dodge, and pelted him with crosses while I had nothing to fear but knockback. I jumped up onto the platforms to dodge his sweeping, exploding lasers. Then came phase 2, and I turned on Jupiter Serpent to protect myself from his annoying bat smokescreen, and I Roc Winged my way to safety whenever he did his charging tackles. That eyeball was a pain in the ass to hit, and nearly all of my deaths were in this second phase, to stray bats that made it through the ice shield because it wouldn't protect me fully when I was moving towards him. I had to notice the pattern to his flight and throw the boomerangs in his way, but I would always still run out before killing him, so I had to make desperate, careful jump-attacks with the whip for the last few hits... ...And I finally did it. Without grinding for the summon card I have a feeling they were expecting you to go explore the castle to try and find. And for the first time in the entire game, I had faced a challenge that I actually felt good about myself for overcoming. But I was already at the end of the game, and it was too little, too late. And even then, it still had its share of fake difficulty with that massive bat cloud and wouldn't rank favorably to any of the Portrait of Ruin hard mode boss fights. ...But that's not even the worst part. No, there was one more realization I had, around the point I got to the underground warehouse, that really took away any desire to play this game again any time soon. I said a lot in the "The Good" section about how much I liked getting around the castle, and how cooperative and helpful the map is in terms of telling you where you need to go and when, and never needing to guess where you can take your latest powerup to find more stuff. All of this is completely true. But it's also undermined nearly to the point of meaninglessness by a simple, uncomfortable fact about this iteration of the infamous castle: There's nothing to find in it. When I started playing this game, I made several notes about the sheer number of health, magic, and heart upgrades I found just in the first area. Indeed, it quickly became apparent that there are way, way more of these things in Circle of the Moon than there are in any other Castlevania game that has them. But unfortunately... that's because they're literally the only things placed in this castle for you to find. No equipment. No items. No cards. Just those three generic upgrades to your health, magic and hearts. And once I realized that, it's like I had come out of a trance. The magic of exploring the castle had just disappeared. Because there was no longer any mystery or intrigue or fun behind what I'd find in all those places I couldn't explore before but now could. I already knew, while barely remembering a damned thing about the raw details of the castle's layout, that I only needed three guesses to what was behind every corner. It was either the way towards the next boss, a save point/warp room, or a meter upgrade. That's it. That's all I'd find. That's all I'd ever find. And after spending most of my playthrough meticulously exploring every single nook and cranny, filling my map out completely at every opportunity... once I got the Roc Wing (which, incidentally, ruined the game's platforming, and is the worst iteration of it in any game that doesn't make you issue a fighting game command for it because you can't restore running momentum in the air and it won't restore your double jump no matter how many times you use it, but that's neither here nor there)... ...I just gave up on filling out the map, knowing what I'd find in those last couple of passageways and electing to head to the observation tower and... the dreaded five words of any game you're playing in a marathon... "get this game over with". The point when playing becomes an obligation, a duty, a chore, rather than a fun thing in and of itself. And I felt that way for the rest of the game, all the way up to the final fight with Dracula, which finally breathed some life and excitement back into me. The ranking so far 1: Portrait of Ruin 2: Dawn of Sorrow 3: Circle of the Moon I do not regret my time playing this game. Not at all. The first half of it was quite fun, and I enjoyed myself a lot, and the thrill of exploration, while it lasted, was quite strong. But I don't have any desire to go back to it for a long time. Not even the bonus mode I unlocked will convince me to replay it like it did when I was in high school. Most of what I enjoyed would not be enjoyable a second time, and what I didn't enjoy I dread going back to. I cannot say either of these things for either of the previous games I've talked about, so unfortunately, Circle of the Moon is the new bottom of the ranking so far. ...Well, on that mildly depressing note, that's it for my retrospective on Circle of the Moon! Stay tuned when I discuss the next game on the list, Harmony of Dissonance! Edited June 3, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rapier Posted June 1, 2019 Share Posted June 1, 2019 Part of me wants to do that as well, but I can't even finish a single game of that list. Before the endgame, I'm already burned out and then other things take priority. In any case, good luck. No one asked, but I'd rate them as: Symphony of the Night Aria of Sorrow (a strong contender for SOTN, imo) Dawn of Sorrow Didn't play Order of Ecclesia or Portrait of Ruin much to comment. Symphony had the cool stages, OST, enemies, bosses, an immense castle, special moves and everything I could expect from a Metroidvania (I can only imagine the surprise to the people who had their firsthand experience with one back then). My only issue is with how the game tends to have a trivial difficulty most of the time, and the mid-lategame gets boring very quickly. Aria had everything that made SOTN good, a decent roster of characters and an engaging difficulty. I wish I could remember its details better, because all I know is that I enjoyed it more than the rest. Dawn was a good follow-up to Aria, but with some annoying issues that made me put it lower on the list. The mini-game with the stylus only serves to make boss fights more frustrating, anything kills Soma with a few hits, and it felt as if every enemy took ages to die, even generic mooks, which for me is a cheap way to compensate for difficulty. There are more weapons, but they're more of the same and they don't matter. There are more souls, but not are they grindy, but also most of them are irrelevant and add little to nothing to the gameplay. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 2, 2019 Author Share Posted June 2, 2019 (edited) Harmony of Dissonance ... Sigh. Okay. I know I said I would replay every Castlevania game I could get my hands on. And I tried. I really tried with Harmony of Dissonance. I knew it wasn't going to be the best, so I streamed it for a friend of mine so we could have some fun roasting it and shooting the shit. I expected with weekly sessions I'd probably be able to get the game done by the time it became Harmony of Dissonance's turn on the list, and we'd have some fun making fun of the worst entry on the list and make it an enjoyable experience. But I have to cut my losses with that game and just move the hell on. Because five hours in, I've already played enough to know where it goes on the list, and I have no desire to subject myself to another minute of it. I am far more interested in guaranteeing two runs of Aria of Sorrow, the first to unlock hard mode and the second to play it, and maybe even sneaking in a genuine hard mode run of Dawn of Sorrow just to make sure I wasn't being unfair in my judgment of it, than I am in completing this... thing Konami forced Iga and his team to churn out in a year. It's not just the worst Castlevania game. It's not just the only Castlevania game I would actively deign to label a "bad game". Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance for the Gameboy Advance is one of the worst games I have ever forced myself to play in my life. There isn't a single damned thing this game does that every other Igavania doesn’t do ten times better, from controls, to exploration, to combat, to music, to graphics, to story. The only one that this does anything better than is Circle of the Moon, and that's by sheer virtue of technically belonging to the formula that CotM largely ignored, at times to its cost. But even then, there are countless areas where CotM kicks HoD's ass, rams it headfirst through a wooden fence, and then takes not only its lunch money, but also its pants. I barely remembered anything about my first playthrough of this game. I knew I hated it as a teenager, but apart from its infamous music I had no vivid memories of why, just this general feeling of the castle being a pain to explore. Ten years after first playing it and, in contrast to every other Igavania, I barely remembered anything. In hindsight this is hardly surprising, because three days after replaying it, when I first got the idea to start taking notes, I was already struggling to remember details of this fucking game. My first three hours, three hours I spent streaming this with a friend, mind you, were a near total monotonous blur. It's difficult to describe how totally different it feels playing this game compared to literally any other Igavania. The way this game manages to take the fun out of almost every aspect the games that preceded and succeeded it excelled at. That crushing, depressing feeling of pointlessness that replaces all of it, the feeling that not only are you not having fun anymore, you also don't feel like the end is getting any closer. How the game briefly comes alive to the level of mediocre whenever you find a new place to explore before descending back into soul-crushing tedium as you vainly go back and forth across this colossal, confusing, shortcut-free map, trying to find something you can do with the powerup you just got. I'm barely exaggerating when I say that phase of figuring out where next to go takes up half of your time playing this game. The main reason for that is that the game doesn't let you teleport around it until well over halfway through it, and even then the warp points are few and very far between. Worse still, the game has none of Circle of the Moon's powerup design philosophy that made it so easy to guess where you can go to use your latest powerup, because they have multiple advancement upgrades that functionally do the exact same thing, just to different obstacles. There are at least two, possibly three different brands of locked door you need special keys for, and since the map doesn't mark anything but doorways, walls, save rooms and dimension-hopping warp points, there's no way to tell them apart until you travel all the way across the map to re-investigate the area manually. A combination of these two things makes trying to play this game without a Gamefaqs map an exercise in perpetual frustration. Hell, even when I snapped and started consulting said maps, my efforts to find something plot-relevant I could use the crushing stone on led me to three consecutive dead ends where the places the breakable walls blocked were double-blocked by the high jump powerup you can't get until way later, leaving me babbling and nearly whining like an idiot while my friend laughed at the absurdity of using the breakable walls to block places they would have still been thoroughly blocked without. That, ultimately, was the moment when I decided playing more of this game wasn't worth my time. I didn't have the infinite patience of a teenager who still grinded in RPGs, and thus lacked the willpower to explore every single nook and cranny of this map on foot without a single teleport room. But it was far from the only thing that made me conclude this game is badly designed. Oh, I have many, many more complaints. 1: The music is terrible. This is such a common complaint that I barely see the point of repeating it, but I want to make clear that it's not just because they only use 8 bit instruments. That would be nonsensical, given that even back in the NES days those synths produced utter audio bliss like the Silver Surfer theme and Mega Man 2's Doctor Wily Castle theme, and even today chiptune music has awesome, rocking tunes produced from it all the time. No, the real issue is that none of the music is catchy, or exciting, or pleasant to listen to. The best song in the game is Successor of Fate, the first song for the first area (as is so often the case), and even then I still don't even know how what value of X I'd have to use for a "Top X List" for that song to see a spot on it. It really contributed to a sense of confusion and isolation, making it harder to tell various areas of the game apart, making it feel like I'm wading through this thick, confusing fog whenever I'm traveling from place to place. 2: The graphics are hideous and gaudy. I'm constantly baffled by the people saying the graphics were a drastic improvement over Circle of the Moon. I mean I can understand feeling that way at the time, as being able to see what's going on without a backlit screen must have been a massive plus, but I've seen people make that claim today, by today's standards, and I just don't understand at all. The bright colors the game constantly uses give it this bizarre, trippy air that doesn't sit with me at all and hardly suits the series' gothic atmosphere. It feels even more out of place than the DS era's brief backslide into anime portraits. But more importantly, none of the sprite animations look cool, least of all those of Juste Belmont, who looks like a total doofus whenever he's in the air, made even worse by not even having a double jump animation. While Juste has many more frames of animation than Nathan Graves did, Nathan managed to look cool and dynamic and impressive in every single one of them, while most of the time Juste just looks like a clown. 3: You ain't no air fighter, Juste. While the double-tap to run in Circle of the Moon had a plethora of problems of its own, I felt way more comfortable controlling Nathan than I ever did controlling Juste, for one simple reason: Juste has absolutely no game in the air. On the ground he's one of the most agile Belmonts in history, with a pretty intriguing game mechanic where he can dash left and right, forward and backward, basically at will to close in on and retreat from enemies. I can't describe how much I wish I could love this, and how much fun it could be, but it all goes to shit the second Juste leaves the ground. First of all, he's so unbelievably sluggish moving horizontally through the air, about as fast as Nathan Graves without a running start, and it's so bad that I'm quite convinced it's not actually possible to use the platforms in several early-game boss arenas to jump over the boss's head without getting hit. Second, and far more damning, Juste can't stop moving forward in the air while using his whip attack. He can start moving forward (and only forward, not backward, for some reason) if he jump-attacked from a standstill, but he cannot stop or reverse direction if he attacked while moving forward in midair. And this feels so bizarre, arbitrary and awkward that it makes fighting any enemy you can't hit from the floor (which is a hell of a lot of enemies) without getting hit yourself an exercise in frustration. I don't feel I can properly put into words how much more awesome this game would have been if they had designed Juste to be as agile in the air as he is on the ground, and let him carry his dashing momentum into his jumps, change direction mid-attack like normal, and maybe even air-dash. That would have been a hell of a lot of fun, and might have helped to make this game good (with a hell of a lot of other adjustments, mind). Actually, he's just awkward to move in general. His slide kick is ridiculously fast and long and doesn't feel right or natural, and his diving kick has pretty much the exact same problems. Nearly everything about the way Juste moves around when he isn't using his dash commands/ general ground movement is insanely awkward. 4: Enemy AI is absolutely laughably bad. This game contains some of the worst-designed enemies in the entire series, with AI and behaviors that are either so laughably broken that you don't even have to fight them, or annoyingly broken and frustrating to deal with. A few highlights: * Medusa heads' spawning patterns mean that as long as you keep moving forward on a flat surface, they will literally always pass over your head without any need to dodge or attack them. And a room that handily demonstrates this is in the first damned area. * Scarecrows, or whatever those monsters that are corpses hopping on pitchforks are, don't actually have a hitbox on the fork part and will never hurt you as long as you stay on the ground. This is so blindingly obvious while playing that it has to have been intentional and not an oversight, but I don't see the point of it, especially since there aren't even any rooms they're placed in to my knowledge where blocking you from jumping is even an inconvenience. * Skeleton blazes and fishmen will jump right over your head if you dash headlong through the rooms they're in. * Bone Spiders will always face in the direction you are relative to them upon entering the room, and never change direction after that until they respawn upon re-entering. The problem is that due to some rooms winding around, this isn't always the direction you will be relative to them when you run into them. And that is a problem because they were only ever programmed to move backwards when recoiling from hits, even when you are attacking them from behind, meaning that any attempt to attack them in melee while behind them will cause them to trample you before you have time to dodge, rather than move away from you and give you space to breathe. 5: The magic system is an objective downgrade from Circle of the Moon's DSS. While the Dual Setup System had 100 different abilities from combining two cards, this game's system of enchanting the game's six subweapons with one of five magic books gives you a mere 36 total combinations, counting not using magic on them at all. That's barely more than a third of what the last game had to offer. Worse still, you only ever have access to a maximum of six of them at any one time, because you can only ever use magic on the subweapon you last grabbed from a chandelier, making experimenting with various powers and finding your favorite one a complicated and long-term process. And this means that the complaints I had about subweapons in Circle of the Moon apply double here. I mostly relied on Ice Bible to cheese annoying fights, but at the urging of a friend to give the others a shot, I did so, and found that most of them weren't nearly as useful. Worse still, none of the subweapons had a really cohesive set of elemental attacks you could have access to, with only one ability per subweapon really being worth using. So I couldn't even pick the best subweapon and have my pick of elements to use it with. 6: Bosses, Bosses everywhere, not a relic to grab. The game just has way too many bosses who don't actually serve any purpose and have no real buildup to them. You just fight them and move on, oftentimes merely being rewarded with access to a single item that often isn't that much better (if at all) than what you previously had. I must have fought about 10 before I gave up, and I barely remember half of them. 7: Juste is kind of a total doofus. Granted, this brought me genuine laughter and joy, so it's hard to lump this with the other complaints, but he definitely makes it harder to take the game seriously, what with him responding to running into Death by the first major warp gate by literally shouting "Aaargh! Death has returned!", and his absolutely impossible-to-comprehend obsession with sprucing up a single room of Dracula's second castle with furniture you steal from the rest of it. 8: Absolutely shamelessly lazy reusing of old sprites and monsters. I don't mean in the sense of palette swaps and the like. No, it's far from the first Igavania to do that, and it wasn't by any means going to be the last. No, I mean that they actually had the unbridled audacity to just take existing enemies like the Ruler Sword, bump up its stats and attack patterns/styles, and then label it "Ruler Sword Level 2" as their actual honest-to-goodness name. I just can't get behind that decision, it just feels transparently lazy and tacky, to the point that it has to be less lazy than it looks, making the decision a sheer failure of optics. ...And... I think that's it! Everything I could think of that pissed me off while playing this game. Whew! Now I don't have to write about it anymore an can go back to enjoying this project again! Oh, wait, right, the updated ranking. Okay, here you go: 1: Portrait of Ruin 2: Dawn of Sorrow 3: Circle of the moon 4: Hypothetical Reality 57, Bloodstained is disappointing 5: Hypothetical reality 97,979, Konami makes a new Castlevania game written by Rian Johnson 6: Probably the pachinko game 7: Harmony of Dissonance ...Sorry about that, but I just felt that much of a need to put some breathing room between HoD and the other ones I actually enjoyed playing. As much as I took issue with Circle of the Moon by the end of it, I practically feel unclean putting these two games right next to each other, because they just aren't comparable in any way. Just keep in mind going forward that Harmony of Dissonance is a veeeerrrry distant last place, and god help us if it turns out I have to change that. Edited June 3, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Interdimensional Observer Posted June 2, 2019 Share Posted June 2, 2019 (edited) On 5/30/2019 at 12:42 PM, Alastor15243 said: Oh some of them still have some pretty fun platforming. I know, particularly that optional tower at the end of Ecclesia. Sorry Circle of the Moon soured at the end. I forget how the Dracula fight went, all I recall is timing your many leaps in the final phase. And that those little flying swords enemies en route to Adramelech (did I spell his name right?) were the bane of me. I do recall this game has a rare Igavania sequence break, you can kill Camilla before Death I think. Yes the toxic water will hurt, which is why most won't do it. Magician Mode can get through it without issues and would be the best to attempt it. Use the invincibility DSS card combo and the water won't hurt. You'll have to turn off the ability to hit levers to move the block stairs for a brief moment every so often, but that is it. As for Harmony of Dissonance, remember, salt purifies, salt is holy. I agree with the criticisms from what I remember of the game. Mind if I continue to add the list of issues with the HoD that isn't the download-only multiplayer romp called Harmony of Despair? First, spritework. Juste looks the best, no better than a knockoff Alucard, which is what artwork-wise he is. Maxim and Lydie however, both are several degrees of inferiority in spritework to Juste if you compare when they're on the screen together. Neither has sharp definition to their forms, both are soft blurry blobs of colors in the forms of humans. Lydie is the worst, and it shows when in the best ending she tries to break up the two. Second, on a related note, the story is really bad. Igavania was never anywhere near strong here as I said before, but HoD I just find the most... absurd? IIRC, the reason Dracula's Castle reappeared in the first place was because Maxim was jealous of Juste and so decided to collect Dracula's Relics, only to be corrupted by them. Death is here in a prominent role because of Symphony of the Night, and so that there is a trace of a decent villain. The game ends with Death defeated, and Maxim slain and Lydie dead, or both are saved and a pale phantom of Dracula spawned from his relics is killed. The friends in the good ending make up after this little Demon Castle Dracula faux pas between them. The game is just a young friendship story. Sure that was a core part of Circle of the Moon's story; Soma is a prettyboy, with a love he as usually happens in anime stories doesn't like to admit; and PoR is more anime. But Circle at least opened with a failed confrontation with Dracula, and the Sorrows and PoR had other things. Harmony of Dissonance has nothing else to it at all. 11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: 7: Juste is kind of a total doofus. Granted, this brought me genuine laughter and joy, so it's hard to lump this with the other complaints, but he definitely makes it harder to take the game seriously, what with him responding to running into Death by the first major warp gate by literally shouting "Aaargh! Death has returned!", and his absolutely impossible-to-comprehend obsession with sprucing up a single room of Dracula's second castle with furniture you steal from the rest of it. Juste is an embarrassment to the Belmont clan. But to be fair, his father didn't let him go to school for Interior Castle Design, calling it a frivolous dead end job. It's worth pointing out that he never actually killed Dracula. Dracula Wraith is only a ghost, a stirring fragment of Dracula that can't even remember what it is in full. Juste is the weakest playable Belmont around. 11 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: And this means that the complaints I had about subweapons in Circle of the Moon apply double here. On the Subweapons issue, thinking on it, HoD is likely the worst with it. Symphony of the Night gives you the Bat, Wolf, and Mist gimmicks, the spells like Dark Metamorphosis if you know how to use them, and some weapon variety with things like the Shield Rod. All of these are not Subweapons which you can use. There is a dominant Subweapon- the Holy Water on grounded targets, and the Axe is the only thing with good anti-air (but no DoS Axe Armor soul), but you can use anything. Circle of the Moon, if you collect enough DSS Cards, gives you enough options outside of the Subweapons to play with. I just wish I could set two DSS abilities at once. This game does have it the worst when it comes to Subweapon balance, the Cross crucifies everything. Some DSS Cards do not come until late (and let's ignore how obscure they can be to find- the Candles), with two of them being locked to the nasty Battle Arena. But without seriously going back and playing the games, I think this is better than HoD. Harmony of Dissonance does Subweapons the worst, because they are everything that is for attack variety. Juste like Nathan has a whip as his only primary weapon, a whip he can't mess as much as Nathan can via DSS. Juste has no independent selection of spells like Alucard, all his spells are bound to his Subweapon. The final book, the Summoning Book, requires that ultra-late (as in last upgrade or second-to-last) high jump to get, and the Lighting Book requires you complete that challenging fast rolling ball room. I'd consider these worse than the late DSS cards, since even without them you have more to play with in DSS than Juste's Books. The silver lining is that none of the Subweapons predominate like the CoM Cross. If they ever did a more thorough remake of the first three or non-Aria GBA games, I'd really like it if they made the Subweapons something that staying in your inventory once obtained. That they don't is just a holdover from the Classicvanias. Edited June 2, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 2, 2019 Author Share Posted June 2, 2019 (edited) 1 hour ago, Interdimensional Observer said: Sorry Circle of the Moon soured at the end. I forget how the Dracula fight went, all I recall is timing your many leaps in the final phase. And that those little flying swords enemies en route to Adramelech (did I spell his name right?) were the bane of me. Oh yes, those Bloody Swords were definitely annoying, until I got their mars card and could use its superior weapons. Having an overhead swing does wonders for fighting flying enemies, a big part of why I used it so much. The charge attack you have to Roc Wing over does brutal amounts of damage, but is super easy to dodge once you know how. The real issue with the final phase is how he covers his vulnerable eyeball with those damned bats. 1 hour ago, Interdimensional Observer said: I do recall this game has a rare Igavania sequence break, you can kill Camilla before Death I think. Yes the toxic water will hurt, which is why most won't do it. Magician Mode can get through it without issues and would be the best to attempt it. Use the invincibility DSS card combo and the water won't hurt. You'll have to turn off the ability to hit levers to move the block stairs for a brief moment every so often, but that is it. Yep! I considered doing that but decided to explore everything the game had to offer for the sake of it. 1 hour ago, Interdimensional Observer said: On the Subweapons issue, thinking on it, HoD is likely the worst with it. Symphony of the Night gives you the Bat, Wolf, and Mist gimmicks, the spells like Dark Metamorphosis if you know how to use them, and some weapon variety with things like the Shield Rod. All of these are not Subweapons which you can use. There is a dominant Subweapon- the Holy Water on grounded targets, and the Axe is the only thing with good anti-air (but no DoS Axe Armor soul), but you can use anything. Circle of the Moon, if you collect enough DSS Cards, gives you enough options outside of the Subweapons to play with. I just wish I could set two DSS abilities at once. This game does have it the worst when it comes to Subweapon balance, the Cross crucifies everything. Some DSS Cards do not come until late (and let's ignore how obscure they can be to find- the Candles), with two of them being locked to the nasty Battle Arena. But without seriously going back and playing the games, I think this is better than HoD. Harmony of Dissonance does Subweapons the worst, because they are everything that is for attack variety. Juste like Nathan has a whip as his only primary weapon, a whip he can't mess as much as Nathan can via DSS. Juste has no independent selection of spells like Alucard, all his spells are bound to his Subweapon. The final book, the Summoning Book, requires that ultra-late (as in last upgrade or second-to-last) high jump to get, and the Lighting Book requires you complete that challenging fast rolling ball room. I'd consider these worse than the late DSS cards, since even without them you have more to play with in DSS than Juste's Books. The silver lining is that none of the Subweapons predominate like the CoM Cross. If they ever did a more thorough remake of the first three or non-Aria GBA games, I'd really like it if they made the Subweapons something that staying in your inventory once obtained. That they don't is just a holdover from the Classicvanias. Couldn't agree more. Classic-style subweapons are just a pain when placed a sprawling open-world environment. PoR had the right idea to be sure, just spoiled it with an annoying mastery system. But overall still less of a hassle and more fun with any ones you took the time to train up. I'd love to see Circle of the Moon remade with a more modern, tight control scheme. maybe a version of the arena that lets you use magic, and maybe the ability to map multiple card combinations to multiple buttons (also not needing the button combination summon/item crash cards, and just doing it the instant you press the button). Oh, and don't forget actual shit to find in the castle. But I hope they keep its unique, strangely gargantuan room design. Those rooms were fun to get around once you got the wall jump. But of course, this is modern, Igaless Konami we're talking about. I don't think it'll happen in the foreseeable future. Edited June 2, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johann Posted June 2, 2019 Share Posted June 2, 2019 I'm interested in this Great write-up of your renewed impressions and reflections on the games. PoR is my favorite of them, mostly because it offers so many varied ways to play it. At some point after going through these, are you considering revisiting the Classicvanias as well? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 2, 2019 Author Share Posted June 2, 2019 5 minutes ago, Johann said: I'm interested in this Great write-up of your renewed impressions and reflections on the games. PoR is my favorite of them, mostly because it offers so many varied ways to play it. At some point after going through these, are you considering revisiting the Classicvanias as well? Possibly. I was never any good at them, found the controls awkward, and only ever managed to beat Dracula X Chronicles in my determination to unlock Symphony of the Night. Now, on the one hand, I’ve clearly improved since then given my renewed take on the difficulty, but I’ve also still struggled to be good at dodging and attacking in the revisited games with with stiff control schemes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johann Posted June 2, 2019 Share Posted June 2, 2019 6 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said: Possibly. I was never any good at them, found the controls awkward, and only ever managed to beat Dracula X Chronicles in my determination to unlock Symphony of the Night. Now, on the one hand, I’ve clearly improved since then given my renewed take on the difficulty, but I’ve also still struggled to be good at dodging and attacking in the revisited games with with stiff control schemes. They can be pretty brutal, yeah. Each of them have their own issues while also having ways of being fair: Castlevania 1: Awkward jumps and some stages/bosses throwing so much stuff at you that you can't possibly dodge. However, it's only 6 levels and there are ways to cheese things, like using Holy Water III on Death. Simon's Quest: This is just a bad game altogether and really only worth playing out of curiosity. With a massive overhaul, it could be a decent Metroidvania. Castlevania 3: Longer and harder levels than 1, but has more ways to play by having extra characters and different routes. Worst thing is that dying against Dracula puts you back to earlier in his level, rather than right at him. I think the Japanese version fixes this, which is available in the recent collection. Super Castlevana IV: The smoothest gameplay and excellent levels and bosses, only classic game to have multiple whip directions. Only big issues is that the whip is too good, making subweapons kinda useless Bloodlines: Like C3, it has some tricky levels and bosses, I personally found this to be the hardest of them all (particularly the boss rush at the end). Two playable characters is good though. Dracula X: The poor man's Rondo, it's mostly ok barring some major issues with platforming, alternate paths being cut off unfairly, and the Dracula battle room is half made up of pits Rondo of Blood: Challenging for the right reasons, branching paths and secrets that encourage exploration, can replay any level from a stage select screen, and an alternate character for radically different (easier) gameplay. The Item Crash power is a welcome leg up if you're frustrated, but never trivializes bosses. I think all of them except Dracula X and Rondo are on that new Castlevania Collection at least, along with the GB titles and Kid Dracula Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rapier Posted June 2, 2019 Share Posted June 2, 2019 30 minutes ago, Johann said: and the Dracula battle room is half made up of pits Please don't remind me of this. I seriously gave up at that game right there. Also, I second that Harmony of Dissonance was a terrible experience, and also my first one. I really am not sure how they could make such a clunky, dark game, because even Circle of the Moon's very basic formula works fine as it is, and it's nowhere ambitious. If it weren't for Aria later, I'd have given up on the series. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted June 2, 2019 Share Posted June 2, 2019 On 5/29/2019 at 2:41 AM, Alastor15243 said: 3: As a grown man with shit to do who has thoroughly become disillusioned with grind, I was not a fan of the fact that most souls got more powerful the more souls you got, peaking when you have 9 of the same soul. Through my general experimentation (in fairness, the game isn't quite as fresh in my memory as it was before I went on to PoR), I generally found most souls weren't all that great with just one copy, though there were a few exceptions, such as the Witch soul. I generally found melee combat to be the best strategy most of the time, and... It's frustrating sadly enough, one of the bigger issues that it requires such a grind. It doesn't even level the same way across all souls, like some have an effect every 3 souls or something. The Witch soul's still not as perfect as in Aria though..... On 5/29/2019 at 2:41 AM, Alastor15243 said: 5: Three extra bonus modes. Not one, not two, but three. And they aren't even hastily-cobbled-together nonsense either. Well, the jury's still out on Old Axe Armor. I'll need to figure out later how much of me liking it in high school was because it too was blue, because it seems like it qualifies for "hastily cobbled together". But two of them are every bit as fleshed out as Julius mode, and the sheer replay value that provides to a game that already has more content than Dawn of Sorrow is breathtaking. The requirement for unlocking Old Axe Armor mode can go to hell though. Killing a thousand old axe armors. Seriously! If I hadn't already needed to farm those things for the ancient armor to stand a chance against Dracula without healing, I don't know if I'd have bothered bringing my kill count that high to unlock it on my replacement cartridge again. That sounds like a lot of fun actually. The extra modes, not grinding 1,000 kills on one unit type. On 6/1/2019 at 4:48 AM, Alastor15243 said: Another high point is DSS. This is actually a really cool way to introduce a magic system to a metroidvania. Between combinations of 10 action and 10 attribute cards, you have 100 different abilities. And that's the thing: by the time you've gotten all 20, you have 5 times as many abilities as you've collected cards, meaning there's an exponential increase of what you can do with each successive new card you add to your arsenal, and while there's a bit of a rocky start before you start building your collection, that drastically cuts back on the need to grind in the long run and greatly increases the excitement you're going to feel whenever you get a new toy. While I initially messed around with it more, by the time I got to the chapel tower and got a Mars card from those damned bloody swords I was fighting, I used Mars Mandragora, the Rose Sword, for most of the rest of the game. That isn't to say the others were bad though; I just had the most fun using Mars Mandragora because I liked the way it expanded the vertical reach of Nathan's hitbox, making it way easier to hit flying enemies. And while I'm on the subject, while I initially remembered horror stories of grinding for cards, with the exception of getting Serpent from the earth demon and Golem from the electric skeleton (which took 15 minutes and half an hour respectively), most of the grinding for the other audience room cards only took about 5 minutes or so, and I got the feeling while playing that I would have gotten all of them naturally through revisiting if I had given the game the chance. Because I got a surprising number of cards through simply fighting my way through the castle to go where I needed to go, or to explore places I couldn't get to before. I grinded for Serpent, Golem, Venus, Mandragora, and technically Griffin (it mostly constituted going back into a room full of skeleton athletes a second time), but I found Mercury, Salamander, Jupiter, Mars, Manticore, Cockatrice, Neptune and Thunderbird naturally during my first time through the areas their respective enemies were found in. Granted, I was wearing some 65 points in luck-boosting equipment, but that was something of a drop in the bucket compared to my overall stats in those areas so I'm confident my results wouldn't have been too different unless I'm misunderstanding the formulas. That's a pretty neat system. I had heard it could be imbalanced, but I don't know that much because I never got into Circle of the Moon. 13 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: It's not just the worst Castlevania game. It's not just the only Castlevania game I would actively deign to label a "bad game". Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance for the Gameboy Advance is one of the worst games I have ever forced myself to play in my life. Even the first Game Boy game is better? Oof. 13 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: 1: Portrait of Ruin 2: Dawn of Sorrow 3: Circle of the moon 4: Hypothetical Reality 57, Bloodstained is disappointing 5: Hypothetical reality 97,979, Konami makes a new Castlevania game written by Rian Johnson 6: Probably the pachinko game 7: Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance ...Sorry about that, but I just felt that much of a need to put some breathing room between HoD and the other ones I actually enjoyed playing. As much as I took issue with Circle of the Moon by the end of it, I practically feel unclean putting these two games right next to each other, because they just aren't comparable in any way. Just keep in mind going forward that Harmony of Dissonance is a veeeerrrry distant last place, and god help us if it turns out I have to change that. I mean, I know I don't share the opinion that The Last Jedi's the worst, but at least you didn't rank it below the Pachinko. Yeah, Harmony of Dissonance is one I could not be convinced to play again, I couldn't be bothered to finish. You didn't even mention the weird shit like the room where you have to race a giant ball to get an item. Or the ending boss, which is just a bit pathetic. Regardless, you've still got Ecclesia and Aria, so the only way is up at least. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 2, 2019 Author Share Posted June 2, 2019 14 minutes ago, Dayni said: Even the first Game Boy game is better? Oof. Oh, I was talking about the Igavanias. I actually have very little experience with the classicvanias. 11 minutes ago, Dayni said: I mean, I know I don't share the opinion that The Last Jedi's the worst, but at least you didn't rank it below the Pachinko. Yeah, the pachinko one felt like the funniest one to use as the "third thing". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 3, 2019 Author Share Posted June 3, 2019 (edited) 6 hours ago, Rapier said: Also, I second that Harmony of Dissonance was a terrible experience, and also my first one. I really am not sure how they could make such a clunky, dark game, because even Circle of the Moon's very basic formula works fine as it is, and it's nowhere ambitious. If it weren't for Aria later, I'd have given up on the series. Check with the Vatican. You may qualify for sainthood for giving the series a second chance when HoD was your first exposure. EDIT: sorry for the accidental double-post. I forgot I was the last person to post on this. ALSO EDIT: I figured out a way to emulate SotN, so that's on the list right smack dab between Aria and Order! Ditching HoD has been looking like a more and more sensible decision by the day. Edited June 3, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Interdimensional Observer Posted June 3, 2019 Share Posted June 3, 2019 (edited) 19 hours ago, Johann said: and the Dracula battle room is half made up of pits I have seen a picture of that before, I knew from that alone the game was too evil for me. 13 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: ALSO EDIT: I figured out a way to emulate SotN, so that's on the list right smack dab between Aria and Order! Ditching HoD has been looking like a more and more sensible decision by the day. Enjoy Symphony of the Night! My fourth Igavania, and the first game I might have played on my end-of-life-cycle-purchased-for-cheap PS3. 17 hours ago, Alastor15243 said: Yeah, the pachinko one felt like the funniest one to use as the "third thing". Pachinko is a great choice. A lesser option would have been Castlevania: Judgement. If anyone isn't familiar with it. It is the 3D free-to-move-around fighting game where: Simon in a midriff feels insecure because he relied on the VK whip too much Alucard looks less beautiful Dracula is okay Ralph/Trevor authentically him I think Eric Lecarde is an arrogant child Shanoa is a nun, from a point in her storyline where she cannot have at least one of the Glyphs she does Death doesn't look like Death at all Carmilla is sexy and BDSM A golem exists and is playable for some inexplicable reason Sypha has a big bust Loli Maria has bust envy Aeon is an OC time master and not a chef Grant is a cool ninja pirate And Cornell from Legacy of Darkness is awesome The praise for PoR is making me rethink my opinion on it. I actually sold it years ago to deflate my DS game collection size. Not to say I disliked it, I actually played it so much as a kid that like with Sacred Stones in Fire Emblem, I ended up burning myself out with it, love became exhaustion. Edited June 3, 2019 by Interdimensional Observer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Johann Posted June 3, 2019 Share Posted June 3, 2019 4 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said: I have seen a picture of that before, I knew from that alone the game was too evil for me. It's not as crazy as it sounds, since he only has like 3 (predictable) moves and it's easy to avoid them if you're careful. You can really take your time with it. 4 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said: Castlevania: Judgement oh no, we don't talk about Judgment Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rapier Posted June 3, 2019 Share Posted June 3, 2019 (edited) Judgment is a fun game, at least. I wish the controls weren't so weird, because seriously, it was a bad idea to force the Wiimote through the playerbase's throat the way some Wii games did. Judgment is one of these games where it doesn't work well at all. @Alastor15243 Sainthood comes after death, so, uh... I think I'll pass for now, thanks. Edited June 3, 2019 by Rapier Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 4, 2019 Author Share Posted June 4, 2019 (edited) Aria of Sorrow I don’t know if I can properly put into words just what it felt like to give up on playing Harmony of Dissonance and then, within minutes, switch right over to playing Aria of Sorrow. I described the experience of playing Harmony of Dissonance as being like wandering aimlessly through fog. Well, it turned out the fog was so thick that when I came out of it, I was gasping for air. And Aria of Sorrow was a breath of the goddamned fresh stuff. The difference just between the ways they felt to control was mind-boggling. Harmony of Dissonance was rigid and disorienting, with every other movement function in Juste’s arsenal feeling stilted and alien and deeply wrong, like something out of a newgrounds flash game rather than a professional product. Then I started playing Aria of Sorrow. I could feel the difference immediately. He was fast and smooth, responding to my tiniest inputs in all the ways I’ve come to expect from SotN and every title released from this point on. This is the level of control I expect over my metroidvania characters. The ability to have full control over them at nearly all times, with it always being my fault if I was in the wrong place to dodge an attack or hit an enemy. They’re still a dash below Hollow Knight in my opinion, because Hollow Knight lets you move when you’re doing ground attacks in addition to aerial ones, but still awesome. For that matter, Soma controls and feels even better than he does in Dawn of Sorrow as well. His movement seems a bit faster, for one thing. At first I thought it might be an illusion caused by a more zoomed in screen and his faster-moving animation, but no, I checked, he definitely moves faster, and I can definitely tell you it certainly feels better to control. That’s going to be a recurring theme here, actually. I’ve found through replaying this game that apart from graphics (and oftentimes even then, due to some artistic decisions in DoS that I don’t agree with), this game does nearly everything better than its sequel. Which is a nice way of saying the sequel does nearly everything worse, I realize, but thankfully for me I never experienced that sense of disappointment. Rather than falling in love with the original first and being disappointed by the sequel, I fell in love with the sequel first, and fell even more in love with the original. Aria of Sorrow reassures me that it wasn’t just blind nostalgia that made me like Soma so much, and reaffirms my opinion that, at least gameplaywise, he’s the best protagonist the Igavanias have ever had. Why do I say this? Well let me ask you a simple question: Imagine you are forced to live in an alternate reality in which one of the Castlevania protagonists was the main playable character of every Igavania. Or, on a less bleak and more fun note, imagine there were a project to mod every single Igavania to make a certain Castlevania protagonist the playable character of all of them. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, either works for my point. The question is: which character would you want that to be? For me, there’s absolutely no question or debate about it. There’s only one character in the whole series who could do that and never get stale. In fact, there’s only one character in the whole series for whom that is even an exciting or meaningful prospect. And his name is Soma Cruz. If it were the former question, I would mourn the loss of gimmick variety caused by such a sadistic choice, but my mind also comes alive with excitement at the thought of what powers he might get from the varied and crazy enemies I’ve seen in all the games I’ve played. Even with the shamelessly cloned elemental armors and demons from Circle of the Moon, the sheer variety of abilities they could grant Soma practically write themselves. Magically, Soma wouldn’t play the same way twice in any of them. His powers are defined by each game’s bestiary, and no two games’ bestiaries are anything alike. And I am absolutely delighted to say that my favorite Castlevania protagonist to play as has improved the average ranking of his games on this list. Yep, this is one of the great ones, folks. Let me count the ways. The Good Again, to use the glass-half-full phrasing, this game improves on its successor in nearly every way. To the degree that it’s nearly impossible to explain why I loved this game so much without putting it into perspective just how much better than Dawn of Sorrow this game is. So let’s get started, shall we? 1: No magic seals. Now, the astute reader will notice that I didn’t even mention those things in my entry on Dawn of Sorrow. This is because magic seals didn’t bother me too much in Dawn of Sorrow. Mostly because they never cost me a victory against a boss. Every time I failed to do it properly, I managed to eventually do it right without dying. But even so, I cannot deny that it was a bad idea and yet another entry in a long line of shameless instances of Nintendo pushing its new tech on us in pointless and for-the-sake-of-it ways with no thought of how it actually impacts gameplay. I think the fact that neither of the later DS Igavanias had them is testament to how short-sighted and obviously pointless an idea it was. 2: Everything is faster in a good way. This became readily apparent from the moment I started playing, and kept getting more apparent in more ways as time went on. I can’t tell you how many times I thought to myself while playing this game: “this is faster than it was in Dawn of Sorrow and I love it.” Actually, I think I can tell you how many times I thought that. Let’s go: * Soma moves faster. I noticed this immediately. Not only does he move faster, but his running animation feels a touch more energetic as well, as if they intentionally slowed Soma’s moving animation down in Dawn of Sorrow to make his running animation as buttery-smooth as possible with the added FPS. Which they succeeded in, by the way. Even back when I originally played Dawn of Sorrow, I was amazed by just how smoothly Soma moved and how you could barely tell the difference between each frame of animation and the ones that came before and after. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Soma moves faster. Just fast enough to feel like you’re never going too slow, but not so fast that he’s hard to control. In fact, control feels perfect. * Soma attacks faster. While the variety of weapon types is rather limited compared to DoS and it lacks the ultra-fast katana, every weapon type that is in Aria of Sorrow has a faster and shorter attack animation than its counterpart in Dawn of Sorrow. Honestly, the only time I really felt slow and helpless while attacking was whenever I was forced to do a ducking attack on the ground. This general speed up, naturally, makes combat more fast-paced, which goes well with the fact that… * Enemies are faster. This doesn’t really become readily apparent in the early game, but it becomes blatantly obvious around the point you get to the Arena. Some of the enemies there are crazy fast. They’re more demanding of your reflexes not only to defend, but also to the attack. Enemies like the killer mantle and lubicant (sic) are tricky little bastards you’ll need to be on your A game to fight. Hell, aside from the fleamen and rippers, I don’t think even hard mode Portrait of Ruin had enemies that needed you this alert and twitchy. * Soma even flies faster. Bat Company and Owl Morph are fascinating concepts, but I always hated how sluggish and vulnerable they were, with a transformation sequence and generally slow air speed. As a result I basically never used them for anything but the parts they’re needed for, and after the super jump powerup makes them obsolete I never touched them again. With Giant Bat on the other hand, AoSoma makes Charlotte and DoSoma look like rank amateurs. AoSoma just morphs into a bat instantaneously, with absolutely no interruption to his momentum, and his flight speed is equal to, maybe even a tiny bit faster than, his normal ground and air speed. It’s so much fun to use that I can’t understand why it was changed for the DS games. It feels so good to control that I almost don’t care that they hid the super jump soul in a secret wall and I almost missed it. 3: Everyone looks cooler. This isn’t just the art style, I’m talking about the general sprite work. While I won’t deny the sprites are in beautiful detail in Dawn of Sorrow, everyone’s animations and poses just plain look more badass, cool and generally appealing. Graham is way more intimidating than Dario and Dimitri ever looked. Julius looks like he’s practically gliding across the ground when he runs, as if the ground itself can only bear to get so close to his manly feet. Yoko isn’t wearing pants. I can’t think of a single person in AoS whose sprites I don’t prefer to their DoS counterparts, except maybe for Arikado, and that’s only because his sprites are the only ones that didn’t go through significant changes in DoS and he also becomes Alucard in all his SotN glory. Also, I can’t really describe it too well, but everyone in Dawn of Sorrow feels… unnaturally tall and thin. I’m not sure why it feels that way. But the proportions used in AoS feel more appealing to me in some way I’m not sure I’m properly describing. 4: The souls are better. Setting aside the obvious fact that unlike Dawn of Sorrow and even Portrait of Ruin, you can use abilities at full power right off the bat in this game, a lot of enemies that returned in Dawn of Sorrow had their powers replaced with lamer ones. In Dawn of Sorrow, Mini Devil and Imp gave you a summon and the ability to temporarily swap enemies’ HP and MP respectively. In Aria of Sorrow, they give you that summon and the ability to shoot Mini Devil’s crescent energy blades. Rather than leaving your body to do a pittance of recon as a ghost (a nearly totally pointless power in DoS), AoS’s ghost soul lets you shoot seeking missiles of light. And while I can’t deny it’s fun to turn into a giant winged Valkyrie and charge at your foes with a lance, I honestly feel it’s slightly more cool to summon the spirit of a giant naked woman to swing a massive holy sword at your foes in a huge fuck-off arc. Besides, AoS still has transformation powers. In fact it has three of them compared to DoS’s two. This game also gives you souls that let you run on water (fun, if underutilized) and gives you the awesome headhunter soul, which is essentially a super form that boosts your str, con and int proportional to how many souls you’ve captured over the course of the game. I can’t think of a single one of my favorite souls Soma gets access to that isn’t in this game, and few of them carried over to DoS. It’s just way more fun to mess around with them, and most of them are even useful in some way. I wound up finding uses for ones I hadn’t even thought of touching when I got stuck on the Headhunter boss fight. But actually, no, let’s not set aside the obvious fact that unlike Dawn of Sorrow and even Portrait of Ruin, you can use abilities at full power right off the bat in this game. Because that’s really fucking great. Drop rates for most souls are reasonable enough that even if you go through the game normally, only fighting the enemies in the rooms you pass on the way to your next objective, whether that be finding the next plot area or just having fun exploring the castle, you’ll have plenty of souls to choose from, but probably never the same set twice. 5: Hard mode isn't locked behind clear data. Yet another baffling instance of what really sounds like a problem the sequel would fix rather than a problem the sequel would add. I assumed when I heard about Aria of Sorrow being one of the easiest games that I'd have to use clear data to play hard mode, and this time there wouldn't even be a way to get rid of all of the souls I'd collected. But no. It's an honest to goodness normal hard mode where you can play with a fresh file. And they even boost the soul capture rates of enemies you haven't gotten the souls for yet, just to cut down on the need for grinding while still letting you get more tools in your arsenal. I haven't tested out hard mode yet since I had to beat normal mode to do it (I lost my cartridge and had to emulate it), but let me assure you that did not cause any problems because... 6: The difficulty is better, and in better ways. This was the really fun thing to discover. I initially thought that this would be a cakewalk, considering how easily I plowed through the first handful of bosses. I even half considered playing the game without upgrading my armor at all in order to compensate for all of the enemies doing 1 damage to me. But that turned out to be a combination of collision damage and attack damage being different things on enemies in this game, where just bumping into them doesn't do as much damage in many cases as getting hit by their attacks, and also the fact that I did a very minor sequence break to get a slightly ahead of the curve piece of armor you're supposed to need the double jump to get. You see, there's this trick I discovered you can do in this game called the backdash jump, where you backdash, then immediately jump, then start moving in the direction you were backdashing in before the backdash ends. If you do it right you'll co slightly farther and can even do curved jumps you normally need two jumps for. This doesn't let you sequence break story stuff, but it lets you get a handful of early game items earlier. But I'm getting off topic. The game was indeed initially a total cakewalk, but it started picking up speed quickly. The bosses in this game that aren't later repurposed as generic enemies generally belong to two fundamental design philosophies: big, immobile bosses who generally demand observation skills of you, as they have attacks with windups and warnings, but these cues can take place in places on their sprites that are far apart and demand you pay attention to things other than the weak spot you're whaling on. The biggest instances of this are Balore, Graham, and the final boss, Chaos. The other type is the one I prefer (though I found the former satisfyingly difficult as well), and it involves the smaller, agile, human-sized bosses who test your skills at approach and dodging and reacting to attacks. The biggest and best instances of these were Headhunter and Julius. Especially Julius. I think he might be my favorite boss battle I've fought so far in this marathon. I was constantly diving in for opportunities to attack and then retreating, and every time I got hit it was because I misread the situation and went in at a bad time. The fact that I was making thorough use of the speed up power in this fight, and it felt totally natural and almost intended, just felt absolutely amazing. I did manage to beat this one on my first try (in contrast to headhunter, who gave me quite a bit of hell with his ground-crawling making it impossible to attack him on the ground without crouching and exposing myself), but it was such a close and intense fight that I don't think I've ever had more fun. I died a good deal more in this game than I did in Dawn of Sorrow, and keep in mind I was intentionally nerfing my armor like crazy when playing through that game, while here I was wearing everything I could get my hands on because I felt like it warranted it. So I think I feel confident in saying that Aria beats Dawn soundly in the difficulty department, at least when comparing normal modes. But the game truly hits peak difficulty in the last two main areas of the castle, the Arena and the Top Floor. Here, even the enemies started feeling like serious tests of my reflexes and agility. Lubicants, Killer Mantles, Gladiators, so many enemies were just moving all over the place, difficult to approach and dodge, and I loved every minute of it. I think the werejaguars and weretigers would have been cool fights too, except there's an exploit with them where they just do not know how to handle you if you just duck and spam attack, causing them to charge into you and then expose themselves to be knocked back by your attacks. Well, you can't anticipate everything players do. This sudden exciting rush of enemy difficulty unfortunately does not carry over to the Chaotic Realm, the last area of the game, which was honestly extremely disappointing considering what came before it. Few new enemies appeared, and most of the returning enemies were way too easy for me to beat with my brand new mighty sword of light (which is insanely broken in this game, I must say, what with it having all of the attack speed and land-canceling of the shortsword but having the reach and power and swing arc of a big sword). Still, those two areas were unquestionably the most excited I ever felt fighting normal enemies in this entire marathon while the experience lasted. Also, this is the only game so far where I wasn't once tempted to sit around in a room and wait for my MP to recharge. Mostly because your MP recharge rate is pretty bad, but I actually liked that change given the result. It really encourages you to recharge your MP by hitting candles and moving forward, not by waiting around in a cleared room and screwing with your phone in the meantime. The occasional tonic didn't hurt, and I think this is the only game I ever wound up using them in the openings when I was allowed to use items. This game does have an ability that lets you restore HP by waiting around, but I was never once tempted to use it. I largely just used the health potions I had used up to that point. That might suggest that the enemies in PoR gave me a harder time, perhaps, given how often I was grinding HP and MP between rooms, but I had way more fun with the brand of difficulty the late-game enemies in this game provided. I think I've made my case for Aria being the superior game to Dawn of Sorrow, and even better than Portrait of Ruin in many respects. But, yes... The Bad ...I did have a handful of complaints I jotted down on my phone while playing. I'll list them here, generally in chronological order of when I noticed them. 1: The writing is bad. I know I said when talking about Dawn of Sorrow that Aria has the superior story. I still, technically stand by that. I like the premise and general overarching events of this game much better than those of Dawn of Sorrow. The problem is that the writing is often rushed and clumsy, and we barely get to know any of the characters. We meet J in like one, maybe two scenes before he discovers he is in fact Julius "Killed Dracula For Real" Belmont, and storywise the weight of the climactic, awesome fight between Soma and Julius doesn't feel earned, amazing as it was. And a lot of dialogue seems stupid and bizarre, especially that of Graham and Soma. I don't know what it is, but between Fire Emblem Fates, Harmony of Dissonance, and now this, I keep playing games with mysterious, mystic white-haired pretty boys who look all cool and badass but then they open their mouths and stupid shit comes out. I don't know how much of this is the fault of the localization team, but I'm willing to bet it's a lot, because... 2: The localization is bad. Did you ever wonder, when first playing this game, why Soma Cruz has a Japanese childhood friend when he's an exchange student not originally from Japan? Well that's because he isn't actually an exchange student. He's Japanese, they just wanted to change his name from Kurusu to Cruz for the localization. Which, I admit, is indeed a cooler name. But the fact that they didn't even think for a second about the immediate plothole implications of this change suggests they weren't being too thorough in their work here. As, indeed, do the numerous mistranslated enemy and weapon names, and even several soul power descriptions that are outright lies. Restoring HP by jumping in midair after being attacked is not the kind of "recovery" the Zombie Officer's description meant. It really means you can just right yourself and regain control of Soma without having to wait until he hits the ground. And Dead Warrior doesn't let you "deflect normal attacks" with your special attacks. It lets you cancel your own. 3: The two water powers should have been silver souls, not orange souls. I can kind of understand only selectively wanting to be able to walk on water, but there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to use the water mobility soul at all times without it taking up your enchant soul slot. I initially assumed that they hadn't come up with the idea of making silver souls togglable, and that that was something the sequel added. But no. They had that idea in Aria of Sorrow first, they just didn't make use of it. And also, there's not even a situation where it would be more useful to automatically float rather than have to swim by infinite swim jumping like 2D Mario. A minor complaint, I realize, but it's a bit annoying to have to switch to the skula soul to dive and not get to use any of my enchant souls underwater. 4: The Floating Garden was weird. This is really a minor complaint (as are nearly all of these), but I still felt it was kind of cheating to make the floating garden lead to this network of disconnected rooms floating up above the castle. No other stage in the entire series works like that and it's really disorienting in a way that doesn't feel earned for what sort of place it's done in. I wish they found a way to make a more natural path connecting the main castle to the chaotic realm and the clock tower. 5: The shop is still just as terrible as ever. Nothing more to say about this, just the standard fare of the shitty shop with the only things besides potions really worth buying being hilariously overpriced. But I honestly didn't mind too much beyond the pointlessness of it, because this time I never felt the need to buy anything. Not even the soul eater ring. I was extremely satisfied with the variety of souls my natural playthrough of the game gave me, and I didn't grind at all except one attempt to get the durga soul to investigate past the waterfall (which gave me the soul literally on the first try). 6: I don't like hiding areas behind random drops. Like I said, I had to grind (if barely) the durga soul in order to get a charge attack to clear the waterfall in my effort to explore the whole map to see how hard or grindy it was to get all the clues to get the true ending. Thankfully that part was wrong. None of the books were hidden behind that waterfall, though one was outside of it in a place I could have easily gotten to if I had just used the slide kick in the area where I got the double jump. So it doesn't bother me too much, especially as it's entirely optional content and I barely went through any trouble to get to it. 7: The true ending requirements are kind of obtuse. I mean they technically provide you with all the clues you need, with Graham mentioning "the souls" you don't have, and full exploration of the castle granting you access to three books that give you pretty decent clues as to what they are, but I would have probably been more annoyed having to look that up if I didn't remember it from my original playthrough. Also, the fact that you have to grind the souls to get the ending is an annoyance, but I got both the flame demon and succubus souls naturally, so that definitely softened the blow. 8: The animation for big swords is lame. Not much else to say here, it's kind of blatantly obvious, at least compared to the much more detailed and cool-looking animation in Dawn of Sorrow. The few spears in the game also have lamer animations than in Dawn of Sorrow. But as I said, they're faster, so gameplaywise it's an improvement, if a bit awkward. 9: You can't take Black Panther back with you on a replay. This is one thing I don’t like about the Sorrow games. Did you ever notice that Portrait of Ruin lets you take the speed up power back through New Game Plus, but the Sorrow games don’t? That’s because Black Panther lets you move so fast, on the ground and through the air, that it’s even better than the flying armor soul for long jumps. This makes it a sequence-breaking hazard. Portrait of Ruin, however, doesn’t gate any plot progress behind horizontal jumping tests, just vertical ones, so it can let you take the speed up power back with you on a New Game Plus without any risk of sequence breaking issues at all. Though for me, this is more of a minor niggle than a genuine criticism, since the appeal of New Game Plus has almost entirely become lost on me now that I’m looking for an engaging challenge rather than mindless curb-stompy goodness. Except when it’s as insanely, awesomely detailed as the Bravely games, where you get to choose down to the tiniest detail exactly what you want to bring back. 10: Weapon choice is really limited compared to the DS games. Really, the only weapons I found worth using were the shortswords and the Claimh Solais. Then again, I tend to stick with my favorite in most games, but still, it's a weakness worth pointing out. SO... weighing together all the good with the bad... where does Aria of Sorrow stand? 1: Aria of Sorrow 2: Portrait of Ruin 3: Dawn of Sorrow 4: Circle of the Moon 5: Harmony of Dissonance Yep. It's the new best. While the cringey writing was a bit of an annoyance, and there were a few things that made it clear it came before the DS ones along with all the stuff it bizarrely did better than DoS, all in all It was easily the smoothest and most satisfying experience from beginning to end. Portrait of Ruin may have had a more satisfyingly difficult beginning, but Aria of Sorrow's difficulty escalated in a more natural and elegant fashion where the new equipment I got my hands on didn't make the game get easier rather than harder until the final battle. Plus, all of Soma's powers are useful right out of the gate, with no demands whatsoever for grinding, and I got plenty of them, which puts its gimmick above all three of the previous games worthy of me acknowledging their existence in the canon. And to top it all off, this was my experience playing NORMAL mode. I for one can't wait to play hard. But for now... it’s time to dive right into the original masterpiece known as Symphony of the Night. Edited June 12, 2019 by Alastor15243 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheGoodHoms Posted June 4, 2019 Share Posted June 4, 2019 1 hour ago, Alastor15243 said: That’s going to be a recurring theme here, actually. I’ve found through replaying this game that apart from graphics (and oftentimes even then, due to some artistic decisions in DoS that I don’t agree with), this game does nearly everything better than its sequel. Which is a nice way of saying the sequel does nearly everything worse, I realize, but thankfully for me I never experienced that sense of disappointment. Rather than falling in love with the original first and being disappointed by the sequel, I fell in love with the sequel first, and fell even more in love with the original. Aria of Sorrow was my first Castlevania game and I loved it to bits. So when I decided to pick up another game, naturally I decided to go for Aria's direct squeal. While I wouldn't call Dawn of Sorrow a truly bad game, I definitely felt like I could have better spend my money on Portrait of Ruin or Order of Ecclesia by the time the credits rolled. Nowadays whenever I revisit DoS I always play in Julius Mode since it removes the touchscreen gimmicks and lets you play around with Julius, Yoko, and Alucard, each of them bringing a unique and satisfying play-style to the experience. However, if I want to play as Soma Cruz, I'll rarely play DoS when I have the option to play AoS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeaceRibbon Posted June 4, 2019 Share Posted June 4, 2019 On 6/2/2019 at 8:40 PM, Alastor15243 said: Check with the Vatican. You may qualify for sainthood for giving the series a second chance when HoD was your first exposure. You actually wouldn't need to check with the Vatican for sainthood, because that just refers to a person residing heaven. If you are checking for Sainthood though.... I'll see myself out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alastor15243 Posted June 4, 2019 Author Share Posted June 4, 2019 1 minute ago, PeaceRibbon said: You actually wouldn't need to check with the Vatican for sainthood, because that just refers to a person residing heaven. If you are checking for Sainthood though.... I'll see myself out. Huh. The more you know. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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