What I'm Playing (Volume 93): Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

I'd been craving another turn through a Castlevania game, but didn't have any left to play that I hadn't completed, other than the two sequels on NES. But I had a handheld slot open rather than a home slot, with way more games in the home backlog than handheld, so I manned up, bought a (very expensive) copy of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, and dug in.

The game is a direct sequel to my beloved Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for the GBA. You again control Soma, possessor of the ability to absorb the souls of monsters and use them, and the potential heir apparent to Dracula as the foretold Dark Lord. You must fight your way through enemies and thwart their attempts to subdue you and force Dracula's soul to take over your body, saving the day in the process.

The game is extremely similar to it's predecessor, with a few little wrinkles allowed by the hardware improvements from the GBA to the DS. The first, best, and most important is that the map now always displays, a titanic improvement. Playing a Castlevania game in the Igarashi era typically featured a lot of toggling back and forth between play and the map, an essential process that admittedly gets tiring after a while. Having the second screen upon which a map can always be displayed, however, is just flat out awesome. You also have a few new buttons to play with, allowing X to be used to switch sets of equipment, allowing you to prepare multiple loadouts for boss fight, and the A is now used to perform special attacks specific to your weapon. I frankly didn't use the A button much, but the ability to switch gear on the fly was really nice, and kept you from breaking up boss fights to root through your inventory to swap out souls and equipment as needed. You also have some limited touch screen interactions, with one ability that requires you to touch blocks on the screen to open up paths, and a magic seal system. This system requires you to draw increasingly elaborate magical seals on your touch screen to seal up enemy bosses after you've depleted all of their health. Fail in your input, and the boss returns to life, so you'd better be ready to draw these seals correctly! I'm not a huge fan of touch screen gaming, and it definitely feels like the touch screen was intentionally lightly used, so I'm mostly fine with this. But I did think that the magic seal system had some more unused potential to it. I wonder what would have happened with a system like Lost Magic's, in which you could open up the rune interface at will, and used it to cast spells similar to how you could use button inputs in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Or if you could have used the same idea to unlock certain secrets within the castle. But I'd rather games use a touch interface too lightly than too much, so this was fine, if slightly disappointing.

The graphics are nearly identical, with a little bit of extra DS polish. The DS and GBA are remarkably similar in terms of graphical output in any case, so a lack of a big jump isn't too surprising, and the original looked excellent to start with. There were a few really striking moments that showed off the hardware improvement, including one excellent sequence in which you blast a boss through the floor, and fall down level after level of a tower, shattering floors all the way down. I don't think this was possible on the old hardware, and there are definitely a few examples of improvements like this.

I have to confess that I barely listened to the soundtrack at all, so I can't report on it. What I heard was good, and in keeping with the good quality I expect from the series, so I can't say it was a negative.

The game again suffers from some unclear game design due to the exploratory nature of the series. There were several points where I simply had no clue what to do or where to go, and I shudder to think of how I would have gotten through this game in a pre-GameFAQs era. Fortunately it was released in 2005, so it never existed at that point, but I do like it when games of any era can be soldiered through without outside help, and this one fell short a few times.

There's definitely not a ton of innovations here, and I don't mind that, but I did feel like they could have done a bit more with the formula. Like Mega Man, I love the formula, so I don't mind the marginal changes between Mega Man 3 and Mega Man 6, but for someone who isn't a huge fan, there's not a ton of reasons to pick this one up on top of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow.

This is a fun game, and a solid member of the Castlevania franchise. I really enjoyed my trek through another creepy castle, and would definitely recommend this one to all Castlevania fans, and people who just love fun games with good mechanics. I'll give it a 9.0/10.

Up next on What I'm Playing is a nice quick hitter I need to clear out the remaining 4 games to hit 50 for the year. Here's a quick teaser below:

  

-TRO

What I'm Playing (Volume 92): Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2

Sports games are one of my all time favorite genres of video games, and I've probably spent more time playing them than any other genre. The top 5 in terms of total time spent are probably sports, RPG, RTS, platformers, and fighting. But my guess is that sports is number one by a narrow edge due to the countless hours I've spent playing Madden, NCAA Football, MLB: The Show, and several other titles. It's funny to me that more "hardcore gamers" seem a bit dismissive towards sports games as a genre, and I think it's largely due to the fact that a substantial portion of these people do not enjoy playing or watching sports in general. But sports games are among the first video games ever made, and some of the most common, for a very simple reason. They have an easily identifiable and defined set of rules that reduces the amount of creativity necessary to come up with a compelling user experience, and they are also geared towards allowing multiple players.

Of all of the sports which have been translated to video game form, I think the most consistently excellent sport is golf. My favorite sports game ever is MLB: The Show, but pretty much every golf game across time and platform has been at least good since Golf for the NES. One reason is that almost all golf games now use motion controls or the three click system created in Golf, and these controls just work fantastically to represent the essentials of golf in a video format. The other reason is that golf itself, as a sport, works incredibly well across a ton of platforms and at any level of visual sophistication. There's no defense in golf, which always makes games like football difficult to represent on screen. Tackling mechanics never quite look right in these games, and it's too easy to find exploitable plays and tactics to rig the game in your favor at any difficulty setting. It also has a pretty simple physics notion (wind, uphills, downhills, and slope of the green) that are easily understood and easily simulated, far more so than the random nature of hitting the ball in, say, a baseball game. Golf also lends itself well to playing with friends due to the fact that hotseat golf works really well, making golf work well on everything from a personal computer to a PS4 with any number of controllers and players. There are so many good golf games, from Golf to NES Open Tournament Golf to Mario Golf to Hot Shots Golf to golfing in Wii Sports to Tiger Wooods PGA Tour that it's difficult to find one that is objectively a bad game. Some of these games are better than others, with Mario Golf being the best ever, in my opinion, but there are at least 5 excellent golf franchises throughout history, and very few bad ones.

I've been hankering to play a golf game, and to try out a new one, so I recently purchased Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 to give it a go, and found myself, yet again, enjoying the core mechanics of the three click golf system. If you're not familiar with the series, it has a few differentiators compared to it's competitors. You play as a roster of original characters who have cartoony appearances and freakishly huge hands.

Good luck finding some golf gloves with those trash can lids

 

You can also customize your characters with bizarre accessories to make them, well, unique. So, if you want to eschew a traditional golf cart for a hot rod, be their guest! Or if you want to change out your club for a rubber squeaky mallet, have at it! Want your character to wear a speedo on the golf course? Your dreams have come true! Did you ever want to pick a samurai themed character and dress him up as a french maid? Go for it!

 

The mechanics of the game, despite the quirky touches, are remarkably similar to Golf, as has been the case for about 30 years of golf video game history (don't fix what isn't broken). And they really work, with two primary elements missing that have been included in the Mario Golf series. First, when you load up for your first shot, you get a question mark for wind speed, which is just stupid. You can't measure the wind speed before your drive? This makes for frequently frustrating experiences in which you tee up, aim your shot perfectly assuming a 3-4 mile an hour wind, and it's actually 1 mph, resulting in you landing in the bunker.

Second, you can't use any sliders to adjust your target with your clubs, making short yardage situations in which you have to hit out of a bunker onto the fairway extremely tough. This game really could have used that feature.

The game is also missing a compelling single player mode that curves in terms of difficulty appropriately. Single player mode ends up just doing "challenges" that are just doing a nine hole tournament or match play contest to unlock new items. Once you've unlocked enough items, you are then allowed to challenge the next opponent, who you can play as once you've defeated him. This gets extremely grindy, as you can unlock a maximum of two items per challenge, and at the higher levels you'll need to unlock upwards of 15 items to even be given a shot at the next unlockable character. There are really two successful kinds of single player modes in golf games, the first being a traditional campaign in which you have to bring your selected character through a PGA Tour season/whatever the story was in Mario Golf: Advanced Tour, and the second being a more streamlined approach in which you can subsequently attempt to unlock characters at will, as in Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour. This felt way too grindy to me, although the golfing was fun for several days, so I didn't mind too much. It would have also felt better if the courses/competition scaled better, as I absolutely stomped every opponent for almost all of the challengers, and then got to courses on which I couldn't shoot better than a +5 in 9 holes seemingly all at once. The wind and adjustable shot difficulties simply made it too difficult to navigate these extremely difficulty holes, particularly when you factor in that at higher levels, many of the challenges will feature special rules like adding an extra shot for landing in the bunker or rough.

Despite my preference for the more polished Mario Golf series, I had a tremendous amount of fun hitting the links, again. This is a silly facade placed onto a flawed, but fun game. If you like golf games, and who doesn't, you'll get plenty of enjoyment out of this very cheap game. I'll give it an 8.0/10.

I have no clue what's coming next for handhelds. I've really tapped out a lot of my collection I have to play through due to my increased time for handhelds relative to home consoles, so I may need to purchase another game here. Check back in for a true surprise once I settle on a choice.

-TRO