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
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