Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow - SotN + Shitty Magic Seals

[Dracos]

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is the first Nintendo DS iteration of the long running Castlevania series by Konami.  One of their staple series, it has a long history to live up to, many games great and horrible in its heritage.  One most notable among them was Symphony of the Night, a game that is widely considered to be the best of the series, a superb tale of Alucard's adventure fighting and overcoming his father Dracula to banish him once and for all.  It was a step away from the castlevania's of old, but it was a good step and one that got many fans.

Konami, realizing its popularity, tried repeatedly to copy it.  Largely, what they showed is that they really didn't understand what had made Symphony of the Night popular and great to begin with.  It also didn't help them that they'd killed off their main villain in a permanent sense.  The follow up set of copies were generally regarded as not as good, weak, etc. Just sort of a downturn for the whole series after many very strong games.  The non-copies didn't help much in this, with most of their 3d offerings being pretty weak so far and their old style 2d offerings vanishing from the face of the earth.

In comes dawn of sorrows, and...something went right.  I'm not even quite sure what, but they got it down again.  Here you play Soma, reincarnation of Count Dracula with the power to dominate the souls of monsters.  You battle against an evil cult that wants to recreate the dark lord and are none too specific about who actually takes that spot.  Yeah, it's a bit cheesy, sort of like SotN was there.  Soma, like any natural incarnation, is a thin silver haired bishie.  Joy there.  He's accompanied, for values of encountering them a few times, by an Arikudo, an old man Belmont, a generic mage girl, and a generic shopkeeper guy.  These guys do crap in effect, largely existing so that there's some casual dialogue that happens and a place to buy stuff or fuse souls to items.

All of this doesn't really matter.  You're really playing Alucard.  I know, he looks like a pussy bishonen guy, but they completely ripped off Alucard's entire animation scheme for him and he plays like he's Alucard.  The castle is fun to explore, not quite as good as SotN but you know what, it's good enough.  It's bright, it's got its few little tidbits.  There is lots to navigate in it and neat monsters to kill.  It works.  They added this whole concept of souls where you can get abilities, power ups, etc by ripping the souls from monsters.  A bit tedious to collect them all, but in a single run through and not worrying about that it's neat.  You also get to merge souls with weapons for more powerful ones.  I'm keen on that.  You've got your variety of different weapons to kill people with, including guns.  Yeah, sure I speared like one enemy ever, but the variety was there to work with.

So you've got your nifty larger than life bosses, your castle, your alucard-clone, your meandering cult, your nifty castlevania music, your secret breakable walls, and your crappy dialogue.  All the things necessary for a great romp through Castlevania.  I'm hip to that.  They could've just done that and I would've been keen.  The soul stuff? A little tedious at points and prompting of a rant in its own right, but you know what? Base concept was neat enough and it was entertaining even if I only used like 10 of them.

Unfortunately, they had to screw with it.  They had to be a little DSesy.  They didn't realize that it is an insanely awkward motion to move from using the buttons to using the stylus.  One or the other?  Sure.  Switching between them was painful each time it came up.  At least they realized it wasn't fast and didn't require you to do it quickly.  You had two real instances where it came up.  The first, the minor one, was a few crystal block puzzles where the blocks could only be broken with the stylus.  It was a little annoying, but rare.  The second was that after almost every boss fight, you had to draw one of five symbols, swiftly and without lifting the stylus (accurately was less important than whether its corners went to the right places).  It started off easy and got gradually harder, meanwhile in each instance if you failed, the boss regained some fifteen to twenty percent of his life.  Repeated failures could make a simple boss fight very long and, towards the end of the game, could be exceedingly dangerous as the bosses became particularly more deadly.  Luckly, this isn't bad enough to be game breaking, but it was a major issue that unfortunately is an ugly smear on an otherwise beautiful game.

A more minor issue is that soul drop rates were sort of planned poorly.  This isn't noticeable until you try and collect them all, in which case, even with the soul drop ring that's exceedingly expensive, you'll find a few that are simply painful to get their souls.  Enemies that were assigned miserable 1-2 percent drop rates on top of appearing only once or twice in the entire game world.  This will, inevitably, lead to you getting a fair number of souls by stepping in and out of a room and repeatedly killing the same enemy over and over again, usually quickly reaching a point where you could do so endlessly.  This, obviously, isn't fun.  It lucky is extra stuff just to get the chaos ring (a neat but strictly optional item).  It's disappointing that they did it that way, but ultimately minor in the enjoyment of the game.

Dracos