Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - Fantastic

[Dracos]

It's time again to return to that place of antiquity, that land far off, where peasant fear to travel.  To the lands...of Transylvania!  Or Castlevania, as they get known these days.

Closing up 2006, Konami released the latest in the Castlevania lineup on the DS system, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, a follow up to the long ago genesis Bloodlines game starring the Morris clan and done in the style of the recent Aria and Dawn games while filling in a bit of the past.  Let's just get the important parts out of the way first:

This is a fantastic game.  It really is.  I'll be saying that a lot through it, but I've enjoyed two runs of it throughly and while it's got its problems, being enjoyable wasn't one of them.  It also fits really cleanly into the whole series and does it in a pretty elegant fashion.  I appreciated that it worked hard to integrate itself with the series rather than simply rewrite everything to fit what it needed.  That attention in the minor storytelling that it had was nice.  Also coming off some text heavy games, the general speed at which the story flowed was also refreshing.  There was a general elegance to a fair bit of the writing that left lots of explanation usually unnecessary.  The narrative runs that you are the abandoned son of the Morris family, continuing the legacy of your family with only the bare minimal of training.  Unfortunately, Dracula's castle has reappeared, and with it another vampire by the name of Brauner, along with his two daughters, have come to lead the world to destruction.  With the help of your partner, a bright young mage by the name of Charlotte, who really is just the cute underpowered babe of the event, Johnathan Morris seeks to destroy all the vampires in the castle.

The gameplay was similar to the quite smooth experience of Dawn of Sorrow without the souls (Yay) and with a partner.  While Johnathan Morris, the main character, utilized a whip, alongside other weapons, his partner utilizes magic books and spells.  Johnathan also has subweapons that can be powered up by use and, best of all, with the exception of one spell, pretty much all of them naturally show up over the course of a game easily, so the question is which do you use, not which enemy do you camp.  You can switch between the characters at any time or keep both out (Damage to the non-player character goes against MP instead of HP).  They can also not be and on normal it's entirely possible to beat the game old style: Using nothing but the whip slinging action.  On slight negative note, the whip could do to be more flexible and daggers and punches were practically pointless to use, but as a whole there was plenty of fun to be had with Johnathan.  Charlotte was notably underpowered but made for a cute sidekick character and provided the opportunity for banter, which was nice to see in the all too often quiet Castlevania.

What was also nice to see was them getting outside the castle.  Through it's pictures as levels motif, they had four external areas to the castle that made the landscape much more interesting to go through and allowed for different styles of level.  Nation of Fools, patterned off of a mixture of a clown-filled circus and a world war one devastated town was by far my favorite of the lot and absolutely a blast to play through.  Very inspired there and hats off to the designer that did it.  Unfortunately, much like Symphony of the night, they reused the first four picture themes in the last four.  Different architecture, but it would've been nice to see eight original level locations alongside the castle rather than four, in a picky sense.  Most of the levels had pretty good save placement, though a few towards the end were weak or awkwardly placed about the level.

The music was pleasant and the artwork, while of an animey style, was very servicable throughout.  Particularly the backgrounds caught my eye with nice combinations of 2d and 3d effects going on in them and generally drawing one in without being distracting.  Yes, the mains are a bland anime style, if that bugs you.  It bugged me a little bit, if only because it seemed a touch generic, but it didn't get in the way of my enjoyment of the game and the art is clean and effective so it's good enough for me from design critic side.

The game is not very difficult but it has a few really awesome battles.  Legion is remarkably cool in this iteration, which is odd because I never liked that ball of corpses.  He fit really well into his level and was a reasonably neat fight.  A couple of the surprises in the hidden dungeon were great nostalgia battles and were quite fun in their own right as well.  Death gave some good battles but really they topped it all off with a great final battle that starts off with a classic "What?  But you can't do that!" line from the heroes.  I laughed.  Until I was fireballed in the face anyway.  Very neat and far more enjoyable than Dawn of Sorrow's giant monster battle.  Generally a good show all around in that area and for those wanting a greater challenge (if still not very hard), you can play on hard mode with a strict level limit (25 is probably a good number though 1 is allowed).  Personally, I appreciated the general level it was at and enjoyed that the few times I was usually stopped, it wasn't hammering against a tough section or boss.

The controls, in case you were wondering, were tight and responsive and involved no stylus use.  In fact, I'll say that again because it was so awesome No Stylus Use.  See doesn't that just make you feel better?  Admittingly, they use the stylus in an experimental Sisters game mode that's one of the options after you beat the game.

This ranks among the best castlevanias ever, easily, but I do hold three grudges against it that bear noting.

Grudge 1) Showstopper in the middle.  Similiar to Symphony of the Night, the game has a task to be performed in the middle and, due to strange decision making, it's actually significantly harder to do it right as you have to play a defensive game against random spell choices, some of which simply can't  be defended against (Coctys, I'm looking at you) but ruin the task even if they do little damage.  This was aggravating and halted me for a good bit despite being able to slay that boss simply in moments.  It was also a breeze in 'hard' mode due to being able to nigh instantly cast the spell due to later equipment enhancers.  This difference in hard mode indicates that it's probably a mistake that it is such a pain but either way, it was a definite drop in the experience.

Grudge 2) Showstopper 80 percent through in the form of a ghost train.  The ghost train really isn't hard... save for the fact that the AI doesn't like to realize it should push, so it offers a very nonsensical event: The best thing to do is to send your partner away and summon it back after pushing starts so it simply teleports into a pushing mode.  With a tiny margin of area, it was remarkably easy to fail at even knowing the solution and executing it right and involved fifteen seconds of walking each time you failed to restart the puzzle.  That was really lame, Konami.

Grudge 3) It was buggy.  Particularly with subweapons.  I crashed  the game twice and caused a couple of glitch spots from regular subweapon use.  That really doesn't need extra explanation I suppose, but save often.

Outside of those, it was an excellent game experience that with a good flow of new abilities and neat battles coming in.  Highly recommended.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

His name is Brauner, Drac. Not Bharams or whatever.

Anyways, I fundamentally agree with your assessments. While I never had any game crashes and found the 1st gripe an interestin challenge, you're hitting 1.000 here. Awesome game and a geniune improvement on the themes of the DS and Castlevania in general.

[Dexie Oblivion]

Never had an problems with bugs or crashes, and I managed to do the 1st gripe correctly on the first try, myself...

[Dracos]

His name is Brauner, Drac. Not Bharams or whatever.

Anyways, I fundamentally agree with your assessments. While I never had any game crashes and found the 1st gripe an interestin challenge, you're hitting 1.000 here. Awesome game and a geniune improvement on the themes of the DS and Castlevania in general.

Thanks.  Fixed.

Anyhow, the first gripe is actually interesting as it has a lot to do with their randomness.  Had the selection of moves that they did been better, I suspect I would agree with you on interesting challenge.  For me?  I had a huge run of ones interrupted with the 'hit everywhere' coctys spell.  As far as I'm aware, blocking that doesn't work, whether it's defensive stance or whatever.  It'll get through and do a pathetically miniscule amount of damage.  I found it really easy to accidentally kill them an d really difficult to keep her from getting hit long enough to cast it.

Due to the massive disparity between experiences this fight tended to get as far as I can see, I think that they screwed up.  They wanted an interesting challenge but they made some poor move choices which didn't work well with the block and interfere playstyle they were encouraging.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

Anyhow, the first gripe is actually interesting as it has a lot to do with their randomness.  Had the selection of moves that they did been better, I suspect I would agree with you on interesting challenge.  For me?  I had a huge run of ones interrupted with the 'hit everywhere' coctys spell.  As far as I'm aware, blocking that doesn't work, whether it's defensive stance or whatever.  It'll get through and do a pathetically miniscule amount of damage.  I found it really easy to accidentally kill them an d really difficult to keep her from getting hit long enough to cast it.

Due to the massive disparity between experiences this fight tended to get as far as I can see, I think that they screwed up.  They wanted an interesting challenge but they made some poor move choices which didn't work well with the block and interfere playstyle they were encouraging.

Dracos

I'm not sure they screwed up as much as it's a difficult portion that has a fair element of luck. Strategy matters as well - Taunt's useful, as are stalling tactics and just dumb luck.

But anyway.

Did you clear Richter Mode, Drac?

[Dracos]

No.  stopped midway.  Nearly cleared hard and I'll eventually get back to Richter.

Dracos

[Anastasia]

No.  stopped midway.  Nearly cleared hard and I'll eventually get back to Richter.

Dracos

As a heads up, the last battle with Richter is an insane bitch. It's the only fight in the game (Besides the Nest of Evil, but that's special) that punishes you for not levelling up.