Castlevania: Lament of Innocence

[Dracos]

This review is going to be more of an impressionistic style given it took me a grand total of a day to finish the entire game and it's all very thoroughly still in my mind.  This is the latest in the famed Castlevania series by Konami.  I was technically not planning on buying it as I thought the story was happily concluded at the dramatic and evokative ending of Castlevania:Symphony of the Night, but after receiving it for a gift, I decided to sit down and play it.

My first impression: Mediocrity.  I sat down without reading the manual and turned it on, letting the opening introduction play and watching through it.  The voice acting for the narrator wasn't that great, though he did an okay job, and the overdramatic script lead in was pretty darn bad.  They asked you to eat a few things that were pretty hard to swallow premises (much more involved then a simple: There is a vampire.  He took your wife.  Stab him!).  This culminated in the lead character, Leon Belmont, heading off to fight vampires and abandoning the church.  Heading into the woods, you promptly meet Rinaldo, the game's one shopkeeper and guy who apparently pulls magic shit out of his ass.  Rinaldo promptly chats with Leon in what is one of the most ridiculous attempts to see how much they bullshit can they feed the player before the player throws up.  Literally it involves taking a christian knight in the 11th century and feeding us, in order: "Okay, you can stand alchemy, but what about having your stuff enchanted?  And black magic?  Oh and why not let's have you do some sacrificial blood pacts while you are busy being a christian knight?"  I seriously was ready to give them the benefit of the doubt and the classic suspension of disbelief but they just demanded too much.  I couldn't see a christian knight in that day and age going that far into what would clearly be 'non-christian' rituals.  The storyline goes down from here.  It's really a pity.  If you are a hard core Castlevania fan, you'll find this story absolutely apalling, with tremendous amounts of retroactive continuity going on.  So, the question is if the game is worth playing for other reasons, because only a masochist would play it for the story.

And the answer is, in my opinion, not really.  The game would make a rather fun rent, but has too many problems and too little replayability to be worth buying.  In combat, the game pretty much shines with a good, if not great, combat system.  The combat system starts off on a straight forward 3d combat system with semi-auto targetting for your whip (point the direction, if an enemy is there, you'll connect) and a double jump feature (which doesn't belong with the setting but is there anyway).  It then adds on top of that the basic sub weapons of castlevania which can be modified into about twenty or so special attacks that cost hearts (Which are remarkably hard to run out of, so effectively can be used all the damn time).  Additionally it has a skill system that pops up as you play expanding your attack reptoire.  The skills are pretty nifty, but felt sort of shallow overall and would've been nice to be far more varied.  Many of them were simple repeats of other skills done at different 'times' in the attack routine.  Most were also totally unnecessary as a the simple basic whip strike was enough for virtually everything.  Sadly, the enemy AI was rarely up to task though.  They almost always made the assumption you'd be attacking directly, and often let you run right past them if you tried.  Additionally, their patterns tended to fit without change into a few basic setups which worked on every single enemy of that type without fail.  Thus it was simple, if easy fun throughout.  (Reviewers note: There is a crazy mode unlocked when you beat the game that is apparently harder, but I didn't care to go back through the game so if the AI is better in it, I can't say)  So if you like going around and whacking easy things, the game does that pretty well.

Unfortunately, the level design is utter tripe.  A good 20-40 percent of the game is just empty refill corridors which means there is an awful lot of tedious walking around.  Moreso between the computer controlled camera and the room design, a lot of rooms were annoying.  Often the camera would be pointing directly away from where you had to jump or walk, providing a confusing setup that was particularly bad for some of the jumps.  The secret design varied from blatantly easy to extremely unintuitive and some stuff was tossed in just to be there (roller coaster area for example) and exists in a sort of unexplained void.  The whole thing came off as extremely uncreative in design and generally poorly built.  Particularly of note was the two black rooms.  The black rooms were a room of pits and platforms with half the platforms invisible unless you landed on one.  But don't worry, falling into the pits doesn't kill you.  So you have infinite tries to guess where the invisible platforms are.  Needless to say this merely creates a very frustrating and unentertaining puzzle design that never should've got out of discussions and into the game.

I'm not going to go into the voice overs any further than to say they were miserable.  The music was okay.  It wasn't of the quality of some earlier castlevanias but it had some nifty tracks.  I expect that Lament of Innocence will eventually get remixed or arranged into someting truly superb and they did fit a Vampire Hunter remix into the ending credits.  Overall though, I wouldn't put out for the OST.  Nothing like some of the earlier ones.

Overall, while I enjoyed my play, the game has problems.  I wouldn't recommend paying 50 bucks for this game.  A 5 dollar rental would likely see you through all you could ever desire of the game and if you really want to replay a game, go back and pick up Symphony of the night.

[Anastasia]

Heh.

Strangely enough, I heard a fair amount of good stuff about this game. Not just from random morons, but from people I trust a fair deal. So I picked the game up last week and gave it a go.

Two hours of gameplay later, I haven't touched it. Why? Dracos hit it dead on about Rinaldo and the idiocy of the story therein. Okay, if I recall my early Castlevania games the Vampire Killer was given to a Belmont by an angel.

WAIT, RETCON!

No, it's a whip made by a mage/alchemist/hobo and given to a moron who went to a monster filled castle without a weapon. After this and a voice over scene that was enough to prompt ear damage, I got into the game. Whipping the monsters was straight forward, with Skeletons and Zombies usually not even getting close.  Sure, no big. These freaks are supposed to be cannon fodder, so I wasn't alarmed.

I proceed to play through the first few sections, mostly adapting to the system. I'll admit that I died a few times, as I rarely play 3d games and it took me a while to get used to controlling Generic Belmont. Though, once I got the groove down, it was cake.

Further, it was utterly boring. The battles went from new to rote within a few hours. I don't need to tell you that's a bad, bad thing. Mash Triangle or Square and watch the undead get creamed! MASHMASHMASHMASH! The challenge decreased at a scary pace, frankly, beyond what I would expect for just getting used to the game mechanics.

At this point, I went to bed that night and haven't picked it up since. It failed to interest me enough for a second playing session. The attempt at gameplay felt shallow and simple early in the game, the music was WEAK(I have omitted a rant about the music and what a Castlevania game's music should be in the interest of preventing a 10,000 word digression.), and the opening scene ensured that I wouldn't be entranced in the least by the plot.


This leads me to only one conclusion:

Lament of Innocence is not a Castlevania game. It's just another PSX/PS2 era 3der that has a horror skin slapped on for shits and giggles. I cannot believe that a true Castlevania title would be so lackluster, even more so than that Sega Genesis entry into the set.

Disbelief is the only recourse to this game; I shall not entertain the thought that the same company that put out the earlier Castlevania games spurted LoI out.[/b]

[Dracos]

To put it a bit more bluntly...Olguin summarized my thoughts on this game nicely when hearing me rant while playing it.

:It's a shame you can't ECB a video game.  Send them a fifty page "This is why your game sucks.":

Dracos