Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow

So eventually IGA regained his sanity and created the best Castlevania on the GBA, and then one of my favorite Castlevanias period.

It's hard to exaggerate what an improvement Aria of Sorrow was over Harmony.  The developers finally managed to get BOTH good graphics and audio in their game.  The story, while still dumb as hell, finally moved away from "oh no dracula" to "oh no the destiny of a pretty unlikeable teenager who actually is dracula's reincarnation."

Soma's magic gimmick is probably the best system the metroidvanias are ever going to see, though there are still substantial problems with it.  Every enemy in the game has the potential to cough up its soul.  Each soul is classified into one of three categories: the typical "up+b" bullet attack, a "guardian" ability that can be toggled with the L or R buttons and are usually useless as hell, and souls that grant various passive stat increases.  One soul in each category can be set at any time, allowing a pretty fun amount of experimentation.  Finally, I can throw bones or operate a vacuum cleaner constructed from bones!  Dawn of Sorrow kept this system, except that now many souls now require you collect multiple copies of the same soul in order to increase their power and appearance.

Of course, there are issues to the system.  The first and more minor problem is that some souls are far, far better than others. Sure, you can throw a bone, but why do that when you can shoot a screen wide bolt of lightning that does more damage than the bone and hits multiple times?  Certain souls just trivialize the game, but of course, one can just ignore those souls and have fun with those that are a little less broken.  Aria is not a hard game, and pretty often just feels like a sandbox inviting you to try to solve the same room with different abilities.

The bigger stumbling block is that the chance a soul will drop is frequently ridiculously low.  God help you if you're curious as to what various enemy souls do, because Aria and Dawn require you to either farm like your very life depended on it, or stumble through the game hoping on the kindness of strangers and random number generators.  This is annoying in Aria of Sorrow, but due to the fact that Dawn of Sorrow requires you to have nine souls of many monsters to see their full abilities, you are just going lose your mind dealing with things if you're a completionist.  More problematic is that since killing monsters gives you EXP, doing any farming is just going to further break whatever new powers you get thanks to shiny improved level up stats.

To give an example, roughly a third through my first time through Dawn of Sorrow, I ran into a room filled with Ghost Dancer enemies.  I knew from my experience with Aria that Ghost Dancers give a soul which increases your luck stat, and since I love random item drops (FUCK YOU MEPHISTO I'VE GOT 250 ITEM FIND), I began to plow through the room over and over again.  There was nothing else in the room aside from some guy called an Amalaric Sniper.  After a level's worth of grinding (above 5 minutes), I finally got a Ghost Dancer soul, and realized that I would need to get eight more to FULLY MAXIMIZE MY LUCK STAT.  I gained seven levels in that fucking room.  In addition, I got nine Amalaric Sniper souls, upon which I realized that that soul was a horribly overpowered bullet soul that was my "go-to" attack for the rest of the game because who cared at that point I was basically stomping over everything.  In a particular act of developer maliciousness, there is an item that increases soul drop rates, but it costs so much money that you need to farm enemies for an hour just to make the bank necessary for a rate increase that really isn't that good to begin with.

Aria/Dawn is really the true successor to Symphony of the Night.  While Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance played largely like easier, non-linear Castlevanias of times past, Aria/Dawn are just like Symphony in daring the player to because as ludicrously powerful as possible.  A large part of this is that the two games finally went back to giving your character multiple weapon types, and each new weapon is progressively more powerful and viscerally satisfying to use than the last, as opposed to the previous metroidvania titles making your whip a tiny bit more powerful each level.  While Aria/Dawn can't reach the same potential of absolute brokenness of Symphony's Crissingram or Shield Rod, there's still a steady diet of grooming you, the player, into some slaughter king.  One of my favorite parts of Dawn of Sorrow was being able to use enemy souls to infuse weapons into newer weapons.  Reaching the most powerful weapons possible requires the souls of boss monsters themselves.  Holy shit, I can use the soul of Death to make his scythe?  Eventually one can stop caring about boss patterns or silly things like that, and just simply strongarm their way through every encounter, giggling as you one-shot every fucking bad in the world.

Of course, then they had to go and fuck everything up.