Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

God, who fucking cares at this point.  Someone on action button wrote a breathless, comprehensive review of the game like it was a radiohead album, and it honestly impresses me, because I cannot get my dick up with reference to this game.  Sure, I've played it (twice in fact), but that has less to do with its quality and more to the fact that I am a consumerist slave when it comes to whipping weird floating monsters to try to pick up an armor that is going to give a tiny increase to my pain numbers.  I don't have an Xbox 360 because I know I would be endlessly twirling my ever-increasing gut on stupid awful Harmony of Wait Did They Seriously Reuse Harmony for the Title runs.  I can still be all happy when playing Julius Mode on Dawn of Sorrow, but even thinking about Ecclesia is like a eternally ordained desk job: I'll do it and do it well, but fuck if I really care about it.

Oh man a new fighting mechanic where you have nothing but spells and your MP refills really fast when you're inactive.  Enjoy experimenting in the early game when you have nothing but basic weapons that you'll have to constantly switch to meet increasing situations, because you'll never switch again once you get the 3-way fireball spell that registers a hit from each fireball, making your heroine a magical equivalent of Doom 2's super shotgun, except you'll never run out of ammo and never deal with Revenants on ledges halfway across the map.  OH wait, my bad, you'll switch one more time when you finally reach Castlevania and get the multi-hit light-element lasers.  For better or worse, the skills needed to triumph in combat are more primal now, as aside from some totally worthless support skills, all spells are easily gained and never level up.  It's a nice way to avoid endless grindfests and protect hapless developers from having to tweak combat difficulty between those of us that gained 40 levels in the Ghost Dancer Room from Dawn of Sorrow and you lunkheads that dared to play the game like normal human beings.  Sadly, I was so starved for grinding that I spent an hour in my first playthrough killing owls in the same room just so I could level up one support ability that I never even used.

Now, what's that, you say?  ONCE you reach Castlevania????  Indeed, Ecclesia's other gimmick is that the first two-thirds of the game are short, linear areas arranged on a map designed to make game review idiots think that this game is REALLY GOING BACK TO THE CASTLEVANIA ROOTS.  The action button reviewer tried really hard to portray them as some sort of fundamental difference from the typical endless room vomit of previous Metroidvanias, but this is, of course, merely an attempt to sound smart because they are basically the same thing, or at best, bite-sized versions of the paintings from Portrait of Ruin.  They're not bad per se, though the charm dies off when they start reusing settings in the latter half of this particular escapade.

The charm really starts to rot when you start getting the missions.  I neglected to talk about missions in Portrait of Ruin, probably because thinking about them was pretty depressing.  Completing all the missions through the course of Portrait was essentially a simulacrum of working for a boss who is steadily losing his mind.  Your tasks start off fun and lighthearted ("Kill ten axe knights!  Find a piece of meat to beat up!"), get steadily more unhinged ("Kill this rare enemy until it drops its rare item!  Kill five different kinds of enemies to get five rare items!  Fuck around with your equipment until you reach stupid high INT stat!"), and finally go bugfuck insane ("LEVEL UP THREE SUBWEAPONS WITH STUPID HIGH REQUIREMENTS!  KILL OPTIONAL BOSS WITH THIS HORRIBLE WEAPON!  FUCK MY DOG GUARDIAN ANGEL!").  The worst part was that some quests required items that could be sold and never bought back or regained from enemies., which was truly godlike design, especially when you realized that you could only have five available quests at a time, and you can never remove a quest.

So, to be fair, the missions in Order of Ecclesia are eons better, but still awful. Now, the missions are given by townspeople you start to rescue through your journeys.  Very few do not involve grinding, and some involve what in hindsight is possibly the worst thing to happen to Castlevania: the random chest.  Each of the "stages" has chests placed in certain locations.  The chests can be either plain wooden chests, or fabulous metal chests.  Each class of chest can contain one of roughly four items, and the selection changes per stage.  Does this sound a little familiar, players of Harmony of Seriously Why Would You Ever Want to Remind Players of Dissonance?  Essentially, Konami has done it again: gone is endless enterings/leavings of a room to kill a monster, now we get to endlessly trudge through treasure runs until we get 5 gold ores!  Castlevania is  now the fucking Daily Dungeon in WoW.  The only possible good thing is that as you progress in the game, what previously only appeared in the rare chests begins to show up in common chests, but if you were me, missions tended to follow a certain pattern:

1) Get mission, swear that you were just going to wait until the material appeared in common chests.
2) On the first time in a new map, find a random rare chest with the material in it.
3) Emboldened with fortune like a gambler winning big in his first hand of poker, decide that you're just going to ride this wave of luck and get two more of the same material on this map, as this shouldn't take long at all!
4) Sell your wife for a new DS a/c cable because the old one burnt out on your 150th run of SPOOKY STONE VALLEY.  IT'S GOTTA COME UP AGAIN, RIGHT?  RIGHT?

I guess what I'm saying is that I kind of hope Konami is dumb and continues the treasure chest system for the inevitable 3DS Castlevania, because I hate it so fucking much that it is the only thing that will counteract the carcinogens in my brain that will otherwise force me to get the first (terrible) version of the 3DS so I can kill more weird floating things for big money and big prizes.