Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin

Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is sort of a Christmas Ghost of the Future warning to all Castlevania fans, all some kawaii Death-tan anime girl pointing to your grave that reads "LVL 99, 200.6%, 24:60:60."  I understand the reasoning behind the game's flaws (which is better than I could say for Harmony), but they're still flaws that really exemplify the negative, dull trends that the 2-D castlevania series is heading towards.

Visual and Audio-wise, there's really no complaints.  The soundtrack is probably the best of the DS titles, and only second to Circle of the Moon's glorious nostalgia clambake.  The story is a vague followup to the Genesis's Castlevania: Bloodlines, with the Belmont clan still anonymous in Nebraska in the 19th century, and only Jonathan Morris, son of the Texas guy who I never played in Bloodlines and a magician girl whose lines and interactions with other character is vaguely creepy as hell "you look so young but you're a woman ooga ooga."

Oh that's right, TWO playable characters.  Understandably, the developers of Portrait of Ruin saw how utterly, unstoppably powerful Soma was in Dawn of Sorrow and decided that the answer to this problem was to have two characters, each only about half as powerful as Soma.  You're free to play as either character, but can also have the computer control the second character at the same time.  The AI alternates between "serviceable" and "standing in front of a boss's painfully telegraphed attack."  Thankfully, when your AI ally takes damage, only your MP takes damage.  Of course, since your main source of damage largely comes out of magic and magic-powered subweapons, there's almost no reason to have your ally run into skeletons except to have the girl cast stat buffing spells or do DUAL ATTACKS, which are ludicrously powerful spells that render almost every boss into a pile of giblets.

What my real problem with Portrait can kind of be symbolized in the equipment screen.  After SotN, which admittedly did have eight character slots (though by a tenth of the way though the game you never really cared about what stats could ever mean aside from the one that made the number above bads get bigger), the metroidvania series never went above four equipment slots.  Suddenly, with Portrait we've got eight slots.  Per character.

Now, it's really not that big a deal.  Two of the slots are devoted to your subweapon and combo attack, and most equipment either applies to just one character and is either a clear upgrade or one of those mundane DO YOU WANT ONE MORE CON POINT OR ONE MORE INT STAT rhetorical questions that no one should ever really care about.  However, it also meant that your CASTLEVANIA ADVENTURE is a chinese water torture of endless new equipment that you're probably going to want to compare against until you feel like your character stats are one of those corkboard drug gang organization charts from The Wire.

But that's not the real problem.  Everything about Portrait is like some autist's horrible nightmare.  Aria and Dawn of Sorrow also placed you in some number-crunching grind frenzy, but the operation was simple enough that you didn't really have to think about anything.  But suddenly, with Portrait, it's not enough to kill an enemy, because you need to "master" the whip dude's subweapons by hitting a bad with them and THEN killing them which gives a certain number of points and meanwhile the enemy display in the top screen is telling you how many times you killed the bad and what his favorite color is and DID YOU COLLECT THIS ITEM HUH?  To put it another way, I could mindlessly grind in Aria/Dawn, but Portrait grinding makes me want to take up smoking.  There's just something about the game that forces the player to be way more active about the grind process, and it drives me insane.

The other variation on the formula is the whole concept of PAINTING WORLDS.  See, we're not fighting dracula, but instead a really boring other vampire who makes evil paintings.  So in addition to going through a somewhat truncated Castlevania, you also have painting worlds that you have to overcome.  Three out of four of the painting worlds are sort of fun: evil town, evil forest, evil pyramid.  But then there's the evil circus.  I'm pretty certain no one enjoys the evil circus, which features such things as obnoxious environmental dangers, paths going nowhere, and a weird square design that essentially means that you COULD just beat it with half the map covered but of course Konami knows that you won't do that so you have to do a basic mirror image of the map to find everything AFTER the boss is dead.

So, whatever, you think.  One bad level.  You finally get to the end, and the game reveals "oh yeah, vampire dude created four more evil paintings, and they're not optional."

"Okay."

"Yeah....they're basically the laziest inversions of the first four painting maps."

"Okay."

"And we made the evil circus remix is waaaaaay more annoying this time."

I understand that this was a fairly painless way for the game to extend its length, but I still took a two-month break from the game when I realized I'd have to do evil circus again.  It was still awful though, don't worry!  The cherry on top of this realization that Konami basically has no respect for us retarded Castlevania fans was that the bosses of the new paintings are just total retreads of basic Castlevania bosses.  And of course, Akmodan Fucking The Second had to be the boss of evil circus.

I don't hate Portrait of Ruin, or at least not to the extent of Harmony.  It's just a massively disappointing journey into being forced to admit that at this point Konami's treatment of the 2-D Castlevania series is sort of a fat guy on a couch going "well uh in the next game uhhh we'll have the hero just cast spells and typical weapons will just be spells get it okay gonna sleep now"

and that fat guy's name was dramatic foreshadowing