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.

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

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.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance

Imagine you're a small, parasitic organism from outer space.  You can spend literally thousands of years floating through space in suspended animation, until eventually you beat the odds and successfully survive the heat of entering a planet's atmosphere.  Once you have awakened, you immediately begin to search for the strongest source of psychic energy in a small area, then quickly begin to invade that sources.  The source is not extinguished, but you gain control, quickly assimilating the sources' knowledge, memories, and goals.  You understand that you are the designer of one type of planetary entertainment called video games.  You helped to design one under appreciated game about a monster in a castle beating up other monsters.  A sequel was formed by a different part of the same company, but for whatever reason, they have now turned to you to produce the new game, which is to be known as Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance.  Despite your parasitic nature, the passive psychic gestalt of your species renders the goals of the host into your own, and you are overjoyed that your lifespan will last exactly as long as the projected development cycle.

You carefully analyze the preliminary meetings.  The previous attempt at Monster Killing Castle was not disliked, but apparently some were less than pleased that the audio overshadowed the graphics.  Some people in the room nod at this observation, and you sense the time to strike.

"Clearly, we must put everything into graphics.  My graphics in my game were good.  Use all of those."

A lesser creature, bowing, explains that if you are referring to trying to use sprites from Symphony of the Night, that would force severe cutbacks into the music.  Emulating funny American television stars, you shrug, and begin to plot the series of events that will result in the creatures body being impaled on a fence post several days later.  Despite wisely not taking responsibility for the action, subordinates begin to avoid you after meetings.  And graphics do proceed well.  Occasionally, there are fleeting attempts by others to make you care about the fact that the music sounds like recording a tone-deaf kazoo in a paper bag.  But you understand the gamers.  They will hail you, even if they could not even comprehend you.

You begin to study your game, the so-called symphony.  The gamers have begun to find it, to love it.  You understand the species well enough that putting in the same few concepts with the smallest improvement is a deeply admired characteristic of video games.  You realize the best path is just to take the symphony, and improve. 

One problem brought to your attention with the previous game was the difficulty.  Gamers could not simply stumble their way through every situation in the first try.  Unacceptable, but the symphony provides the way.  Simply give weapons that will destroy every problem regardless of situation.  But then the overlord informs you that, again, data restricts the game from incorporating all the different weapons from your symphony.  You consider slicing his throat, but then an idea takes hold.

"Not a problem.  We will simply give a whip, make it unfun to use.  The subweapons will be the key.  There will be things that you can attach to subweapons to render them literally unstoppable."

The overlord thinks you are going places.

Ideas come faster and faster.  The symphony had many bosses, so you will also include many bosses with insultingly simple attack patterns.  Create shopkeepers that allow you to buy armor to bypass any problem that might occur.  Hidden rooms hurt gameflow, remove all of them and instead just create rooms that go absolutely no where without reward for their exploration.  People liked that one boss with all the bodies attached to it, make two of them and make both of them almost as terrible as the bosses that are just bigger versions of regular enemies and almost as easy.

But these are appetizers.  The main course is being prepared, as someone with poor grammar would say.

There have been questions about how one can deal with all these bosses.  The memory limitations, always, like a monotonous drone, the same drone you hear when you have procreative relations with other members of the species.  But you know. 

"Two castles."

Uncomfortable shifting.  Someone still dares to speak.

"I guess we could do something like an inverted castle.  It might be seen as a bit of a ripoff of Symphony, but still..."

"No," you interrupt, "it will be the same castle...but different."

The same man, same insect.  "So identical in layout.  Okay, so we'll still have the first castle be where the player gets all the movement-based abilities, and the second be sort of a sandbox type area..."

"No.  Switch between castles.  Constantly."

"So is the second castle going to be harder, or...I feel like I'm missing something here."

"Some places in second castle harder than same area in first.  Others easier."

The man takes off his glasses.  He seems frustrated.  "So, just to make sure I have this right.  The character is going to be going between two huge castles that will be entirely identical in layout, with few clues about exactly where he's going and the next destination having absolutely no relation to where you just were.  Am I getting this?"

You have begun to gain an appreciation for certain artists that draw "horror comics" in this country, for they seem to preview the sorts of scenes that you create, have unfortunately created just after the man talks, his limbs and blood and still screaming head careening off the walls and your painstakingly crafted castle map.  As your body shifts back into a form that the gaping bystanders can comprehend, you add: "I think we should have like three different keys too."

You're so proud of your game.