Because I needed to play something while stressing out over tax season…
Well, this is a pretty random title to land on my site for a review. …But also not really. I’ve mentioned this before, but I was a moderately sized fan of the 11-year-long run where the Castlevania series was eking out the other half of the Metroidvania namesake. Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow were big childhood games for me. Order of Ecclesia was a favorite of mine— at least until I got stuck because the game is bloody hard. While Symphony of the Night is chilling as one of my favorite games of all time.
I’ve wanted to go through all of this seven game run at some point— I couldn’t do it as a kid because I had limited funds— but other games kept coming up and keeping me busy. Basically, life happened. So, looking for a safe, comfortable game to play while dealing with the stress of my accounting job during tax season, I decided to begin this ack-basswords journey with the Game Boy Advance launch title, Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. A title that I always heard great things about, wanted to play, but never did. And now that I have… I feel that I shouldn’t have.
To put the conclusion at the front, I did not like Circle of the Moon. I think it is a bafflingly designed game in many respects. And as per Natalie.TF tradition, I need to write a review explaining why I feel this way!
Castlevania: Circle of the Moon Review
Platforms: Game Boy Advance, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe & M2 Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Konami
This review is based on the version of the game included in the Castlevania Advance Collection for PC.
Part 1: The Main Review
As a GBA launch title, and operating under handheld game design philosophy of the time, the story is pretty minimal in Circle of the Moon. Dracula has appeared once more and a merry squad of vampire hunters— Nathan Graves, Hugh Baldwin, and their mentor Morris Baldwin— go to put this vampire back in his casket. However, Dracula was expecting them, captures Morris, and sends both Nathan and Hugh down a big hole.
Nathan and Hugh survive and set off through this castle to defeat Dracula yet again, only occasionally bumping into each other in the process. There’s so little dialogue it would not surprise me if the script was translated in a single day. Characters are largely defined by their role and design. And there are barely any secondary characters to speak of barring a few of Dracula’s peons, whose banter largely exists as pretense for boss battles. It’s serviceable, but clearly designed around the idea of being a “Game Boy” Castlevania.
Graphically, the game was initially criticized for being too dark on the original Game Boy Advance’s almost black-tinted display, but rendered on a modern screen, I think it looks pretty great. Backgrounds are lavishly detailed, truly making the most of the added colors of the GBA to paint some particularly vivid locations. While the catacombs should just be some murky stony hole, it is given depth and character through the shifting colors of the stone and implied depth of its environments. It uses columns, indentations, and simulated lighting to make the world feel like it has definition, and demonstrate what this new tech can do.
The observation tower is a cluster of green iron, brown stone, dark churning gears and bronze pipes of varying sizes, arranged with a deft enough hand that it’s easy to forget how limited the tile set actually is. Statues and stained-glass give a sense of grandeur and class to more regal environments. Even the murky brick laid caverns have an impressive amount of variability between each location. I might not remember the names, as they only show up once, but there is both enough detail in these environments to tell them apart and remember them for their artistry alone.
The character spritework is clearly lifting heavy inspiration from Symphony, but adapted around the lower resolution and screen space of the Game Boy Advance. Everything’s a bit simplified, smaller, has a black outline, and only a handful of unique frames. As an occasional pixel artist, I find the way they managed to squeeze so much detail into such small canvases wildly impressive, and consider the larger bosses to be visual feats. Well, at least when they aren’t using rotating sprites. Everything is clearly defined, identifiable, and generally looks like it belongs together, setting a baseline that looks good in its original game, and was built off of, if not directly lifted from, in later entries.
For a launch title, this is all wildly impressive, showing some excellent understanding of both the hardware and the technical craft of pixel art. I do have some nitpicks, like how Nathan’s running animation looks like it’s missing a frame, but on a visual front, I have basically nothing to complain about. The same goes for the audio. Sound effects are sufficiently punch and have good auditory feedback. The soundtrack both reprises classic Castlevania melodies while adding a few new ones. It avoids the overly chippy sound that sometimes came with certain GBA titles— including its successor, Harmony of Dissonance— and only suffers from the fact it has maybe half an hour of music to fill up a whole campaign, reusing the tracks across multiple environments. Good music, not enough of it, pretty common criticism, I know.
As the first second first noteworthy 2D Castlevania after Symphony of the Night, Circle of the Moon natural builds on many of its foundations, fashioning itself as an exploration-driven affair with leveling up, equipment, usable items, and lite RPG elements. However, as a successor to Symphony made by precisely zero of the people who made Symphony, there are a lot of differences in how the games are designed. You are playing as a designated vampire hunter with only the Vampirekiller in hand. The upgrade system is wildly different and full of new ideas that make this game stand out among the rest of the series. And a different design ethos can be felt throughout the entire experience.
There is a lot to say about how Circle of the Moon functions as a Castlevania game, and more broadly Metroidvania game, but before getting into that, I want to talk about the more foundational mechanics. The crack of the whip is sufficiently snappy. There is enough of an arch to it to give the player a hitbox with some loose verticality that makes certain enemies more bearable. The classic blood/love-powered sub-weapons all return and all take the form you’d expect. And despite my initial impression, Nathan is not built in the mold of classic Castlevania protagonists with lumbering speed and deliberate movement. He is not as graceful as Alucard or subsequent protagonists either, and in occupying this middle ground, in taking the approaches the game does, everything just feels a little off.
I have gripes with the underlying movement of Circle of the Moon, and they go in… both direction. Let’s start with vertical, as that’s simpler in theory. The classic Castlevania protagonist does not have much in terms of arial dominance and tends to rely on sub-weapons to hit airborne enemies. Axes are the best for that, daggers are number two, crosses can work, and if you had holy water, you probably messed up. Circle of the Moon is notable for featuring a considerably large cast of flying enemies that move quickly, erratically, or launch projectiles that can pivot into basically any direction across large rooms. This is annoying in general, as you are at a clear movement disadvantage, but when combined with the GBA screen size and the fact that sub-weapons swap-outs are bizarrely rare in this game, it makes these encounter feel… unfair.
What am I supposed to do unless I had the foresight to bring the right sub-weapon to this encounter. What should I do if I don’t want to switch out my current sub-weapon because there are only, like, five places I can get it in the entire game? Many flying enemies are not like the medusa heads, who might be bastards, but they are fair bastards who follow a pattern. But the harpies, succubi, and various demons that float around? They have wide movement ranges, don’t follow a clear patterns, often moving reactively, and are best dealt with the moment you see them. Sometimes they can be cleanly dispatched, but all it takes is one sloppy reaction for them to ruin your day.
Next is the horizontal movement. An obvious bit of criticism to levy toward Circle of the Moon is its lack of a back dash, the ability to build distance with enemies during combat. This is key to making the melee combat in this run of Castlevania games feel the way it does, yet instead of reprising this mechanic, Circle of the Moon tries something different.
The default movement speed in this game is… slow. Really slow. It’s clearly trying to emulate the classic games rather than the faster paced Symphony of the Night, and it encourages the player to take a more methodical approach to everything. However, this approach is quickly altered with the introduction of a dash ability just a few minutes into the game, letting the player run if they double tap the direction pad.
The most common parallel that comes to mind is the movement of 2D Kirby games, where Kirby goes from a leisurely stroll to a hustle with a double tap. This works in Kirby, as those games rarely emphasize challenge and give the player great air control. Castlevania… doesn’t. Going through Circle of the Moon, I am unable to recall a single instance where this walking speed was ever useful. No precise platforming or stealth instances encouraged this, and I went through the game wishing that I could always dash by default… and getting hit because I failed to double tap a direction. Walking makes dodging harder, makes jumps stiff, and generally makes the player character feel less capable.
This slower speed worked fine in the more methodical 1986 to 1995 run of titles, but Circle of the Moon is a lot looser, more demanding, and more designed around empowering the player through mobility. If the player is sufficiently skilled, regimented, and mindful of every input, they can avoid walking, but most players are going to fail double taps here and there and get hit through their error. Error that simply would not exist if the game just had normal movement.
Part 2: The Upgrade Problem
Something I always like to highlight in a Metroidvania is how the game chooses to empower the player character through its core upgrades, and Circle of the Moon takes a more… minimal approach. Aside from the aforementioned dash ability, obtained before the first boss, upgrades cleanly fall into two categories. Better jumping and keys.
Between a double jump, wall jump, and super jump that lets the protagonist ascend even the longest vertical shaft, the game clearly values letting the player move through the world with finesse. …Albeit in a way that generally clashes with the double tap dash. You are empowered by the end of the game, but the need to dash before each jump, combined with a particular fixation on hallways and zigzagging level design, don’t often give the player opportunities to feel empowered. Sometimes the level design lets them jump wildly in an open area, other times double jumping is just a way to dive into unseen danger thanks to the limited screen space of the GBA.
As for the keys, that is my (disparaging) name for the tackle, heavy ring, cleansing necklace, and last key. The tackle is technically an attack, but it has few if any practical uses when the whip and slide (an innate skill) are just as versatile, and is largely just there to break stone blocks. The heavy ring is a tool to push wooden boxes that block paths, something Alucard and Juste Belmont can do just fine with no upgrades— which I find particularly funny. The cleaning ring turns poison water into regular water right before the sewer area, which is fittingly the worst area in the game. And the last key is a literal key.
…One of the defining elements of Metroidvanias is the dual use of upgrades, as not only a tool to access new areas, but to let players do new things, meaningful things, in the broader world. There are eight main upgrades in Circle of the Moon, and only half of them do this. This does not necessarily make it a bad Metroidvania, but it shows a surprising lack of forethought into the mechanics by the developers and is simply less interesting. Circle of the Moon has good ideas, has creativity, but it simply does not infuse them into the core skillset of its protagonist. Instead, it throws these ideas around with a level of carelessness that makes the game feel… almost unfinished.
If anybody is talking about Circle of the Moon, they are obligated to bring up its signature Dual Set-Up System, or DSS. Throughout the game, the player obtains attribute and action cards that can be equipped and paired in order to trigger certain effects in exchange for draining their magic gauge. Some are basic, like turning Nathan’s whip into a flame whip. Others are more passive, like buffing a stat by 25%. Others are transformative, such as having surrounding Nathan with projectiles that both protect him and deal damage. Some negate effects, give the player access to new moves, and with 100 total combinations to play with, the game is positively empowering to the player.
This is a great system, one that grows multiplicity in complexity with each new card obtained, and the sheer volume of things the player can do, ways these cards can be used, grants the game a surprisingly high level of depth.
…Unfortunately, the game is terrible at giving players access to these cards. DSS cards are obtained through only one method: by defeating enemies and hoping for rare drops. All 20 cards are obtained this way, and their distribution is inherently linked to both finding these enemies and farming them until they drop their DSS card. It is borderline impossible to find all cards without external resources, even with the pop-ups of the Advance Collection, and I only found 15 by the time I was ready to call it quits.
This is a problem, as the depth of the system directly increases with every new card added to your collection and you, ideally, want a full set. More cards means more possibilities means more systems to engage with and consider. Instead, I believe the game expects you to finish it with an incomplete set, maybe half of the cards available, before starting a new game with the code FIREBALL and playing through an alternate campaign.
This magician campaign gives the player altered stats and stat growth, making their defenses and melee attack worse, but gives them access to every DSS card from the start. The progression is exactly the same, but this decision, this pseudo new game plus, shows the developers were aware of how much fun it was to play with this system. …They just didn’t know how to distribute these fun toys they’ve made.
The poor distribution, and the fact that you need to manually discover and set every card combo, really undermines the system, and made me far less inclined to actually experiment with it. Early game combos do not fall off as better ones are introduced, at least not necessarily, and for the majority of the game I was just rocking a few abilities:
- An enhanced whip skill that gave a damage buff and elemental affinity to deal more damage to certain enemies, the main option for the early game.
- Dual orbiting fireballs that deal as much damage as the whip, protect Nathan, allow him to hit opponents out of his whip’s limited range, and deal fast damage to enemies right next to him.
- Poison mist that erratically bursts from around him, dealing chip damage to enemies and destroying projectiles— very useful in spots.
- The ability to heal 1% of Nathan’s max HP while standing still— which is the ONLY easily accessible healing method outside of health upgrades and save rooms.
- The 25% bonus luck skill, which makes it easier to farm drops from enemies. Self-explanatory.
- Status immunity skills, that prevent Nathan from getting poisoned or frozen, which are not obtained until AFTER the area full of enemies that inflict poison with every hit.
Now, there are definitely more creative skills here, including a whole host of summons, but the few skills I used regularly had enough practicality that I did not feel the need to experiment. …Also, 20 of them required me to do a half circle motion, to activate them, which I cannot do that with any degree of regularity. I practiced for ten full minutes straight, kept changing my approach, and while it triggered sometimes, it just did not stick for me. I either do it too fast or too slow and trying to do any specific input on an Xbox Series controller sounds like a fool’s errand.
I ultimately like the DSS system as an idea, but it is easy for me to view it as a mere predecessor to ideas that would be refined across the Sorrow duology, Order of Ecclesia, and even Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It’s cool, and I’m sure that playing through the game on magician mode would give me a new appreciation for it. However, I was not so inclined to do that for several reasons, including the way every other upgrade in this game is handled.
So, how do you handle optional upgrades in a Metroidvania game? Nothing can be essential, so the easiest approaches is to throw in stat boosts, health upgrades, and capacity increases to give the player a higher level of lenience as the challenge increases. The DSS cards would have been great items to hide throughout the castle, yet instead the level designers— or more likely designer— chose to fill it with incremental stat upgrades. Health +10 potions, magic +10 potions, and big hearts that increase the max capacity by 6.
These upgrades in and of themselves are fine. The core gameplay is built around using both magic and hearts to supplement what the whip cannot do, so they are a very logical thing to increase over time. However, the game truly has nothing else to give the player as a reward for exploring, and with over 100 of these upgrades, they quickly lose their allure.
Let’s start with the heart economy, as it is an odd cluster of design concepts that just do not mesh well together. Sub-weapons in Circle of the Moon require a varying number of hearts to use, and are powered accordingly, but that just discourages flippant use of sub-weapons unless hearts are easily replenished or it’s a boss encounter. Hearts are typically obtained in increments of 1 or 5 by smacking burning things, and unlike health and magic, they cannot be replenished at a save point, meaning you need to farm them if you get too trigger-happy.
Some environments, like the sewers, are positively bereft of hearts, and their irregular distribution discourages players from using them, as they may need them for a boss or specific encounter. And while the player can easily obtain a max heart cap of over 300, this currency runs into the missile problem of Metroid. After you get like 200 of something, upgrades simply feel like a formality.
Magic upgrades should be exciting, except the magic economy is also pretty skewed. Magic recovers over time, the recovery rates grows with Nathan’s intelligence stat, and staple abilities only require an insignificant amount of magic to use. The limited pool of magic only comes into play if you are using abilities that have a high magic draw, but those are often so high that I found them prohibitively expensive to use, even when I had over 900 magic. Magic supply, for practical purposes, is more dictated by the regeneration rate than the actual capacity, so getting an extra 10 magic points feels like a formality after the first hour or two of the game.
As for health, this should be simple. Health upgrades are only meaningful in proportion to the damage the protagonist is expected to take. When a health upgrade means getting to take another hit, they feel like genuine upgrades. If health upgrades only let them take half a hit, they feel like you are making progress. But when health upgrades only account for about a fifth of a standard regular-enemy hit you are taking, when they only increase health by less than 2%, they start feeling kind of pointless. In fact, during the latter half of the game, I primarily viewed health upgrades as ways to easily replenish HP when saving rooms were a ways away.
Oh, and I almost forgot the kicker with the health, magic, and hearts capacity upgrades. All of these things are upgraded when Nathan gains a level. 10 HP, 10 magic, an extra 2 hearts when playing in the standard mode. …The math changes in various alternate stat modes. This means that, effectively, Nathan gets oodles upgrades by just wailing on enemies, beating bosses, and progressing through the game, no upgrades needed, which makes the health, magic, and hearts upgrades strewn about feel… even more perfunctory.
These stat upgrades are always the same, drop off in usefulness about halfway through the game, if that, and are presented with an inconsistent level of grandeur. Something like 25% of all upgrades are found by whipping a wall, entering a secret room with a single enemy, and either defeating them or jumping past them to grab the upgrade. They are not really challenges, and feel more like filler. The game needed X upgrades, and this approach was pretty easy to implement.
Other upgrades are presented down the expected path of trials and challenges. Reach the end of this hallway, defeat the enemies, get the reward. Use jumping ability X to access platform Y for reward Z. Or do one of a few semi-complicated puzzles, like the single switch puzzle where you need to haul ass to get a heart upgrade. These are not bad, but with the quantity of collectibles in this game, I could not help but notice their formulaic distribution.
I would not call this design— this distribution design and broader level design— bad. However, it is rarely interesting, feeling like it is going through the hits, recycling general room concepts, and using a few blasé block or switch hitting puzzles to occasionally interject something novel into the experience. It all works, yet it regularly feels like the work of one person who did not have the time or ideas to iterate, play with designs, or cut out some of the fat of the experience. I’m sorry, but there are only so many zigzagging hallways full of bulky enemies I can go through before I start feeling like I’ve already done this.
I’ve said a lot about the upgrades in this game, but I’m not even done yet, as I need to talk about equipment. Circle of the Moon has an equipment system unlike anything I have ever seen, and not in a good way. There is no money in Circle of the Moon, no way to sell things, and all forms of equipment are obtained solely through enemy drops. Armor, armaments, and usable items like potions or status heals. You can ONLY get these by defeating enemies, and on the standard mode, the drop rates SUCK.
Throughout my entire playthrough, I only accumulated a total of 14 healing items, 10 of which only healed a pathetic 20 HP. I went through an area lousy with poison enemies, meant to drop antidotes. I killed over 30 of them, got poisoned TOO MANY times, and I only got two antidotes. Farming for specific drops, even with boosted luck, easily added 90 minutes to my 10-hour-long playthrough.
I simply missed several intended upgrades because I did not know they were dropped by certain enemies. I only managed to even learn about endgame armor and equipment through the collection’s encyclopedia feature, and had to farm obscurely placed enemies over and over to get what I was looking for.
Yes, this is meant to make the game more experimental, to infuse mystery into the experience, and to give players a puzzle to solve. That is fine in moderation. But when you use this for EVERYTHING, even the most basic pieces of equipment, you’ve taken it too far.
Look at Symphony of the Night, look at any Castlevania that followed this. The hybrid approach of manually placed equipment, shops, and enemy drops works very well there, and I CANNOT understand how any designer though this drops only distribution made sense. All it does is lead to some players getting lucky and other players missing out, getting fewer choices, and struggling through late game areas with iron armor.
There are SO MANY things that could have been done differently here. Distributing SOME equipment as general collectibles in hidden rooms. Having a clause that prevents enemies from dropping the same set of armor for the sixth time, when there is NOTHING that can be done with excess equipment. Having enemies drop potions or healing items at a higher rate, so players don’t need to obsessively farm for healing items. They COULD have modified the drop rates to give the player consumable items after they obtain the functional max amount of each equipment. But they didn’t! They just didn’t!
The elements of a good system are here. I can easily imagine how a diligent upgrade system could radically transform this game for the better. Yet, there fixed upgrades are underwhelming, the better or more interesting ones are distributed randomly, and true strength is hidden behind obscure farming that would need to be repeated every playthrough.
I’d say these elements make Circle of the Moon a prime contender for a game to be transformed via modding, and it somewhat was. Mods have been released to address DSS drop rates and another that makes Nathan always dash. However, I would argue, and just did, that the problems with the upgrade system are so pervasive that they warrant an overhaul to the game, at the risk of compromising what it is, let alone whatever the original vision was.
Part 3: The Challenge Problem
The upgrade systems of Circle of the Moon are… less than perfect, but that would not necessarily be an issue if the game were an easygoing breezy affair. Unfortunately, it is not, being home to quite a number of difficulty spikes and instances where, if I were playing on original hardware, I probably would have just given up.
The math for regular enemy damage numbers starts reasonable, but undergoes a considerable increase during the mid-game and continues throughout. Once I reached the Underground Gallery, enemies started dishing out so much damage and were stacked in such tight arrangements that I had to take “stand around and heal” breaks when exploring environments as I inched toward the next save room. This would not be so bad if I had healing items I could use, but with these drop rates, I certainly did not.
The game also has a curious fondness of littering the latter quarter of the game with optional mini-bosses hidden in often random places, or trading out early game fodder with super strong enemies. They can take dozens of hits, deal as much damage as bosses, can just be run past, and are exist primarily as either roadblocks or a distributor of rare drops. I would be fine with them if they were just proper minibosses, but they’re not. You’re meant to fight them multiple times, grind for their gear, and do this to unlock both late game DSS cards and a scattering of bonus equipment. Though, you can just ignore them, and the game actually expects you to during one of the most curious interactions in the game.
Right before the penultimate boss room, there is no easily accessible save room to visit to heal up and avoid trekking through a hallway of bulky enemies that hit like dump trucks. The closest thing to a save room is a warp room that is guarded by a super strong miniboss, the Devil. You can just run past them to get to the teleport room, and when leaving the teleport room, but that is still the game telling the player to run past a miniboss at least three times. Well, unless the game just does not want you to save your game before a boss, which… it might not. Who’s to say at this point?
Speaking of bosses, they warrant their own discussion, as bosses are a truly unpredictable assortment of encounters. They range from trivial skirmishes to fights that were seemingly designed for a different game. For example, the second boss is the necromancer, a floating humanoid that surrounds himself with damaging projectiles, has two phases, and summons enemies as distraction fodder. They move quickly, deal substantial damage, and are a general pain to actually hit. If you know the patterns and brought the right sub-weapon, you can clear the battle in a minute. However, any challenge where a boss flies out of range and strikes you semi-randomly from off-screen will feel cheap to a certain genre of players. …And that genre is me.
The fourth boss, the dragon zombie, is another hump to crawl past, being a battle against two undead dragon heads with giant necks. They are huge enemies, with massive hit boxes, that don’t technically float, but they might be easier if they did. The dragon heads spin in circles, damaging Nathan with their necks and heads, while moving erratically and during projectiles. Because these things are so bloomin’ huge, it can be hard to simply track their movements and generally maneuver around them.
Are you supposed to fight them on the platforms they both reach? Are you supposed to jump onto the floor, which looks like a hazard, so you only have one head to worry about? Or are you just meant to sit yourself up high and throw axes or bones at the dragons until one of them dies and then take on the other? I don’t know! I just conservatively hopped in and out of range, using my protective fireballs to deal 80% of the damage while trying to stay alive. It was not a satisfying win, but the boss’s patterns were so opaque that I don’t care to figure out what I was intended to do.
Then there’s Death, whose boss battle is largely about dodging homing projectiles of several different flavors while Death floats above Nathan, bounding from right to left. It’s not too bad, but the constant projectiles and threat of close range damage makes them at least somewhat annoying to fight. In phase two, they transform into a scythe tank during the second phase, where the player needs to carefully plant their whip swings while staying out of range of his melee attacks. …While dodging the projectiles spawning from the ceiling. …And Death’s ground slam that slows down Nathan for a few seconds.
It’s not that bad, but it seems like the only way to comfortably beat this boss is by spamming sub-weapons, using the poison mist DSS pair, or obsessively spinning Nathan’s whip to destroy projectiles. None of these feel like good ways to defeat a boss as notorious in the series as Death.
Also, and this might seem like a nitpick, but bosses in Circle of the Moon do not drop healing orbs or restore HP after they are defeated. Which is sacrilege considering how this is a staple of the series, and… questionable game design. If you beat a boss, you are probably battered and in need of healing. Yes, a save room is almost always close by, but why have the player run the risk of beating a boss, getting hit by a random enemy once, and needing to do it all again? Just heal them and let them get on their way!
It’s a bit of careless design that circles back (haha) to a pervasive thought that I had while playing Circle of the Moon. For a game designed to be replayable, for a title that encourages the player to go through it upwards of five times, it does not feel like it was properly fine-tuned or playtested. Everything about it works, it functions just fine, but certain design choices, placements, and even stat choices feel like the designers’ first draft. So many little arbitrary decisions became obvious as I played through this game, and it became increasingly difficult for me to believe that anything in this game went through more than maybe two iterations.
Part 4: The Finale Problem
I realize that this entire review is mostly me complaining about the balancing of a 25-year-old game. However, these things were what I was primarily thinking of during my time with it, what I remember most about it, and definitely what weighed heaviest in my mind as I finished it. And oh my does Circle of the Moon end on a bizarrely balanced note.
The final battle against Dracula (because it’s always Dracula) starts off pretty easy. His hitbox is his entire body, rather than his head, and most of his attacks are seamless to double/super jump over. …Except the electric bat attack. I have no idea how you’re supposed to dodge that one. After trouncing him, the player can save before the actual final boss, demon Dracula, which is broken up into two phases. The first is a joke if you’re using the cross, as demonic Dracula spawns in, fires a couple projectiles, and then despawns out after taking enough damage. The second phase took me ten minutes to clear, and calcified my thoughts on much of this game’s design.
In the second phase, Dracula appears, flashes, and then charges at Nathan, bumrushing him and dealing 33% to 50% of his health. This can be avoided by using the super jump to dodge him, and after doing this a few times Dracula transforms into an eyeball surrounded by respawning bats. The eyeball rotates around the boss area, not actively attacking the player, but giving them the opportunity to deal damage to it. The problem is actually getting close enough to it as bats keep spawning and threatening to deal 7% to 10% of Nathan’s HP. The poison mist does wonders killing the bats, and does chip damage, but whipping a small, moving, flying target is a tall order in this game.
Checking guides and longplay footage, I can tell the community preferred solution to this is to use summons to deal damage during the specified interval. Except I did not know how to get the DDS card needed to do summons and, as I said previously, I can’t do the input for summons. So I just struggled and did things the manual way, eventually winning and getting the ending for this story-lite experience.
However, Dracula is not the true final challenge in this title, as Circle of the Moon has a 17 part enemy gauntlet, the battle arena. …And it is some bloody bullcrap. The game disables the DSS system for this challenge and only gives them hearts for their troubles as they schlep to the end. This means players can only rely on their base skills, their stats, their singular sub-weapon, and backlog of items. …It is possible for diligent players to undermine this challenge by rocking 99 super potions, and I think that was the intention, because this is some BULLSHIT.
There are so many enemies, with such buffed stats, in such contained areas that it does not feel like a genuine challenge, but a punishment meant to troll, enrage, and baffle players. Sorry, but needing to fight seven minotaurs at once, each with access to a wide and tall AOE attack and narrow gap between attacks, as they creep towards the player and the wall, is neither a fun nor rewarding experience. Creating a room full of 15 flying enemies with erratic patterns who curse the player, leaving them unable to attack, is just a troll move.
Even with save stats, even with the ability to rewind, the level of precision required to get through these challenges without downing health potions like crazy is so immense that it baffles me. The game clearly wants the player to beat it 100%— multiple times— but getting through this once requires a level of mastery that I lack the patience for. It’s one of those instances where I look at footage of people playing this and ask “were we even playing the same game here?” Because simply pulling off these jumps with the dash system being what it is a feat.
Furthermore, what is the POINT of having all of these fun and interesting abilities only to FORBID the player from using them in the hardest challenge? Why would you ban use of the game’s signature mechanic like this? And what does the player ultimately get for all their trouble, all their toil? Better armor that they can do nothing with. There’s no sort of New Game Plus mode or anything, no persistent upgrades across playthroughs à la Resident Evil titles. That would at least be something, instead… I guess the game just wants you to do this ordeal five times.
Part 5: A Miserable Little Pile of Problems…
I really did not want to make a review that was such a dressing down, but going through Circle of the Moon, it was all too easy to focus on the negatives. I cannot help but fixate on the little things, the arbitrary design decisions, and things that annoy me on my initial playthrough, let alone subsequent treks through this world.
There is a good game within Circle of the Moon, and I have enough foresight to understand why this would have been such a celebrated game upon release. Because it is a fully featured portable entry in a legacy series that has new unique ideas and offered what was seen as a console quality experience circa 2001. (SNES went left the market in 1998 and this was leagues beyond whatever the Game Boy Color was doing.) However, quality is in the details and balance is everything.
If I want to view this game critically, as its own entity, and not as a relic of a bygone era, not as an entry in a broader series, I think it’s pretty middling, if not subpar, as a game. I think that this game could be rebuilt into something better through careful alterations to stats, controls, item distribution. I like many of its ideas and think they are worth studying. I would even call the game’s design decision fascinating, albeit in a not-so flattering way. However, too many things are too loose, too arbitrary, and too frustrating for me to ever love this game.
…And in saying that, I think I might have cursed myself into playing through the next five 2D games in the series.