Because it’s the best of the three, apparently.
Having gone through Circle of the Moon (2001) and Harmony of Dissonance (2002), I figured that, before shifting to my pressing to-do list, I should wrap things up with Aria of Sorrow (2003). Developed in parallel with Harmony of Dissonance by a largely different team and released 11 months later, Aria of Sorrow is often deferred a high level of praise. It’s commonly seen as the best of the bunch in on Game Boy Advance, one of the best in the series, and it was the Castlevania game I spent the most time with as a little one. So, going back to it reawakened a lot of memories. Some good, others… let down by the weight of reality.
Yeah, you thought this was going to be a gushing nostalgia bomb? Not quite!
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Review
Platforms: Game Boy Advance, Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC (Reviewed)
Developer: Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo & 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 21st Century Castlevania
Aiming to deviate from the established narrative mold of the past games, Aria of Sorrow ditches the strict historical setting of the series and instead takes place in 2035. Protagonist Soma Cruz is a student studying in Japan, heading to watch the solar eclipse with his girlfriend, Mina Hakuba, only for the two of them to get spirited away into the eclipse itself, which contains Dracula’s castle. The how and why are gradually explained throughout the game, building up a large mythos and premise for another game in the series that, 23 years later, we have not seen height nor hair of.
Once arriving at Dracula’s castle, a mysterious man by the name of Genya Arikado informs Soma that he has “the power of dominance,” allowing him to absorb and harness the power of the souls of various monsters. This is both a plot relevant connection, indicating that Soma has a certain destiny to be here, and is the narrative justification for the central soul mechanic of Aria of Sorrow and its sequel. With the power to defend himself within his hands, Soma ventures forth for a way out of this castle, meeting a gallery of side characters who also got swept up in this mess: A soldier, amnesiac, witch, and nutjob missionary, who all further the game’s story through breaks in the game’s sprawling traversal.
This is easily the most story that any of these Metroidvania style Castlevania games have had thus far, and it’s easily the best. The characters have enough personality and encounters to feel like defined characters. Considerable effort was put in to build up Soma’s role and the past events leading up to this state. Optional dialogue can be found by visiting the starting area, just to further the ebb and flow of the narrative a bit more. It’s not particularly developed, or lavish, but it’s present enough to keep the player wondering, keep them invested, and get them to care about these characters. Some would say that’s all they want.
I won’t delve into the twists that come during the end of the game’s story, as they both advance and recontextualize quite a few things before reaching a rather personal finale. It ends the story on a high note, and was resonant enough that it got a direct sequel two years later, Dawn of Sorrow.
However, after going back-to-back on Castlevania games, I do find the execution of the premise to be mildly disappointing. For a game that takes place in 2035, there is virtually no indication that we’re past the 1800s with the world design. The cobblestone walkways and elegant halls of Dracula’s castle still look as they did hundreds of years ago, and we barely get any glimpse of the outside world.
Soma and certain characters have modern clothes, their images crafted by the excellent Ayami Kojima, who gave Soma a slick white coat and jeans with stylish golden studs, yet this just puts him in line with the likes of Alucard and Juste. I suppose the series was not quite ready to bring Castlevania to modern day— we’d have to wait until Lords of Shadow 2 for that, sorta.
Using some of the same technology from Harmony of Dissonance, Aria of Sorrow unsurprisingly feels pretty similar, though not quite as luxurious with its movement. Soma is molded more akin to Alucard with his access to dozens of usable weapons and a game feel that naturally shifts with each new equip, changing up how he plays based on the weapons the player finds and their general power. While the game’s signature souls system adds several layers of modularity to how he plays in combat, rendering Soma as a plain vessel that you can tweak to your liking throughout a playthrough. Accordingly, Aria of Sorrow does not have the same buttery or luxurious game feel I praised Harmony of Dissonance for, but it’s also a far cry from the rigidness of Circle of the Moon, so we’re still in the green.
As for navigation… I’d say it’s good, but not great. The Dracula’s castle of Aria of Sorrow is sufficiently big and varied enough to feel like a dense playground for exploration. However, it is also designed to be traversed in a very specific way, with a significant number of winding hallways and dead-ends that don’t have much of value or interest. Warp rooms certainly help, quite a lot, yet they also exemplify this problem. It is easy to look at two spots that are close on the map and think that you should be able to get there however you want, but no.
I lost track of how many times I had to backtrack through a hall or two to find something I overlooked or get from point A to point B. For example, in order to get the true ending, you need to acquire three books, one of which is hidden behind a gate in the upper left section of the Inner Quarters. There is a warp room in the middle of this environment, but it sends you outside of a hallway that branches over and over for six rooms before I could arrive at my previous roadblock. If you look at the map, my destination was literally three blocks away from the warp room. That’d not even be a walk away, if not for one pesky wall.
There are other minor frustrations like this. How there is never an especially convenient save point next to a warp room. How there are no warps right before the final boss, requiring a good 10-15 minute trek to get to the main shop. How the game has its very own water temple with the Underground Reservoir, which is mostly optional, but contains such highlights as the warp room guarded by yellow medusa heads and that cryptic waterfall. Or how you need to go through a conceptually neat yet mildly opaque warp maze to get to the clock tower. …And final boss.
It’s not a frustrating experience. I went through the map again using the postgame Julius mode to make sure of that. (It’s a great way to clear the game in about three hours, with few difficulty spikes.) However, I still found myself questioning the map design more than I would like. Maybe this was just their way of making the game harder after Harmony of Dissonance was deemed to easy by some. That would explain some of the more bothersome and plentiful enemies littering the endgame.
Part 2: Traditional Tools for the Job
Before getting into the signature souls system, let’s first talk about upgrades. Rather than reprise the life, heart, and magic upgrades of prior games, the upgrades in Aria of Sorrow are a lot narrower. Permanent increases only come from leveling up, putting a greater emphasis on grinding over exploring in order to accumulate raw power and defense, while other upgrades are supplemented by the scattering of equipment placed across the castle halls. There are about 25 weapons, 10 sets of armor, and a dozen accessories to find, in addition to whatever drops the player happens upon. Which, in my playthrough, was just enough to give the player a constant streak of new toys to play with while allowing upgrades to feel meaningful.
Weapons are easily the most notable of these upgrades, as after many whip-based entries, things are back to the Symphony of the Night model, where Soma can equip many weapons of different properties. Weapons of course scale as the game goes on, but the player has reason to accept or reject upgrades due various factors. Secondary effects of weapons, attack speed, their attack range, with some striking further or having an arc, are all important to consider. Maybe you like how the lance can attack targets below Soma and do the occasional double hit, or you like the more deliberate wide range of a hammer.
Not all of them are winners, a couple of them, especially those obtained via drops, are just novelties, and the elemental weapon system is something I doubt most players would consider. I don’t know why the Hrunting deals poison damage, or what that means, but it was strong and had some appreciated vertical range for hitting fliers. You can play through things however you choose, whether that be a handgun run or a naked run, and that’s pretty neat.
Though, there are two weapons that handily outshine all others, which I affectionately called the BFS, à la the BFG from Doom. The Balmung, obtainable about 70% of the way through the game after going through a devious hallway of spikes and stony medusa heads and the explorer’s reward. It’s a fat long sword with a hilt taller than Soma himself, and deals crazy damage. While explorers who figure out that you can use Curly and Skula to rampage past a waterfall if they transform before touching the water, and break through a hidden wall past a pirate ship, can get the Claimh Solais. While not as long as the Balmung, its swinging attack radius hits everything in front of Soma, it’s fast unlike many swinging weapons, and it even has an elemental effect, dealing bonus damage on many foes.
They both feel broken, but considering some other garbage the game can throw the player’s way, and how bulk certain enemies are, this feels decently fair. I explored, and this is my reward. To slash ’em like the fodder they are!
By comparison, armor is very basic, lacking the versatility of SotN and HoD in favor of a Circle of the Moon style system. With just one slot, there is not a ton of play expression one can do. Intelligence boosting cloaks are eventually phased out by lacking stats, standard armor makes up most of the catalog, but everything is eventually outmoded by the endgame suits. (Okay, you do get endgame robes, but only in hard mode.) This leaves accessories as incremental upgrades before they become a free-for-all of player expression during the latter half of the game. Do you want money, power, magic, drops, or easy EXP? That’s your prerogative!
The fixation on the soul system also means permanent upgrades are left with just the bare essentials. The excellent dual direction dash from Harmony of Dissonance is gone and Soma instead has a standard backdash just slow enough that it isn’t an acceptable substitute for walking. Minus two points. The slide returns from both CotM and HoD, except this time it straight up sucks. Apparently somebody was not happy at how fast the slide was previously, and now there is a notable cooldown between slides, preventing the player from sliding through the castle in style. It’s virtually useless as an attack, and is at most a tool to dodge attacks during certain boss or enemy encounters. It’s no longer an attack, just a way to move while ducking. While double jump is… a double jump, it’s great.
As for the other three abilities, they’re pretty paltry. Defeating the Kamen Rider skeleton, a glorified easter egg, gives the player the ability to do dive kicks, which was just a standard ability in other games. While weak, it gets points for sheer style and novelty. The high jump from the past two games comes back, but it’s completely optional, hidden behind a secret wall, and actually pointless. I used it once after getting it and just forgot about it. (Outside of Julius mode, where it’s a sequence break tool, very cool.) While the “Time Stop Immunity” ability is a key, not an ability. All it does is let the player get past one obstacle, when it really should be an ability that lets the player burn MP to freeze time, allowing them to style on frozen fools like they’re rocking Za Warudo. …Or the Time Stopper from Mega Man 2 (1988). But nooo!
Part 3: Souls of Sorrow – First Attempt
How to talk about the souls system? Let’s start with sub-weapons. What has been the purpose and point of sub-weapons in this series up to this point? Well, that’s pretty simple. It’s a way to attack enemies, dispatch obstacles, and deal damage in a way that’s impossible, or more difficult, with the main attacking weapon. Axes give vertical range, knives are horizontal projectiles, crosses can deal multi-hit damage to tougher enemies while the character retreats, and holy water is damage over time. All of these are useful, and none of them feel redundant.
With Aria of Sorrow, there was a desire to expand this system to incorporate a broad spectrum of player expression, to let them choose their sub-weapons from a large library, similar to equipment in Symphony of the Night. This manifested as the “Tactical Soul” system, or souls system, where the player can equip three souls of differing colors— red, blue, and yellow— which are largely dropped by the 90 or so enemies frolicking through the halls of Dracula’s Castle.
Red souls function as sub-weapon substitutes, releasing projectiles or performing short-range attacks. Blue souls are akin to persistent skills or modifiers, including a floating jump, rotating fireball options, and the ability to hover in midair, which is surprisingly useful. While the yellow souls are passives that boost stats, enable a unique effect, or increases the rates of something happening.
The most common souls by far are the red souls, and they are the ones you’ll be switching through for the majority of a run. They infuse a great deal of variety in how a player approaches the game, functioning as a second weapon that is to be replaced throughout the game. They are, in a sense, an expansion of the pretty broken magic system from Harmony of Dissonance while also being a reprisal of DDS from Circle of the Moon. If the game’s stellar reputation it to be believed, it should be the best system of all three. …And in several respects, I think this is kind of the worst.
My first problem is the matter of power, as many souls you obtain have a low base damage value, often being weaker than Soma’s weapon attack. While the damage scales somewhat, the base damage figure cannot be upgraded, so various souls that may be good in the early game are hard to use in the later game. This means souls are inherently disposable.
Problem two is the fact that the game does not tell you much information about a given soul when scrolling through the narrow list. You just get the name, MP costs, and a brief description. Generally, higher MP costs correlate to more power, but the correlation is not consistent. I would think that the Advance Collection‘s encyclopedia would at least clue the player into their power, but it doesn’t. You need to go to a wiki for that, or just memorize the souls. Which would be hard enough if they had an icon or were in a consistent order, but I cannot tell how the souls are supposed to be sorted. Or, in other words, information is frustratingly opaque for no good reason.
Three, many of these souls are very similar, featuring short-range bursts of damage that don’t feel particularly useful, or are roundabout substitutes for the knife sub-weapon. This can make it hard to find the base soul for a situation, especially when I could not find a clear parallel for the always useful axe sub-weapon. Without access to a good, reliable, way to damage foes, this can make it hard to find a use for magic in many instances, as melee just feels more efficient.
Four, the MP recovery rate in this game is questionable. Nathan in Circle of the Moon recovered MP at a great pace, letting you wander around with an effect active at all times. Harmony of Dissonance had a significant cooldown to recover one’s MP, largely by design as magic was SO GOOD in that game. However, Aria of Sorrow, despite making magic far more important, gives the player a pretty lethargic recovery rate. Even near the end of the game, I was counting something to the tune of 1 MP for every second. When even a decent projectile attack costs at least 20 MP, with just under 500 MP in the endgame, that rate is just unacceptable.
When Soma is not full on MP, breaking candles and vases will give him MP-restoring hearts, a first in the series, but the amount a small heart gives you is paltry, a few percentage points and a barely legible tick on the MP bar. You often either need to consciously conserve your magic or accept that you won’t be topped off until you hit up the next save point. This works, but the ebb and flow of this system did not click with me, and I always had some reservations about it. If magic is powerful and has great range, then I will use it carefully, but make sure to use it. If magic is weak but cheap, then I would be inclined to use it on the regular. But if magic is weak, has spotty range, and is slow to recover… that’s three good reasons to NOT use a key system of this game.
I still used it, of course, but I typically felt like I had both too many options and not enough good ones. Powerful spells eat up a lot of MP but have some of the best DPS or range. I could improve the recovery rate of my magic using the Rune Ring equippable Rune Ring, which bumps up the MP regeneration rate by a significant margin. However, there is only one ring slot— I guess Soma only has one finger— so this requires making a trade-off for a feature that… I think should be just be a passive upgrade.
Going back to the souls themselves, I really mean it when I say I’m disappointed by the variety and diversity of souls. One of the best souls I found was actually the Slime soul, as it would bounce off the walls and have a good chance of hitting larger enemies multiple times, or hit multiple enemies. That’s 140 base attack damage for only 20 MP for what’s basically the Rebound Stone from SotN. Second favorite? Fish Head, which shoots a fireball at 115 attack for 18 MP. Basically just the knife again! Third favorite? Ripple, a knife that gets embedded in enemies and deals damage over time, 65 attack times six for 35 MP. It’s literally a knife! There are more concentrated big damage attacks, but they have such high investment costs and the damage was never high enough where I felt it was worth switching to them, learning how to use them, or… using them.
As for blue souls, those are a far more situational sub-ability, mostly to help with navigation. The first major version the player gets is the Floating Armor that gives Soma the invaluable ability to glide and access hard to reach locations. While the second comes way, way later when Soma gets the Giant Bat soul, allowing him to swiftly fly through the skies, just like Alucard did a couple hundred years ago, but he’s smaller and swifter.
Both of these work as mobility tools, though they have problems. Floating armor can eat up quite a bit of MP at 5 MP per second, and is necessary for some tricky jumps. I would actually argue that it should not even be an equippable soul, and you should be able to use it by holding L once you jump. …Except that would not work with the super jump. While the bat just drains MP like it’s going out of style. At a cost of 30 MP, you are only going to get a few seconds of flight in this form, and cannot do anything to attack while in it.
Beyond that… I only got about 5 of the 20 optional blue souls. None of the summons, mostly not-so-useful shields and Death’s “homing” sickles, which deal a pitiful amount of damage.
Yellow souls are passives, and that makes them particularly valuable, as you can enable certain effects or boost stats. Mechanically, their most common use is when traveling through water zones, where they let Soma Jesus walk or don his iron boots. It makes for a mildly fussy arrangement, needing to switch between souls in the menu while going through these water areas, but it is nowhere as slow as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) at least.
Outside of that, yellow souls are consistently useful. I particularly loved the Giant Worm yellow soul, as it recovers 5 HP every second or so while Soma is not moving. Which, uh, sometimes includes when he’s crouching or falling. Funny how that works. This is likely a carryover from Circle of the Moon, where this was a darn essential skill in getting through some of the hairier enemy gauntlets. Except in Aria of Sorrow, you don’t need to spend any MP on it.
The succubus yellow soul, which is required to reach the good ending, operates similarly, recovering 5 HP with every hit dealt, and it does a lot to boost Soma’s defenses, even if it’s just by a few hits. The Gremlin’s luck boost would be useful, if luck actually worked properly in this game. Otherwise, the best is probably the Headhunter yellow soul, which boosts all stats (except luck) based on how many other souls you have in your inventory. It’s extra damage and extra defense, so that’s hard to beat.
Taking this all in, you might be saying “I just was not using the systems enough,” and that very well may be true, but there are systems that discourage experimentation. The soul selection process is not bad, but it is not exactly great either— there’s a reason Dawn of Sorrow added multiple sets of souls you can switch between. While the vast majority of these souls are distributed via a randomized drop system, where enemies will drop or not drop souls in accordance with their RNG functions.
On one hand, I can see the appeal of this. No playthrough is ever quite the same, and your experience is shaped by your tool set. However, there are good ways to handle this, and simple ways to handle it. Aria of Sorrow goes the simple route. Some souls are exceedingly rare drops, less than one percent, and can easily require players to farm the same enemies dozens of times to get their desired soul. I would know, I did just that, several times.
The player can obtain a ring that doubles the soul drop rate behind an insane price tag of 300,000. (If you are playing the game normally, you’ll have a tenth of that by the endgame.) In order to get this money, the best farming method is to equip the Mimic soul, which converts damage received into money, jump into a spike pit, and then heal up after getting one or two hits away from death. There’s a great spot for this in the Clock Tower. However, even with this, it is far too difficult and time-consuming to get the souls for many monsters, and the idea of getting every soul in this game? …No. I’m not gonna do that crap! You’d have a better time catching every Pokémon in a Pokémon game.
This is bad resource distribution. I don’t mind this approach for bonus weapons or armor. You get plenty of both of those things through other means. But red souls are only attained by killing enemies, so whatcha gonna do? You can either ignore the system or pray to the RNGs (Random Number Gods) that you get good drops.
Part 4: A Crunchier Monster Mash
With the general systems covers, I want to give particular attention to the bosses in Aria of Sorrow. The title mark a return to the more creative designs of Circle of the Moon and Symphony of the Night, with far fewer two-human-scale enemies, larger battlegrounds, and a focus on spectacle. Giant skeletons, giant armor, giant golem, and a giant guy with giant hands. Oh, and a regular-sized manticore. It makes for some dynamic bosses, definitely, but the design of bosses gradually shifts from visually imposing to mechanically imposing.
Headhunter perfectly captures this transition, being a three-stage boss that changes heads and patterns with every phase, growing increasingly aggressive and unconventional. The fast and crawling final form has the poison and tongue needed to intimidate players from growing close, and it may require a few tries before figuring out how to outsmart them.
Death is similarly a challenge, mostly for the sheer range of his attacks and how much damage each strike he does when tossing around his double-bladed scythe. It’s nothing impossible, but it took me a few attempts to get past without resorting to a potion for quick healing, as he was able to take down Soma after just eight or ten hits. It’s not an awful tolerance of error threshold, but it’s definitely a wake-up after the hectic Clock Tower preceding him.
Legion is… Legion. I love seeing them, want to be part of them when I die, but they are never that hard, even if they are constantly chasing after you in a square.
While Balore is another wall of a boss battle. His first phase effectively against a static eye and two flailing hands with difficult to read motions. You need to stop, look, and study to understand how he moves his mighty hands, or else you’re going to take a hundred damage per hit. The way the sprites of his hands rotates makes it a bit tricky to see how or when they will move. You can’t see his shoulders or biceps to gauge where things are going.
Balore may be a wall, but not an impassable one. You do get some incredibly good equipment via an optional challenge gauntlet preceding this fight, and with it in hand, you can more easily focus on a single hand, jumping around it while striking the eye with a weapon or magic. …Then the boss starts showering the field with fire as it’s nearly dead, shooting beams to turn 98% of the floor of the arena into a danger zone. While you can camp on the sidelines, waiting for health to heal, and trying in vain to hit him with magic attacks, there actually is a super easy way to beat him. Simply jump up so that Soma’s attack is in range of Balore’s eye and use the Medusa’s Head soul, which you should have given how common the enemy is, to stay floating in the air. Then, just wail on his eye until he dies and produces a succulent orb.
The next two bosses… are both quite good. The Dracula analog is pretty basic, yet a compelling enough encounter for the first phase, while the second phase is surprisingly easy to exploit. Simply stay crouched under their giant hands and attack the weak point when you can, sliding to avoid the lighting strike.
Then, the penultimate boss battle is a rival battle of sorts, and easily the best one of the GBA trilogy. Your opponent has ways to build distance, keep the player guessing, and unique techniques that go beyond what you can do, but still feels fair. It truly is a battle of old versus new, requiring the player to make the most of the tools they’ve accumulated before they are permitted to go into the final lair.
The final area is a gauntlet in and of itself, a far cry from the Arena of Circle of the Moon, but a pain in the ass all the same. The save points are enough to prevent it from getting too frustrating, though, but the final boss… is just raw nerves.
If I was designing a final boss in an exploration-driven Castlevania game, and wanted it to be really hard, this is exactly what I would do. If I was designing a final boss that I thought was a fun and fair challenge, this is exactly what I would NOT do. The boss battle is broken up into two phases, and they both come from the design school of “let’s throw a bunch of crap at the player for them to weasel out of.” The first phase is against rotating spheres, launching projectiles in shifting environment where it’s hard to see the attacks, let alone dodge them. It’s a boss in and of itself, enough to warrant healing, while the second phase… is even more annoying.
For phase two, you are supposed to destroy four eyes embedded on walls in order to weaken the defenses of a black sphere in the center of the screen, but there are projectiles spawning from everywhere. You need to be on the move constantly to avoid damage, or to maneuver into these elusive safe zones that you probably can’t reliably see with all the junk flying around. You’re really not learning a clear or reasonable pattern, and I’m pretty sure the devs expected players to down healing items through this panic-filled final stretch of the game. Or, at least that’s what I did, as I was not in the mood to make sense of whatever the hell THIS is supposed to be.
I’d make a comment on how this final boss was an utter nightmare in Julius mode, but that fortunately ends right after the faux Dracula, making it pretty much the perfect low stress way to blast through the game.
Part 5: Pixelated Prestige
After the quality yet slightly too dark visuals of Circle of the Moon, Harmony of Dissonance cranked up the colors and lowered the contrast a bit too much. The dark screen of the original Game Boy Advance demanded bright colors, regardless of art direction, and as the third outing, there was institutional knowledge of what worked and what did not. Intricate yet not too dark, not too colorful, and with lovingly detailed bestiary of monsters.
The end result is a game with no shortage of utterly gorgeous backdrops. Everything from the save rooms to the walls of catacombs to the spinning gears of the clock tower to the few instances of 3D thrown in for good measure. Aria of Sorrow is a stunning game when at its best, truly demonstrating the power of the GBA and using whatever trick they could to make the game look impressive. The most notable of which unfortunately cannot be captured in my screenshots, and that’s the glow. This has been a stable across the prior games, but its use in Aria of Sorrow is what really cemented it to me, as it is used to add so much character to the world.
The glow turns the underwater catacombs from something murky into something vibrant. It gives areas a glow that defines the setting, interjecting a broader color pallet through visual effects alone. The Kojima portraits was beautifully compressed within the limitations of the GBA, housing an exceptional amount of detail under such harsh limitations while remaining completely readable. The deluge of character animation work, giving Soma so many weapons, sporting so many enemies, big and small, and populating the background with flying critters, it makes the world feel so much more alive and fuller. However, I do wish that there was just a bit more color definition in some environments, as they do occasionally shift into some dark, yet not too dark, solid background, only covered by a few props. I would not go so far as to say that certain environments feel like they were from different artists but, uh, they probably were.
As for the audio, this is a dramatic upgrade from what came before. Gone is the crunchy chippy sounds of Harmony of Dissonance and in are some excellent compositions from three artists, spanning over an hour of tunes, all of which give each area so much more personality. It’s naturally still music coming from a GBA, but the sound font is so rich and expressive, it’s easy to forget that, fall into the groove, and delight as the punchy sound effects and surprising amount of verbal barks fill the game’s soundscape.
Aria of Sorrow looks great, sounds great, and for a GBA game, I could not ask for anything more than this. Full marks.
Part 6: A Bit of Sorrow
Having gone through all of this, I have to say that… I still like Aria of Sorrow and think it’s a great game, but it does not live up to the mountain I made for it as a kid. Its greatest feature and greatest shortcoming is its signature soul system, which should, and to an extent does, allow for a wide variety of different play types, but is just too inconsistent and situational for its own good. The core fundamentals are here and accounted for, but there’s just enough annoying malarkey here that it would not be my go-to pick for a quick Castlevania fix.
However, I will say that Aria of Sorrow lays an excellent foundation for the series to build upon. Both with the signature soul system, and with the defining feature of this trilogy— its experimental magic systems. Systems that were always interesting and fun to play around with, but never matured to a point where I felt that any one worked exceptionally well. Which begs the question: Did the DS games get a better handle on these systems, refine and rework them while delivering an even, entertaining, experience? Well, there’s only one way for me to know… but it’s going to be a while before I move on from the Advance era and onto Dominus.