Dawn of Sorrow não é tão surpreendente por inúmeros motivos. O seu predecessor, Aria of Sorrow, já havia trazido as mecânicas principais do personagem Soma Cruz, além de uma aventura apesar de tecnicamente mais limitada, no GBA, com melhor direção de arte.

Some a isso o fato de ter uma mecânica um tanto irritante de fazer o jogador puxar a stylus e desenhar um selo na tela para lacrar os monstros do castelo, o que se prova um pé-no-saco em chefes mais intensos e complicados, já que um erro durante o desenho do selo estende a luta.

Apesar disso, é um competente metroidvania que consegue superar os dois primeiros títulos do GBA, Circle of the Moon e Harmony of Dissonance.

Fifth time's the stumble.

For the first time since Symphony of the Night's release, the newest Castlevania entry could not just approximate, but surpass the technical standards set by the PlayStation game back in 1997. Even from the opening set of rooms, low-poly 3D elements and vivid parallax backgrounds establish the setting and sense of adventure with a degree of fidelity that the GBA titles just were not able to display. The areas that compose Dracula's titular castle are both striking and visually distinct, and it cannot be overemphasized how the ever-present map helps making sense making sense of the castle as a building. The sense of exploring a logically planned space is at the strongest it has ever been, and even somewhat sloppy background work in a specific mid-to-late level is not enough to break this illusion.

Beyond presentation, however, the main issues arise from a nasty bug present in the shipped version of the game, and how it affects the Tactical Soul System. Increasing Soma's luck stat does not make a meaningful difference in whether enemies drop their powers for him to use. Couple that with souls having drop rates as low as 2%, and chances are most players will never see the vast majority of abilities in the game unless they dedicate half their playtime to grinding. Among these optional abilities, attacks and mobility upgrades far more interesting and versatile than those obtainable through normal progression can be found. Annoyingly, there is a roadblock in one area that can only be removed by gathering three specific souls with drop rates of 24%, 16%, and 8%, so grinding is somewhat mandatory if luck is not on one's side.

While the impact of this programming error might seem fairly minimal for non-completionists, it also limits a player's kit on a regular playthrough severely. Having access to fewer souls means having access to fewer builds and strategies, and the game becomes more monotonous than its immediate predecessor as a result. Fewer souls also means fewer and weaker weapons, since specific souls need to be infused into specific weapons to transmute them into more powerful ones. In cases in which a weapon can be infused with more than one soul, upgrade paths turn into upgrade trees, which only adds to the tedium for those who like to explore different combat options. Rewarding players with souls more liberally would not only diversify builds, but would also allow players to engage with the elemental weakness system by crafting specific weapons to use against specific foes.

The tension in the game's systems caused by this bug builds up steadily until the final third of the game, in which the snowball effect can be felt in the final boss encounters. Due to the limited combat options, lateral thinking is disincentivized in favor of attack pattern recognition, oddly more in line with traditional Classicvania fights of old. Chances are this is near the top of the Igavanias in terms of difficulty, which is not necessarily something to lament, but it is a shame that it happened unintentionally and at the cost of other systems.

A prettier, more rigid version of what came before, in dire need of some oil for it to run smoothly.

As a huge fan of this game's predecessor, Dawn of Sorrow was a fun and an enjoyable game, with a great story, characters, and gameplay to match. Or at least for the most part, there are many more annoyances such as enemy placement in certain areas that make little sense and how enemies hit you from every angle. Not to mention that once you defeat a boss, you have to use a stylus to draw lines called "Magic Seals" to truely beat the boss, you could understand the frustration when it comes to certain bosses that are annoying to beat and with little help items. This Magic Seal was responsible for a lot of unnecessary deaths during these boss fights. Not to mention that some magic seals work more than the others. Other than that giant hinderance, the game runs well and the sprite art is amazing. Kind of wished that they sticked with the Kojima art work like in the last game, but hey at least the characters are more expressive. The Music is as phenomenal as usual.

I was looking forward to getting around to this game since the very beginning of this series, as since I first played this, it was the game that I ended up liking the most by far, feeling like an upgraded continuation of the previous handheld Castlevania game, taking the same core mechanics from Aira of Sorrow and putting them into a larger scope with far more complexity, which to be fair this game does indeed have. That said, I don’t really consider this quite as perfect as I once did when replaying, thanks to a number of small issues making certain aspects of the game far more unenjoyable. Even so however, this is still one of my favourites, just without the overwhelming preference to it that I used to have.

In terms of control, Soma is quite similar in this as he was in Aria of Sorrow, acting as somewhat as a midpoint between the extremely slow, rigid mobility of the Belmonts and the blinding speed of Alucard, with a range of attack speeds depending on the weapon type being used. These weapon speeds however, are the first of many differences this game has, with the range of weapons providing a far larger variety of these, with the overhead, heavy weapons feeling as if they have considerably more weight behind them, and the smaller ones being even faster than they were in Aria, leaving the player to be able to cater towards their playstyle even more than before. My general issue with this however is the fact that in terms of moving around quickly, this game has no real easy way of doing that compared to previous matroidvania titles, with the overall speed of the game having a tendency to feel a bit on the slow side at times, particularly with how short Soma’s backdash feels in this game, making some encounters feel as if they almost require simply hitting once or twice and then running away to avoid all damage, rather than giving the option of avoiding it at the last moment to maintain a good position of aggression. This fortunately only affects small portions of the game to me, as it seems that a lot of these encounters were properly designed with the lack of a good burst movement option in mind.

In relation to movement, the area where the game excels to me in one of the biggest ways is easily the castle’s design itself, being larger and denser than previous games, while maintaining consistently intuitive paths of navigation through it, limiting the likelihood of becoming lost while exploring. Furthermore, I feel like this game brought back some of the design influence of SOTN in terms of the individual room design, with more instances of quirkiness or unique ideas being shown throughout, such as a room full of succubae disguising themselves as a main character, or a 4x4 grid of rooms that can be moved around like a sliding tile puzzle, making getting to a new area an exciting thing just to see what creative setpieces will be shown. The teleporter locations are all quite intuitive as well, being spread out perfectly as to rarely cause any significant backtracking, making exploration rarely feel like a chore. My only issue with the navigation in the game is tied to exploration being less satisfying in a lot of cases, going back to the issue of some paths leading to dead ends that just don’t feel very rewarding due to the way weapons have been reworked here. In this game, the primary way to get better weapons is to infuse certain enemy souls with them in order to upgrade them, rather than simply finding them as you explore the castle. What this does is make it far less exciting to come across a weapon in the castle, as it’s very likely that it will simply be weaker than what you already have on at the time, with the likelihood of you having the necessary souls required to upgrade it being quite low. This system also has the issue of outright encouraging grinding, which is made a worse problem by how low the drop rates of some of them can be, potentially taking at least an hour of killing the same type of enemy just to upgrade the weapon. This ties into another issue, in which the luck stat is broken in this game to be almost entirely useless, even when maxing it out, the difference being only a fraction of a percentage increase of drop rate at the very most. What ends up happening here is that the pacing of the game is dramatically slowed if the player actually wants to get some decent gear.

With this said however, the souls themselves in this game are overall better in my opinion, having a wider range of effects and benefits, with far more of them actually being viable in some way or another, which is something that could feel a bit lacking in Aria of Sorrow’s soul system, with some simply outclassing others to a large enough extent to make many of them obsolete. Another aspect of this game that truly excels in my eyes is in terms of the boss design, often being more complex and properly challenging than past games, along with having a much grander sense of spectacle, with many bosses having some extremely interesting, unique mechanics to them that make them completely stand out. My personal favourites include the boss that’s able to stop time and lay out traps for you, and one that completely destroys the ground underneath you and causing you both to fall down to the bottom of a massive tower that you’ve been climbing before continuing the battle. While the bosses may be better however, I personally found the endgame to be far less exciting for the most part, with the true ending’s unlock conditions being hidden behind 3 walls you needed to break with specific souls feeling like a much less interesting way to go about things compared to the gradual discovery of the 3 hidden books that made for one of the most satisfying true ending discoveries I’ve had in gaming as a whole. Furthermore, The Abyss in general feels quite mediocre for the most part, with the final boss being straight up bad, being largely easy, tedious and out of nowhere in terms of the overall story, making the game close off in a fairly unsatisfying way, especially after the consistently high standard of boss fights that this game set. As a final issue I had with this game that made it incredibly frustrating to play on an emulator, the magic seal mechanic is awful and there’s no defending it, having to draw a pattern once you defeat a boss is cumbersome in the best possible situation of you having an actual DS, but is made to be nearly impossible when you have to try and use your mouse to draw a precise pattern on an emulator. I personally think that id you’re using an emulator, that the best way to play the game is to download a romhack that removes this requirement from the game, makes it a far better experience overall.

Even with my many gripes with this game, I still can’t help but think that it’s one of the best in the series, as the core aspects of this game, the castle and enemy design, are at their absolute peak here, it’s just a lot of smaller things that come together to make a game that definitely could have used some tweaking, overall being best described as a flawed masterpiece in my eyes. Definitely a game worth checking out, and a mostly worthy sequel of an incredible game.

Full review on my website: https://www.nepikigaming.com/reviews/castlevania-dawn-of-sorrow/

''Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow is a worthy sequel to many’s favourite Metroidvania game in the franchise, and a good title in the franchise overall. The castle was good for the most part, but did have some weird puzzle rooms because they had to force touchscreen controls in. I don’t think the touchscreen controls make the game worse; it just doesn’t make it better, which it probably could have if it was used better and didn’t punish you if you failed. It did improve further on the prequel however when it comes to duplicate soul handling, but somehow made it even worse to get these souls to begin with. The RNG in this game easily is the low point for me and managed to kill my enjoyment at times. Fortunately it is still optional so if you’re not a completionist, you probably won’t have too much issue with this. While I was bummed out, one of the best post-game modes in any Castlevania game was waiting around the corner, so I did end the game on a high note before it was able to influence my mindset. With that in mind, Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow gets an 8 ”Final Guard I hate you so much with your big health pool and low soul drop rate” out of 10!''

I enjoyed the game thoroughly. Late game honestly felt a lot more manageable than in Aria, and a lot of souls felt a lot more useful than before. It's definitely more difficult than Aria, but I say this in a good way.

The varied weapon types and added resistances to certain physical types add encouragement to try new weapon types. I will say, the need to draw the seal to finish off the boss wasn't as annoying as people make it out to be until the 5th seal, and I played the game on emulator with mouse and keyboard.

I did feel like I needed to spam potions on two bosses to get past them though, and your attacks feel weak compared to before.