A very solid sequel to Aria, using a lot of the same ideas but amplyfying everything to an extreme. The game is huge, and has a lot of hidden mecahnics to chew on, with some souls being useless and some being completely broken. But experimentation is the key, and the game has a lot of ways of testing the player.
I recommend playing with Definitive Edition+ hack mainly because it fixes the behavior of Luck value and adds a bunch of small bugfixes. I finished the game on a real DSi and didn't notice any issues.

Dawn of Sorrow tinha um potencial tão grande pra ser melhor que o Symphony of The Night, mas ele acaba sendo o SOTN com o adicional das mecânicas de Aria of Sorrow, mas não é um jogo ruim, só poderia ser mais do que foi;

Já tirando a primeira coisa da lista, o sistema de selar os bosses, por quê? Por quê isso existe? Toda vez que eu termino a luta eu tenho que desbloquear a tela do J2 Prime do Soma, é uma das mecânicas mais desnecessárias da franquia, além de ter que ser preciso com a caneta (ou mouse), ainda tem que ser rápido senão você perde e tem que lutar mais um pouco.

Em contra ponto, o jogo trouxe uma ideia muito boa com a mecânica de almas que foi a fusão de armas com almas que permite criar espadas, lanças, etc. mais fortes (com uma farmada que tu vai ter que fazer lá pro final mas suave). Isso tornou a busca por almas ser algo mais recompensador.

A própria mecânica de almas melhorou também, trazendo até familiares, aliados que tinham no SOTN como almas que consomem MP de forma passiva. Tem novas almas muito bem animadas que permitem combinações muito boas com outras.

O game também oferece algumas mecânicas com o toque da caneta do DS, mas é uma pequena parte da gameplay que você até esquece depois, poderia ter sido mais usado ou totalmente descartado e te levado o sistema de selamento junto.

Uma coisa a se elogiar aqui é a pixel art que é linda, é claro que não é no nível de SOTN, apesar de usar alguns sprites do jogo de PS1, mas pra um nível de DS, é muito bom.

Mas isso eu falo pra pixel art, por outro lado nessa arte de anime, meu Deus, a Ayami Kojima devia ter tirado férias na época pra explicar o quão feio é esse traço de anime genérico anos 2000. Ainda bem que isso não se tornou o comum da franquia.

O jogo sofreu um dos pequenos problemas de SOTN que foi a facilitação pro final do jogo dependendo do quanto você explorou o castelo, o que no meu no caso não foi muito, mas meu equipamento já estava bom. Fora que o chefe final não ajuda muito, sendo até meio decepcionante comparado a outras batalhas que você teve antes.

Em geral não é um jogo ruim, é bom, o problema é que você conhece o melhor e espera o que vem depois ser melhor ainda, o que gera esse sentimento de poderia ser mais.

Before I start the review I'm going to make clear I played a mod that restored original portraits and got rid of the magic seal mechanic.

The final DS game I played
Story wise I see it as pointless, the first game with Soma wrapped up the story wonderfully so this just felt completely unnecessary from a story perspective, especially since it felt like just a rehash of the basic plot of Aria.

Gameplay wise it's similar to the rest of the DS trilogy with the slower movement and solid combat. I honestly don't know what else to say with this game that hasn't been said in the other DS reviews.

I am Soma. 100% map completion. 100% souls. 100% enemy drops. I didn't get max level like in Aria, but that shit would've taken way too long.

I've been very slowly chipping away at the 100% for this game, so I've been waiting a while to make this review.

I would like to start this review by apologizing to my good friend, Jack. Jack, I promised you that the next metroidvania I would play was Super Metroid. I have Super Metroid, I told you I'd do it, I said I wouldn't play another Castlevania game. That was a lie. A few days after finishing Aria, I was lying in bed and I made the decision to start up Dawn of Sorrow on my DS. Since then, I've 100% the game. For that, I sincerely apologize and hope you forgive me.

With that out of the way, honestly, Dawn is pretty good, but Aria is just better in my opinion.

I'll start with all the things I don't like because they definitely thought that they had to change the game since this is a direct sequel and damn, some of these changes are mad ass.

-The magic seal system sucks ass and so does the Balore effect (but that's only important for maybe, 3 rooms so it's not a big deal). The amount of times I fucked up drawing a seal and having to keep fighting a boss is too many to count and I hate having to put the DS down so I can draw some stupid lines on the touch screen. I hate when I have to physically let go of my controls so I can play some dumb ass mini game they put in that adds nothing to the experience. I don't care that the DS has a touch screen.
-Weapon Synthesis is stupid and takes away from the exploration part of the game. The map is really big and (for the most part) well designed. Why bother forcing the player to farm souls to craft stronger weapons (which you can't find in the map now because they're tied to crafting) when you could just take advantage of the map and make them things you find as rewards. The amount of souls I farmed just to craft some weapons which I never used because I would farm the next version immediately is too many to count.
-Just like in Aria, you get Hippogryph (super jump) and Black Panther (run really fast) late in the game. The difference is that in Aria you still have some time to mess around with them and have some fun moving around the map with those abilities before beating the game. In Dawn, you literally get Hippogrph halfway into The Abyss (same as Aria's Chaos map section) and Black Panther within THE LAST 10 ROOMS OF THE GAME. You have basically no time to mess around with these abilities before you reach the final boss, which is just mad stupid in my opinion. To go on a little bit of a tangent, one of the best parts of SotN is that you get a bunch of great and relevant movement options which when used together and practiced, you get an amazing movement system which feels satisfying. Also, you have every ability before the final sections of the game, then you have the entire inverted castle to mess around with them. In Aria, you get super jump and super speed kind of late, but it still works. In Dawn, you literally get them at the end of the game and it stinks.
-The final two sections of the map in Dawn are straight dog water butt cheeks. The Mine of Judgement and The Abyss are both horribly designed and there's nothing anyone can say to change my mind on that.
-Final point and kind of unimportant especially on my end for a metroidvania, but the story in this game is pretty bad. Not important, but it was bad enough that I took note of it and the writing isn't very good either. When I say that, I mean that its even worse than some of the cheesy stuff in things like SotN, which definitely isn't well written, but at least it's not offensive and has some charm.

Okay, with all that out of the way, I still did really enjoy the game and think its good. The combat is fun and has a bit of a learning curve from Aria, but nothing that ruins the game. The game is overall more much more difficult than Aria, which isn't necessarily a good or bad thing, but was noticeable. The souls were still fun to mess around with, but weapon synthesis kind of fucked it since I'd have to use souls for weapons and I was too lazy to farm multiple of a bunch of souls. The weapons are satisfying to use and the bosses are still (for the most part, fuck Rahab) well designed like in Aria (nothing as good as Julius or Chaos though, but I also haven't done Julius mode yet so I haven't fought Somacula). Finally, the castle (not including The Mines and The Abyss) is well designed, but they put in a lot of the really tall and open rooms which just made me want super jump early and that sucks ass. Overall, good game, definitely has flaws, but still a solid time and I'm biased.

One of the most mid Castlevania games i've played not a bad game but, The castle is one of the weakest castles in the series. The souls skills in great majority are all boring, and the bosses are almost all a bullet sponge that deals a huge amount of damage, but if you equip the devil soul and stock a lot of hp potions you can tank all of them... also the seals are not an interesting mechanic and sometimes if you do too fast or too slow it will fail.. its just dumb, idk.
The music and the pixel art of DS era still amazing. also i like the weapon evolution system.
Overall it just feel rushed.

Dawn of Sorrow is built on the same skeleton as Aria of Sorrow, utilizing the monster soul system on top of the standard igavania formula, and for the most part it’s a worthy inheritor of that bone structure. It mostly plays things safe but with some tweaks here and there for better and worse.

For the better, the weapon upgrade system is great and feels like a natural extension of the soul system, and is yet another thing that makes every play through feel unique if you just let the chips lay where they fall instead of grinding. I also adore the use of DS style 3D in the background of various screens, the town area you keep returning to with the clock tower in the background looms large in my mind as I think of my time with the game. I also adore the puppet master ability that allows you to swap positions with a dummy, that leads to some really interesting progression blockers.

On the negative side I think there are two big things that stick out to people - the touch screen gimmicks and generic anime portraits. These are both things that annoyed me, particularly the touch screen gimmicks like the symbol drawing you have to do to defeat every boss in the game. That being said, I don’t think either of them interrupt the core loop I’m there for so much so that it ruins the game for me. I know there’s a fan patch that remedies some of this that I may try out at some point as well. I think for me the biggest issue was just that the level design wasn’t all that great. There are some areas I’d absolutely dread returning to because they’re so tedious to navigate, and the warp rooms always seemed to be placed in such a way where I wasn’t able to avoid the worst bits. I think just playing through the game normally this wouldn’t have bothered me as much, but going for 100% and grinding for some particular souls really made the navigation grate on me by the end.

All in all though, it’s an igavania that really works on a systems level, just adding a little bit more on top of the sublime system of its predecessor, and that’s all I really need in one of these.