Aria of Sorrow was amazing game but Dawn of Sorrow is formula perfected. Aside from character art that everyone complains about anyway, this game looks gorgeous with detailed, layered backgrounds and lavish animations. Music goes on par with graphics giving us best soundtrack since SotN without even one weaker tune. All the gameplay additions make soul farming and combat far more engaging. DS touch screen gimmicks do not become much of a hindrance (however reaching out for stylus in the middle of the battle can be distracting) and game 90% of the time still depends on button inputs. After all those years I am still impressed what IGA and his team achieved here even if lack of Ayami Kojima art is sorely missed.

This is one of those games that would be one of the best for me. Unfortunately, I learned some things about it and had to lower the score.

I love doing Luck builds in Castlevania games! Igavania games are weird about their drops and it's fantastic. You can get coffee, or a suit, or a magic vacuum that steals souls - it's so interesting. I'm not into grinding into games, but Castlevanias are the only ones where weird stuf you get pushes me to kill an enemy a few more times. So I pretty much lost all interest in the game when I discovered that in this game, Luck stat is borked. How do you manage to do this?!

Dawn of Sorrow is even more reliant on enemy soul drops than its predeccessor. Not only do you get cool abilities, and need them to progress sometimes, but also you need souls to craft better weapons.

So I went through the majority of the game getting steamrolled because I refused to switch out my Dancer Soul and my dumb 777 shirt, which, turns out, was all for nothing, since getting past 36 Luck gives you like a 0.001% bonus every level and Dancer souls don't even raise the luck that counts towards the appearance of souls. What.

Gameplay: 4.5
Art Style: 4.5
Story/Lore: 4
System: 5
Chracter: 4
Total: 4.4