Man I don't know what everyone else saw in this game that I didn't but I just hated my overall time playing this one. The map design is so bland and boring, the movement is so limited, the card system is a neat idea if you can actually get enemies to drop the damn things. And while it is their first attempt at a metroidvania on the GBA, it really felt like it. The removal of currency and having no game shop made this game unnecessarily hard. If I weren't playing this one on the emulator I don't think I would've beaten it. I filled out like 90% of the map and even by the end I was struggling. I hear people really enjoy the card system but I could never get these damn things to drop. I feel like drop rates in this game in general are so rare and scuffed that It doesn't matter how well you play, you'll reach a bullshit section due to how underleveled you are and don't have the appropriate armor to take care of the threat.

Also, you can ONLY use a whip in this game, Idk man that's just lame, I get it, he's considered to be a belmont but this just makes him less fun to play as. I think the devs may have realized this so for Aria you actually play as a non belmont, and further down the line if you do play as one they give you the option to use different weapons like with Jonathan in Portrait of Ruin.

Yeah I didn't like this one, at all, I wish I could see what all the 3-4 stars people saw in this one but as it stands this is my least favorite metroidvania i've played.

I'm tired.

Let's play armchair game designer, because lord knows we don't have enough of them on here.

Before you can run, you must walk, and boy does Nathan Graves enjoy walking. Nathan just adores going on a stroll in Camilla's castle while his master's getting his toenails ripped off in preparation for being slaughtered in a satanic ritual. Mr. Graves wouldn't know how to run even if I slapped his dump truck ass with the world's most painful block of wood. It's a godsend that Camilla's basement houses the very shoes he needs to be able to find the joys of exercise again after he forgot how to sprint when Count Dankula played his Trap Hole card in the introduction scene. One must wonder how long it would've taken if Drac's minions didn't make such a fuck up as to leave shoes for Mr. Graves to wear for his aching strolling feet. Even with these shoes Nathan only knows how to barrel forward with wanton disregard for his own being. Alucard had it figured out already, just run with care. That's all you gotta do. For Nathan though? Only two speeds exist. Tortoise, and drunken hare riding on a Kawasaki Ninja.

The input for running in this game is bad enough with requiring me to dash dance on the dpad and kill my thumbs, but Nathan's whip attack is noticeably sluggish compared to past Classicvania outings. It may not be noticeable at first, but try ducking and whipping and go back to playing as Simon in any of the past games and you'll definitely feel it. Nathan can jump like a stiff pong paddle and can even wall jump, and trust me I'm proud of him for being able to do so, but he should stick to his day job. Wall jumping in this is automated for at least two seconds as Nathan pauses on the wall and propels himself into the direction of enemy fire that sends him careening back down the pit that he was trying to make his way up from. You will encounter this scenario a lot, I assure you, especially with Circle of the Moon's obsession with slap dashing Armor enemies everywhere with annoying attacks that can bop you from the other side of the screen. No joke, I had a moment where I thought I was hitting an Ice Armor enemy in the underground waterway safely, only to get a very pleasant surprise in the form of another spear flying from off screen and stabbing me through the adam's apple thanks to the second Ice Armor that was behind him.

The primary system is collecting some shitty Yu-Gi-Oh cards and playing Blackjack with yourself to combine two of them and give yourself some form of power up, which could range from boring effects like your whip getting an elemental bonus, or actual cool shit like turning into a bone-throwing skeleton that dies in one hit. Unfortunately, the card for turning into a glass jawed skeleton is about 95% into the game and requires killing a very specific candle enemy that requires backtracking to a who-gives-a-shit area, and kindly asking it to drop the damn card sometime this week. This is where I get to bitch about the worst part of Circle of the Moon besides Nathan's completely useless movement, and it's the outrageous drop rates. That card that I'd need for the aforementioned skeleton transformation? The drop rate is zero point four fuckin' percent. That doesn't just effect the cards either. Health items? What are those?!

Seriously, I went for hours playing this game and didn't think healing was even a thing in Circle of the Moon besides the absurdly paltry potions that give a measly 20 hit points back, or getting to one of the sparse save points that fully heals you. Hell, you don't even get healed after boss fights. I beat probably six bosses before a piece of meat suddenly dropped from an enemy, where I double-taked and went back just to stare at it for a while. There is not a shop to speak of either, shopkeepers aren't welcome in Circle of the Moon. No buyable health items for you to help with the horrendous onslaught of tedium, but you can go ahead and enjoy all those completely useless armors you get to lug around on your person. Sure is a hard game we got here, would be nice if I could have some items, but Dracula is against formal goods trading.

Circle of the Moon is about inconvenience. It inconveniences you with movement that isn't convenient for the challenge that is set up for you as it would be for past entries. The only way to make your pathetic movement less inconvenient is to find cards inconveniently hidden away in an unknown enemy's back pocket that could potentially make certain encounters flat out trivial, like the normally problematic ice element in the underground waterway, or Dracula's nigh-impossible to dodge meteor attack in the final battle. It's all an inconvenient excuse to grind if you lack information, which this game inconveniently gives you none assuming you're not playing the Advance Collection version, which was the only convenient bit from my experience. Thanks M2.

It took me about three months to finish the save file I started on the Advance Collection a ways back after I completed Harmony of Dissonance and it's toilet noises, and it's mindbogglingly to me to realize that it was around last Christmas that I replayed and finished Aria of Sorrow again on the same collection. It wasn't necessarily a skill issue, it was a thumb issue from the horrendous dash input, and my complete apathy to this game's entire philosophy of wanting to train me on it's solitaire system only for the battle arena to give me the middle finger, and take that same system away in the ultimate show of disrespectful inconvenience. It was optional, sure, but it's existence is more than enough to make me want to transition into a volcanic state. It was even more aggravating to find out that Konami apparently bumped the experience requirements up for the western releases, thus demanding me to update the list for all the times they fucked us in the ass. I needed a lot of Picross breaks, and apparently a detour to that Peach game I didn't care about.

It kinda goes without saying, but the thought of replaying this on original hardware with the bad GBA screen, no suspend save, or in-game overlay hints of what enemies are carrying cards is less appealing to me than taking an epilator to my ballsack. I'll give it a pity star for Dracula's final boss design, I guess. I guess.

Thus concludes armchair game designer session, if you enjoyed what you've read, please like, comment, subscribe, ring the dingaling, and maybe sing me a nice song.

I'm going to bed now. Goodnight.

hoooooonkmimimimimi.

+Nathan Graves dump truck ass
+Rakugakids reference
+Yo Camilla call me
+Proof of Blood

-Nathan Graves dump truck ass
-Sinking Old Sanctuary?! More like Stinking Old Sanctuary!
-Why is my hair not as nice as Hugh's
-Where's my burrito

In a trend this year of giving second chances to games I gave up on previously, I picked up CotM on the Japanese Wii U eShop. I ended up liking Paper Mario: Sticker Star a decent amount playing through it earlier this year. The second chance was worth it for me. This game however, the second chance was not really worth it for anything other than being able to say that I've now beaten all the Metroid-style Casltevanias. It's easily the worst of the Metroid-y Casltevanias in almost every way. I did everything but the hella difficult battle arena, and it took me around 7 or 8 hours.

So where to begin with this game. It's the only Metroid-style Castlevania game not to have production involvement from Koji Igarashi, and it was a very early title for the GBA. A problem back then that I did not have was that the backgrounds for the stages were nearly impossible to see on the OG GBA's super dark screen, and being that I played it on a Wii U with a Pro Controller, I also had a much bigger screen and different control method than one attached to the screen. It has a number of strange design decisions and steps backwards from Symphony of the Night that make it feel overall like a simplified version of SotN but with worse controls and less variety. It's almost like someone took Casltevania 3 on the NES and morphed it into a Metroid-style game.

The first really baffling design decision is that the main character Nathan has no default run ability. You start off only being able to walk, and you walk SO slowly. The first power-up you get is the ability to run, but you run by double-tapping left or right. All that constant double-tapping really starts to hurt your thumb after a while. The combination of the removal of SotN's back-dash means your only fast movement for dodging is either this double-tap running or doing a Mega Man-style floor slide. This makes the game's movement really clunky and not terribly fun to do, as the need to double-tap means you're constantly reminded of how pointlessly awkward they are. The whip attack that Nathan uses is also quite slow and methodical, and he absolutely FLIES backwards when he gets hit, which when combined with the awkward walking really makes it feel like a weird Metroid-ification of a classic Castlevania game (and I never found that to be a positive comparison).

The castle itself isn't super interesting or memorable. Almost all of it is either long hallways or vertical S- or U-shaped corridors in a way that makes the castle simultaneously vast and boring to traverse. In another strange step backwards from SotN, there is also a very strange utter lack of warp points in most of the castle for no good reason, meaning that you'll be doing a ton of backtracking on foot if you wanna use your new movement powers to get all the health, mana, and heart-count (for sub-weapons) upgrades littered around the castle. A lot of the movement powers also aren't that interesting or are entirely for opening up content gates. Outside of the double-jump and vertical leap, almost all of them are useless outside of the traversal sections that outright require their use. No bat-form, panther-speed, or special dodges to unlock here.

The most fun I had with the castle was just going from place to place ticking boxes off a list getting more upgrades for my base stats, as the enemies are almost never really threatening (and when they are they kill you FAST), but the very rote feeling of reward of "I completed a task" is a fairly low bar for a game to provide enjoyment with. Speaking of the enemies, they're nothing really special either. The game has pretty low enemy variety even for a Metroidvania. It's not laughably paltry or anything, but it feels noticeably lesser than the other games that had the luxury of ripping sprites from older Castlevanias (a place where age has been unkind to early games in the series like CotM). The bosses aren't very good either. Most of them range somewhere between very strangely easy or super duper hard due to attacks that require outright luck to dodge and/or do more than half of your healthbar in damage. The final boss is particularly guilty in that regard. There are a couple fun fights (I liked the big green Ram thing and the fight with the guy with powers like yours), but most of the fights are forgettable even for a Metroid-y Casltevania game.

Where the special stuff does lie is in the DSS card system the game has, and it messes that up too in a way that feels really unnecessary. The DSS card system is a system where you can find base and modifier cards (a dozen different kinds of each, iirc), and by equipping one of each and pressing the L button, you'll activate a special power. You don't know what they do until you activate them the right way, and the game won't even tell you what they do or how much MP they cost until you've activated them. There were a couple I couldn't even figure out how to properly activate, so they were left as "???" for the entire game. This lets you get stuff like a kinda crap mid-run shield (it's not active as you jump, so it's useless around 60% of the time, and some enemies phase right through it because of how they spawn), more powerful elemental whips, damaging shields, longer invincibility time, or even new weapons like turning your whip into a giant elemental sword. Of course, I didn't get to try out most of the DSS system because of the main flaw in it: The cards for it are far too hard to find. Certain enemies drop cards, and you have no idea which. Many of them are quite rare drops as well, so unless you know where to look and deliberately farm them, you very likely won't find many or even most (as was the case with me) of the cards in the game. The DSS feature is by far the best thing the game has going for it, so other than an adherence to genre conventions, I can't really imagine why they'd hide their best content this way.

Graphically I have seen the game described as an enhanced GBC game, and that just about fits. The animations are very limited (especially compared to other Castlevania games), with most enemies only having a couple frames of animation, and the sprites aren't super detailed either. Some of the backgrounds are quite nice, although as said previously they would've been quite hard to see on an original GBA screen most of the time. Despite the limited graphics, the game still has problems with slowdown. It often isn't much of a problem, and is only present when certain enemies or several of a certain type are on-screen at once. However, it's an AWFUL problem on the final Dracula fight. There were many times on failed attempts at Dracula that button presses not registering how I wanted them to (particularly for the upwards high jump) had me falling into a powerful attack that got me killed.

The other elements of the presentation are a mixed bag. The story is unobtrusive, sure, but it's also very uninspired and honestly might as well not even be there. The context it provides to certain fights is nice, but it's definitely the least ambitious story out of any of the Metroid-y Castlevanias. The music is largely remixes of older Castlevania music, so it's usually really good. The music is probably the #1 thing this game easily has over its GBA Castlevania counterparts.

Verdict: Not Recommended. This is a trudging, sub-par Metroidvania affair the whole way through. Frustratingly difficult far more often than enjoyably challenging, clunky controls, boring presentation. Especially with the inundation of fantastic Metroidvanias coming on the market these days, your money can go towards much better than Circle of the Moon as can your time. I know this game has its defenders, especially on this site, but I can't enjoy this game the way they can. Before I started this playthrough I held the opinion that this was probably the worst of the Metroid-y Castlevanias, and the only thing this playthrough has changed is that now I know its definitely the worst.

Good music, very good level design and for the most part really good boss battles. Unfortunately, the main character is super slow and only learns to run as the game progresses, but you have to press twice in one direction, which seems unnecessary, couldn't running have been the default? :/ I often got lost and had to backtrack a lot. But that's just the way it is in a Metroidvania. The magic system with the cards was quite cool, but I hardly used it. It's just stupid that cards drop randomly and you never really know which ones are good and where to find them. I felt extremely underleveled towards the end of the game and was very grateful that there were save-states :D

Finished on April 27th, 2024

Played this on the Steam Deck through the Advance Collection but- I like this box art more.

Overall this is a fine enough start to the GBA games- it being on a smaller handheld and not having Igarashi on board would make this game attempting to hold up to SotN's quality a monumental effort. But, for it being a release title for the handheld I can imagine most fans were probably sated by it.

In 2024 however a lot of issues feel that much more glaring as CotM's main gameplay feature: the DDS cards kinda throw a wrench into my expectations for the experience- namely its fusing with the RPG mechanics of the usual igavania. It feels as though you're expected to grind- grind on monsters that hold the cards that you dont yet have. Partially to make sure you're up to snuff for the next section of the castle and partially because a new card opens up a slew of new combinations with each card you obtain...but how good some of these new powers are varies wildly. It gets even more peculiar nearing the end of the game when some cards get hidden away in prior boss rooms and the battle arena- the completionist in me wanted to nab every card but I was not willing to sit through the tedium of
->summoning thunderbird on Lilith twice
->Leave room and repeat
->wait a minute or three so your MP refills
->repeat for 10 or so levels
Like i COULD but then you'd just be entering the battle arena several, several times to get the cards anyway- I just wanted to get a move on.

The DDS cards are neat and all but too many of them feel too samey for me to really want to commit to them. Some of them unlock new weapon types to dish out, some of them give elemental attributes to your whip, some allow you to summon- its pretty great at first but mostly I just stuck to a handful of these combos. It also feels weird considering how these feel as though they're trying to replace other mechanics? Like item drops? I swear I barely had any potions or heart items drop throughout, so mostly I stuck to the healing combo i mentioned earlier which is suitable but it just felt- odd, idk. No shops, no currency just the one card combo you could potentially miss out on.

Some of the bosses are pretty tedious (Death, buddy, what happened to you?) and the castle isnt all too interesting visually. It does become a bit more fun to explore as you hit the end of the game and get the Roc's feather, allowing a long, vertical jump up to cut through towering sections of the map and even playing a fun role in the final boss.

Its fine for the first handheld (not?)-Igavania title, although much of this traversing of Dracula's castle feels bogged down one half being a more rudimentary progression of unlocking your movement abilities and the other half being this momentum breaking grind for your combative flairs in the DDS system.

Castlevania: Circle of the Moon was released as a Game Boy Advance launch title. And developer Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe’s swan song, for the subsidiary was dissolved the following year. The game kicks off with the protagonist Nathan and his partners walking in on Camilla’s revival of Dracula. Their attempt to interrupt ends with mentor Morris being held as sacrifice as Nathan and Morris’ son, Hugh, plummet down a long shaft to the castle’s underground. The two rivals split up and the player takes control of the whip-wielding Nathan, who leisurely strolls and whips his way past bomb-throwing skeletons fire-spitting bone heads. That is, until you locate the Dash Boots, so Nathan can finally start exploring in earnest.

Circle of the Moon aims to balance traditional Castlevania with Metroidvania-inspired exploration. In addition to your traditional sub-weapons it introduces the Dual Set-up System (DSS). Combining two cards, dropped by enemies, results in a magic enhancement. Sadly, it’s poorly implemented. It relies heavily on RNG with low drop-rates and no hints as to which enemy could potentially drop what card. I finished with only half the cards but also with 23 Leather Armors, which served no purpose as there’s no means to exchange redundant items for money or, say, cards. The game also ramps up its difficulty fast in the second half of the game, mostly by throwing hordes of evolved (recoloured) enemies at you. Boss fights aren’t exactly the cherry on each area’s cake, either. Half of them float around, sparsely animated, firing off projectiles while you dodge and facepalm for losing the Cross sub-weapon yet again.

Conclusion: Circle of the Moon offers a solid but uninspired Castlevania experience. Some unfortunate choices in its design leaves a lot of potential untapped and it might’ve been a great entry in the series with a little more budget (and perhaps love) from Konami’s headquarters.

The biggest puzzle surrounding Circle of the Moon to me is how it came to be. Could it be that it's a B-team game that went sour? Perhaps it was a rush-job to get something out for the Game Boy Advance's launch? Or maybe, it was born from a legitimate desire to mesh Symphony of the Night's level design with more traditional Castlevania gameplay. It's even possible it was all of those things combined. Regardless of the answer, however, it's clear that it was a mistake.

Circle of the Moon is economical in regards to its storytelling: the cast is restricted to Dracula and a cohort along with three vampire hunters, and one can count the total cutscenes on their fingers. In fact, after a very short introduction in which Dracula gets resurrected, the player gets thrown straight into the action -- literally, as the hunters fall into a trap hole, becoming separated. The group is composed by the mentor Morris Baldwin, who's captured by the antagonists, along with his two apprentices Hugh Baldwin and Nathan Graves, the latter being the playable character.

Dracula's home, this time around, is a complete bore. Unlike the game worlds one will see in most metroidvanias, this one isn't structured in a way that the areas mesh into one another: each area presents a more or less linear layout, an obstacle course built around the power-up required to access it. At the end, there's a boss, and right after them, a power-up that opens the next area. The power-up also unlocks a shortcut near the boss room which leads out of the section of the castle they're in, which in turn, the player will likely never have to enter again.

It's very easy to see this weak design through the castle map itself: notice how Abyss Stairway, Eternal Corridor and the left part of the Audience Room together link to the entrances and exits of almost every area in the game, like this ugly glue between levels. Now compare it to the SotN map, which is much less regular and loops around itself in multiple parts. Also note how the warp points are spread out throughout the castle and are actually useful in SotN, unlike the ones seen in Circle of the Moon.

And we're still not done tearing into this castle because our vampiric host had the god-awful idea of having every optional pickup be an HP, MP or max heart increase, with new equipment being obtainable only from enemy drops. One can only imagine that this choice was due to gear being mediocre anyway, offering only stat increases or decreases, but the result is that exploring alternate paths or finding secret rooms is never met with an exciting reward. In fact, by the end of the game, it's an activity that will likely be entirely ignored, as the difference between 252 and 256 hearts is negligible. Again, compare with SotN and its flashy swords and suits of armor that make Alucard immune to different types of damage -- it's harder to justify not exploring in that game.

As awful as the castle is, however, it would have been far more tolerable if Circle of the Moon just played better. Nathan Graves has that name because that's where we'll all be by the time he finishes swinging his whip -- even compared with Richter from Rondo, which is a far more punishing game than every Igavania, Nathan attacks more slowly. In fact, almost every action this man takes has to be accompanied by lengthy, uncancellable anticipation and/or recovery animations: one of the earliest power-ups lets him tackle and it's more like an awkward tumble forward, barely usable for its designated purpose of breaking obstacles. Later on, a pair of magic boots enables a wall-jump, which was clearly gimped at some point in the design phase so it wouldn't allow just any ascent, and god forbid Nathan jumps from too high a platform while climbing because he will have to spend a while getting back on his feet.

To make things even worse, Nathan has a low default walking speed, which is meant to be counteracted with a dashing ability that is one of the earliest power-ups. To dash, the player must press left or right twice, a choice of input that greatly increases the likelihood that the action of simply walking out of harm's way will come in too late or that the input itself will be dropped. Which leads us to the deeper issue with this moveset: Circle of the Moon's enemies were seemingly created assuming a responsive character, coming at Nathan with fast attacks, wide movement ranges and plenty of projectile spam. This is especially true for bosses, which aren't all terrible -- most are -- but often feel like playing chess against an opponent that's playing StarCraft.

In an attempt to add some sort of spice to the gameplay, enemies also drop cards, which are used to cast buffs and spells through a system called DSS. The DSS can be seen as a precursor to the Soul system seen in Aria and Dawn, but one that's still anemic and dysfunctional. Every card is a random drop from enemies; only specific enemies drop them, at a very low rate; at least two cards are required to trigger any sort of effect; only one DSS ability may be active at one time; switching between abilties requires entering the menu and pressing L while on the ground; so on and so forth. The Advance Collection goes out of its way to display which enemies drop which cards and provides a list of what each combination does, which can only be construed as an admission that the DSS is unusable without a guide.

But hey, once the game is finished, it invites the player to try a new file in Magician mode, which changes Nathan's stats and gives him all cards from the start. Maybe now the full potential of the DSS will be unlock-- just kidding, it just means he's now a weaker version of himself that will spam the same screen-wide spell the whole game, thus providing a final testament to how shallow the system and game is. The bottom line is that Circle of the Moon is a half-baked attempt at a Castlevania that is best avoided: with loads of great Metroidvanias in the market nowadays, it's a hard sell even for the diehard series fan.