It's not Circle of the Moon's fault that it had to follow in the foot-steps of Symphony of the Night, nor that it had to be an early Game Boy Advance title, but both those things are very much the case. Gone is the distinct personality each area held in Symphony, always leaving you excited to see what they're going to do next, instead replaced with a collection of copy-paste hallways and stairways full of increasingly tankier reskins of the enemies you've been fighting all game long. I never thought I'd be relieved to see an extremely basic box-pushing puzzle, but I'll take just about anything to break up the monotony.

This game also brings out the worst elements Metroidvanias can have. Checking the map every 15 seconds as you follow the route from A to B, undergoing huge amounts of back-tracking when you gain a new ability only to be rewarded with an additional 10MP, the game secretly being very linear with a clear intended route for progression and almost no option to sequence-break it, seldom warp points shoved in the most awkward corners of the map meaning that you'll spend a lot of time back-tracking through the same places over and over. A lot of this would be less of an issue if the game world or level design invited my curiosity, but it sadly does not, and the fact that running requires you to double-top a direction makes all the back-tracking even more unpleasant (my thumb is actually sore from this after my final 3 hour session finishing this game off).

The DSS system is also quite disappointing. Some of the abilities it gives you access to are legitimately quite cool, but in order to gain these spells you need to collect cards that are rare drops from enemies; I focused on making my luck stat as high as possible to try and get as many of these cards as possible and yet ended the game only being able to cast 15 of the 100 total spells. I really wanted to see more of what I could do with the magic system but the game just never gave me the chance.

Despite all of this the game was honestly fine. Castlevania's aesthetic is so strong that even here, where it's not being used to its full potential, I still found myself enjoying this aspect a decent amount, and slowly filling out the castle, finding horrifying boss designs, and watching your movement pool grow is satisfying enough, even amidst everything else that is wrong with the game, that I can't really say that Circle of the Moon is bad.