A pretty big upgrade over the first attempt at a GBA Castlevania game, Circle of the Moon. Most notably areas of the castle have much more distinctive visual identities here (they're a bit cheesy but I loved both the moments of psychedelic backgrounds, and the fast-moving clouds of the Sky Walkway), and whilst the castle isn't as memorable, cohesive or surprising as Symphony of the Night's it still has a bunch of cute ideas and fun moments in store and is much more engaging that CotM's mess of copy-pasted hallways. I've seen some complaints about the movement, but I personally enjoyed this aspect too, most notably the pair of dashes have impressive enough range and compliment each other well enough that they became a core part of combat for me.

Despite that there's still a bunch I'm not really on board with here; Castlevania's warp-point placement continues to be maddening prompting a lot of tedious backtracking, the second-castle gimmick is very cool initially but ultimately leads to you spending a substantial amount of the time exploring close-to-identical versions of the same places (the second castle isn't nearly as distinct as in SotN), playing optimally (changing equipment and elemental damages based on context) is constantly in conflict with convenience (realistically everything is going to die approximately as easily even if you don't micro-manage these systems), the economy of the game sets up the best approach to the mid/late-game content to be just heal-tanking everything, despite having a ton of bosses almost none of them are all that memorable and those that are are pretty much just copies of bosses found in SotN, the game desperately wants an additional button or two most notably to streamline the usage of your magic.

I mostly dig the vibes of this game, and it's a step in the right direction, but as I continue playing through these games in order I am left very much hoping that Aria of Sorrow learnt a lot from the failings of Circle and Harmony.