I was looking forward to getting around to this game since the very beginning of this series, as since I first played this, it was the game that I ended up liking the most by far, feeling like an upgraded continuation of the previous handheld Castlevania game, taking the same core mechanics from Aira of Sorrow and putting them into a larger scope with far more complexity, which to be fair this game does indeed have. That said, I don’t really consider this quite as perfect as I once did when replaying, thanks to a number of small issues making certain aspects of the game far more unenjoyable. Even so however, this is still one of my favourites, just without the overwhelming preference to it that I used to have.
In terms of control, Soma is quite similar in this as he was in Aria of Sorrow, acting as somewhat as a midpoint between the extremely slow, rigid mobility of the Belmonts and the blinding speed of Alucard, with a range of attack speeds depending on the weapon type being used. These weapon speeds however, are the first of many differences this game has, with the range of weapons providing a far larger variety of these, with the overhead, heavy weapons feeling as if they have considerably more weight behind them, and the smaller ones being even faster than they were in Aria, leaving the player to be able to cater towards their playstyle even more than before. My general issue with this however is the fact that in terms of moving around quickly, this game has no real easy way of doing that compared to previous matroidvania titles, with the overall speed of the game having a tendency to feel a bit on the slow side at times, particularly with how short Soma’s backdash feels in this game, making some encounters feel as if they almost require simply hitting once or twice and then running away to avoid all damage, rather than giving the option of avoiding it at the last moment to maintain a good position of aggression. This fortunately only affects small portions of the game to me, as it seems that a lot of these encounters were properly designed with the lack of a good burst movement option in mind.
In relation to movement, the area where the game excels to me in one of the biggest ways is easily the castle’s design itself, being larger and denser than previous games, while maintaining consistently intuitive paths of navigation through it, limiting the likelihood of becoming lost while exploring. Furthermore, I feel like this game brought back some of the design influence of SOTN in terms of the individual room design, with more instances of quirkiness or unique ideas being shown throughout, such as a room full of succubae disguising themselves as a main character, or a 4x4 grid of rooms that can be moved around like a sliding tile puzzle, making getting to a new area an exciting thing just to see what creative setpieces will be shown. The teleporter locations are all quite intuitive as well, being spread out perfectly as to rarely cause any significant backtracking, making exploration rarely feel like a chore. My only issue with the navigation in the game is tied to exploration being less satisfying in a lot of cases, going back to the issue of some paths leading to dead ends that just don’t feel very rewarding due to the way weapons have been reworked here. In this game, the primary way to get better weapons is to infuse certain enemy souls with them in order to upgrade them, rather than simply finding them as you explore the castle. What this does is make it far less exciting to come across a weapon in the castle, as it’s very likely that it will simply be weaker than what you already have on at the time, with the likelihood of you having the necessary souls required to upgrade it being quite low. This system also has the issue of outright encouraging grinding, which is made a worse problem by how low the drop rates of some of them can be, potentially taking at least an hour of killing the same type of enemy just to upgrade the weapon. This ties into another issue, in which the luck stat is broken in this game to be almost entirely useless, even when maxing it out, the difference being only a fraction of a percentage increase of drop rate at the very most. What ends up happening here is that the pacing of the game is dramatically slowed if the player actually wants to get some decent gear.
With this said however, the souls themselves in this game are overall better in my opinion, having a wider range of effects and benefits, with far more of them actually being viable in some way or another, which is something that could feel a bit lacking in Aria of Sorrow’s soul system, with some simply outclassing others to a large enough extent to make many of them obsolete. Another aspect of this game that truly excels in my eyes is in terms of the boss design, often being more complex and properly challenging than past games, along with having a much grander sense of spectacle, with many bosses having some extremely interesting, unique mechanics to them that make them completely stand out. My personal favourites include the boss that’s able to stop time and lay out traps for you, and one that completely destroys the ground underneath you and causing you both to fall down to the bottom of a massive tower that you’ve been climbing before continuing the battle. While the bosses may be better however, I personally found the endgame to be far less exciting for the most part, with the true ending’s unlock conditions being hidden behind 3 walls you needed to break with specific souls feeling like a much less interesting way to go about things compared to the gradual discovery of the 3 hidden books that made for one of the most satisfying true ending discoveries I’ve had in gaming as a whole. Furthermore, The Abyss in general feels quite mediocre for the most part, with the final boss being straight up bad, being largely easy, tedious and out of nowhere in terms of the overall story, making the game close off in a fairly unsatisfying way, especially after the consistently high standard of boss fights that this game set. As a final issue I had with this game that made it incredibly frustrating to play on an emulator, the magic seal mechanic is awful and there’s no defending it, having to draw a pattern once you defeat a boss is cumbersome in the best possible situation of you having an actual DS, but is made to be nearly impossible when you have to try and use your mouse to draw a precise pattern on an emulator. I personally think that id you’re using an emulator, that the best way to play the game is to download a romhack that removes this requirement from the game, makes it a far better experience overall.
Even with my many gripes with this game, I still can’t help but think that it’s one of the best in the series, as the core aspects of this game, the castle and enemy design, are at their absolute peak here, it’s just a lot of smaller things that come together to make a game that definitely could have used some tweaking, overall being best described as a flawed masterpiece in my eyes. Definitely a game worth checking out, and a mostly worthy sequel of an incredible game.
In terms of control, Soma is quite similar in this as he was in Aria of Sorrow, acting as somewhat as a midpoint between the extremely slow, rigid mobility of the Belmonts and the blinding speed of Alucard, with a range of attack speeds depending on the weapon type being used. These weapon speeds however, are the first of many differences this game has, with the range of weapons providing a far larger variety of these, with the overhead, heavy weapons feeling as if they have considerably more weight behind them, and the smaller ones being even faster than they were in Aria, leaving the player to be able to cater towards their playstyle even more than before. My general issue with this however is the fact that in terms of moving around quickly, this game has no real easy way of doing that compared to previous matroidvania titles, with the overall speed of the game having a tendency to feel a bit on the slow side at times, particularly with how short Soma’s backdash feels in this game, making some encounters feel as if they almost require simply hitting once or twice and then running away to avoid all damage, rather than giving the option of avoiding it at the last moment to maintain a good position of aggression. This fortunately only affects small portions of the game to me, as it seems that a lot of these encounters were properly designed with the lack of a good burst movement option in mind.
In relation to movement, the area where the game excels to me in one of the biggest ways is easily the castle’s design itself, being larger and denser than previous games, while maintaining consistently intuitive paths of navigation through it, limiting the likelihood of becoming lost while exploring. Furthermore, I feel like this game brought back some of the design influence of SOTN in terms of the individual room design, with more instances of quirkiness or unique ideas being shown throughout, such as a room full of succubae disguising themselves as a main character, or a 4x4 grid of rooms that can be moved around like a sliding tile puzzle, making getting to a new area an exciting thing just to see what creative setpieces will be shown. The teleporter locations are all quite intuitive as well, being spread out perfectly as to rarely cause any significant backtracking, making exploration rarely feel like a chore. My only issue with the navigation in the game is tied to exploration being less satisfying in a lot of cases, going back to the issue of some paths leading to dead ends that just don’t feel very rewarding due to the way weapons have been reworked here. In this game, the primary way to get better weapons is to infuse certain enemy souls with them in order to upgrade them, rather than simply finding them as you explore the castle. What this does is make it far less exciting to come across a weapon in the castle, as it’s very likely that it will simply be weaker than what you already have on at the time, with the likelihood of you having the necessary souls required to upgrade it being quite low. This system also has the issue of outright encouraging grinding, which is made a worse problem by how low the drop rates of some of them can be, potentially taking at least an hour of killing the same type of enemy just to upgrade the weapon. This ties into another issue, in which the luck stat is broken in this game to be almost entirely useless, even when maxing it out, the difference being only a fraction of a percentage increase of drop rate at the very most. What ends up happening here is that the pacing of the game is dramatically slowed if the player actually wants to get some decent gear.
With this said however, the souls themselves in this game are overall better in my opinion, having a wider range of effects and benefits, with far more of them actually being viable in some way or another, which is something that could feel a bit lacking in Aria of Sorrow’s soul system, with some simply outclassing others to a large enough extent to make many of them obsolete. Another aspect of this game that truly excels in my eyes is in terms of the boss design, often being more complex and properly challenging than past games, along with having a much grander sense of spectacle, with many bosses having some extremely interesting, unique mechanics to them that make them completely stand out. My personal favourites include the boss that’s able to stop time and lay out traps for you, and one that completely destroys the ground underneath you and causing you both to fall down to the bottom of a massive tower that you’ve been climbing before continuing the battle. While the bosses may be better however, I personally found the endgame to be far less exciting for the most part, with the true ending’s unlock conditions being hidden behind 3 walls you needed to break with specific souls feeling like a much less interesting way to go about things compared to the gradual discovery of the 3 hidden books that made for one of the most satisfying true ending discoveries I’ve had in gaming as a whole. Furthermore, The Abyss in general feels quite mediocre for the most part, with the final boss being straight up bad, being largely easy, tedious and out of nowhere in terms of the overall story, making the game close off in a fairly unsatisfying way, especially after the consistently high standard of boss fights that this game set. As a final issue I had with this game that made it incredibly frustrating to play on an emulator, the magic seal mechanic is awful and there’s no defending it, having to draw a pattern once you defeat a boss is cumbersome in the best possible situation of you having an actual DS, but is made to be nearly impossible when you have to try and use your mouse to draw a precise pattern on an emulator. I personally think that id you’re using an emulator, that the best way to play the game is to download a romhack that removes this requirement from the game, makes it a far better experience overall.
Even with my many gripes with this game, I still can’t help but think that it’s one of the best in the series, as the core aspects of this game, the castle and enemy design, are at their absolute peak here, it’s just a lot of smaller things that come together to make a game that definitely could have used some tweaking, overall being best described as a flawed masterpiece in my eyes. Definitely a game worth checking out, and a mostly worthy sequel of an incredible game.