great protagonist, great plot (by series standards), genuinely tough-as-nails gameplay that makes you use your brain (in a metroidvania??? madness), best castle design (first metroid-y one since hod) and castle aesthetics. good quest system which is unobtrusive (just as grindy as portrait of ruin's but with far more options at a time and still easier), and plenty of options for experimenting with the best culmination of aria's soul system. the glyph system is still luck based unfortunately, but drop rates are way higher in this game and can be increased even further compared to the two soul titles in my experience. making yourself broken in this game also feels very much earned - something which its predecessors often failed to accomplish barring portrait of ruin and to a degree circle of the moon. mostly great bosses (with a few duds here and there), awesome soundtrack (as is standard), best artwork since kojima, and great (if not the best) environments. easily has the best movement out of any of these games, with the options you unlock in the lategame making it feel great. this would be a 5/5 if not for the fact that the castle is only the last 1/3 of the game and the few lame corridor levels in early-midgame. you owe it to yourself to play this game if you enjoy old OR new vanias as it's one of the closest games to marrying the two styles. ymmv on considering it the best since it's definitely a more experimental style compared to most of its predecessors, but to me it feels like the culmination of what the series had been going for and i think it was a fitting final title (though i definitely wish it continued...).

super mario 64 castlevania edition. great that we got a followup to bloodlines, and doesn't disappoint in that department. fun characters, some of the most 'gamey' gameplay and atmosphere in this part of the franchise, and great environments. easily has some of the best (and worst) bosses out of its cohorts, and the weapon and magic systems are fun to fuck around with and find combinations you enjoy (unlike something like sotn or aos where you'll quickly just optimize). major problems include obtuse true ending requirements and the castle layout being fairly uninteresting (albeit fine for what it's used for). some quests are pretty shitty too, if not grindy, but at least that's not required. also has super varied postgame options.

this game is simultaneously experimental and conservative, and that along with a bunch of other aspects of the game are befitting of its name. its ost has some bangers on it that surpass most of the franchise, though the lows of its lows are fucking awful. it manages to be possibly the only game out of all of these that is metroid-y for almost its entire runtime, giving the player an unprecedented amount of freedom to pick the routes they want. the transition from castle a to b is seamless and each is small enough that retracting one's steps is not a big deal at all. truly, i found that hod's double castle was a joy to explore and was a far better implementation of '2 castles' than sotn's abysmal inverted castle. the forward dash in particular makes exploration feel great, though i wish they'd programmed proper inertia mechanics in, like with jumping. also of note is that harmony of dissonance by far has the best speedrunning tricks and glitches out of any of the games on this list by a wide margin. seriously, go watch the 22-second maxim mode run. anyway, definitely an entry worth playing, which is why it's in the upper half.

mid-to-high-tier out of all these games. great ost in places (but boring as hell in others), iconic castle design which is pretty good in the first 2/3-3/4 of the game, but drops off the deep end in the last 1/3-1/4 when you run through the inverted castle. like with several of the others lower than it on this list, sotn has a fairly dull linear castle for the most part which only dresses itself with dead ends to make it look like exploration matters. decent boss mix and good environments, and lots of pretty little graphical effects not seen in any of its successors. pitiful weapons and combat, with the battle system being so spread thin and all-over-the-place that just spamming the same spell the whole game (soul steal) is better than 99% of the weapons you can get without grinding. somewhat obtuse true ending requirements hampered by the psx translation. definitely a bad example of balancing in a game seeing as it's too easy for most of the game but becomes a bunch of near-instant death zones in the lategame. still, remember that it's pretty in almost every way, and that the easier part of the game is definitely a great way to just chill and put your fingers to work for a few hours. overrated but still good and def worth playing just to say you did.

it's fine, even good, but definitely the most vanilla-feeling one of the castlevania metroidvanias second only to sotn... but sotn at least gets the excuse of being the first of them. very bland environments and fairly standard castle design. the soul system is fun to fuck around with but as soon as you optimize yourself you're never going to experiment with it all that much. obtuse true ending requirements with pretty bad hints, pretty meh bosses, and the soul system is unfortunately extremely luck-based to the point of missing out on most of the interesting ones on a normal playthrough (i only got ~30% of them on my original run). there's honestly not much of a reason to play this game over any of the ones above it in this list. even if it's 'better' than harmony of dissonance thanks to its soul system, it's nowhere near as bold or ballsy and its castle is way less fun to explore. again, still good, just not really the cream of the crop.

i love the fuck out of this game but it's definitely toward the bottom of this list. i'd argue that i enjoyed it more than the two above it, but there's no way in hell that it's a better game than either of them. another of the more experimental titles, this is the other of the two castlevania metroidvanias to try bridging the gap between oldvania difficulty and newvania gameplay. i think it accomplishes that well enough, but the problem is just that it doesn't play well, like, at all. the dss system is fun but broken (you can seriously use all the cards as soon as you unlock the tutorial for the first 2), and lots of its options are either useless or godtier to the point where the balance is a joke. the game itself ranges from above average for a castlevania metroidvania to completely brutal. i felt like i was developing masochistic tendencies the more i played this game, but i also seriously vibed with it somehow. still, the controls suck ass (seriously, double-tap running?) and the whip is flaccid as hell. the soundtrack is great but almost entirely unoriginal, so it loses points where most of the rest of the series would be benefiting. anyway, still a pretty good game and worth checking out if it piques your curiosity. you might just find that you love it. also of note is that this is one of the only ones of these games to be metroidy at all given the amount of routing options you have throughout it.

very easily the worst of the 2d games on this list because it's the only one of the entries that had absolutely no reason to exist at all. we could have gotten a demon castle war game but nope, we got a mediocre metroidvania instead. is dawn of sorrow bad? hell no. is it worth playing over its cohorts? also hell no. annoying touch gimmicks with not-too-interesting bosses, and a fairly uninteresting castle design (echoing its predecessor) characterize this game. still, it has some of the best speedrunning glitches out of its cohorts, and its soundtrack is as good as always. it loses in the art department, unfortunately, and while the actual game environments are some of the best in the series, they're not utilized in a good castle. a frankly stupid plot and characters which seems to only exist as an excuse to have fan-favorite soma run through a castle again. still, like most of the rest of this list i'd consider it pretty good, pretty fun. its soul system is definitely improved from its predecessor and continues to be one of the better ideas the developers had (and would eventually hone to completion in ooe), and the weapon system is fairly versatile and less optimization-focused as sotn or aos (but only by a little bit). it also has some of the better speedrunning glitches in this series, second only to harmony of dissonance, really. if that means anything to you, then check it out. still, dawn of sorrow is easily the 2d castlevania metroidvania i'm the least likely to return to any time soon, and it's the one i'd least recommend to anyone looking to play one of these games.

actual piece of shit game. possibly worth playing for how campy it is but what it does to the series' lore is both bad AND irrevocable on top of the game as a game being boring and braindead as sin. the music is as good as always, though!