It has taken me many tried to beat this, but I've done it!
This was the first ~Metroidvania~ in the series after the legendary SOTN and it was a GBA launch title, all of which shows. The music is mostly tracks from previous games but worse sounding. Luckily they're all good and catchy so it still sounds great. Your little man Nathan Graves has about 3 frames of animation in his run. The art isn't the beautiful Ayami Kojima stuff we love, but there's something about this look for Dracula that I liked. He has a beard.
But what's interesting here is that the play is really different from SOTN! It's a lot more formulaic: Find new area, beat boss, get power to find next area and so on. I never would have expected to care about the shop in one of these but turns out when the basic healing items are all rare drops and the enemies are unbelievably tanky and do a lot of damage. The game is a big grind and poorly paced as a result.
So in addition to a whip and the normal Castlevania subweapons you've got the DSS system, where you collect two types of cards and can combine them for different effects. Every card is a rare drop, and a lot of them are from very specific enemies. The effects themselves are actually varied and really neat, from different weapons to access to summon and item crashes to more normal stuff like passive state bonuses. I don't think you were intended to get every card in a playthrough (I sure didn't) but as Gamers you will naturally want them all, and without a guide that's a ridiculous undertaking. With a guide it's not much better.
Overall this is weak in the world of mobile Castlevanias but it's the first one to my knowledge where you can just use a gun and that has to count for something. That's at least two stars right there.
This was the first ~Metroidvania~ in the series after the legendary SOTN and it was a GBA launch title, all of which shows. The music is mostly tracks from previous games but worse sounding. Luckily they're all good and catchy so it still sounds great. Your little man Nathan Graves has about 3 frames of animation in his run. The art isn't the beautiful Ayami Kojima stuff we love, but there's something about this look for Dracula that I liked. He has a beard.
But what's interesting here is that the play is really different from SOTN! It's a lot more formulaic: Find new area, beat boss, get power to find next area and so on. I never would have expected to care about the shop in one of these but turns out when the basic healing items are all rare drops and the enemies are unbelievably tanky and do a lot of damage. The game is a big grind and poorly paced as a result.
So in addition to a whip and the normal Castlevania subweapons you've got the DSS system, where you collect two types of cards and can combine them for different effects. Every card is a rare drop, and a lot of them are from very specific enemies. The effects themselves are actually varied and really neat, from different weapons to access to summon and item crashes to more normal stuff like passive state bonuses. I don't think you were intended to get every card in a playthrough (I sure didn't) but as Gamers you will naturally want them all, and without a guide that's a ridiculous undertaking. With a guide it's not much better.
Overall this is weak in the world of mobile Castlevanias but it's the first one to my knowledge where you can just use a gun and that has to count for something. That's at least two stars right there.