It's been a good few years since my marathon of all the Igavanias, and I've been kinda in a gaming funk the past week or so, so I picked up Aria of Sorrow on the Japanese Wii U VC. My memory does blend together a little with the sequel, Dawn of Sorrow, but this is still one of my favorite Igavanias. Certainly my favorite of the 3 GBA Castlevanias. It also kept in line with this month's TR theme, so that was an even better excuse to pick it up and give it another playthrough. It took me a little over 5 hours to beat it, according to the in-game clock, and I got the best ending with 99.6% of the map revealed.
This Castlevania was a bit of an odd-ball at the time for being not only set in the future of 2035, but also for being one of the first of 3 games in the series that utilized the Tactical Soul system. In short, any enemy you kill has a chance of dropping its soul, and there are 3 types of souls, activatables linked to pressing Up and B, activatables connected to holding R, and simple passives. This combined with not only different weapons to find, but weapons that have different attack styles (rather than how Alucard just has differently ranged straight-forward swipes in SotN, for example) really brings a lot more to the table for how you can approach combat. It also makes exploring new areas that much more exciting, because a new enemy in itself can present its own new brand of loot aside from any neat new weapons it may drop. The game handles great and it never is a huge pain to navigate the castle to go back to new areas like it so often is in Harmony of Dissonance. It also has a much more friendly difficulty curve than a lot of its predecessors while still managing to be challenging.
It's not as pretty as the DS games, of course, but the graphics are very pretty. I never found the music super impressive though. I was listening to podcasts while I played it, but I still had the sound on, and only one song (Julius' battle theme) ever really managed to capture my attention. The game is identical to the American version for everything but the text (obviously), but I still found it interesting. It's nothing super special, but it takes a neat twist on the Castlevania stories up to that point, and it's never super obtrusive or boring beyond needing to mash through some conversations to retry boss fights sometimes.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still the best of the Castlevanias on GBA, despite not being better than its DS successors. Still very much worth your time if you're into Metroidvanias and want something on the GBA, and it still holds up just fine as a 7$ affair on the Wii U in the year 2019 when there is no shortage of excellent Metroidvania games on platforms like PC and Switch. Only barrier to entry might be if you actually wanna play it on the GBA, as it's a bit short for what a hefty price it demands these days.
This Castlevania was a bit of an odd-ball at the time for being not only set in the future of 2035, but also for being one of the first of 3 games in the series that utilized the Tactical Soul system. In short, any enemy you kill has a chance of dropping its soul, and there are 3 types of souls, activatables linked to pressing Up and B, activatables connected to holding R, and simple passives. This combined with not only different weapons to find, but weapons that have different attack styles (rather than how Alucard just has differently ranged straight-forward swipes in SotN, for example) really brings a lot more to the table for how you can approach combat. It also makes exploring new areas that much more exciting, because a new enemy in itself can present its own new brand of loot aside from any neat new weapons it may drop. The game handles great and it never is a huge pain to navigate the castle to go back to new areas like it so often is in Harmony of Dissonance. It also has a much more friendly difficulty curve than a lot of its predecessors while still managing to be challenging.
It's not as pretty as the DS games, of course, but the graphics are very pretty. I never found the music super impressive though. I was listening to podcasts while I played it, but I still had the sound on, and only one song (Julius' battle theme) ever really managed to capture my attention. The game is identical to the American version for everything but the text (obviously), but I still found it interesting. It's nothing super special, but it takes a neat twist on the Castlevania stories up to that point, and it's never super obtrusive or boring beyond needing to mash through some conversations to retry boss fights sometimes.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Still the best of the Castlevanias on GBA, despite not being better than its DS successors. Still very much worth your time if you're into Metroidvanias and want something on the GBA, and it still holds up just fine as a 7$ affair on the Wii U in the year 2019 when there is no shortage of excellent Metroidvania games on platforms like PC and Switch. Only barrier to entry might be if you actually wanna play it on the GBA, as it's a bit short for what a hefty price it demands these days.