After writing this blog for over six months I finally got around to beating a modern game. Although this will only be modern for the next few months as the 3DS is going to come out in March and displace the regular DS. It doesn't seem to take very long for video games to become retro, so I give the DS about another year before it starts getting talked about on classic gaming forums.
I don't know if you've played many Castlevania games in the last 13 years, but ever since Symphony of the Night came out there have been about a dozen games that are exactly like it. I can't really complain that much because they are all good, but you usually know what you're getting before you turn the game on. The two most noticeable are that they are side scrolling and they all have a really dumb subtitle.
I want to talk about the subtitles for a second because they drive me absolutely crazy. I don't know why they had to make it so hard to tell what order the games came out in. When I started playing Dawn of Sorrow I found out that it's actually the sequel to Aria of Sorrow. I guess I was supposed to know that because they are in alphabetical order. They both end with the word Sorrow, but it's still easy to get them mixed up. Actually my eyes start to glaze over just looking at their names. I think I picked out Dawn of Sorrow because it's the easiest to spell. Would it have been so bad to call them something like Castlevania Advance or Castlevania DS? You need to either give them more specific titles or quit making the storylines connected. Anyway, I'll try not to talk about this so much when I'm playing the other Castlevanias. I think it's out of my system now.
So now that I've gotten my mini rant out of the way I can get on to the game's true bread and butter, the side scrolling gameplay. I don't know if you can remember, but back when Symphony of the Night came out side scrolling games were pretty much dead. Castlevania resurrected the genre just like how they keep doing with Dracula. Ever since then side scrolling has been the standard in the series. There have been some 3D attempts but nobody cares about them at all. I'm honestly not sure why they keep trying.
Dawn of Sorrow is one of the traditional kinds. In fact it's so traditional that it's a little bit boring to talk about. It's got all the gameplay elements you love. The big Super Metriod style map, the items that let you open up more areas, the weapons and armor to buy, and of course the big bosses. You do get to capture souls in this one so that changes things up a bit. As far as I know every regular monster gives you some special ability. You can also augment your weapons with monster souls which can be fun, but can also be very tedious. I probably spent an entire hour fighting the same monster over and over again because I needed his soul to augment my axe. At least with the DS I can watch tv at the same time so I don't get bored.
Honestly there's so much sameness in the series that it's hard to think of much to say. I think they could've made your character move a little bit faster, and I hate that all the strong weapons are also extremely slow. Of course the whole thing only takes about 10 hours so perhaps it's for the best. A faster moving game would have been over much too quickly. Other than that it was another fun Castlevania experience. Hopefully the next game I play in the series will be more interesting to talk about, but I'll try to spread them out some so you don't have to read about them all at once.
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