1.
Axiom Verge (Windows/Steam)2.
Fire Emblem Heroes (iOS/no IAP)3.
Fire Emblem Heroes - Hard, Lunatic, and beyond: late game content4. Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS)
Here we are in August and this is really just my 3rd game to report back on. This whole being a dad business is super time consuming, though I gotta say, I'm in no hurry to see the end credits. The little one is crawling these days, so I have to stay sharp. But anyway, on to the game. I knew I wanted to try a DS Castlevania, and I suspected that it would be compatible with the kind of short play sessions I would have to limit myself to. I was right!
So, Dawn of Sorrow is a direct sequel to Aria of Sorrow on the GBA. It it set a year later. Soma and Mina are just hanging out downtown having a conversation about how Soma's soul-absorbing days are long behind him when a woman named Celia appears and sends three monsters against Soma. She claims to want to defeat him and facilitate the creation of a new Dracula through her cult. After defeating the monsters and collecting their souls, Arukado appears. Soma goes after the cult in a remote area where the cult has attempted to recreate Dracula's castle despite being warned against doing so by Arukado.
The gameplay here is pretty familiar in some ways. Kill enemies, gain levels, collect dropped equipment, and grind for souls, some of which drop at a frighteningly low rate. Gameplay occurs on the lower screen, and it's really nice to be able to toggle between the map and your stats and last enemy data on the top screen. Having the map up all the time makes it much easier to deal with navigating from one area to another. But this is a DS game and a sequel, so despite the sameness of the core mechanic, there's some new stuff in the mix. The first big change is that you can collect up to 9 souls from a creature, and the number of souls you have affects the power and nature of some of your attacks and abilities. Collect 9 skeleton souls and the bone you throw is larger and more damaging. This pushes players to not only collect souls but to bank them. The second major new mechanic is the necessity to upgrade weapons with souls. There are some weapons that can be bought, found on the map, or dropped by enemies, but they are mostly relatively basic and low-powered weapons. In order to unlock more powerful arms you must use souls to evolve these lower-power weapons. Some of the weapon paths are quite complicated and use rather difficult to obtain or rare, or even unique boss souls, to unlock. The third big change is that some unique gameplay elements have been added to use the touch screen. In one part of the map there's an arrangement of rooms you can adjust through a sliding block puzzle interface. There's also a soul power that lets you destroy certain blocks on-screen by touching them with the stylus. Finally, there are 5 magic seals in the game. Almost every boss is behind a magic door the requires one of the 5 seals to open. Once you defeat the boss, you then have to draw the seal accurately on the screen in order to seal the boss away. Fail to draw the seal correctly in the allotted time and the boss recovers some life and must be beaten down again.
While it is nice to have additional mechanics in a game that is otherwise rather similar to the previous title, these mechanics are actually at the root of the game's biggest problems. Now that souls are effectively currency in addition to abilities, grinding for souls can be even more frustrating. Wow, I got the rare iron golem soul! That sucker is HARD to kill and the drop rate sucks! Now I can sacrifice the soul and no longer have it's ability and upgrade my sword to do more damage! And if you've played any of the SotN-style Castlevania games, you know that constant weapon upgrades are necessary to stay current. Thankfully, the annoyingly elusive creatures found in Aria are gone. Instead there are 3 hidden creatures you can kill for their souls. There are little messages in the game that allude to their existence, and luring them out is a puzzle to solve. But once you know the solution you can easily keep doing it, and the drop rate for their souls isn't depressingly low. The touch screen content also introduce some problems. The block destruction mechanic is used sparingly and largely as a gating mechanism. The sliding block puzzle rooms area is just another thing to look up on-line because sliding puzzles are never worth it. And the magic seal mechanic is potentially the most frustrating of all if you don't deliberately practice the seals. When you defeat a boss there really isn't time to pull out the stylus, so you have to draw the seal with your finger, and you have to make sure to press down, because if you let off at the wrong time it decides you messed up and then you have to fight the boss longer. It sucks dying because you didn't remember the direction of a line or press down hard enough when drawing the seal.
It sounds like I'm being harsh, but there's some improvements over Aria as well. The music is much higher quality and some of the tunes are great. The DS also uses a lot of subtle 3D and warping effects to enhance some backgrounds. It's not quite as nice as SotN, but definitely impressive compared to other non-SotN titles in the series. The resolution of the DS screen is higher than the GBA, but still lower than the Playstation, so while there's more screen space than on the GBA it can still feel cramped in places. Color use is better than on the GBA and there is some great animation in play. Enemy art and design seems to be a mix of Aria and SotN. Many creatures appear in their SotN incarnations, and many new monsters are as well animated or better than SotN and Aria. The enemy design is probably the high point of the game. Level design is a mixed bag. There is no alternate castle (a good thing), and there is a semi-secret end-game area, much like the chaos realm in Aria but less disorienting to navigate. Normal castle areas, however, often suffer from uninspired or annoying room layouts and unnecessarily complex path navigation from one end of a larger room to the other. Perhaps there is some of this inherent to all these Castlevania titles, but it feels more annoying in this game for some reason. Only the upside-down castle in SotN was more frustrating to move through. There's a better variety of weapons in Dawn compared to Aria. Too bad you have to spend souls to unlock most of them. Most weapons feel slower than in previous games. The overhead weapons are particularly slow. Also, why does every game have to screw with the Valmanway? The end result is that I don't really have any weapon I just LOVE using in this game, unlike previous ones. There may be better weapons for particular purposes, but none of them are just super fun to use except maybe the thrown weapons. Those are fun, but also very low damage. I'll also give props to the story. It's not as cool as Aria of Sorrow, which had a fantastic story, but it's not bad at all. Soma is dragged back into a world he was trying to leave behind, some of his enemies are not who or what they appear, and there's again, a couple neat twists to the ending. There's also 3 different endings.
I enjoyed the game and for a mobile Castlevania title it's a visual and auditory treat, but the level design isn't quite as sharp as Aria or SotN's regular castle areas, the touch screen mechanics feel unnecessary and annoying, and the soul grinding aspect, already frustrating at times in Aria, is now even more frustrating due to the need to bank souls and sometime spend them on necessary weapon upgrades. I'll probably stick with the game a bit longer to try and 100% the souls and weapons, because I'm an addict like that, so clearly the flaws weren't enough to derail my enjoyment of the game. And I think if you played Aria and enjoyed it you'll probably enjoy Dawn of Sorrow as well. Just know that the changes aren't all good. I want to play the other two DS Castlevania games because I want to see where this model has gone from this point. It's clear that between Aria of Sorrow and Dawn of Sorrow that this particular soul-collecting mode is tapped out. But hey, it was a really cool idea and it was used well, and now it's time to move on.
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