immortalfrieza said:
Going against Kotaro, I'd say that Curse of Darkness is easily among the best Castlevania games and the best of the 3D ones hands down. It has great story and gameplay and it's PS2 so the graphics are dated but meh. To give you a quick idea of what it's like, it's pretty much what Symphony of the Night and the other 2D Castlevania games like it would be if they were 3D instead of 2D.
Really?
Really? "Pretty much Symphony of the Night in 3D?" If you like the game, good for you, I'm a bit envious, but it's honestly
insulting that you would compare Curse of Darkness to Symphony of the Night. I have bashed Portrait of Ruin to high heaven in this thread, but honestly Curse of Darkness's level design is even worse, somehow. I swear, you couldn't make worse level design than what you find in CoD if you
tried. I really wanted to love Curse of Darkness. The characters are awesome. The story is really cool. The soundtrack and atmosphere are phenomenal.
But the level design isn't even really "design" in any sense of the word. It just exists for the sake of existing. It's a glut of space that strives for nothing except being huge. Every location is just a sprawling map of infinitely copy-pasted boxy rooms and corridors with nothing interesting in them. It's like they wanted to be able to call it "the biggest Castlevania game yet!" on the back of the box (which it actually does say), so they just built a handful of rooms and copied them over and over and over until they had a "massive" world that feels lifeless and empty. And it's impossible not to notice how repetitive the environments are once you inevitably end up with deja vu so strong that you need to open the map to make sure you aren't just going in circles. Sure, you can choose your own paths through the semi-nonlinear levels to an extent, but when there's so little to see, you have no reason to actually explore. Playing through the game, sometimes I wonder why they even gave you a jump button (let alone a double jump) because the game almost never gives you any platforming to do, any reason to actually use that jump button, and if that doesn't demonstrate how asinine the level "design" in this game is, nothing will.
Basically nothing is utilized well in this game. Perfect example: there's that one bit a little ways into the game where you can't get to the next area because there's a gap in the path. So you fight a boss, get an Innocent Devil that can fly, and use it to fly over the hole. And then that ability to fly is never used again, except for one other time at the end. This is something I mentioned in a previous post. Most of the other Innocent Devils are pretty much the same, like the one that moves heavy objects. You only need them once or twice, and there's barely any use for them in the rest of the game. In a good Metroidvania, even the most situational abilities have uses beyond
just opening new pathways. Again, I said this before: a double jump gives you better aerial mobility, a slide can be used to dodge attacks, even something like the underutilized wolf form in Symphony of the Night lets you run faster to get through long corridors more quickly. Everything in Curse of Darkness seems clunky and forced. The monster raising mechanic is cool, but largely pointless in practice.
Oh, and in the same vein, I just remembered those god-awful cannon segments that control poorly and really don't belong in the game. It feels like they were added just
because.
And the combat is utter shit. Lament of Innocence is probably the best point of contrast, since it's so similar, and its level design wasn't great either, but at least the locations were a manageable size so the copy-pasted rooms didn't become as glaring and tedious, and the combat was actually pretty decent to make up for it. Leon was fun to control and fight with, his whip combos were really satisfying to dispatch enemies with. Hector, by contrast, feels just slow and clunky. His running speed is almost
painfully average, his attacks feel wooden and underwhelming and it can sometimes feel hard to hit things as a result, dodging is way too stiff, and guarding is far more effective than it should be to maintain even the illusion of difficulty.
To the game's credit, there are some cool boss fights. But when the enemies all seem really stupid and weak and pretty much every encounter can be conquered with the exact same combat strategy, it gets really boring really quickly. Combat quickly devolves into: lock on to an enemy, mash the attack buttons until it dies, maybe sometimes hit the block or dodge button. Hell, even the boss fights have really terrible AI and the challenge almost exclusively comes from their bloated health bars.
Curse of Darkness is one of those games that has the benefit of gorgeous window dressing in the characters and mythos, but wastes it on a completely terrible game. I hate putting it this way, but it's style without substance. I remember one old review of the game that put it very well: "It's an album with pretty cover art and dull songs."
