dscross said:
Kotaro said:
My god - thanks. I didn't expect that level of detail. Lol. I'm surprised at a couple of those choices being so low. I loved circle of the moon for example. I mean, it's really hard, but it's not unfair by any means. It's just challenging. The end boss is ridiculous though, I will admit. You do get of lot of game in there though.
I also don't get your level design complaints, especially for Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow. I thought the level design was quite similar to many others in the series - and I like those.
It's all subjective though, obviously.
Also, as much as I do like HoD, I can't believe you put it 3rd - lol. The music. Oh god the music.
I bloody love Rondo of Blood. I find it so satisfying to play through and it's the only one I regularly play to unwind.
I apologize in advance for how huge this post is going to be, because now you've gotten me started on Circle of the Moon, and... hoo boy, here comes the rant.
Circle of the Moon's problem is that it's only good about half the time, like I said. Every five minutes, something jumps out at me that makes me think, "Why is this like this? It would be so much better if it was like this, instead." Sometimes it's awesome, sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes it's just bland.
It's not necessarily too hard, it just has a difficulty curve that jumps up and down like a kangaroo on crystal meth. On a trampoline. During an earthquake. One minute I'm breezing through with minimal challenge, and the next it feels like I'm banging my skull against a brick wall. And then as suddenly as it came, the challenge is gone. It's not a variable interest curve, it's just poor balancing. And yes, there are absolutely parts that are unfair. I can't recall anything specific right now, since I haven't played the game in years, but I definitely remember calling bullshit at a few points. I think one boss fight had randomly-falling rocks that, when combined with the boss's attacks, could sometimes make damage all-but unavoidable?
As to the level design, the castle's atmosphere is great. It actually
feels like a massive, otherworldly fortress. It has scale without being bloated in scope, and there's some good thought to the enemy placement compared to some of the other games. I love this game's clock tower, for example. But there are too many zig-zagging corridors for a game where you need to double-tap every time you want to run (Seriously, why design it that way? When will the player
ever want to walk when they can run?), and fuck the Underground Waterway, which I maintain is one of the worst areas in any Castlevania game ever. Fuck those stupid, trial-and-error, slow-as-hell, flow-breaking switch puzzles, and fuck the overpowered enemies that can kill you in two or three hits (unless you have the right cards equipped, but I'll get to the fucking cards soon). I would seriously rather run back through Harmony of Dissonance's aqueduct, and that's the worst area in that game. Most of the other areas are barely any better, just being boring as hell. The Eternal Corridor is a fantastic example of how bland the level design in this game is most of the time. And while the enemy placement is often really good, there are too many places where the same combinations of enemies are repeated over and over, creating an endless sense of deja vu, and eventually the challenge disappears and you're just going through the motions.
Now, the cards. I hate the bullshit Dual Set-up System. Why do some enemies just randomly drop trading cards? Why are there so few different cards? It just feels like a random idea that someone had late in development and decided to throw in to add some variety to the player's ability set. It could be an interesting idea if it was executed well, but it's just really half-baked. For one thing, there is no bestiary or anything in the game, so there's no way to see which enemies drop which cards, or even drop cards at all. So the only way to fill out the pitifully tiny selection of the things is to either spend hours grinding against every enemy in the game or check a wiki, which is just player-hostile design. Going further than that, none of the cards have any description of their effects beyond a bunch of question marks, meaning there is no way to find out what any given combination of cards will do without trial and error, and making notes on a piece of paper or something. Pick two cards, press L, and see what happens! Or doesn't happen because maybe it's some sort of defensive effect that the game isn't going to explain to you, or because you need to enter some arcane button combo that the game also will never tell you. Once again, when you need a guide to play your game,
that is a badly-made game. Conveying information to the player is paramount to making your game enjoyable. Some mystery is fine, but unless that's the entire point of the thing, then you need to tell your player what the hell is going on and what they're doing.
Oh, and the visual design is all bland and samey. Outside of a very small number of standout places, there's basically nothing interesting to look at. And the soundtrack, while decent, is mostly composed of forgettable remixes of tracks from other games.
Okay, rant over, moving on.
Yeah, the music in Harmony of Dissonance is pretty bad. But really the only thing I think that game does particularly wrong outside of that (and how broken magic is) is that the boss fights are boring. I adore the dual castle concept as it's seen here. They have the same layouts, sure, but you get this really cool, pardon the wordplay,
dissonance between the two in terms of the way they feel. Compare, for example, the treasury. In the corporeal castle, it looks like a treasury. Glittering gold and jewels all around, you do feel like you're in this massive treasure vault that someone with a castle of this size might have. Then you reach it in the ethereal castle, and the background of piles of treasure is gone, and instead you're looking out as a vista of blasting volcanoes beneath an alien sky. It's strange and surreal and the atmosphere is completely different. I fucking love that.
And they made some pretty neat puzzles from this, like destroying an object in one castle to break down a wall in the same spot in the other. Clever stuff.
Dawn of Sorrow... it's not nearly as bad as Portrait of Ruin, I admit. But it's still really bland once you get into it a little. That opening area is brilliant. Wandering around a town in the winter. Snow falls all around you, when you jump on top of a car, the snow falls off of it and it sinks under your weight, the interior of the buildings lets you see all the support beams and such inside the walls, it's wonderful. But it feels like it was designed by a completely different team than the rest of the game.
Immediately after this promising start, you enter the alchemy lab, and... it's just gray corridors. Identical gray corridors. Hell, until you reach the secret area with the homunculus enemies much later, it barely even has anything to do with alchemy. Then you get to the boss of the area, Balore, reimagined from the fight with him in Aria. And let me say, I love the idea here. You beat him once before, and now he's back with some cool cyborg bits. That's awesome! And the fight is even really different from the last one. Even better! But what do you get for beating him? The ability to break a very specific kind of block with the touchscreen. A kind of block that only exists in one part of the castle besides the lab. Whoop-de-doo. It's the kind of bullshit situational ability that I hate in Metroidvanias. A good Metroidvania power-up not only opens new paths, but can be used for just general movement or fighting besides that. A double jump gives you better aerial mobility. A slide can be used to avoid attacks. Even something like the Flying Armor soul has a surprising amount of utility. This... it may as well have just been a key to open a locked door for all that it lets you do after this.
And none of the areas after this ever really get back to the level of the opening town. After that, the only real highlight to the level design is the boss fight with Gergoth, where you break through the floors and fall down the tower halfway through the fight. It's all just boring, vanilla, stuff we've seen many times before.
Portrait of Ruin is even worse, and while I warn you to prepare for another rant, bear in mind that this is actually
condensed from my complete thoughts and I could seriously go on for pages about why this game is such a poorly-designed mess. The level design really is the main culprit, because while it might feel fine on the surface, when you actually dig in and analyze it, oh lord is it bad.
For the main castle, it feels less like a logical succession of rooms and areas and more like they just drew a castle shape on the map and filled it in with rooms like a jigsaw puzzle, which is the most backwards approach to level design that I can think of. Going inside the paintings sounds like an awesome idea, getting to explore all these exotic locations outside of the castle. But in practice, they're even worse.
The first painting is a perfect example: the City of Haze. A city! Cool! But why is it just the World's Largest Bakery/Butcher Shop next door to the World's Largest Chapel? Oh, and speaking of the City of Haze, the enemies here also exemplify a major problem with this game: they act like they're still fighting a retro Belmont rather than a modern Castlevania character with all sorts of weapons and cool abilities. The Warg Rider, for instance, reacts so slowly and goes down so quickly that it's rare it can even get off one attack before it dies. I didn't even learn until my third time through the game that it has a fire breath attack! Oh, and the enemy placement throughout the entire game often makes zero sense. Maids vaccuming the floor of a fucking cave, anyone? Or oh, recycling the chest mimic from Dawn of Sorrow, but not having any regular treasure chests, so that you quickly realize that every single chest you see is an enemy and they cease to be any kind of surprise.
The rest of the paintings are just as bad. Why, when I enter an area called a "forest" do I spend most of it indoors? The pyramid is comparatively better, until you try to fill out the map for 100% and have to jump into all these little nooks to do so, which is irritating. At least it has that one really cool secret room inside the stomach of that giant worm monster you kill, but that hardly makes up for anything. The World of Fools circus-themed area also has a pretty cool gimmick, when you run around and start seeing furniture and enemies walking on the walls and ceiling. And then the wonder fades once you notice that they only really designed half of the ring-shaped map and then just mirrored it for the other half. Cynical laziness, plain and simple. Boss fight? The return of Legion! ...Which was clearly not designed to be fought with a long-reaching whip that can easily hit its middle section before even destroying the outer ones. Just as disappointing as everything else.
And then you purify the sisters, but before you can fight Brauner, you have four new paintings to clear, all presented all at once. And
every single one of them is just a palette-swapped rehash of a previous painting. The exact same basic graphics with maybe minimal changes besides color scheme, very similar layouts, and just nothing new. It kills the pacing and it's obvious that they were only added to pad out the game. Honestly, the game would have been a lot better if these four areas had been cut entirely. Yeah, it would be a lot shorter, and yeah, it would still be pretty bad, but it would still be an improvement.
Oh yeah, also the bonus dungeon. Cool idea, and Order of Ecclesia ran with the idea nicely, but here it was just really lazy, with almost all of its bosses being just recycled wholesale from Dawn of Sorrow, even when that doesn't make sense. Balore is a great example: in Dawn of Sorrow, he was a cyborg because Soma had already beaten him in Aria. Here... he's still a cyborg, but there's no reason for it, and it raises the question of how he's then later
not a cyborg in Aria of Sorrow, which is chronologically later. And Gergoth loses the one thing that made its fight interesting in Dawn: the fall through the tower. The fight against Fake Trevor, Fake Sypha, and Fake Grant, lifted from Symphony of the Night, is even worse. In SotN, you were playing as Alucard, so it was fitting in a dark sort of way for him to fight evil doppelgangers of his old companions. For Jonathan and Charlotte to run into the same three is just meaningless.
Laziness: that just sums up Portrait of Ruin as a whole, really.
That's not even getting into the redundancy in so many of your upgrades. It seems like every time the game gives you some really creative and unique new power, it then almost immediately gives you another one that's a better version of it, but also way more conventional. You get the ability to jump off of your partner's shoulders for a boost in height, but then a few minutes later you get the double jump. You get the ability to transform into a frog to squeeze into tight spaces, but then a little while later you get the owl transformation which can go everywhere the frog can, but can also fly, and then very soon after
that, you get the much easier to use infinite-uppercut so the owl's flight isn't even needed anymore.
And the game gives you a ton of cool toys to play with, sure, but it's honestly too many. With Charlotte's large number of spells and Jonathan's absurd number of subweapons (and let's be honest, the subweapons are way more developed and useful than the spells, and the same is true for Jonathan's massive number of weapons versus Charlotte's tiny handful), it feels like they were trying to replicate the feel of the Soul system from the Sorrow games. The difference there, and the reason the Soul system is superior, is that the Souls were explicitly defined after the enemies that dropped them, and it was tied into the story and Soma as a character. Plus, stealing enemy abilities is conceptually so much cooler than just getting new weapons and tools. By comparison, Order of Ecclesia's Glyph system works really well because, yes, there's a large number of different spells, but there are few enough of them that they almost all have uses and none of them (aside from the ones that get obsoleted by upgraded versions) are redundant. in Portrait, when the hell am I going to use, say, the cream pie subweapon (aside from that one boss fight)?
And screw the sidequests. You get great stuff from them, but it's so easy to screw yourself over because a lot of them require items you only get one of
but can sell, meaning it's possible to lock yourself out of the later quests and the ultimate reward, the Magus Ring, until New Game+.
Oh, and the story is a waste. World War II could have been a really fascinating setting, but it doesn't end up playing into anything.
Oh yeah, there's also that one glitch that can make the game unwinnable. Yes, that exists. If you skip the cutscene after the boss fight against Death and then go back the way you came (to, for example, save) instead of moving forward, then the door never opens and you can't move on. And there's a related bug (though this one is harmless) where, if you skip the cutscene where Eric tells you his real name, then his dialogue boxes continue to identify him as "Wind" for the rest of the game. Just to add one final bit of stupidity on top of everything.
Once again, I'm sorry this was so long and so negative, but I love this series so much that the negative things tend to stand out to me more. And the reason for this level of detail is that I actually enjoy analyzing and picking apart games to see why they do or don't succeed. And Castlevania is one of my favorite game series to talk about, because even the best installments have fascinating flaws to them, and the bad ones are bad in interesting ways.
