For the layman, there are basically two 'successful' styles of Castlevania: Classic Castlevanias, Linear sidescrollers that play similar to Megaman, with steeper difficulty and a lives system, but more focus on level design and tightness of gameplay--and "Castletroids", which use an exploratory map style similar to Metroid games, feature leveling and RPG stats (ugh), and lots of droppable toys and oddities to collect.
There is a third, 3d God of War--style brand of Castlevania, but it always seems to fall flat on its face with redundant button-mashing and ugly, boring level design. (See Lament of Innocence, Curse of Darkness, and the N64 Castlevanias)
I got bored, so I did a little review, Yahtzee-style, of Castlevania Aria of Sorrow for the GBA.
Best: Aria of Sorrow
Aria is somewhat of an ensemble dark horse for this series, simply because of the way it implements itself. You are 'not' a generic whip-wielding vampire-slayer type attempting to murder everyone's favorite Count, but rather, a Japanese-school transfer student named "Soma Cruz" (effectively 'body cross', get that Catholic imagery we're setting up here) who showed up on Dracula's front door-step for no better reason than that he chanced to step through a Shinto torii, and ended up with his female semi-asian love interest in an undead-infested nightmare castle. The concept of the game is that you have awakened a power within you that allows you to absorb the souls of the castle's various mythological creatures at random when you brutalize them; an ability you are told you can somehow utilize to escape (despite everyone giving you odd looks for it--explained as the plot develops).
The game has a slightly d20 modern crossed with Van Helsing feel, featuring a semi-future (circum 2020) setting in which guns and technology 'are' available in addition to a cavalcade of swords, lances, axes and the like, but to limited degrees due to you being trapped in an alternate, evil dimension. You will pick up the occasional handgun or the ability to toss grenades (as well as hot curry--but don't ask!), and the occasional reference to a 'prophecy' of the end of the world around the Millennium gets tossed around--but that's swiftly overshadowed by a gothic-ish setting, full of dungeons, haunted ballrooms, an underwater ruin, a killer clock-tower full of spikes and gears, and the like.
Starting the game, you'll find yourself dying a lot, particularly on Hard. The difficulty curb in this game is a bit cruel at times, particularly when you encounter the mid-game Clocktower full of painful spikes and Stunlock (TM) Medusa Heads, along with the Grim Reaper Boss. If it isn't completely clear by this point--the game likes to break out its platform roots on you in painful way at points. Thankfully, the difficulty curb does ultimately soften on you a bit as you expand your inventory of superpowers, but not so much that it becomes tedious.
However, the appeal in this is that the RPG system Symphony First implemented has turned over a new leaf in the form of the Tactical Soul system, which doles out interesting special abilities unique to each monster existing in the game, which you are then called to mix-and-match to have suitable equipment to progress. For instance, there's one soul that allows you to perpetually float in place. Couple this with a handgun and the ability to throw grenades, and you have a recipe for an interesting brawl against a laser-beam firing giant monster, or an insane preacher who can summon meteors and hellfire--the stuff corny-but-obscenely-popular anime is made of. It's rewarding to play through the game a second time and end up getting entirely different souls from the first run through--just a pain that sometimes the game is really finicky about how many of a given shambling monstrosity you have to 'murder' before they'll drop the damn things.
On the downside, the graphics for the GBA are a little simple, albeit not as ugly or hindered by frame-rate as Harmony of Dissonance and Circle of the Moon--Konami's earlier two stabs at the GBA. The music is a bit 'boopy', but there are a couple of particularly memorably tracks to make up for this fact--the Castle Corridor theme and the Clocktower theme come to mind, the former even making its way into the DLC Harmony of Despair, for XBLA and PSN.
Fans of the series tend to divide between this and SoTN. While the former has a vastly more impressive set of loot weapons and items, the magic system in SoTN relied on clunky Street Fighter style button mashing (a vestige that later appears in Portrait of Ruin), while most of the latter portion of Symphony of the Night (pretty much everything after you beat the 'pretend-final boss' and move onto the upside-down castle) was quickly dissolved into maiming monsters with your overpowered assortment of attacks, fueled by ever-growing stat increases. It reeks of the whole problem with RPGs in that once you are over-leveled for a challenge, all gameplay exits the experience in favor of insta-killing anything in your way. Symphony was particularly egregious in this offense, handing you a "Shield Rod" and "Alucard's" shield combination, which effectively turned you into death-on-legs with the ability to kill anything you touched and simultaneously heal yourself to full health--moreover making both these items surprisingly easy to come by. Aria is certainly a shorter game, but it knows how to keep you on your toes, all the way up to the very satisfying conclusion... assuming you can figure out how to unlock the real goddamn ending (a bad habit SoTN started, that unfortunately carried on to every single castletroid installment after.
There is a GBA version of this available along with Harmony of Dissonance (which is essentially the biggest fuck-up of the Castlevania-rpg genre, rather a yin-yang combination, to be honest). So get that, plop it in your old DS (assuming you have one) and then go pirate a ROM of Dracula's Curse for the NES, or something, and tell me how you think it compares (Don't).
