Idle Thoughts

The last great Castlevania games (★★★★☆)

This review is going to end up being a self-imposed history lesson more than anything else. Sorry. There’s not that much to say about the actual Castlevania games in Castlevania Dominus Collection. I had never played any of the three Castlevania DS games as I’ve never owned a DS. And yet the games will feel intimately familiar to anyone who’s ever played a metroidvania, especially Symphony of the Night. All three games are very good, but none of them transcend Symphony of the Night, the Castlevania game par excellence and perhaps the platonic ideal of a metroidvania. It’s impossible to overstate how important Symphony of the Night is. It’s the game that got me interested in fan sites and fan writing, way back in the days of the Castlevania Dungeon.

Before the DS games, three more Castlevanias were released on Gameboy Advance, but all three of them were much too crude to actually survive a direct comparison to Symphony of the Night, except maybe Aria of Sorrow.

The three DS games in this collection can at least compare favorably to Symphony of the Night, but they are derivative of it by their very nature. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? That being said, each of the three games tries to do something a little bit new.

Dawn of Sorrow has no Dracula and every single enemy can drop a new active or passive skill. However, in practice it’s a hassle to farm each enemy to obtain a new yet redundant ability.

Portrait of Ruin has you control two characters at once. It’s the closest the series has come to an actual new level of depth to its mechanics. Technically, it lets you use two subweapons at once, but the inputs get switched depending on which character you’re controlling, so it can get a bit confusing. As the name implies, Portrait of Ruin has part of its map tucked inside magic paintings, Mario 64-style. It’s a cute way to fit somewhat novel stages like the streets of London and an Egyptian pyramid inside Dracula’s castle.

Order of Ecclesia has fabulous character artwork, easily on par with Symphony of the Night, all of which was sadly mangled by the DS and still is in this version. Ecclesia streamlines Sorrow’s abilty-collecting system and Portrait of Ruin’s quests while still being a solid 2D action game. In other words, it’s the closest thing you’ll ever get to a better Castlevania game than Symphony of the Night. This is not faint praise.

The multiple screen gimmick of the DS is handled by displaying both in one screen, so you get a map screen and an enemy status screen scrunched into a corner. I thought this would be distracting by looking at the trailer, but it turns out it works like a charm in practice. For one, it means never having to open the map. You can also view potential item drops at a glance, and you’ll have to do a whole lot of enemy farming if you want to find all the items. Having immediate visual access to enemy weaknesses is also handy, but it’s only truly useful in Order of Ecclesia.

As a bonus, the collection also includes a port of Haunted Castle, one of the worst games in the series. A remake of that game has been added as well, so you have a slightly less worse version of a bad game. Then again, you’re technically getting a brand new Castlevania game. Yay? To its credit, Haunted Castle has Cross your Heart, the best Castlevania song, better than Vampire Killer. You heard that right. Deal with it.

All three DS games retain many of the flaws of Symphony of the Night. They’re literally the same game in many ways. By that I mean the rampant recycling. Rondo of Blood (the other quintessential Castlevania game from the non-metroidvania branch of the family tree) introduced new monster sprites with an anime style. I used to think of them as the “good” sprites. And they are good. Just compare Super Castlevania IV’s skeleton to Rondo of Blood’s skeleton. Symphony of the Night reused most of those sprites. So do the three DS games. In fact, Konami reused those sprites for more than a decade. It does get pretty repetitive. Alucard, Richter and Maria have been ripped straight out of the previous games and added as playable characters, something between a cool Easter egg and an eye-rolling exercise in corner cutting.

The three games also share Symphony of the Night’s annoying tendency of having hundreds of different enemies, very few of which can fight back. What’s the point of having an enemy with a fancy name from the Goetia like “Decarabia” if you can kill it in less than a second? I suppose recycling enemies is appropriate if most of them don’t survive long enough to execute their attack animation. Heck, many enemies might as well be loot boxes tied to a sprite. Symphony of the Night is a ridiculously easy game, made even easier by knowing what the good items are. The DS games at least feel better in that regard. They’re not a complete cakewalk and the bosses are very strong, perhaps too strong when compared to their minions. For better or worse, the reliance on experience levels messes up the action. You can level your way out of any tough situation, but the enemies will never be “just right”. They will always either be doormats or horrendously strong.

So yeah, there’s not much more to say about the games themselves. Those three are pretty much the final words in the story of 2D Castlevania (I’m not sure anyone truly cares about the 3D games, even if some of them are technically not that bad). Well… there is also Harmony of Despair from 2010, which recycled Symphony of the Night and all three DS games in one big multiplayer sludge of assets. It’s the end point of a decade of recycling the same content. Recycling squared. Harmony of Despair is the true final word in the 2D series, I’d say. It wasn’t completely awful per se: unleashing many players in an enormous level where everything happens all at once was pretty innovative. However, it was also a tedious grinding game, barely a notch above a free-to-play phone game.

The Castlevania series’ main enemy was time. It was always a creature of 2D and all the big bucks have long since moved to 3D games. Order of Ecclesia came out in 2008. In 2009, From Software’s Demon’s Souls came out. Yes, Castlevania is another victim of the soulslike genre, and yes, this is going to be another article that talks about soulslikes. To be fair, the Souls games are probably the best recreation of the metroidvania concept in 3D. They have: the interconnected levels (especially in the original Dark Souls), a dark medieval setting, action with light RPG mechanics, various equipable weapons, enemy item drops, secret walls, shortcuts, etc.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t still 2D metroidvanias being made. If anything, there’s too many of them. The real question I’m asking myself is: how well do these three DS games from nearly 20 years ago compare to games from today, at least compared to these new 2D metroidvanias? The answer is: pretty well!

Except for the dated graphics made for a tiny screen, these games could sit alongside stuff like Ender Lillies: Quietus of the Knights and Blasphemous. Heck, those two are so gothic they’re practically Castlevania fan games. That being said, Hollow Knight, the new king of the genre, is still a few notches above those in terms of quality.

Castlevania is truly dead. Not because it’s impossible to add another game to the series, but because even if you do make a new one, it will draw inspiration from something else, namely Dark Souls. “Metroidvania” is a genre where both of the games that make up the name have lost relevance, both culturally and from a design perspective.

Even if someone made a new Castlevania game today, it would still end up being inspired by Darks Souls. Castlevania itself was inspired by the Hammer movies, the classic black and white stuff. Werewolves, mummies, and obviously vampires. It was relatively light-hearted horror, a smorgasbord of all the mythological beasts the devs could come up with. A Monster Mash, if you will, accompanied with a heavy-metal inspired soundtrack.

That stuff is soooo 1995.

A new metroidvania now needs to have its own inscrutable “lore” supplied in snippets by every random item. It needs a grimdark world in decay where everyone is already dead or dying (extra points if the hero restarts the world by killing god and then sacrificing themselves). It needs a soundtrack that’s as tortured as the mood. It needs to add parry/dodge mechanics. It needs some kind of loss mechanic on death and a bonfire that respawns enemies, etc.

In other words, new metroidvanias retrofit soulslike concepts back into a 2D frame. Look back at Blasphemous, Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary or Grime and tell me that’s not true.

I’ve heard Nine Sols has just taken Hollow Knight’s crown as the king of the new metroidvanias. Guess what the game says it’s inspired by? Sekiro, i.e. Dark Souls.

To be fair, there’s another thing new metroidvanias tend to have that were not part of the original Castlevanias: masocore-style platforming gauntlets filled with spikes that have to be negotiated with precise double jumps and dashes. As for the exact influence for this, Super Meat Boy is as good a culprit as any.

For his part, Koji Igarashi, the father of the Castlevania metroidvanias, went off to create Bloodstained. It’s… okay? Like a lot of Kickstarter projects, it feels like a game slavishly trying to recreate past glory, but without access to the original IP. Bloodstained has a 2.5D art style that’s much less appealing than good pixel art and also somehow ends up being less original than the DS games. Perhaps moving on is not so bad?

What I’m getting at is that the games of the DS collections are good, but not quite must plays. In truth, they’re footnotes to Symphony of the Night. However, they do have “historical” relevance, if you can put it like that. They’re some of the last vestiges of a genre in a pre-Demon’s Souls era. That makes them precious. The only place where you can find something untainted by the influences of the present is in the past.

[EDIT: Geez, it’s even worse than I thought. Castlevania is now retroactively lending its IP to a copycat like Vampire Survivors. Well, at least they’re hitching their wagon to something popular.]