Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow/Castlevania: Akatsuki no Minuet (キャッスルヴァニア ～暁月の円舞曲)

The Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (C2SQ) release on the Nintendo Entertainment System, part of the 1987 onslaught of sequels-that-went-entirely-different-directions, was part of a concerted effort to make games more "epic" in scale. In video games, nothing was more epic than the RPG, offering dozens of hours of playtime, experience points, levels, upgrades, dialog and otherwise all the things that were missing from the 45 minute arcade games that had inspired consoles up to that point. Japanese game designers had long attempted to use the RPG model as a way of breathing more life and playtime into an otherwise short game. A number of improbable games with "RPG Elements" came out as part of this experiment in fusing styles, racing games, sports games, even a pinball game. C2SQ was one of these many, sometimes confused, products that emerged.

Whether C2SQ is a good game or not is up to some debate. The longer view of history has not treated it universally kind. It's plagued by dubious design decisions, weak powerups, loads of grinding, unknowable puzzles and backtracking, instant deaths and other annoyances. But it was a noble attempt, and everybody I knew had a copy of it, and thought it was awesome at the time even if none of us ever finished it. The next 11 Castlevania games were a return to a decidedly non-RPG style of game.

By the mid-90s it was clear that the Castlevania jump-n-whip model had run its course, yet it was still a vibrant and beloved franchise. One of the chief designers of the Castlevania, Koji Igarashi, lamented seeing piles of Castlevania games in the bargain bin at local stores -- the games were popular, but short-lived. Furthermore, consoles had moved on and the 3d revolution was in full-swing, yet Castlevania's signature gameplay mechanics didn't translate well to 3d.

A contemporary of the original Castlevania game on the NES was Metroid. Metroid was a revolutionary game. Using the limited hardware available at the time, Gunpei Yokoi (known for his unique philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology") defined an action-adventure-exploration model for games. Instead of slavishly hammering in bits of commonplace RPGs into other game genres, Metroid eschewed most of these things. The goal was exploration and the reward for exploring was power ups. This was copied in later games like Blaster Master, but the Metroid games continues to stand as a gold-standard for this kind of game.

This model, and the RPG-like C2SQ formed the kernel then for the revitalization of the Castlevania Franchise. In 1997 we saw the release of one of the finest video games of all time, Castlevania:Symphony of the Night (CSOTN) It was a powerful homage to Metroid, yet refined the game style on almost every level. More a 32-bit version of the what the Metroid formula had become with Super Metroid, so good was it that the term "Metroidvania" was coined to capture this particular genre of game. The games played so close to each other that you could almost swap the tilesets of each game and not know it.

Still, despite rave reviews, Konami tried to put out various 3d-style Castlevania games to almost universally limited success. By 2001 it was clear the Castlevania didn't have legs as a 3d game. It was this year that Nintendo was going to release the Game Boy Advance and there was no doubt that a Metroid game was going to follow. Inspired yet again, Konami decided to reach back into their archive of past successes and remembered CSOTN. Deciding to release a Castlevania game as a GBA launch title, Konami pulled out all the stops and released Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, the first Metroidvania style Castlevania in almost 5 years.

It was so successful that it spawned 2 more immediate sequels: Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow (CAoS) all on the GBA. Typical of immediate sequels, Harmony of Dissonance was less successful, but Aria of Sorrow nails the formula. 

 

In a typical confused, tedious, badly written and unnecessary Castlevania storyline, you play as Soma Cruz, probably the least plausible teenage character ever created. Soma, who looks more like a middle-aged high society dragon lady, is a potential vessel for Dracula and is granted strange powers over the souls of demons. In other words, if you kill a certain kind of enemy, you might randomly absorb their power for yourself. In practice, this is pretty cool, if not sometimes a bit tedious to get certain souls. There are an astonishing number of souls, some more useful than others, but it give you something to do other than boredom while backtracking endlessly around the castle. It's almost a Pokemon type subgame as you really want to find all of the souls possible.

This mechanic also replaces the traditional Castlevania optional weapon. You can get everything from a spear throwing ability to a giant skeleton arm that follows you around smashing enemies to bits. One of my favorites is a Sith Lord style lightning charge. The combination of souls, and other weapons you pick up throughout the game provide you with nearly endless combinations of attack powers and it's worth playing through the game a few times to see what souls and weapons you'll end up with.

As you continue to power up, you eventually become a virtually unstoppable juggernaut. There are some who complain about this, but I never felt upset about it, it keeps the late game breezy as you flitter around the castle chasing down that one last item, or adding that one last secret room your couldn't get to before to your map.

There's also an unbelievable number of primary weapons, with wildly different properties. It's fun to find them and then try some of the oddball ones out for a while. Some of the weapons look great on paper, but don't work well in certain combat situations, so you'll find yourself learning the feel of each weapon and quickly switching between different ones even during the course of a single fight. This keeps combat brisk and interesting for most of the game.

The game plays really well, controls are tight and a handy backdash move can turn some early-to-mid game fights into mini fencing duels with some of the stronger enemies. Your character evolves and stays expressive throughout the game. There really aren't too many cheap hits, and to be honest the game isn't really all that hard. There are plentiful save points throughout the castle and the automap does a reasonable job of showing where you need to explore next. There's a few maze-like sections that can get tedious to figure out, but they're more than balanced out by the rest of the game.

Graphics are pretty good. They don't suffer from the typical GBA "developed at a higher resolution  then scaled down to the GBA resolution" problem that a great many GBA games have. It's clear that Konami, like Nintendo, developed this game from the get-go to fit within the limitations of the system, and the presentation of nearly everything in the game is fantastic (your main character's funny looking long legged running cycle notwithstanding).

The Castlevania series is legendary for the amazing music. Even on the lowly Black and White original Gameboy, the music was stunning. CAoS's music is lackluster by Castlevania standards, great by normal GBA standards. It's more than competent and rarely intrudes, but it's not memorable in the "catchy" sort of way you'd like. Is it bad? No, definitely not, it's actually quite decent, just not up the kind of standard you'd expect out of the series.

But wait, there's more. The game has different endings and even an entire second quest where you play through the game as a Belmont, whip and all. It's not as fleshed out as the main game, but Julius Belmont plays different enough from Soma that it's worth puttering around the castle for a couple hours to see how to solve different situations. It's fun and keeps the game replayability high, long after you've exhausted the normal quest.

It's obvious that CAoS did something right, while no more Castlevania games graced the GBA, the series kept on strongly, with no less than three similarly styled Metroidvanias coming out on the Nintendo DS through 2008. That makes a total of 7 games of the Metroidvania type across 3 platforms (with some coming out on the WiiU Virtual Console) -- and to be honest it doesn't really matter which ones came out when and on which platform, they're all only moderately different, and to be honest, the Castlevania story doesn't matter at all, any or each will give you hours of enjoyment. They're all just more of the same awesome game style.

Understandably, Konami decided to abandon the Metroidvania formula after all those similar games. At this point, Castlevania is well down the road of becoming a moderately good God of War clone. If we're to see more games of this type, they'll probably not be coming out of Konami.