I'm trying Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

[PrettyNier]

do you have a ds
seriously, do you have a ds

get any of the ds castlevanias
you'll get the whole SotN/metroidvania experience from those

not to mention that they're arguably better

dawn of sorrow and portrait of ruin are both miserable from an artistic standpoint and a game design standpoint: not a single thing has any lasting meaning or merit. the physics and movements are superficial at best, the level design is consistently little more than boxes or rectangles with floating platforms (with no attempted visual context to explain them), the enemies artificial intelligence is terrible and feels on par with something you would have fought in one of the first castlevania games. unfortunately for portrait and dawn, the character's capabilities have increased a thousand-fold. the primary focus of these games is more to arbitrarily collect things and max out percentages, simply for the sake of doing it; there is no soul, there is no reason behind it. and the few instances where there are rewards, these rewards are meaningless or do not justify the cost.

worst things about portrait of ruin: level design. jumping on charlottes back. frog form. owl form and super jump, and how the latter completely eliminates any potential use of the form. how unbalanced jonathan and charlotte are. how the game is practically tooled for grinding. the vast majority of sprites are re-used; the new sprites suck, and there is no real consistent style in the game as a whole. the game feels like it is a result of a check-list as opposed to a real effort on any front to do something interesting or entertaining.


even despite its flaws symphony of the night is basically objectively better on every front


e: im leaving out ecclesia. ecclesia is almost as good as symphony. it suffers from a few of the same problems as portrait and to a lesser extent dawn, but damn the difficulty is actually balanced out, the combat is incredibly tight and more often than not it actually gives purpose to things (you are not just handed a million potions) and utilizes the systems it has in place.

But uh, they say it's 6 player cooperative play, but they've only mentioned 5 characters, so I'm wondering who the 6th is.

i really don't think there will be a 6th character