Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

aka: CV: AoS, Castlevania: Akatsuki no Minuet
Moby ID: 9237
Game Boy Advance Specs
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Description official descriptions

Normally a solar eclipse isn't a dangerous event, but for Soma Cruz, being sucked through a portal and into Dracula's castle during one will turn his day into a total nightmare. As Soma, you must venture through the castle and find a way out. As you do so, you will discover the true meaning behind the event, and why Dracula has risen yet again.

Although set in the future, all of the weapons and hazards are the same or similar to those seen in past Castlevania titles. Soma can find or buy weapons of all types such as swords, spears, and axes. Through his mysterious power of Dominance Soma can take the souls of his enemies and use their powers as his own, providing passive stat boosts, powerful magic, or even summoning them forth to fight on his behalf. Dracula's castle is a single continuous building, and as Soma's power of Dominance grows and he acquires more monster souls to power abilities he can bypass obstacles that were previously insurmountable. Players can link up with a friend's copy of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow to trade souls between them.

Spellings

  • キャッスルヴァニア ~暁月の円舞曲~ - Japanese spelling

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Screenshots

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Credits (Game Boy Advance version)

94 People (57 developers, 37 thanks) · View all

Producer
Director
Chief Programmer
System & Player Programmer
Enemy Programmer
Map Programmer
Demo & Event Programmer
Chief Designer
Player & Weapon Designer
Enemy Designer
Map Designer
Scenario Writer
Character Design & Illustrations
Sound Director
Sound Programmer
Sound Effects
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 53 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.2 out of 5 (based on 85 ratings with 5 reviews)

Wow.

The Good
Aria of Sorrow is as close to Symphony of the Night as the Gameboy Advance games have ever come. Before you get the impression that Aria of Sorrow isn't quite as good as Symphony, or that all it attempts to do is recreate it, let me stop you. Aria of Sorrow rocks. The music rocks. The graphics rock. The inventory system? Yeah, it rocks too. Aria of Sorrow gets points in my book for one of the most rocking side scrollers made to date. Much like its often compared to predecessor, Symphony of the Night, Aria of Sorrow gives players the ability to level up, manage an inventory system, and even absorb the souls of their enemies to give them special magical powers. All of these elements, on their own, are solid. As solid even as a level up system or inventory system in a pure RPG. There are no "gimmicks" in Aria of Sorrow, only great features. Running around Dracula's castle is as enjoyable as running around anything ever was. The castle has the typical CastleVania environments - dangerous gardens, mysterious caves, mechanical clocktowers, they're all represented here. For a game that's played on a such a small screen, KCE Tokyo has done a great job of creating mood. As far as the actual game goes, hitting monsters with weapons has never been so fun. Each monster in Aria of Sorrow has a unique behavior, one that you'll have to learn to adapt to. As you gradually gain skills, you'll gradually be taught by the game to use them. The difficulty is just right. Aria of Sorrow remains challenging without falling into the CastleVania trap of being entirely too hard (CastleVania 1 comes to mind) or entirely too easy (Symphony of the Night, anyone?). With each weapon you obtain, you gain a different range, damage, trajectory, and so forth. I actually found myself strategizing which weapons to use where. The game does a good job of pitting the environment against, and for the player. Fighting enemies on steps isn't the same as fighting them on level ground. As you play the game, you're intuition will guide you through the environments, subconsciously keeping the game entertaining to you.

The Bad
I played it on a smaller GBA screen. This game is detailed enough to look decent on a larger screen, and if a person were to have a GameCube/GBA TV Adaptor they would probably have a better time playing the game.

The Bottom Line
I can honestly say that it owns. By far the best CastleVania title to hit the GBA, heck, it's one of the best CastleVania titles to hit any platform. And that, friends, is saying quite a lot.

Game Boy Advance · by WJAndrews (32) · 2004

A real desire to achieve 100%

The Good
There's always a way. If you're not good with buttons, just kill some enemies, level up a bit, and make some money in order to purchase potions and items. Eventually you'll be strong enough to defeat whatever that seems to block you. In Super Metroid you may have learnt to avoid enemies as much as possible, here you'll want to kill them all, since with every enemy you kill, you gain experience points and become stronger.

If you set out to achieve 100% collection rate, you'll likely only want to kill enemies that you have not yet collected. So you will want to leave and enter rooms repeatedly to kill the same enemies over and over, while ignoring other enemies. There are very few things in life that hit a man harder than this feeling, this desire, to collect an enemy's soul. Aria of Sorrow provides this feeling.

Cool characters. Soma looks like Sephiroth, and the girl Mina is his childhood best friend and she's attractive. You play as Soma, so that's an immediate motivation to start playing (assuming you're a guy).

The environments are full of symbolism. Paintings and sculptures of angels, demons, and all those religion and prophecy stuff.

The whole "gain new powers to unlock new areas" thing is delightfully similar to Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. You can only jump this high at first, so there will be rooms that are out of reach. In later stages, you gain an incredibly awesome ability that shoots you straight up towards the ceiling. This is by far the coolest move in any platform game ever, that even outshines Super Metroid's Shinespark. You're no longer walking or running through rooms, you'll be jumping around in rooms. You're always jumping, it's ridiculous.

Most of the time the path is clear and you'll know where to go next. You won't feel frustration with this game. You're always leveling up and collecting stuff. Satisfaction is ALWAYS there in your heart and soul.

The Bad
Some weapons and armors are useless (If you have played Diablo 2, this is like picking up a level 2 leather jacket when you're at level 30.) For example you'll see a sword quite early in the game, but won't be able to acquire it until much, much later. You'll naturally want that sword to be worth the wait, since you'll move through that room frequently, and everytime you enter that room, you see that sword, and wonder "when am I going to be able to get THERE? What ability is required for it? What special attribute does this sword have?" But by the time you get the sword, you already have a weapon that's better in every aspect. You'll want to sell this lame, newly acquired sword for money, in order to buy the Soul Eater Ring.

But seriously, this isn't even nitpicking. It's less than a nitpick. There isn't anything in Aria of Sorrow that I don't like.

The Bottom Line
100% soul collection rate may seem hard at first. After the main quest is completed, you'll probably be at only 20% or less. You'll wonder how long 100% takes. Actually, the process doesn't feel long, because it's filled with satisfaction. Everytime you collect a soul, it becomes a new spell that you can cast, but I don't even care about that very much. I collect it because I wanna collect it, not because I wanna use the spell. Every time you add 1% to the grand total, you're like "OH YEAH" "THAT's what I'm talking about". You'll want to dance. So, basically, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow invites you to dance, to celebrate 80 joyful moments in your life.

Game Boy Advance · by Pagen HD (146) · 2013

Just as good as Castlevania games gets

The Good
I haven't played any Castlevania games that came out after Super Castlevania IV, so I really didn't know how they were at all. I found a used copy of Castlevania : Aria of Sorrow, and a friend told me that it was very good, so I picked it up. I was quite surprised that this game is really not much like Castlevania games I've played on the NES and Super NES, except that's it's a platformer and that it's a very good game.

The gameplay of this game is fantastic. You can level up and equip different weapons like you can in action RPGs, effectively making this game an platformer-RPG. I've tried many platformer-RPG games on the NES, including Faxanadu, Zelda II : The Adventure of Link, The Battle of Olympus, and of course Castlevania II : Simon's Quest. However all of them make me feel lost after 5-10 minutes of gameplay and as following a walkthrough isn't really fun, I've assumed the platformer-RPG genre was just not a good formula. Fortunately, Castlevania : Aria of Sorrow proved me the exact opposite.

Controls are easy and responsive, playing this game is just as fun as playing any other platformer (as opposed to games mentioned above). You can equip weapons with different response speed and range, allowing you a wide range of strategy against you opponents. Is it better to equip a slow weapon but that is powerful or to equip a weaker and more short-ranger, but much faster weapon ? Also, each enemy in the game has a low probability to release a soul when defeated. You are then able to equip 3 different kind of souls, attack, support and "implicit" souls at a time. Collecting them will allow you to use enemie's attack against other enemies, which is cool, and allow you to perform a very wide range of various moves. In order to progress the story, you must find special abilities which will for example allow you to jump higher in order to access new areas, etc...

You take the control of a guy named Soma Cruz that is the weirdest hero ever. He looks like a girl, have a weird name and looks more like a bad guy than a hero. Although he's the protagonist of this game, he's not a Belmont clan guy by the way. The game happens in September 2035 and you are teleported in the inside of a solar eclipse (in fact a solar eclipse is actually predicted in Japan for that date), inside the castle of Dracula (don't ask me what it does inside of an eclipse). You only goal is to exit. Of course there isn't a story as developed as in true RPGs, but it's definitely a decently developed story for a platformer.

The graphics of the game are really among the best I've seen on the GBA. Sprites are very detailed and animated, you can see the cape of the main character flowing into the wind. There is a lot of transparency effects, and background is very detailed. It basically proof that 2D doesn't mean outdated graphics.

The music of the game is excellent and varied, sometimes upbeat/fast-paced and sometimes slow and melancholic. Each level have a music that suits it well. Unlike the majority of GBA games, sound effects are very well done as well. You get some voice acting (in Japanese) from enemies and you can really hear the bones of your enemies falling apart when you defeat them. The protagonist also randomly hurls when attacking which sounds great. It's one of the rare GBA games that made full use of the sound hardware.

Finally the difficulty is just right, the game really isn't hard but when entering a new harder area you'll probably loose a couple of times before finding the first save point where you can recover. After that you can just level up if you have trouble, so the game isn't really hard, but it's not too easy either. You can carry healing items and use them during boss fight if you want, but sometimes you'll be saying "I'll retry to beat that boss this time conserving healing items for when I'll really need them". You can unlock an "oldscool mode" where you play as another protagonist which this time have the classical whip, cross, axe and holy water as weapons, and where you get rid of the story scenes and RPG elements of the game (levels, items, etc...). You still don't have the crappy jump control of NES Castlevania games, fortunately.



The Bad
The only thing I can possibly think is that the game is a bit short. After beating the game normally you can unlock new modes, but still beating the whole game in all modes adds up to 12-15 hours in total even if you level up a lot and try to discover each tiny corner of the game, which is quite short by modern standards.

The Bottom Line
This game has excellent gameplay, graphics and sound, and proves that the platformer-RPG genre isn't doomed to crap anymore. While a lot different from Castlevania games I've played on my old Nintendo consoles, it's still just as good as it was. Super Castlevania IV is still my favourite of the series tough. So if you have been playing classic Castlevania games and are curious to play a modern Castlevania game for your little GBA you're looking to the right place. If you have missed the classic games of course I still recommend to play this, but you're still missing something.

Game Boy Advance · by Bregalad (937) · 2008

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The Game Boy Advance version of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2003 – #4 Game Boy Advance Game of the Year

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Kartanym.

Wii U added by Michael Cassidy. J2ME added by chirinea.

Additional contributors: Apogee IV, Guy Chapman, Exodia85, Dae, LordRM, Trypticon, Patrick Bregger, FatherJack.

Game added May 20, 2003. Last modified March 3, 2024.