Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow

The Good
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow is the best Castlevania game for the Game Boy Advance system. Harmony of Dissonance, the second of the series for the GBA, was worse than Circle of the Moon, but it had some good features that this game keeps. So, we can define Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow as the game that has the best thing from the two previous games released for the GBA.

Castlevania has nothing new on its gameplay. Now we can move our character in the air as we did before in Circle of the Moon. The essence of the game is still the same, explore the whole castle looking for secret areas (now the breakable walls are back!), collect valuable objects, complete your monster encyclopedia and rise up some levels before fighting the big bosses (as big as always).

For the first time you have no sub-weapons on your side. Those sub-weapons have been replaced by red souls (most of the classic sub-weapons of the series like the axe or knife are available as souls too), so, hearts will give you just some mana points and nothing more. In Harmony of Dissonance, hearts were useless but here they are really important.

Talking about souls, you have three types of them, the red souls that could be used as sub-weapons/special moves, the blue souls which are like special moves that will use a lot of mana (things like flying as a bat or become a monster to make more damage) and the yellow ones, which are special powers that will be always active and they don't need mana (strength up, lucky up...). This soul system really suits the game, and soon you'll start collecting all the souls, really far from the annoying DSS of Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and the "strange" book system of Harmony of Dissonance.

Here we don't have two castles, just one big castle and (that's a new thing) many different characters. There are many save points during the game, much more than in the previous Castlevania games but it's not easy to progress. As in the previous games, different endings are available according to what you do during your adventure and it's recommend to reach both of them (at least, the good one).

Many different weapons are available, you have handy knifes, spears, swords, hammers... each weapon has different effects and some of them are perfect for certain moments. You'll see your equipped weapon when you use it against your enemies, that means that we don't have generic graphics for weapons, every weapon has a different one.

Harmony of Dissonance had bigger sprites, but graphics were worse than the graphics for Aria of Sorrow. Now the graphics are well-balanced and we don't have that strange blue aura on our main character. Something's similar with the sound, the music for Aria of Sorrow is perfect, as a game with this name deserves.

The Bad
The L button is useless. Harmony of Dissonance featured a new gameplay system in which you need to master your skill using the L and the R button to evade attacks, but in this game only the L Button remains and it's really useless. You don't need to use it to finish the game.

As happened before, to collect every item and every soul is something boring or tedious because sometimes you need to kill the same enemy over 50 times to get the item or soul. If you're one of those players who need to collect and complete the monster encyclopedia you'll need a lot of time and patience. Of course there are some items that will increase your luck, but it's not enough and sometimes is frustrating.

Boss Rush Mode appeared for the first time on Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, and it was a nice mode to increase game's length. Here you have the same mode, but it'll take a bit to finish it and the game has no more game modes. That's just because Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance has much more big bosses.

Story is boring until you reach the end. The storyline is really depth less. Dialogues are annoying and senseless as well, but once you know how to enter the Chaos Realm it becomes more interesting and the special ending improves this weak point.

The Bottom Line
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow has the best things of the previous games and it's the definitive Castlevania game for the Game Boy Advance. It has some weak points, but it's probably the best action-platform game for the GBA. Many different weapons, special powers, enemies, big bosses and hours of gameplay make this game an essential one.

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.

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.