Castlevania: An Overview of the Other Half of the Metroidvania Genre

If you've known me for more than a week, then you already know how much of a ravenous Metroid fan I am. Super Metroid remains in my top 2 games of all time, even after more than 15 years since I first picked it up. The series has a way with atmosphere, immersiveness and exploration which scratches an itch deep in my soul. While I'm extremely excited for the two (TWO!!) new Metroid games Nintendo is finally giving us, there remains a wide dearth of Metroid games (I'm not counting Other M and Federation Force as Metroid games because fuck them).

Where Nintendo failed us, the indie scene has breathed new life into the metroidvania genre with a wealth of titles. I could list dozens of great games in the vain of Ori and the Blind Forest, Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. Through all these years though, I've managed to neglect the series that gives the metroidvania genre the latter half of its name: Castlevania.

Unlike Metroid, Castlevania is less consistent with its genre. The early games on the NES and SNES were fairly straightforward side-scrolling action games. Newer Castlevanias, such as the Lords of Shadow games have fallen back toward pure action games. Starting with Symphony of the Night on the PS1 and extending through 7 games, the Castlevania series took on an open world structure much like Metroid. Their success cemented the series as a symbol of the genre, leading to the, admittedly, clunky term: Metroidvania. The designer credited with this metroidvania paradigm shift in the series is Koji Igarashi. He's is sometimes just referred to as "Iga", leading to the moniker "Igavania" to refer to this type of Castlevania game. I'll be using Igavania to refer just to the metroidvania Castlevanias.

Several months ago, I decided to rectify one of my greatest gaming shames by finally playing Symphony of the Night. The first of the Igavanias, SotN no doubt receives the most attention among its siblings and is frequently ranked among the best games of all time. Once I had finished SotN, I found myself gravitating toward Aria of Sorrow after watching a friend stream the game after it had been put through a randomizer. It hadn't started out as such but before long, I ended up on a quest to play every single Igavania game. I completed my quest, as you can probably guess from the fact that I'm writing this article, and I have a number of things to say about the games. I think that playing these games back to back without the cloud of nostalgia or fading memories gives me an interesting perspective on how the series has progressed. I'll be discussing my thoughts on each game, followed by my general thoughts on the whole series.

Symphony of the Night

While I had never played it previously, SotN is such a popular game that I had gleaned some knowledge of it. I knew the inverted castle existed, for instance. I had also watched several speedruns of the game, but those were so quick and skipped so much that I never retained anything from them.

Outside of the somewhat awkward prologue with Richter defeating Dracula in Castlevania Bloodlines, I immediately noticed one of the critical gameplay differences with Metroid (expect a lot of comparisons to Metroid and Super Metroid in particular): The range at which combat takes place. Igavanias expect you to be up close and personal most of the time, while Super Metroid wants you to keep your distance. This holds true throughout most of the Igavanias, so I'll be going over that more in-depth later on.

To make up for combat being more dangerous in close range, SotN has much quicker attacks, especially when combined with jumping. Jumping is extremely critical to the combat in all of the Igavanias, perhaps most so in SotN. While airborne, you're allowed to attack once, and the instant you hit the ground, you're able to attack again. With good timing, this allows you to attack very quickly as you jump, attack, land, attack and repeat. The variable height jumping (dependent on how long the button is pressed) allows very short, quick hops that speed up this loop massively. This makes combat much more intensive and dynamic, as you need to manage quick and precise inputs while being keenly aware of the boss's next move. At such close range, you have little time to react. Combined with the significant knockback when hit, the combat can be quite punishing (especially if you get stunlocked in a group of enemies).

Symphony of Night definitely takes advantage of the PS1's capabilities to render some crisp, higher resolution sprites. The animations, particularly on Alucard (did you know Alucard is Dracula spelled backwards??), are all quite smooth and look nice. I'm not really a fan of the trail Drac-Boy leaves as he moves though. It muddles his sprite a bit and just seems unnecessary. The 3D elements also take advantage of the PS1's capabilities, which is why they look like trash. The PS1's poor 3D rendering makes these jittering objects stick out obnoxiously. On the other hand, SotN's soundtrack is, for the most part, quite nice. It's probably my favorite Igavania soundtrack. I don't know shit about music though, so all I can't say much more than “it sounds nice”.

While not a major concern, there's one oddity in SotN that all of the subsequent games fixed. In order to use healing items, they must be first equipped to the hands, thrown on the ground, and picked up. It's exactly as cumbersome as it sounds. The difficulty of use massively devalues these items to the point that I almost never used them in my playthrough.

One of the few things I knew about SotN going into it was that there was an inverted copy of Dracula's castle. Every time I heard it mentioned, it was accompanied by gushing praise for the wonderful level design and novelty. Brace yourself for this hot take: I didn't like the inverted castle. It's an almost exact copy of the normal castle. Copy, paste, flip vertically, call it day. "But wait", I can already hear you crying, "the level design works both ways, that's really impressive!" To that I say, it doesn't really "work" in the inverted castle. It's traversable, and that's the extent of it. There are so many inverted rooms that become impossible to navigate without late-game powerups like the bat form and gravity boots that give you basically free reign over any 2D space. These allow you to reach anywhere in the inverted castle from the moment you set foot in it.

This complete lack of progression in the inverted castle is what really kills it for me. One of the most important parts of level design in a metroidvania is strategically limiting the player. In giving the player free reign over the entire map with all of the traversal options, it becomes fairly aimless. Even though the layout is essentially known beforehand, the locations of what you're looking for are scattered haphazardly around the castle, leaving you to re-explore the same level structure again with no guarantee you'll run into them in a timely manner. Overall, the inverted castle just felt like low effort padding. If they had moved some of the later traversal options to the inverted castle and used them to expose the player to it more gradually, I think it would have flowed much better.

Circle of the Moon

Earlier I said I had neglected the Castlevanias, but that didn't mean I had no experience with them. The only Igavania I had played previously was Circle of the Moon. I had finished the game before, but the last time I touched it was about fifteen years ago. Most of my memory of it had become fairly vague. I owned the game back when it was first released on the shitty non-back-lit Gameboy Advance. You youngsters who haven't tried to use one of the old GBA's don't know the pain of just trying to just see what was on the screen. Circle of the Moon was particularly bad for this, as it's a very dark game.

By far my biggest grievance with an otherwise fairly solid game is something I hated even when I played it as a dumb child: double-tap to run. The base movement speed in CotM is much slower than in other Igavanias. This is offset by the running upgrade acquired very early on. Running is not automatic, however, you need to double tap the direction you want to go in order to run. On the surface it might not seem too bad, but keep in mind that you lose your running status if you need to change directions. That tall stairwell with the alternating repeating ramps? You'll have to double tap each time you turn around to get to the next ramp. Running is also essential for platforming, since it drastically increases your jump distance. If you want to jump farther than 5 inches ahead, you need to double tab for a running jump. This has a huge impact on combat as well, where many enemies cannot be jumped over while walking. You'll usually want to be running in combat for the extra mobility, but when you're trying to bob and weave through various huge boss attacks, double tapping constantly becomes extremely irritating and clunky. Just having the run speed always on would probably move CotM up on my ranking of Igavanias.

Where SotN had a fairly clunky system for magic, one of the big selling points of CotM was its DSS system. DSS means... uh... dual... ssssomething... system. Yeah. Anyway, it involves two sets of cards: action and attribute. One card from each set can be chosen, and their effects combined to create a variety of effects. Technically, there are no other equippable weapons other than the standard whip, but many DSS combinations replace your standard whip with magic-based weapons with far more variety than SotN. There's also various shields, familiars, elemental full-screen attacks and more.

Overall, DSS adds a lot to the game, but it's not perfect. In order to use a card combo, both cards must be acquired. Cards are random drops from certain enemies, and finding them is very hit-or-miss. In my recent playthrough, I found 8 of the 20 cards (4 from each set) without any grinding or knowing where they drop. This left me with only 16 of the possible 100 combinations that I could use. The card I did find were very spread out, leaving me with just a few combinations available to me through most of the game. Because of the cards being divided into two sets, your available combinations increases by an amount equal to how many cards you have of the *other* set. This makes the early cards comparatively weak as they'll only provide a few combos to you at the time, and later cards are very strong, as they'll be able to combo with the many others cards you have. This heavy slant toward the endgame makes the system far less useful on a normal playthrough. Evening out the power curve with the system as is would involve handing out the cards much more readily early on. Having some be placed in fixed locations, almost like powerups would allow the game to more consistently control what combos are available at a time and give more significant rewards for exploration than the typical boring MP or HP max boosts.

One thing that CotM is missing that all other Igavanias have is a merchant. There's no money in this game and no way to purchase consumables or armor or anything. This is especially odd with how healing items work in CotM. Healing and heart recovery items are severely underpowered. By the end of the game, my health pool was around 800, while one standard potion healed all of 20. They heal barely anything, so they became nearly useless very quickly. The lack of a consistent supply and rarity of drops makes healing potions simultaneously very valuable and also barely useful. It feels like they wanted to encourage luck-based builds that farm for consumables, but luck-boosting equipment is also very rare and requires farming enemies. Other equipment, on the other hand, drops frequently even with minimal luck. By the end of the game you might have 50 cotton shirts, but you'll never be able to do anything with 49 of them. A merchant you can buy from and sell to would have plugged these holes nicely.

Something I noticed very quickly was that the stat progression as you level up has a much sharper curve in this game than any other. I mentioned earlier that my health at the end of the game was over 800; that's almost double what I typically had at the ends of the other games. Damage numbers were a big indicator as well. Starting out, they seemed fairly normal, but backtracking through the same area just a few level ups later showed a massive increase. By the time I killed the first boss and looped back around to the first hallway, I was already doing triple-digit damage to the basic bats, and nearly everything died to one or two hits. Hits for over 100 damage were rare in the other Igavanias, even at the endgame. Backtracking through areas you've done before ended up being very trivial. This can potentially be boring from a lack of challenge, or refreshing as your traversal goes quicker. I tend to lean toward the former, which is why I appreciate something the game does later on. For some forced backtracking segments, the enemies get upgraded to be more current. Those hallways with tissue paper skeletons now have werebears and spider-women that are actually a threat. This freshens up the old areas a bit, making that backtracking a bit more interesting.

Harmony of Dissonance

From the moment Harmony of Dissonance began, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was older than it actually is. The larger, simpler sprites, lower fidelity music and clunkier controls made this game feel more like an early Gameboy Color title. Even its predecessor, Circle of the Moon had a much more modern feel to it. I won't say this on its own is a bad thing, but much of the design seems to pull from the worse aspects of its retro style.

Like CotM, your protagonist, Juste, only has a whip at his disposal. Unlike CotM, the magic system doesn't provide any alternatives. While magic in HoD is powerful, it's also quite limited, as it uses heaps of MP, meaning your whip will be your primary damage dealer through the whole game. There are several modifiers to the whip in the form of equipment, but these primarily add elemental damage and don't significantly change how it functions. By the end, I was desperately missing the rapid fire dagger weapons from SotN. The quick jump canceling attacks in SotN are gone, as the whip animation continues to play even after landing, locking you out of another attack until it finishes. The greater range of the whip somewhat makes up for this, so I won't deduct points quite yet, but another aspect of it really got my goat.

Attacking while jumping removes your air control. If you fling your whip mid-air, you had better be on a good trajectory, because you lose control of Juste afterward. The series has put huge emphasis on jumping for mobility and damage in combat, but here it can be a liability. In SotN, a very effective strategy is to jump toward and enemy, attack and quickly turn back as soon as the attack connects. This minimized the time you spend immediately next to the enemy. Back in HoD, to avoid barreling into enemies after jump-attacking, jumps often need to be straight upward. This is a huge hit to mobility in combat and makes Juste feel very stiff. Fortunately this isn't a huge issue for most bosses. The bosses are a huge issue themselves.

Igavanias are more boss-focused than Metroid. They tend to be more frequent and more challenging - sometimes. HoD has the frequency, but the challenge is absolutely nowhere to be found. I found most of the bosses in HoD to be pathetically easy and simple. The first boss, for instance, is a giant bat. Its pattern consists of flying back and forth slowly while occasionally shooting a single small, slow-moving fireball. It's actually difficult to be hurt by it without purposely trying to be. You could argue that this is just a tutorial boss to ensure you know the controls, but I would say that the normal enemies leading up to the boss are many times more challenging and require a much better handle on the controls. The following bosses barely ramp up the complexity as well. Even the second fight with Legion, a very late game boss, does nothing but slowly float around a small area of the room and drop maggots on the floor occasionally. You can beat this thing without even moving. Since bosses are such a big part of the games, having them be so trivial is by far my biggest complaint about HoD.

To get away from the negativity about HoD, let's talk about my favorite addition to the game: dashing. SotN has a back dash ability that causes Alucard to move backward quickly. It can be useful for avoiding sudden attacks but its uses are fairly situational. The back dash returns in HoD and it gains a front dash, allowing Juste to quickly close in on or back away from the target. On top of that, while Alucard had to wait a moment before back dashing again, Juste can chain dashes together all day long for very quick, sustained movement. Dashing becomes much more practical in combat and it greatly reduces time traversing the castle.

Harmony of Dissonance also fixes the lack of a merchant from CotM. They even did one better and added multiple merchants with different inventories. But there's a caveat, of course. Some merchants only appear when certain conditions are met. For example, one merchant only appears if your hearts total is even, and another only appears if its odd. These merchants don't sell anything particularly valuable, and the costs of the items are the primary gatekeeper, so it feels a bit unnecessary to gate the merchants themselves like this. Still, this is a direct improvement over CotM since it makes healing items much more viable. SotN still has the advantage though. For some reason selling to the merchants is limited to special gemstones, which are surprisingly rare. All of the unused equipment in your inventory will still just sit there for eternity.

While healing items can be useful, the vast majority of healing in Igavanias is done in save rooms. The placement of save rooms is one of the largest factors contributing to difficulty. Placing these rooms in just the right places is extremely important and, when it's done right, feels natural and fair. They need to be readily accessible and apparent in the player's path. If they're too far out of the way, players may miss them entirely, making the current segment significantly more difficult. If you haven't guessed by now, some of HoD's save rooms are not well placed. I found myself missing save rooms frequently, and having to go back for a thorough exploration to find them.

One particularly egregious case of bad save room placement is when you find the first teleporter. Once you've found it, you've already traversed several large rooms and you find yourself in a disconnected part of the castle. You quickly find one major branch in your path. To the left is a fiery room with skeletons, to the right is a crystal room. Both rooms are quite long and hostile with enemies multiple levels above anything you've seen so far. If you went left, congratulations, you're on track for a save room. You just need to survive several more long, difficult rooms. There's another branch at the start of the first fiery room and if you happen to take it, you'll run into a vastly overpowered enemy that can likely kill you in one hit. If you do make it to the save room, you'll find an MP upgrade next door and nothing else. This entire branch is a dead end that exists purely for the save room and MP upgrade. You'll have to immediately backtrack through the previous 4 rooms to make progress. If you went right at the first branch then you're probably fucked. The right route leads you through about a dozen more rooms before you get another chance to heal. It's such bizarre and punishing design that I'm surprised it got through playtesting.

The good bits of Harmony of Dissonance are unfortunately fairly few and are overshadowed by bigger negatives like abysmal boss design and bizarre and unbalanced save room placement. I put it near the bottom of my rankings, but not quite at the bottom.

Aria of Sorrow

Each Igavania commits one or more major errors in its designs, such as the inverted castle in SotN or running in CotM, with one exception: Aria of Sorrow. This last entry on the GBA may be the most solid all around Igavania. All of my complaints about it are mostly nitpicks and most of my compliments are design choices that worked well enough to become standard in the rest of the series.

Let's start out with the good bits. The biggest is the soul system. Nearly every enemy in the game has a chance to drop their soul which can then be equipped for a particular effect. There are three types of souls: active, persistent and passive. Active souls give you a secondary ability, something like the old knives, crosses, holy water, etc, but with variety on par with CotM's DSS. Persistent souls are souls you activate for a continuous effect like slow falling or spawning homing sickles every second. Passive souls are pretty straightforward and give some effect just by equipping them, such as the ability to walk under water. While it doesn't have the novelty of combining effects like in CotM, souls have even more variety thanks to the huge number of them. Unlike CotM though, the souls power isn't concentrated at the endgame, since each soul drop gives exactly one effect, giving a fairly smooth power curve through the game.

Each Igavania utilizes warp rooms to ease traversal through previous areas. There tends to be more backtracking than in Metroid games, so these can be very essential for streamlining the experience. One very annoying thing about them is that entering a warp gate cycles you through the warps you've found in a predefined order. If you need to get to the warp room that comes just before the one you're in in the cycle, then you'll need to go through all of the other rooms to get there. On top of that, the cycle can change every time you find a new warp room, so trying to remember the cycle becomes pointless and you'll probably end up just opening the map after each warp to see where you are. It's annoying. Aria of Sorrow is the first Igavania to fix this by displaying up a copy of the map when you enter a warp gate that allows you to directly select which warp room you want to go to. It's a small thing, but it saves a good amount of annoyance.

Aria of Sorrow also combines the best part of SotN's and CotM's weapons. From SotN it gets the equippable nature of weapons. They aren't magical or require souls; when you find them, you equip them and they're usable like normal. From CotM it takes the variety of weapon attacks. You've got fast, small dagger, slightly longer sword, very long lances that poke straight ahead, greatswords that arc above and in front of you quickly, and of course the classic whips.

Since I can't stop talking about merchants in Igavanias, AoS's is an improvement over HoD. There's only one, but he has a variety of items, his inventory increases as the game progresses, and you can sell equipment to him. He's almost the perfect merchant and I love him. More importantly is where he's located. AoS is the first to introduce what you could call a safe room. This is an easily accessible area with various NPCs and many of the NPC-related facilities. The safe room is fairly sparse in AoS, but later games significantly expand on the concept. Just having an area you can go back to for recovery and restocking can have a fairly comforting psychological effect.

That's enough positives. Time for the nitpicks. While the safe room is right next to a warp room, it's significantly farther from the nearest save room. In fact, all save and warp rooms are separated by at least a few other rooms. Most later games will almost always keep the warp rooms very close to a save room for convenience. Separated rooms often means that, if you happen to come across a warp room while traversing a new area and need healing, you'll simply warp to the lowest level area you have access to and push to the nearest known save room. This'll usually be far safer than trying to continue on to find a new save room. This makes warp rooms behave like more time consuming save rooms when needed as such, so why not just add an actual save room right next door and eliminate some needless backtracking?

The soul system is my favorite addition to AoS, but it has one minor flaw. After you've collected a particular soul, that enemy can continue to drop copies of its soul. Unfortunately, the merchant doesn't deal in souls, so there's not much point in acquiring souls beyond the first of each type. In addition, the selection of passive souls has few compelling options. The headhunter soul is acquired about half way through the game and gives extraneous souls their one use. It increases all stats based on the total number of souls you've acquired. Even with few to no duplicates, by the time you find the headhunter soul, it'll very likely be the best general purpose option for the passive slot, and it only gets more powerful as you progress. There ends up being only a handful of passive souls that are worth using.

Without any major missteps and a number of very nice additions to the series, Aria of Sorrow sits comfortably at the top of my ranking of Igavanias.

Dawn of Sorrow

Dawn of Sorrow took most of the neat things Aria of Sorrow did and... didn't really do a whole lot new with it other than bring it to a new, more powerful platform. As a result, I don't have a whole lot new to say about DoS, since most of what I said about AoS still applies. That said, DoS does have a major misstep.

Many bosses are gated behind doors that require a special item called a magic seal, of which there are several levels. In order to defeat a boss behind a magic seal door, you need to complete a small minigame where you draw a pattern on the bottom screen of the DS. The minigame triggers when you deplete the boss's heath, but if you fail it, the boss regains a portion of its health and the fight continues until its health is depleted and the whole cycle starts again until you complete the minigame. This may not seem too bad at first, but it becomes a major problem as the seals become more complex. Drawing each seal consists of lines connecting several nodes on a circle that must be drawn within a time limit. Toward the end of the game, the time limit becomes quite demanding, forcing you to sacrifice accuracy in touching the nodes. The biggest problem is that there is absolutely no feedback while drawing. You'll never know if you failed because you weren't close enough to hitting a node or if you ran out of time. I didn't even know there was a time limit until I started to fail even with very accurate drawing. Each failure means the fight drags on even longer, increasing pressure for the next drawing to succeed. By the third failure, you've basically killed the boss twice over while just trying to figure out how you're drawing the dumb thing wrong. This is an incredibly frustrating mechanic that serves no purpose other than to satisfy Nintendo's requirement that the game utilize the touchscreen in some way.

Now that the elephant in the room is out of the way, let's go over some of the things DoS improves over its predecessor. First off, it keeps the map persistent on the top screen. I didn't know how handy an always-visible map would be until I used it. Pausing to open and stare at the map every couple rooms had a tendency to break the flow of gameplay. In DoS, you can much more easily keep a mental image of your location, destination and path in mind, since a quick glance upward, even briefly in the middle of the action, is all you need.

One of my nitpicks of AoS was that extra souls beyond the first of each type didn't really do anything. DoS fixes this with a weapon upgrade system. It'll take your weapons, combine them with some of your souls and produce an upgraded weapon. Weapon upgrades require specific souls, so to get full use of it will require some grinding, but the occasional upgrades you just happen to have the right souls for are another character progression path, and so I appreciate its addition.

If there's one thing Igavanias lack more than anything, it's a compelling story. While DoS's story certainly isn't compelling, I have to give it credit for at least attempting to have some plot-driven gameplay. It doesn't work in the end, but I appreciate the attempt. DoS also seems to try fleshing out its characters a bit more, or at least the merchant type NPCs. You've got your standard merchant and weapon upgrading NPCs in the game's safe are that you'll be talking to quite a bit throughout the game, and they actually have a bit of personally to them. Their dialog changes frequently as you progress, so there's more than just a couple of lines for each.

Alright, that's enough good things. Back to the nitpicking. Each weapon has a special MP-using attack activated with a separate button. I found myself using these very rarely because they use an enormous amount of MP for the damage they do and their difficulty to hit with. In almost every case, I'd be better off using an active soul. I like the idea of special weapon attacks, but they're just too poorly balanced to be generally useful.

The seals you have to draw to kill bosses come in several different flavors (or levels) and each level unlocks a different set of boss doors. These are used extensively to gate progress, perhaps a little too extensively for my tastes. While every progress-gating upgrade in metroidvanias, when boiled down to their essences, are just keys to open progress doors, flat out having a number of keys and doors feels just a little lazy and unnatural. A more natural gating sequence would be getting to the wrecked ship in Super Metroid. The grapple beam is the key to get you in there, but it doesn't feel like one because it affects your gameplay outside of just unlocking certain "doors". Figuring out when and where to use this key also makes the player feel more in control of their progression. I won't take too many points off for this though, because a good portion of the game does have a more natural progression. It's only very noticeable in a few situations.

Finally, I just need to say "Fuck You" to whoever decided to add a sliding block puzzle to the game. There's a 4x4 sliding block puzzle where you re-position a set of rooms in order to create paths to several goals. I spent 20 minutes fiddling with that damn thing just to access the 3 goals. Sliding block puzzles are never fun. Do not put them in video games. Delete them.

Portrait of Ruin

Where Dawn of Sorrow played it relatively safe without many major changes from Aria of Sorrow, Portrait of Ruin distinguishes itself by tweaking the formula in several significant ways. Sadly, these tweaks weren't for the best.

The first change you notice in PoR is the co-op system. You have two characters at your disposal (Johnathan and Charlotte) and the ability to switch between them at almost any time. By default, only one character is out at a time, but the other can be summoned to help in combat. The inactive character can be commanded to use their equipped special attack at the press of a button, which will summon them briefly to perform it. Johnathan is your typical Belmont stab-it-until-it-dies type. Charlotte is much more magic focused, as any dialog involving her will let you know loud and clear. She can only equip one weapon type: books. In my playthrough I found exactly 4 books for her to use, each a direct upgrade from the last. While the books do have a decent hitbox (an arc in front of Charlotte that hits slightly above and below) and a neat effect (increasing numbers of weapons popping out of the book), the horrific lack of variety and late game options makes magic her primary function. Johnathan, like protagonists in the previous two games, has a wide variety of weapons he can equip.

The bigger problem with the dual characters surfaces with how magic is used. All of Charlotte's magic requires a cast time. For most spells it's fairly short, but it requires her to stand still and not take damage. This means that it can be very difficult to aim spells at enemies in the air, since casting can only be done while standing on something. I neglected to mention something earlier: you can have your partner out helping you fight, but if your partner gets hit, your MP bar acts as their health bar. Your MP is drained whenever they take damage and if you run out, they disappear. The partner is controlled (poorly) by the AI, so your partner taking some hits is almost inevitable. Summoning Charlotte to cast her magic leaves her open to damage during the casting and for a short time afterward. You can probably start to see the problem here. There's very little reason to play as Charlotte directly, using her magic is potentially costly due to her being vulnerable, the requirements to cast make it difficult to use effectively, and using Charlotte as a fighter will destroy your MP bar very quickly. The idea of having a partner is really interesting, but it becomes a liability except for the occasional very expensive combo attack.

The next big thing is the titular portraits. Although I guess portrait is a bit of a misnomer, since they're more like landscapes. Anyway, these painting are scattered throughout Dracula's castle and are entrances to, essentially, other worlds. These worlds are generally small in comparison to the castle, maybe only a fifth or a quarter as large. What makes them unusual for an Igavania is that the painted worlds are completely separate from the main castle; they doesn't even show up on the same map, and there's exactly one entry/exit point. This gives them a very linear feel, especially since there's only one major boss and upgrade to find in each area, after which you're free to leave. There's only one instance I recall where you're required to return to a painted world to progress.

Despite the linearity, I don't really dislike the four main painted worlds. They bring in some variety in setting, as they're not limited to Dracula's castle. The Markt (sic) Street painting has you exploring a city street outdoors and indoors with a variety of shops, like a butchery with hanging corpses that you can hit to swing around, a restaurant with destructible objects that often drop food, and shelves you platform onto that spray various food products all over when you move. They're unlike any other areas in Igavanias that they're quite refreshing. The first time you go through them, that is.

The worst part of PoR, and the one that drags it down at least one rank, is the five paintings that unlock after the fight with both sisters. The game springs five paintings on you all at once (though only four have any significant content) and completing them is the only means of progress. This wouldn't be too bad with the variety I enjoyed in the first four paintings, but four of these five new ones are literally just the first four again, except re-skinned. They all have the same structure, mostly the same progression, and many of the same visuals. The enemies and starting points are different, but these areas feel very lazy and uninteresting. These re-skins have exactly one goal in them, making them even more linear than the originals. If these were quick romps as a review of old areas, I would have much less of a problem with it, but as it is, this section of the game represents nearly a third of the total length. It completely killed the game's momentum. I would compare it to Dark Souls's second half, but at least Dark Souls gives you completely new areas to explore.

Even with the poor partner mechanics and the first set of disjointed paintings breaking some of the world's cohesion, I was really enjoying my time with the game. Then the second set of portraits showed up and massively disappointed me.

Order of Ecclesia

Oh boy. Where to start with Order of Ecclesia? Where Portrait of Ruin made some small tweaks to the formula, Order of Ecclesia completely rewrote large segments of it, to the point that I was hesitant to call it a metroidvania for a while.

Let's get the one good thing I liked about OoE out of the way first. OoE brings back both hearts and MP, but in an interesting way. Hearts are used exclusively for very powerful weapon combos. The two weapons you have equipped can be combined for a variety of different effects. As for MP, instead of regenerating slowly and being used for special magic attacks, MP in OoE regenerates extremely fast and is used for basic attacks. Using MP for basic attacks sounds terrible at first, but you can think of MP like a stamina meter from Souls series. After a moment of not using any, your MP fully refills in just a few seconds.

Making this quicker MP valuable, is glyphs. Most glyphs represent a type of weapon, such as a sword, mace or lance, many of the traditional subweapons, like thrown axes and daggers, and a pile magical attacks like lightning bolts or stone fists. Combined with the fact that you can equip a glyph to each hand and attack with each hand separately, you've got a lot of combat options that are usable without wasting very slowly refilling resources. The biggest part of this is that there are actual, really real ranged weapons that can be used as main weapons. This allows you to break the close range Igavania combat convention and give you far more options to tackle enemies. I really liked this system and am so disappointed that everything else in OoE is shit.

The first half of the game can barely be called a metroidvania. OoE is the only Igavania that has a world map. The game is broken up into discrete areas that are accessed via this world map. Some of these areas can be somewhat substantial; about the size of a painting in PoR, while most of the other areas have nothing but a single path through them. Several of them are literally a single, long, straight corridor filled with enemies. There is absolutely no connectivity between these areas outside of the world map so there is no cohesion, no real pathfinding to do, minimal exploration and really fucking boring level design. It feels as if Order of Ecclesia was trying to move the series in a much more action-oriented direction.

Let's keep going on the bad level design train. So many of these areas in the first half are straight shots to some goal, be it a boss or a powerup or an exit to unlock the next area. Those areas that don't end in an exit don't even try to guide you back to the entrance with a shortcut or a warp. You have two options: backtrack through the entire area you just completed, or use a magic ticket for an instant teleport back to town. Don't have a magic ticket? Fuck you. Magic tickets are useful, certainly. They can be used to avoid game overs if you're really hurting, but the level designers used them as an excuse to let you end a long area in a dead end. Just a simple warp to the entrance would go a long way to not feeling incredibly lazy.

The goal of this first half of the game is to rescue a number of villagers and populate your safe area. There's a ton of NPCs that populate the town. Each type of equipment gets their own merchant, and nearly everyone has a set of quests that reward various unique pieces of equipment or new items for purchase. The game never explicitly states that every villager must be saved until you run into the bad end. It flashes a vague glimpse of where the missing villagers are and gives you a game over screen (I guess that wouldn't really be considered an ending, then). You'll run into the vast majority of them just by progressing normally, but there are a few that are a little dickish to find. These people are hidden behind destructible walls that have ZERO indication they can be broken. You need to go through the indicated areas and hit each wall until you find the one that these villagers were hidden behind. If you're like me and didn't even know there were destructible walls in this game, you'll probably end up meticulously filling in every square that the map suggests, only to find nothing.

Once all of the villagers are saved and you beat the special boss (again), Dracula's castle shows up and the game shifts genres back to a metroidvania. The level design gets a bit better here, but you know what gets even worse? Boss design. Bosses in Order of Ecclesia are giant sacks of health that do a massive amount of damage. They're designed to be beaten with pattern memorization, rather than improvisation and quick reflexes. In the previous games it usually felt as if I had a chance when going up against a new boss, but by Dracula's castle in OoE, I didn't even bother trying to win the first few tries and just focused on scouting the patterns (with save states because I didn't want to wait for the game to reload after I died). Most of these bosses are absolutely gigantic as well. They give you very little room to maneuver. The shadow boss in Drac's castle stands out to me. The huge boss takes up the entire height of the room and 2/3 of the available width. His grabs and meteors leave almost no room for error without taking damage, and the patterns, especially in the second phase, will take at least a few uses to learn. All of this while each hit takes a fifth of your max HP. This guy took me half an hour to take down, even with some light save state abuse. I can appreciate a challenge, but this is pure memorization and just not very fun.

Speaking of bosses, let's get to the biggest "Fuck You" in the game: Dracula. At this point, the last plot-related dialog you've seen is several hours ago when Dracula's castle first appeared. After you've found the three Cerberus glyphs in the castle and opened the upper area, you'll find a really neat upgrade that allows you to fly. You can move in any direction freely and you can even attack freely; you don't stop moving when you attack while flying. Anyway, you've got a bunch of rooms with many very strong and annoying enemies ahead of you. Suddenly, you come to a staircase with clouds rushing by in the background. It's Dracula's throne room. You enter, you exchange a bit of dialog, the usual boring stuff, and phase 1 begins.

Dracula does his normal humanoid Dracula attacks: fireballs and bigger fireballs and teleporting. That new flight powerup would be really useful here, but Drac REALLY doesn't want you to use it. He has a special counterattack he uses whenever you're flying. It's possible to avoid, but it severely limits its usefulness. Once phase 2 starts, In phase 2 he just gains a few new attacks, some of which can kill you in about a second. I spent 40 minutes on this phase, even with heavy save state abuse. The horde of dogs he summons can be very difficult to deal with, since they move very fast, do a lot of damage and probably won't die to one hit. You also need to constantly have your finger on the jump button if Drac is off screen. He may be prepping to charge and life drain you for a ridiculous amount of damage.

So you beat phase 2 and move onto the crazy abomination part of the fight where the flight powerup is finally used to good effect. Actually no, in phase 3 all you need to do is equip the Dominus glyphs and use the special attack. There. You're done with the game. The entire final boss was just pale-dude-in-a-cape Dracula. No special transformation. It was incredibly disappointing, the difficulty was off the scale, and the flight thing you just got that completely changes the combat dynamics is nearly worthless. There wasn't even any buildup to the final fight. The last cutscene happened hours ago. You just stumble into the final boss room with no fanfare. Since OoE was the last Igavania (chronologically), this final boss was basically the capstone to the entire series, but it's the laziest, bullshittiest boss in the game, and maybe the whole series. I was legitimately a little Mad At Video Games after I had finished it. Since cooling off, I'm just incredibly disappointed in it.

Castlevania

So there you have it. Thanks for reading 7000+ words of me rambling about the Igavanias. I enjoyed most of the games, but not all of them. I talked about ranking the games multiple times, so here's the full list:

• 7. Order of Ecclesia
• 6. Harmony of Dissonance
• 5. Circle of the Moon
• 4. Portrait of Ruin
• 3. Symphony of the Night
• 2. Dawn of Sorrow
• 1. Aria of Sorrow

Before I end it, I'd like to discuss parts of the series as a whole, particularly in contrast to the Metroid series. The first thing to keep in mind when comparing Metroid and Castlevania is that, while they're both metroidvanias, they have very different aesthetic and gameplay goals. Metroid emphasizes a thick, immersive atmosphere to create a mood. Dialog is nearly non-existent in the series to create a sense of loneliness and the soundtrack is typically more ambient. Igavanias are built more like action games that emphasize faster combat, active (but still quite bare-bones) plots that try to drive the player forward, and more melodic music that tries to exist the foreground. Metroid has long range weaponry to allow for more care and caution in engagements, while Castlevania has primarily close range weapons and smaller health pools that make engagements faster, riskier and more frantic. Beyond their metroidvania structure, the two series are as different as night and day.

Something that bugged me throughout the series is hearts. It's a resource that carried over from the old NES and SNES Castlevanias that were used for secondary weapons (holy water, axes, dagger, etc). The use of hearts in the Igavanias varies from game to game, and some even do away with them entirely (like Aria and Dawn of Sorrow). In every game that does use them though, they're always bizarrely difficult to replenish. Save points will always refill your HP and MP, but they never refill hearts. If you need more, your main source will be farming destructible objects throughout the castle. Order of Ecclesia is the only exception with a rather out-of-place object in town that will refill your hearts by continually spawning large hearts right above you. Why they couldn't just refill them directly, I have no idea. It seems like a last second hacked-in addition. While this is better than nothing, it still requires you to go back to town, probably using a magic ticket in the process. Most of the Igavanias struggle to distinguish the function of hearts and MP in that they both power alternate, more powerful attacks, but hearts are disproportionately more difficult to recover, and I can't figure out why. Make save rooms recover them fully and this is fixed instantly.

Compared the Metroid, Igavanias are a treasure trove of plot, characters and dialog. Compared to any other series with a story, however, Igavania plots and characters are as thin as tissue paper, generic, inconsequential and predictable. "Oh wow! I never would have guessed that this person who is not Dracula was not the final boss and that Dracula is the final boss!" With the possible exception of Order of Ecclesia and its bizarre structure in the first half, at no point in any of the Igavanias did I feel like the plot mattered, or was a driving force in the gameplay. Rather, I would occasionally stumble into a cutscene that would play out, sometimes paired with a boss, and then I would continue the same metroidvania gameplay loop as if nothing happened. I actually prefer the Igavanias with *less* plot and dialog, since they're not breaking the flow with as many cutscenes for me to try to understand and care about when they're actually mostly pointless.

I talked about this a bit before, but the room design in the Igavanias are so incredibly boring and repetitious. A very large percentage of the rooms in these games are flat, featureless corridors with the same set of enemies copy/pasted one or more times. There's also the long vertical shafts with the same repeating platforms and enemies for multiple screens. Compare that with the more organically designed rooms in most Metroid games. There's almost always something to do in Metroid rooms to traverse a room beyond just killing enemies, be it jumping, morphballing, speedboosting, space jumping, or whatever. Backtracking becomes far less tedious when you've got something interesting to do. I think this, as well as better interconnectedness and level flow, are why Metroid games don't need the anything like the warp gates that every Igavania has.

Every Igavania has the majority of its gameplay take place in Dracula's old, dreary castle. While you can have a lot of weird stuff in an old, magic castle, it's still a big limitation on the design space of the game world. So much of it ends up feeling flat and sterile. Portrait of Ruin started to break out and explore different areas, like Market Street and the pyramid. Those areas all felt very fresh and interesting. Order of Ecclesia took it a step further with entire outdoor areas in mountains and undersea caverns. Sadly, most of OoE's level design was just awful and didn't do these areas justice. Metroid has had a good balance with a variety of natural and artificial locations which makes its worlds feel more interesting and diverse.

At the end of the day, I think this Castlevania quest has given me a greater appreciation for the Metroid series. The Igavanias are all at least a few steps behind Super Metroid, but not without their own merits. Aria of Sorrow is a fantastic game in its own right and Dawn of Sorrow almost nailed it as well. I backed Koji Igarashi's new game, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night long before I started this quest out of love of the metroidvania genre, and after finishing all of these games, I'm only more eager to give it a try. There's a lot of potential in the Igavania style of games and by no longer being bound by Konami or the conventions associated with the Castlevania name, they have the freedom to make something really amazing. If they'll pull through on that is yet to be seen, but I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic.