I haven't really been in a survival horror mood as of late, so I had to find another way to keep it spooky this Halloween.
I mean, few gaming series have their roots as deep in classic horror as Castlevania. I wouldn't exactly call these games scary, but they definitely lean heavily into that spooky season aesthetic that everybody is looking for this time of year. It's not exactly an "Off the Beaten Path" franchise, but it is one I'm not overly familiar with. I have certainly played the games before, I am a huge fan of Symphony of the Night and the lesser know Lament of Innocence was one of the first games I ever reviewed, but it's not a series that I am super heavily invested in. I've played most of the mainline ones, but not necessarily to completion, but I haven't really branched out to many of the lesser known titles. I certainly haven't played any of the handheld entries in the franchise before.
Speaking of things that are scary, I kind of find the whole world of handhelds to be a little bit intimidating. Outside of a few well known titles, I just don't have a lot of experience with handheld games. Most of what I do have comes from the original Game Boy with some slight dabbling in the Game Gear library. There was always interest in consoles like the Vita, PSP and DS, but by the time those systems came out I didn't have the time or money to support buying games for them. And that brings us back to the Game Boy Advance, one of the more interesting handhelds I have ever encountered and the few I have ever owned.
The GBA is an interesting little machine, one that I don't think I ever fully appreciated. I bought one of these for one reason and one reason only: to be able to play classic SNES and NES games on the go. The amount of amazing ports for this thing is staggering, from Super Mario Bros. to Breath of Fire to Donkey Kong Country to just about every Final Fantasy that existed at that point. Hell, even Doom made its way to the GBA. That sounds like it shouldn't work, but they made it happen. While it was awesome to have so many great games on the go, I never really gave much thought to the GBA's original library. Again, it just felt like there wasn't enough time with all the console games that I kept adding to my list. After playing through Circle of the Moon, It's safe to say that was a shame.
COTM puts you in control of Nathan Graves, a vampire hunter trained by the legendary Morris Baldwin. Baldwin fought alongside Nathan's parents, who perished in a battle with the evil Count Dracula many years ago. Since then, he has been training Nathan, as well as his son Hugh, to follow in his footsteps should the evil count return. It turns out that training was very much needed, because, as is customary for the series, Drac is on his way back to cause all sorts of trouble. Nathan and the Baldwins infiltrate his castle, ready to defeat the vampire before he can return to full power. Things immediately get off to a bad start, as Dracula and his associate Camilla capture Morris and destroy the floor beneath Nathan and Hugh, dropping them into the catacombs beneath the castle with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their weapons. Hugh, insistent on rescuing his father on his own, runs off, leaving Nathan to fend for himself. It's up to you to climb back up to the top of the castle, rescue Morris and defeat Dracula before he can return to his full power.
At the time, the Castlevania series was kind of being pulled in two directions. Most of the entries in the series were more typical 2D sidescrollers, you move to the right battling enemies, jumping over pits and defeating bosses over a variety of levels. However, 1997's Symphony of the Night had started pushing the series in a new direction, towards what we would now call the "Metroidvania" style. COTM fit into the latter category. Your map will expand as Nathan explores the castle, with more and more areas becoming accessible as you acquire more abilities. By now it's a tired and true formula, but at the time it was still sort of a new direction for the series. It was also a new direction on less powerful hardware, which gave a lot of series fans some pause. But COTM is incredibly well made and it felt like a truly deep gameplay experience. It wasn't nearly as large as SOTN, I wouldn't expect it to be, but it was still a substantial game that required some real effort and exploration to complete.
The next positive, and yet another surprising positive, were the graphics. While I knew it was a fairly powerful handheld, I did not realize the GBA was capable of graphics like this. The rotation and scaling effects are on par with plug in consoles like the SNES. The sprites are detailed, the animation is solid and the backgrounds are truly beautiful. It's also shockingly clear for a handheld system. It wasn't the first time I played a handeld with color graphics, but I am shocked at how detailed this game was. It's especially impressive considering COTM was a launch title, which usually means a not using a console's full potential. But that didn't appear to be the case here, this game looks like it used every ounce of the GBA's power to create a visual experience that would have looked good, even outside the constraints of a handheld. The sound is similarly strong, not the greatest in the franchise, but that's a high bar to clear. It fits right in with other Castlevania titles and again, is technically impressive from a handheld console.
Exploration is critical in Metroidvanias, it's probably the most essential part of the genre. If the area you are gradually making your way through isn't interesting or well designed, you aren't going to have an incentive to continue. Fortunately, that wasn't the case here. The castle layout flows quite naturally and the backtracking all feels like it makes sense, you definitely need to bounce back and forth between areas but you rarely have to travel too far. There are a good variety of vertical and horizontal sections and the enemy placement is solid, though it is a little bit cheap in certain sections. The layout isn't perfect, there are a few too many upgrades hidden in seemingly random one or two screen hallways. A lot of these games do this because of lazy design, but I think it's more down to memory limitations here. Even still, the castle here is far larger than I thought it would be and while it isn't quite as large as the castle in SOTN, it still felt plenty large.
Having interesting abilities is also critical in these games. While there are relatively few bigtime abilities here, I think there are only about five, all of them feel like they drastically impact the way Nathan can get around the castle. Of course there's a double jump, there always is here. But you can also break through blocks, push crates and eventually learn to jump infinitely. But the biggest differentiator here is the Dual Setup System, or DSS. Throughout the game, Nathan will find cards, dropped by specific enemies. There are 20 in total, 10 action cards named after Roman deities and 10 attribute cards named after mythical creatures. The action cards will grant you a new skill or ability, which could be as simple as a stat increase or as complex as an attack requiring a fighting game style input. The attribute cards will add an element, fire, ice, earth, you know the drill. The real meat of the system is the combinations you can create, mixing different cards can make all sorts of things happen. Mixing the Mercury card, which alters the abilities of your whip, with the Salamander card, which imbues Nathan with fire properties, will cause your whip to perform a fire attack. It's an incredibly deep system, there are 100 different combinations you can create and most are some level of useful. Add damage, increase your hearts gained, heal yourself, if you can dream it, you can do it. This is one way COTM is superior even to its bigger brother SOTN.
Of course, there were a few problems here as well. I have always kind of found the more traditional Castlevania games to be a little bit stiff and unresponsive. It's one of the reasons I have never been a diehard fan of the series and I have always preferred the much smoother SOTN to the more traditional games. Unfortunately, at least for me, COTN maintains the more rigid and stiff controls of the NES and SNES games. That goes for both the platforming and the combat. The former isn't a huge problem in a Metroidvania, platforming is typically low stakes, but the latter can be be a major nightmare. I found it to be quite an issue here during the later portions of the game. Nathan can only whip forward, kind of like how it was in the original Castlevania. That's kind of a problem, because you have a lot of enemies that move in incredibly irregular patterns. The blood swords in the clock tower were the biggest culprit here, hitting these things felt damn near impossible. The enemies are very beefy here and you typically have to dodge their attacks quite a few times to get enough hits in. Nathan can take a few hits, but some of the late game enemies can really dish out punishment. It all leads to a ton of frustration and what I feel were cheap deaths.
I also had quite a bit of issue with the boss fights here. When The biggest positive about bosses is "there aren't that many of them," that's a major problem. There is a really bad difficulty curve, the first two bosses are too easy, while the last three are entirely too hard. I guess Death isn't so bad, especially considering how hard he is in some other Castlevania games. But that twin Dragon Zombie fight was brutal. They do tons of damage, have very hard to read telegraphs and put you in entirely too many situations where it feels like you have no choice but to take a hit. Honestly, the most reasonably difficult boss in the game is probably the final one, Dracula is incredibly difficult, but in a way that the final boss of a game should be. I really hated the boss fights in this game and they felt far more frustrating than they needed to be.
But that doesn't change the fact that COTM was an excellent, surprisingly big title in a small package. I can't express enough how technically impressive this game is, graphically and gameplay-wise. To me, a lot of handheld titles have always felt like scaled down knockoffs of more fleshed out console games. This didn't feel like that at all, if you told me this was a Super Famicom game that had never been released outside Japan before being ported to the GBA, I would have believed you. I'm not going to go out and say it's better than SOTN or anything like that, but it was far closer in quality to the PlayStation icon than I ever imagined it would be. And the best part? There are two other GBA Metroidvanias that I've never played that are apparently just as good or better, or so I'm told. I will definitely get to those at some point. But for now, I have to give COTM its flowers for being an exceptional playthrough.
9.25/10
I mean, few gaming series have their roots as deep in classic horror as Castlevania. I wouldn't exactly call these games scary, but they definitely lean heavily into that spooky season aesthetic that everybody is looking for this time of year. It's not exactly an "Off the Beaten Path" franchise, but it is one I'm not overly familiar with. I have certainly played the games before, I am a huge fan of Symphony of the Night and the lesser know Lament of Innocence was one of the first games I ever reviewed, but it's not a series that I am super heavily invested in. I've played most of the mainline ones, but not necessarily to completion, but I haven't really branched out to many of the lesser known titles. I certainly haven't played any of the handheld entries in the franchise before.
Speaking of things that are scary, I kind of find the whole world of handhelds to be a little bit intimidating. Outside of a few well known titles, I just don't have a lot of experience with handheld games. Most of what I do have comes from the original Game Boy with some slight dabbling in the Game Gear library. There was always interest in consoles like the Vita, PSP and DS, but by the time those systems came out I didn't have the time or money to support buying games for them. And that brings us back to the Game Boy Advance, one of the more interesting handhelds I have ever encountered and the few I have ever owned.
The GBA is an interesting little machine, one that I don't think I ever fully appreciated. I bought one of these for one reason and one reason only: to be able to play classic SNES and NES games on the go. The amount of amazing ports for this thing is staggering, from Super Mario Bros. to Breath of Fire to Donkey Kong Country to just about every Final Fantasy that existed at that point. Hell, even Doom made its way to the GBA. That sounds like it shouldn't work, but they made it happen. While it was awesome to have so many great games on the go, I never really gave much thought to the GBA's original library. Again, it just felt like there wasn't enough time with all the console games that I kept adding to my list. After playing through Circle of the Moon, It's safe to say that was a shame.
COTM puts you in control of Nathan Graves, a vampire hunter trained by the legendary Morris Baldwin. Baldwin fought alongside Nathan's parents, who perished in a battle with the evil Count Dracula many years ago. Since then, he has been training Nathan, as well as his son Hugh, to follow in his footsteps should the evil count return. It turns out that training was very much needed, because, as is customary for the series, Drac is on his way back to cause all sorts of trouble. Nathan and the Baldwins infiltrate his castle, ready to defeat the vampire before he can return to full power. Things immediately get off to a bad start, as Dracula and his associate Camilla capture Morris and destroy the floor beneath Nathan and Hugh, dropping them into the catacombs beneath the castle with nothing but the clothes on their backs and their weapons. Hugh, insistent on rescuing his father on his own, runs off, leaving Nathan to fend for himself. It's up to you to climb back up to the top of the castle, rescue Morris and defeat Dracula before he can return to his full power.
At the time, the Castlevania series was kind of being pulled in two directions. Most of the entries in the series were more typical 2D sidescrollers, you move to the right battling enemies, jumping over pits and defeating bosses over a variety of levels. However, 1997's Symphony of the Night had started pushing the series in a new direction, towards what we would now call the "Metroidvania" style. COTM fit into the latter category. Your map will expand as Nathan explores the castle, with more and more areas becoming accessible as you acquire more abilities. By now it's a tired and true formula, but at the time it was still sort of a new direction for the series. It was also a new direction on less powerful hardware, which gave a lot of series fans some pause. But COTM is incredibly well made and it felt like a truly deep gameplay experience. It wasn't nearly as large as SOTN, I wouldn't expect it to be, but it was still a substantial game that required some real effort and exploration to complete.
The next positive, and yet another surprising positive, were the graphics. While I knew it was a fairly powerful handheld, I did not realize the GBA was capable of graphics like this. The rotation and scaling effects are on par with plug in consoles like the SNES. The sprites are detailed, the animation is solid and the backgrounds are truly beautiful. It's also shockingly clear for a handheld system. It wasn't the first time I played a handeld with color graphics, but I am shocked at how detailed this game was. It's especially impressive considering COTM was a launch title, which usually means a not using a console's full potential. But that didn't appear to be the case here, this game looks like it used every ounce of the GBA's power to create a visual experience that would have looked good, even outside the constraints of a handheld. The sound is similarly strong, not the greatest in the franchise, but that's a high bar to clear. It fits right in with other Castlevania titles and again, is technically impressive from a handheld console.
Exploration is critical in Metroidvanias, it's probably the most essential part of the genre. If the area you are gradually making your way through isn't interesting or well designed, you aren't going to have an incentive to continue. Fortunately, that wasn't the case here. The castle layout flows quite naturally and the backtracking all feels like it makes sense, you definitely need to bounce back and forth between areas but you rarely have to travel too far. There are a good variety of vertical and horizontal sections and the enemy placement is solid, though it is a little bit cheap in certain sections. The layout isn't perfect, there are a few too many upgrades hidden in seemingly random one or two screen hallways. A lot of these games do this because of lazy design, but I think it's more down to memory limitations here. Even still, the castle here is far larger than I thought it would be and while it isn't quite as large as the castle in SOTN, it still felt plenty large.
Having interesting abilities is also critical in these games. While there are relatively few bigtime abilities here, I think there are only about five, all of them feel like they drastically impact the way Nathan can get around the castle. Of course there's a double jump, there always is here. But you can also break through blocks, push crates and eventually learn to jump infinitely. But the biggest differentiator here is the Dual Setup System, or DSS. Throughout the game, Nathan will find cards, dropped by specific enemies. There are 20 in total, 10 action cards named after Roman deities and 10 attribute cards named after mythical creatures. The action cards will grant you a new skill or ability, which could be as simple as a stat increase or as complex as an attack requiring a fighting game style input. The attribute cards will add an element, fire, ice, earth, you know the drill. The real meat of the system is the combinations you can create, mixing different cards can make all sorts of things happen. Mixing the Mercury card, which alters the abilities of your whip, with the Salamander card, which imbues Nathan with fire properties, will cause your whip to perform a fire attack. It's an incredibly deep system, there are 100 different combinations you can create and most are some level of useful. Add damage, increase your hearts gained, heal yourself, if you can dream it, you can do it. This is one way COTM is superior even to its bigger brother SOTN.
Of course, there were a few problems here as well. I have always kind of found the more traditional Castlevania games to be a little bit stiff and unresponsive. It's one of the reasons I have never been a diehard fan of the series and I have always preferred the much smoother SOTN to the more traditional games. Unfortunately, at least for me, COTN maintains the more rigid and stiff controls of the NES and SNES games. That goes for both the platforming and the combat. The former isn't a huge problem in a Metroidvania, platforming is typically low stakes, but the latter can be be a major nightmare. I found it to be quite an issue here during the later portions of the game. Nathan can only whip forward, kind of like how it was in the original Castlevania. That's kind of a problem, because you have a lot of enemies that move in incredibly irregular patterns. The blood swords in the clock tower were the biggest culprit here, hitting these things felt damn near impossible. The enemies are very beefy here and you typically have to dodge their attacks quite a few times to get enough hits in. Nathan can take a few hits, but some of the late game enemies can really dish out punishment. It all leads to a ton of frustration and what I feel were cheap deaths.
I also had quite a bit of issue with the boss fights here. When The biggest positive about bosses is "there aren't that many of them," that's a major problem. There is a really bad difficulty curve, the first two bosses are too easy, while the last three are entirely too hard. I guess Death isn't so bad, especially considering how hard he is in some other Castlevania games. But that twin Dragon Zombie fight was brutal. They do tons of damage, have very hard to read telegraphs and put you in entirely too many situations where it feels like you have no choice but to take a hit. Honestly, the most reasonably difficult boss in the game is probably the final one, Dracula is incredibly difficult, but in a way that the final boss of a game should be. I really hated the boss fights in this game and they felt far more frustrating than they needed to be.
But that doesn't change the fact that COTM was an excellent, surprisingly big title in a small package. I can't express enough how technically impressive this game is, graphically and gameplay-wise. To me, a lot of handheld titles have always felt like scaled down knockoffs of more fleshed out console games. This didn't feel like that at all, if you told me this was a Super Famicom game that had never been released outside Japan before being ported to the GBA, I would have believed you. I'm not going to go out and say it's better than SOTN or anything like that, but it was far closer in quality to the PlayStation icon than I ever imagined it would be. And the best part? There are two other GBA Metroidvanias that I've never played that are apparently just as good or better, or so I'm told. I will definitely get to those at some point. But for now, I have to give COTM its flowers for being an exceptional playthrough.
9.25/10
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