Last night I completed my 17^th Castlevania game, the latest installation, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. I know what you’re thinking. Dude, that came out last October. It’s old hat. Nobody cares. Well, if that IS what you’re thinking, let me tell you something, you hater. Dracula is timeless. There’s no “rush” to beat him; he’s only going to rise again in the next game. That’s the whole Castlevania mechanic, after all. (Besides, that’s how bad the backlog of games I hav e to play on the Nintendo DS is.)

Not a Castlevania fan? I don’t blame you. Castlevania’s popularity has waxed and waned like the moon. You might say… like a circle of the moon.  Its portable “metroidvania” installments have really catered to the existing  fanbase, and if that’s not you, nothing I could say here could probably sell you on picking this one up, as it’s a step even further in that direction. However,  if you have even a passing interest, or if you managed to get that ridiculous pun I just made, you should read this anyway.  Just keep in mind, no “casual” gamers need apply. Because before I say anything else, I’ll say this: Order of Ecclesia is probably the hardest Castlevania has been in a long, long time.

Players take the role of Shanoa, one of the first female protagonists to grace the series in what had previously been restricted to a long line of effiminate male vampire hunters – the Belmont clan, to be specific.  She’s a pretty badass character. Hot, graceful, and the first character to make use of a new battle system the game calls “Glyphs.”

See? Hot. 

When Shanoa breaks statues, or kills certain monsters, they drop Glyphs, which offer Shanoa her only methods of attack. Some are traditional weapons, like swords, axes, or lances, while others are elemental spells, like light beams, blocks of ice, or falling rocks. It’s incredibly unique in that unlike previous iterations, where MP was finite and depletable, Shanoa’s MP bar auto refills within less than two seconds of inactivity. The trade, is that EVERY attack she uses costs some level of MP. Additionally, some of these Glyphs can be combined to form uber attacks called Glyph unions which consume the traditional hearts instead of MP. I really liked this system. It was beautiful to spam lightning bolts without worrying about MP loss, or to alternate between a rapier and a beam of concentrated light.

Also unlike previous iterations, instead of exploring one giant castle, you’ve got a whole bunch of various spooky locales to get your ass handed to you in. Enemies hit hard, and bosses…  well,  the game harkens back to a time when reaching a save point never felt so good, and stage bosses were to be both feared and respected. You WILL die on 90% of the bosses, more than once. The game goes super old school on your ass, and forces you to figure out patterns to each boss before you even have a chance of survival. Most of these patterns change up half way through as well, so getting a boss to the midpoint is only half the battle in a literal sense.

This has a up and a downside. First, the bosses were impressive. Not only in size, (some took up the entirety of the lower screen and then some) but in respect levels. If I go up against a boss and it hands me my ass in 10 seconds, I know I’ve got work to do. To me, that’s this game issuing a challenge. It’s telling me I’m not GOOD enough yet, without feeling like the game is resorting to cheap bitch tactics to kill you, alla Megaman 9. No doubt many gamers of today’s generation aren’t of that mind set, but I don’t think they feel the same satisfaction I do when a boss gets rocked on the 15^th try. I feel like I’m showing the game what’s what.

The bad news? It gets old, real fast.  The bosses have ridiculous amounts of HP relative to your damage, and on the flip side, some bosses can kill you in literally five hits. I think Kurt Kalata, maintainer of the finest Castlevania resource EVER, the Castlevania Dungeon, said it best: “One only has to remember one of the most intense battles in Castlevania – the first battle against Count Dracula. It’s remarkably tough, but he can be killed in roughly a minute. Stretching things out is a lousy way to make them more difficult – it just makes the battles more tedious, so they feel more like battles of endurance rather than battles of skill.”

That being said, I killed Dracula in this game in under a minute (on my third try, but my first two were mucked up by own accord.) Sadly, it was the most underwhelming fight in the entire game.

Another area I’d say the game takes a beating is in the story department.  Previous iterations of Castlevania have done a spectacular job connecting in a fairly coherent timeline for a video game. If you pre-ordered Portrait of Ruin, you actually got a nifty time-line poster, showing how all the games fit together. That’s one of Castlevania’s finest points. For as lame as the stories are, they’re ALL connected.

Ecclesia departed from that. They obviously wanted to work in a female protagonist, who was not a Belmont, and so they shoehorned her in. The Belmonts have mysteriously “disappeared,” and the only mention of them comes at the story’s only turning point, midway through the game. I don’t think Ecclesia even commits itself to a year – because if it did, I guarantee you it would conflict with either the Symphony of the Night or Bloodlines plotline. The only way Shanoa even fits into this is if she is after Richter, but before the events of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which has actually been worked into the story as canon. Obviously you don’t know or care about this, but as a fan, as a guy who can name each Belmont, in sequential order, including the ret-conned ones, this is rather important.

The story that does exist in this game is as cheesy and predictable as Castlevania should be, and I was not unpleased by it. The voice acting, except in the case of a few townspeople, is tolerable as well. I only rail against the lazyness of IGA, the flamboyant Japanese dude behind the series’ reigns now, for failing to work in tandem with the other titles.

I also noticed another familiar name in the credits, a Mr. Hulett, as the editor. No doubt he is to credit for the one line that gave fanboys such as I a reason to nod in approval. [SPOILER ALERT PEOPLE!] As Shanoa approaches Castlevania, she launches into a soliquloy, closing with, “I am the morning sun come to vanquish the horrible night!” It was beautiful.

In the end, I am glad to have another Castlevania notch in my belt, and I look forward to the “current-gen” game that was teased at last year’s TGS. I’d love to see the series give me control of a Belmont again.  I’m over these new protagonists.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Scott Strichart, games. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.