Retronauts - 683: Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia - The Metroidvania Book Club Pt. 1

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Nadia Oxford, Stuart Gipp, Chris Sims, and Kate Willaert kick off a new feature to play and discuss great metroidvania in depth. Play along and join the conversation! This time: we tackle the first half of the final true Castlevania game. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more and join our Discord to take part in this ongoing metroidvania chat at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end. And this episode is not closing time for Retronauts. No, it is about closing time for the Castlevania series, but the opening of a new chapter of Retronauts, a new book as you were, as it were, if you will, yes. This is the first of what I hope will be a long series, a quarterly series potentially, of episodes called the Metroidvania Book Club. And we are not actually reading books. I mean, by all means, go for it. But it's, as many other podcasts have done, a play-along kind of situation where we are going to select a Metroidvania game and explore it in depth. Why Metroidvania, you say, Jeremy Parrish, because you answered it right there, Jeremy Parrish. That's right. So I am a Metroidvania sicko, and I have invited some of our other Metroidvania sicko friends to become regulars. this series and hopefully be able to participate in every episode that we do. And the idea is that with each game, we'll devote two episodes to that game and then move on to another game. And I would

like for each person to have their turn selecting a game for us to explore. So it's not just me saying, here is what we should talk about, but rather each of the participants saying, here is the video game that best expresses my Metroidvania sick onus and so hopefully we'll get a nice broad view of video games through a very specific

genre lens but lots of different tastes and interests within that space and if not well the good news is there are five panelists here but there is a sixth panelist and that is you. That's right gentle listener you, you are

the hero here. You are the sixth panelist you are going to be participating in this, whether you like it or not, and that means that once the sixth topic comes around, you, the retronauts community, will be selecting it. But it's going to be a while before we get there. Like I said, quarterly. So if we're all still alive in 2026, please look forward to it. In the meantime, here in 2025, we have, besides myself, Jeremy Parrish, a panoply of regular retroknots sickos. Let's start. Let's go over to the UK. Who's the sicko from the UK?

Gee, I wonder who it could be. It's me, Stuart Jip. Hello. I didn't think of a joke for this one because it seems like we're doing something a bit more serious and analytical and it's very, it would be inappropriate to jokes. So, no fear. Nah. I mean, this is, this is basically me saying, you know what, if Stewart can get away with five parts on Sonic 3, by God, I can do two parts on a castle Pennsylvania game. So how serious is that? This is Stuart Gip Calibrated, actually. So really? You are the measuring stick here. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I feel so honored. Well, there you go. So, Stuart, how much of a sicko are you for Metroidvania's? Where did you, this is Kate's, oh, I spoiled it, Kate's suggestion. Where did you first fall in love with the

Metroidvania genre. It actually, I think I was probably kind of a late bloomer to it because the big games, you know, well, the games that gave it, its name, Metroid and Castlevania, the Symphony of the Night. It's not the Symphony of the Night, but I'm going to call it that to amuse myself. They didn't hit for me because I just didn't have a PlayStation. I didn't have a Super Nintendo. I didn't get to those games at all. And I think probably the first game like it that I played was Cave Story on the PC.

which was free, of course, which helped a lot. But then later, I played Aria of Sorrow. That was the first of these that I can recall playing. They were sort of proto-Metroredvania-ish games like Wonderboy, the Wonderboy sequels on the master system back in the day, but because they were divided into levels most, I don't really think of them. Apart from Dragons Trap, obviously, but I didn't have that.

So, yeah, Arir of Soror, which, of course, for me, means that Metroidvania is much more leaning in the Vanier. direction than the Metroid direction. That's where I had that experience first. Although through osmosis, I recognize things like the map is taken from Metro Metro Metroid sort of codified that whole map thing

or at least in that specific box by box, what's in this room, what's in that room, manner. But from there, I loved Arroy of Soros so much that it was just a matter of looking into everything that sort of came since then. I've actually, I'm going to get kicked off now, but I've actually kind of got fed up

with Metroidvenius. So I've gone into a phase of I've become more of a Luddite And I just want to play It's a stage-by-stage stuff really But then it's every so often A really cool one will come along And like I really like bloodstained

Mostly because it called back to games like this Obviously with the same director But I wouldn't say I was that much Of a Metroidvania siko But the ones I am a syco for Like the Castlevania ones I am deviant to the extreme Well even if you lean toward the vania side

You live not too far from London So you can go take the train, and then you can play vania on the metro. So that's kind of Metroidvania right there. It's true. It's bringing it all together. Yeah, the only problem is you never get any upgrades and the layout never changes.

That's true. But, you know, there is the exploratory element. It's true, yeah. They get across the me when I knock the walls down, though. It's a problem. And you probably don't want to eat the meat that you find there. Oh, no, no, I eat the meat. Oh, okay. Fair enough.

All right, so I mentioned our next guest by a name. So please introduce yourself and explain your sicko-tood regarding this genre. Hey, I'm critical Kate Willard. I am the sicko from Minnesota, which incidentally is where Semi-Sonic the band is from, random bit of trivia there, the closing time. So that's like half of a Sonic, the Hedgehog? Yeah, I parked up.

Parked him was disappointed. So I got into Metroidvania's from Super Metroid, which was a huge game for me because I had never played a game before where exploration was like the main point, the main objective of a game. But for a long time, I was only a fan of like Metroid games then. Like when Metroid Prime came out, I was super into that. I did not play Zero Mission because I did not have a handheld until I didn't own a handheld until like the 3DS era. And then I, for the longest time, I didn't even like backtrack. So I've played all of the- What kind of Metroid player are you if you don't backtrack?

Exactly. What is going on here? I did eventually, though. I did go back and play all the 2D Metroid games. games, and I also, like my, but before I did that, I should say, my kind of reinter, my, my introduction to the wider, broader genre of Metroidvania was actually Shadow Complex when that came out on the Xbox 360. Yeah. That, that kind of like, I was like, oh, this is a whole genre. I should play more of these. But I've missed out on like the, the, most of the 2D Castle

Slovenia since I hadn't played those until, well, I bought, I bought the recent collections. I bought the collections have not had an excuse to play them until now. Like this, this is the first one. I don't know, the first one I've played, I don't know if that's a horrible introduction to it or not. Well, we can talk about that. I think it's, it's an interesting introduction. And in some ways, it will all be downhill hill from here, but in other ways, it will be kind of a relief. So take that as you will. Let's see. From up in the similarly frigid cold lands of the north, we have our Canadian panelist here calling in through a tariff-free connection. Thank God. For now. They're not going to start charging for data, are they? Damn it. Oh, God. I'm screwed if they did. Anyway, I'm Nadia

Oxford, frequent Retronauts Computer, Computer, Contributor. Stop all the download in. Sorry about that. My first experience was actually, I don't know if he could call Simon's Quest a light Metroidvania, but that was when I kind of got the idea that, oh, I like these games that send me wandering, even if I have no idea what to do. And for a long time, I didn't really find anything like that, because I wasn't really big into Metroid or I just didn't play it. I actually played Super Metroid for the first time when I got married and my husband brought over his copy and I'm like, oh, this is actually a really good game. But before that, I played Symphony of the Night because it was Castlevania and so I'm expecting, oh, Castlevania, Whippy, whippy, you know, fun stuff. And then I see this completely different format once I got past the equally confusing bloodlines opening.

and at first I was like this isn't what Castlevania should be but I just kind of immediately got into the gameplay loop so I just didn't care about the fact that it wasn't like traditional Castlevania in fact I think I prefer it to this day All right And finally

Hopefully a guest will be allowed to talk this episode unlike the past few episodes he sat in on It's your dime, Jeremy. That's true, you're calling and collect. Yeah. Hey, everybody. It's me, Chris Sims, full Metroidvania sicko. Also, in... I know your favorite, your favorite Metroidvania is Super Mario World. You've made that clear. I did. I did try to convince Jeremy that Super Mario World was a Metroidvania. That's how much of a sicko I am. I could, I could buy into that if I was in the right mood. Listen, it's got gear gating. It's got a

permanent inventory. It will get semi-permanent. I think you might be right on this. I can't wait for your chapter. I'm thinking about this now and it's like the galaxy brain meme in my head. Yeah.

Same. I am also in the very Metroidvania-ish state of Minnesota, though it is not where I am from. And very kind of cliche,

but it was Symphony the Night for me. And it was Specifically, I can tell you exactly what day it was, because I had gone over to a friend's house to watch King of the Ring, 1998. Ah, nice. And after McFoli was thrown off the cell by The Undertaker. My God, that man's broken half. We were still so hyped. We ended up staying up really late, and he had a PlayStation, and he had something in the night, and that was the first time I played it.

And I was like, this is the best game that's ever been made. That's quite a night for you. You went from, like, super brawny men to a very lithe, ethereal man? I think Alicard's, like, you, there's a cloak, there's a heavy jacket. You don't know how jacked he is under there. He's pretty jacked. You don't know that he's not the John Cena body with the Yoshisaka Amano head. I'm not, I'm not buying it, but okay.

That's scary, but yes. But, yeah, like, I am a big, big Maternity fan. And I'm sure I'll plug it at the end of the show, but I have a series of reviews that I've been writing of every Metroidvania that I have ever and will ever play. It is a genre that I have never gotten tired of, and specifically the Castlevania side. There was a time in my life where I would replay all of the Egovania, like Symphony Night, to Ecclesia every Halloween, like every October. That was Castlevania Month for me. Yeah. Although I famously did not play Super Metroid until, like, 2019.

I think, like, we talked about it on the show. I recall that. That game's good. Yeah, that's pretty great. Super Metroid's great. It turns out. You've got to paste these things. I think that's a good idea.

You know, you save the real big ends for, like, later in life, and then you've got something to look forward to you. That was the big backtracking. That's why I go with Earthbound. Yeah. And that's certainly been the case for me with the game talking about this episode, Castellania, Order of Ecclesia, or Order of Ecclesia, if you prefer. I don't actually know how it's supposed to be pronounced, and you can't look to the Japanese

title for like a pronunciation guide, even though Japanese is phonetic, because the Japanese title is Akomajo Dracula, Ubo-Wareta, Koku-in. So none of that sounds anything like Ecclesia. What does it mean? What does it translate to? I don't know. You said it so personally. Demon Castle Dracula. Dracula, the stolen seal. There you. I mean, we knew the Demon Castle Dracula part.

Okay. Well, I'm just reading from Wikipedia because that is the last known source of correct information in the world. Ironically. Yeah, used to be not. But anyway, yeah, I played this game back when I first came out and really bounced hard off of it and had gone back a few times since then and bounced really hard off of it. And that is because, it really front loads its difficulty in the sense that it's kind of got that kid icarus thing going on where it's really, really unforgiving at the beginning and it expects you to play with very, very specific patterns and techniques until you start to level up and then it sort of opens itself up. But it does not have a learning curve so much as just like, you know how they design pickup trucks now where if you're like standing on the street, the pickup truck's hood is actually taller than your head.

That's the difficulty curve on order of Eclosure. It's just an F-150 smashing into you by way of the Nintendo DS. And it's very painful. The first boss you fight is very challenging, the giant skeleton. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a tough one to get fast. Yeah, we can talk about that, but it's one of those where the developers clearly playtested this a lot, and they watched people's strategies and patterns and said,

let's program this little asshole to counter all of those strategies. So everything that people do intuitively, we just give them the middle finger and it causes them to lose horribly. Yeah. So it's a rough game. But, you know, I had to play it, literally had to play it in order to keep my job. So I... What era was this? This was this past year when the Dominus collection came out and I'd already done the hand-drawn maps for the advance collection a few years ago, a couple years ago. And so obviously they said, oh, okay, well, we want the same thing in the Dominus collection. And so, you know, the first two games, Portrait of Ruin and Dawn of Sorrow, no problem. Played those through many times. Orde of Ecclegia, not so much.

So I had to brace myself and get through. And then, you know, I found once I got past those kind of opening areas and I started to get better glyphs and started to have a better array of skills to make use of the systems and the elemental and typing like with the weapons, you know, just had a broader array of abilities and options, it became very, very, very. it was always challenging, but much more accessible and not so much much much much much much like, wow, they expect me to do exactly one thing over and over again, but much more like, here's sort of like a challenge. And now I have three or four different ways that I can get around it. Let's see what seems like the most fun thing to do. So once you get past that sort of opening two hours or so, I think the game really opens up to you, at least to me, I can't speak about you, but, um, so it took me, you know, more than 15 years to

finally get around to finishing Ecclesia, but I did. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. And, um, you know, having gone back and replayed Portrait of Ruin and Don of Sar, I, I kind of feel like those games have a lot of, um, sort of an underlying design issue, which is that they have zero friction to them. And they just feel like, I don't know, Portrait of Ruin especially, there's so much to the game. My God, I had to draw it all by hand. There's so much to that game. And it's just, you're just kind of cruising through. Like, there's nothing really memorable about most of the game. It's just like, here's, here's content for you. Please enjoy content. And, you know, it's fun. But compared to Ecclesia, where everything feels much more

carefully designed and managed and presented in a way that you can't just blast through it. You have to really think about what you're doing. I found that very engaging. I don't love how some of the bosses are way, way, they're tuned to be much more difficult than the rest of the game. I'm not a big fan of that design philosophy of like, oh, well, you've gotten this far. It's been, it's been, you know, it's been pretty easy so far. It's been manageable. Now you're going to have to replay this boss eight times. And, you're before you can finally take it down and you have to use a specific pattern or a specific weapon. Please enjoy. Not a fan of that. Bloodstained I still haven't played through because it does the exact same damn thing. But I'll get to it someday.

I'm sure I'll have to do it for work or something. I don't know. Anyway, so that's my time with Order of Ecclesia. But we are going to talk about the game. And like I said, this is part of the Metroidvania Book Club. Like I mentioned, this was my selection for the book club based on the fact that I finally beat this game and was like, I should do something with this time that I've invested into it. I was really curious as to why you picked it to start with, especially given like that experience.

Like, was this always the one that you were like, we're going to start with the last, the final Castlevania game? Well, I don't think we're just going to be playing Castlevania games for this series. I think it's going to be, it can be anything. I mean, if you want to make a case that Batman Arkham Asylum is a Metroidvania, which I think you'd have a pretty good case for. If you want to say Super Mario World, Chris, I'm going to let you do it. Super Mario will evolve in Metroidvania than Arkham Asylum. What I'm saying is that if you can make a case for it, we'll do it.

So I feel like, ideally, we're going to cover a broad range of games. And so, one, yes, I did just recently play through Order of Ecclesia for the first time to completion. But two, it's really damn good. And it does a lot of things that I'm really sad that the Castlevania series went away after this because if they had built on the strengths of this game, I can't imagine where they could have gone on like 3DS. It sure would have been better than Lords of Shadow for that, you know, that bad, bad 3DS. They would have made bloodstained. they would have that's a thing that really got to me

about this play through because I haven't replayed Ecclesia in a while like Ecclesia since you know kind of the end of the the D.S. era it was shocking

to me how much it is a direct line from Ecclesia to Bloodstained which I knew in my head but didn't know in my soul. I mean this is this is a bloodstained is sequel to this game in everything except name. Like, they change the character's names and you're not

fighting Dracula. It's some other guy. But it's, it is, it is order of Ecclesia too. Just straight up. No, no question about it. And, you know, that's, that's fine. That actually makes me want to go back and finally play it when I have some time. But for now, I just want to make use of the many, many, many hours I spent with this game last year, because let me tell you, hand-drawing all those maps, it's time-consuming. And so I got to know this game very intimately. Did you draw, like, all the different sub-dispirate areas and the castle? Because then, like, the straight-line ones must have been at least a small relief to

Yeah. Yeah, the two straight-line ones. I mean, I embedded a tiny thumbnail of the front side of the map, the world map part of it, into the notes that I put together for this episode. So you can refer to it there. It's got all the little boss characters. It's going to be almost unreadable at the size that it's printed. But that's not my fault.

I didn't make those maps so dense. That's on Konami. But anyway, where I was going with this was, this was my selection. And we're going to talk about this game in two halves. We're going to talk about the overworld and just kind of the systems and everything this episode. And the next episode, we'll get to the back half of the game, which is the Dracula's Castle. And we're also going to open up comments from listeners. Very specifically, we are going to have a space in our Retronauts Discord, which patrons have access to,

where you can talk about your thoughts on this game and then subsequent Metravenia book club entries. So please look forward to that. Please enjoy this episode. It's a spoiler zone. Be aware. But it's okay because you're going to play this game and enjoy it with us and then share your thoughts in Discord. And it's going to be cool. It's going to be a good time. We are going to talk about fighting some Dracula's. Actually, there's just one. All right. So, Castlevania, Order of Ecclesia. This game came out in 2008. I've mentioned, I've explained where, where I played it for the first time, which was back then and also very recently, and Kate, I believe you said you played it for the first time in the Dominus collection, but what about all you other folks? I got the game when it first came out because I am a big Igavania head

and I think I did eventually end up finishing it but I had problems with the bosses because there is a boss that's like trying to emulate Shadow of the Colossus which was like... Oh God, yes, yes. Yeah, so I was just like... Eligo.

Is that the big horse guy? The center guy, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, I just had a problem with the way the bosses were balanced. I don't know if this is a place to start talking about balance issues or if you want to hang on to that for later in the episode. We'll hold on to that. We'll hold on to that.

But definitely, like, I don't hate the game by any means. I don't say it's a terrible game. It's good. It's a great game in many respects. But I feel like maybe it took, you're absolutely right about there being the friction that this game, that this series really needed by that point. But I also think that they took certain things from a portrait of ruin that worked really well. there and just tried to dissect it even more and make it new, and it didn't really work out in the end. But yeah, we'll get into that, I'm sure. So I'm very middle of the road on Ecclesia.

I'm actually curious to hear what you mean by that. Oh, right now? Yeah, sure, sure. Okay, so I just, I feel like Portrait of Ruin had the Jonathan Charlotte, Jonathan Charlotte, to kind of get those different styles mixed into the gameplay. This game has that weapon system that's generally like, okay, swords, maces, um, maces, against skeleton, swords against fleshy things, etc., etc., and it really rides that hard. Whereas in Portrait of Ruin, it was very easy to switch between Jonathan and Charlotte. It was fun to hear them yell at each other.

But in this game, I have a problem holding down A and shifting and remembering what my loadouts are, and the names are all in Latin, which I'm stupid. I don't remember what anything means. So I do have some problems with there being too much of the wrong kind of friction, but we'll talk more about that, I guess. Yeah, so expecto Petronus is the one that we're not allowed to joke about that series anymore. Reference it at all. No, I agree.

Like that weapon loadout switching system was actually present in Dawn of Sorrow. You could just like tap X and you would switch. I didn't need it so much. So like this game is very, we'll get into that. Okay. Yeah, that's the thing is like this game. want you to do that. It really requires you to do that. But instead of giving you a single button to swap out the loadouts, like Donofsara did, it's, yeah, it's this weird button

combo. And it's not intuitive. Like, why do they do that? It's not. No, my old knobbly hands could not remember. I couldn't, like, I don't have the capacity for muscle memory anymore. It's pretty sad. I was pressing R before I was pressing A and that would make me do a stupid attack. And it's like, it was just like R or press the control pad or something. It'd be easier, but I still have a problem remembering, like, you have three slots in each loadout. Don't remember what's where. Again, we're all old. We're all, where's my teeth?

So we're going to have trouble with these loadouts. Not to be a modern gamer about it, but also the game doesn't tell you anything about the damage types. I don't need a, I don't necessarily need, hey, Shanoa, did you know that you can use a budgeting weapon against? skeletons, but, like, I only remembered that was a thing because it's a thing in D&D. Like, it's a, yeah, it's a thing in Dark Souls and everything. Yeah, it expects you to have played Dungeons and Dragons or Vagrant Story or something that has that element to it. And that was something that took me a while to kind of catch on to because Castlevania

had never really dumb that before. Right. Like, you had elemental stuff, yeah, you know, a mummy, throw fire at it. It's going to burn better than, like, you know, an ice demon will. But the, yeah, the. weapon affinity is just not something that you really saw in the Castlevania games over the course of more than 20 years of games. So it did, it just took me a little while to kind of clock to the fact that, oh, yeah, actually, it's doing this RPG thing that's never happened before

in Castlevania. And no one actually in the game, like there's no indication that that's the case. You just have to kind of watch the damage you're doing. But in the early stages of the game, you have so few weapon types that you don't really have the capacity to swap an experiment with the weapons or glyphs and say, oh, this one's much better. Oh, I'm seeing a pattern here.

It's just, yeah, it's a rough start. You have to learn on your feet, yeah. That's interesting to me because, like, coming to this first of all the Castlevania handheld games, I was like, am I totally lost because this is assuming I'm an expert Castlevania person who was picked up all this knowledge across like

six games or whatever. No. It was gas-lady-you. Yeah, it was the first time where Castlevania's designer said maybe people play other games besides Castlevania. And that was unexpected because we don't. It's interesting to me because there's a divide

there coming off of Aria, dawn, and Portrait, which they're all, I mean, I love those games, but like once you get a weapon that's a higher number. You just use that weapon from then on, really. And the things that you get like the spells or the souls, they're cool, but you find the cool ones that work. And then you just use those again, you don't really mess around with them that much. And just other than to use them, go, hey, that's cool looking. But in this game, it's all of a sudden it's like,

you've hit an enemy with what you think is your strongest weapon. It will do one damage. You know, be like, well, shit. And then you might not even have the right glyph to do the damage you need to do. you might have to go and find it somewhere, absorb it even from like an enemy or something. And it's just going from this kind of, I mean, portrait of ruin, which a game I absolutely love.

And even though I clearly recognize that it's just a big nostalgia, like a nostalgia festival, hey, remember this stuff? But I loved it. And coming from that to this, quite recently, well, for this as well,

was just this kind of, oh yeah, I forgot, this game's really, really difficult. And the thing is, I don't know if it's really super hard. it's just super punishing. Like, you can't take many hits in this game. You can't really defend yourself.

Enemies are sponges, too. You can't buy health-up items until you've done missions in the game. Like, there's no reliable way of healing even. It's, and it makes it a lot more punishing. And I think having bite-sized levels is a nice concession to that initially. But, yeah, it's interesting how it's kind of odd playing it even as a fan or even playing it as someone who's playing it for the first time. You're going to run into the same walls, which I guess is the great,

the great sort of level in this respect. You get the, you just go into a level, and all of a sudden, the Undertaker's kicking my ass. Like, it's just... It's fully just the Undertaker. Yeah. Hilarious. Somebody stopped the damn match. It's really funny.

Yeah, I, um, this game reminds me of, oh, go ahead. Like you were saying, previous to this, it's like the different types of weapons. They had different functionality, like, you know, whether it was attack speed or the type of area they hit or, or something like that. But it does become a, it's much less of an aesthetic choice in this one. exactly which is a pain yeah absolutely and you know some of the some of the flaws in this um like you mentioned stewart i think the lack of healing items like that's straight out of circle of the moon but that was a different castlvania team like of all the things to bring back why that one i mean there are there are healing items yeah but to get them uh you have to unlock them in the shop

and then once you do unlock them the good ones are very, very expensive. So you have to figure out some sort of cash exploit so you can actually afford them. It also adds an interesting layer of exploration within the items because I discovered that the killer fish barbecue is very good for healing you and is much cheaper than a super potion and can be farmed, which is just, it's not intuitive, but it also makes you feel kind of smart when you figure that out, like you've sort of got one over on the game. And you need to be smart to finish this.

There's a lot of, almost every screen is incredibly threatening. There's no breathers. It's like, everything can kill you. It's like Dark Souls. Sorry, but it is. It is. It's fine. Dark Souls is a huge Castlevania rip-off.

It's even got the stamina thing when you attack. It's even got the stamina. No, I think we just need to make peace with the fact that Dark Souls is just a giant Castlevania rip-off, and it owes everything to Castlevania. So it's totally fine to make the comparison, because we know that this is what inspired Dark Souls. But this, you know, the mention of the fact that when you enter a new area, something is going to, like, immediately go after you and destroy you.

Yes. It really reminds me of the DS remake of Final Fantasy 4. Yes. Which was built around, I think, the same, the same sort of thinking that we're making this, you know, for people who are fans of the series, who have their ways of play, who kind of know what to expect. and we want to shake them out of their complacency. We want to surprise them. We want to give them something that's really difficult and force them to, you know,

instead of just kind of breezing through all these familiar spaces and just kind of subsist on comfortable familiarity to really have to stop and think, whoa, what do I do now? Which is how Castlevania used to be back in, you know, like the eight-bed days. So I can admire it, admire it in that respect. But it just feels like, you know, there's no kind of boundary between breezing through Portrait of Ruin and starting up Order of Ecclesia and just getting utterly annihilated by everything on the screen. Yeah, because Final Fantasy 4 DS, it made itself very clear from the start what it is. And this is the game where, you know, by then Final Fantasy 4 was ingrained in your heart. So you go to the Antlin cave and say, oh, I'm going to use magic on this.

guy, because otherwise he'll counter me. And this time, he used magic, and he counters you because they're just being dicks about it, but that's the fun of it. Whereas, as he say, with Ecclesia, it's going from a very jovial-looking, frankly, game to kind of a darker game where everything kicks your ass and, like I said, the Undertaker keeps trying to kill you. I actually ran into the Undertaker to see if he would tombstone me, but he didn't. So much damage.

I died very quickly. He does so much damage. I feel like this was kind of a thing that developer. were doing with sort of legacy series at the same, around this time, because you also had Mega Man 9, which was very much designed around, hey, people know how Mega Man works. They've been playing it for 20 years. But what if everything they did, we accounted for and we effed them up by countering that. Like, I love 9 because every time I just kind of like, you know, slid into it and was like, oh, I know what's going to happen. It would,

It would, like, it was clearly designed by people who had watched people like me play the games and said, I know how this guy thinks. I've watched him live stream, you know. I've watched him, you know, played drunk at Tokyo gaming bars and just kind of work through the patterns. So let's add these new twists in here. You know, the skeleton in the prison in order of Ecclesia is exactly the same as like some of the, like the platforms. I think it's in Splash Woman's stage, where you jump and you think you're going to be able to land on it. No, a crystal man stage, I think. And it just like swings out of the way when you least expect it.

And you have to totally approach it a different way so you don't fall into a pit and die. Yeah. So, yeah, and like the, you know, the magic counter system or, you know, Dr. Lugay in Final Fantasy 4 who now attacks you with poison gas if you do a certain thing. Yeah. So I feel like this was a way, an attempt by the people who are responsible for these aging franchises to say, we need to freshen this up. We need to change how people experience it. And also, I think, kind of a way to get back to the roots of gaming, you know, from the A-Bid era, where games tended to be unforgiving and punishing.

And the people who fell in love with the series like Castlevania or, Mega Man, like, they memorized those experiences and they learned, you know, the muscle memory I have. It was all spent on Castlevania and Mega Man and Mega Man, too. Like, that's where it all went. I don't have it anymore. It's like, you know, I used up all my juice, my memory juice. So, you know, I think it was an attempt to kind of, to sort of commune with that spirit of game design, which was very different than overall game design thinking in. the 2000s, where I was very much like, oh, you bought a video game, here you go, here you go, we're going to give you little ammo caches, enjoy, here's an hour and a half of tutorial, please

enjoy, thank you. Yeah, I hate those games that want you to have fun. If I had that fun when I'm playing a game for even one second, I lose my mind. It stops being fun when they're nagging you about like, you know, here's what happens when you pick up

a rupee 12 hours into the game. Yes, I know. It's 50 rupees. Wow, I can buy so much. Thank you, Link. Thank you. I'm aware. You know, there's probably like one guy out there who had forgotten. I was like, oh, thank God. Oh, that's what this is.

It's one rupee. Okay. Green means one. I feel like Ecclesia, I couldn't call it Eccles cake because of the village of Eccles. Or whatever Ecclesia is like, for me, it's, I feel like this is a bit of a trite thing to point out, but it's kind of, it's subversive, isn't it? It's, they're subverting

everything for the sake of it, really, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it's even down to like, you go into, you've got these segmented sort of levels, so to speak, which are mini-metroidsvania maps in and of themselves when they're not straight lines. And what you'll be thinking, okay, I start here, I go to the end, I fight the boss, we move on, and then you go to into a map, and the boss will be the first thing that you encounter and be followed by the rest of the stage. And it's just, even in the little things like that, it's trying to get, what's the word wrong foot you, And I find it kind of intoxicating because I do like games that are fun.

Don't get me wrong. I like being given lots of infinite ammo and stuff. I do. I love that. But also, I think it's really fun when a game gets you and goes, ah. And this game does that several times in places that I don't want to mention yet because they're more back half of the game. And talking all the way down to the final boss, this game will make you think something's

going to happen, and then something else will happen that's much cooler. Do you remember when Ega, I believe there was a video of Ega making a level in Mario Maker? Oh, God. And he put the boss first. Or something like that. That's a very ego move. But if I'm Dracula, why am I putting my weakest guys out first? I'm putting death and Gallimoth in the opening hallway because I don't want to get whipped to death by a Belmont or.

sliced to pieces by my son. Putting Gallimoth in the start of symphony, that's the end of the game right there. It's done. Yeah. Yeah. That's, if I'm Dracula, I want to win. But it's your kid, you know? Yeah. It's a fraught relationship.

You want them to grow. It's still not like that. Yeah. It is fraught. Thank you. This is definitely the most difficult of the, I would say, of the EGivania's by far, because the other ones are very prone to, well, I say prone to like it's an accident. They let you break them and that's fun. You know, they let you get great items early on the game.

and just like galamoth when i fought galamoth i had some armor that meant he was doing one HP damage to me i don't know how i managed it something dropped it i don't know and i'm like yeah there's a barrel ring that absorbs lightning yeah and i think i just had it without even knowing what it was and i'm just like oh that's the hardest boss in the game and i didn't even like that game until i discovered it again later and went oh i see yeah this is brilliant but with with order of ecclesia i think to compare it to bloodstained a little bit sorry it's interesting because Bloodstained is definitely a fusion of Ecclesia and the previous two games because they did sand the edges down a bit.

It's still difficult, but they wanted to make it more accessible. And as much as I love Bloodstained, when they did that, they took some of the character out. Like, this game has character oozing out of its paws. Like, there's so much bespoke stuff in this game that, as well as the Sprite, like, rips from the old games, yes, but there are so many new weird enemies and new weird areas, like the skeleton cave, there's imaginative stuff like that. And even little things, like the prison, when you get caught by the spotlight and a little robot comes out and just marks you and one of it. Oh, the tin man.

That thing's a bitch. And you can't do anything to it. And then later you get caught by another spotlight and you're like, oh, here comes the robot. And Freddie Krugher's friggin' head flies onto the screen. And he has the tongue thing, by the way, I noticed. It's horrible and brilliant. I do feel like there's something to be said for the idea of this being thematic in that everyone, in every protagonist of a

Castlevania game is having a bad time to various extremes but I feel like Shanoa is having a uniquely bad time. She's really gone. She's very disempowered at the beginning of that game. So the idea that you start off really overwhelming

and you don't really get much of a break until like after you meet Albus the first or second time like it makes sense. it's like wow yeah it it sucks it sucks to have lost your memory of how to do things it's definitely really cohesive with with the themes i think that's i mean that's what makes this one stand out so much

is how everything uh just comes together so well uh even little things like i'm bringing i'm really sorry about i forgot the name of the artist they brought back i think from the older games instead of using the anime um portraits even that is like oh hey we're back you know they they actually did not. The original illustrator was Ayami Kojima. Yes. And the artist on this one is Masaki Hiroka. So it's a different, it's a different artist. It's kind of the same vibe, but his men are not nearly as pretty as Kojima's men. Like, she draws beautiful human beings, just otherworldly beautiful. And everyone in Order of Ecclesia is a little more grounded, a little more mundane. I've noticed that the men and the woman like both they have the same faces they like the character portraits it's kind of like the the Yoshitaka Amano thing um everyone is just sort of beautiful and drawn in a very distinctive way i i do like that shonella's characteristic of not being able

to feel emotions does just make her seem tired yeah she feels she gets me every time she shows up Oh, cut. You want this? Fine. I'll get you your oar. Yeah, how many, how many oars? Gray, fine. All right. Kate, I think you were going to say something? Oh, I was just going to ask Stewart, like, based on your point that, like, there's all this friction, but it's also got some of, like, the most character in terms of these creative ideas. Like, do you feel those are connected that, like, the creative ideas, like, maybe they were, they just went for these creative ideas that they might.

might have normally shot down for the sake of, like, this would be too difficult? I do feel like there's a sense of we're going for broke with this game. Like, this is the last one. I think they know it's the last one. I mean, the only one after this was what, the Harmony of Despair, which is just a, well, not adjust it. It's a great game, but it's not a proper Castlevania like this as if you... I think there was also judgment. Or did that come before this.

Oh, yeah. Judgment came after this because Shanoa's in it. Yeah, yeah. I think it linked up with it, didn't it, actually. Probably. That's... Non-canon. I know what you mean.

Well, we've come back to Death Note again. Yeah. No, it all comes back to Death Note. All according to plan. No, I do think... I do think that there is... I mean, I don't think I'd be able to express it that well, because me, no, smart. But the...

When you are facing off against sort of the odds that you're facing in this game, and obviously the character is facing off against tremendous odds at the same time, it makes it cohesive and it puts you in there with them. Maybe you're not completely sort of cognizant of it while you're playing it, but there's so much about the game that's odd and different. If you've played the previous ones, you're going to be, there's almost nothing that's, it's like they've gone, we need to do the exact opposite of what we did here.

We need to, even like Dracula's Castle is full of just unusual areas that you haven't seen before in the previous games. And it does feel very much like there, Like I said, they're going for broke. I don't know how much money they had to make this, but it doesn't feel cheap because there's a lot of more new art in this game than there is in something like Portrait of Ruin, right? Or at least less reuse of enemies,

or use of sprites. A lot of the normal sort of recurring bosses don't show up, and if they do, they're very drastically different. Well, something that this game does is recycle its own assets a lot. If you look, this is something, you know, again, I can speak about intimately. Um, every map area in the overworld is matched by sort of an equivalent space that has a similar structure, uses a lot of the same graphical assets, but, you know, there's some new element to it, some new gimmick, but there, there, there's like two water areas and two rocky mountain passes and two woods, misty woods, yeah. Yeah, so not dissimilar as a portrait ever in reusing the portraits towards the end of, right. No, I mean, it's, it's very similar, but. it feels a lot more meaningful here.

But someone mentioned something about Ega designing a Mario Maker level. And so I do want to think back to the time that I interviewed EGA about Portrait of Ruin at E3.

And I said, you know, dawn of sorrow to me feels like, especially once you beat it and you open up the extra mode where you play as the trio of heroes, it really feels like you were trying to remake Castlevania 3 in a way. Have you ever thought about remaking Castlevania 2? And he was like, no, I don't like that game. It's, it's, uh, the, the,

the villagers are too mean. Like, they always lie to you. I, I don't like it. So I was like, oh, okay. Now that I played Castle, Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, this game is Castlevania too as a Metroidvania. Yeah. And Chris, I know you have thoughts about this. But I mean, the thing that kills me is they clearly designed the overworld of this game as a single contiguous space and at some point

in development probably very late they broke it into individual areas so when you exit you go to the world map instead of just going on to the next space which really changes the feel of the game from Castlevania 2 which is just like here's this vast space that you have

to traverse but the thing that kills me is they didn't rearrange the levels to accommodate this or account for it. So you have a lot of stages where you have warps and save rooms right at the entrances of the stage and then nothing in the middle, which doesn't make any sense if you have this world map system where you can just duck out to the world map and save the game on the world map two screens away from the save room. But it does make sense if the entire game is one contiguous Castlevania II style world, where the only time you ever see the world map

is when you go to a warp room and you choose to warp around and you need the save points because you have to save progress as you're exploring. I feel like I would love to play the version of Order of Ecclesia where everything is just linked together.

I feel like that would not be a difficult rom hack as rom hacks go. Like I've seen some pretty pretty invest, like heavily invested rom hacks in my time. And I feel like changing the pointers for this screen when you exit it. What does it do?

Does it take you to the world map? No, it takes you to this next level. And, you know, having drawn out the entire world map for Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, I got to put down all the maps that I drew. And let me tell you, it all links up great. It makes one big space that you could explore with, you know, kind of like multiple paths through it. Just like Castlevania, too. Ego, what did you do?

Who made you do this ego? Was it Kodami? He told me that he liked Castlevania, too. This is a, I don't know where this discrepancy come from. Eke is deceptive. He is. He's a, he's a, he's a, yes, a sly bastard. He told me that Castlevania wouldn't have, wouldn't have happened without two.

But then again, he didn't say he loved Castlevania too, just like he used it as an idea for Canami so that he could say, hey, this is what I have in mind. I feel like, I feel like that was the idea here. But, Chris, I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this question. if I haven't just, you know, stolen your rant from you. If I had to guess, and who can fathom the mind of Koji Garashi, but I would guess that he feels about Castlevania, too, very similarly to the way I feel about it, which is that it is a game that's reach exceeds its grasp. What I wrote down is that Order of Ecclesia is the fulfillment of a 21-year-old promise. Castlevania 2 is a bad game. It's not a good game.

It's not fun to play. It's counterintuitive. It is intentionally a hassle to get through on very basic levels. It's not a good game. It is a game a decade ahead of its time. It's a game that's like trying to make an action RPG before either of those things really exists. And I think there's a lot of respect that I have for it because of that. Like, I love contiguous worlds and leveling up and RPG mechanics and getting new weapons and day-night cycles and all that stuff that's in Castlevania, too, but bad.

So getting this as what is, feels very consciously like. a sequel to Castlevania 2 specifically in a way that so many of the Game Boy Advance and DS era games are specifically sequels to Symphony the Night because they know they have to put a second castle in there or else you're going to be disappointed because everybody loves that second castle in Symphony the Night. This one goes back and I remember I was talking about Castlevania 2 back when this game came out. and I was talking about Castlevania, too, and I was like, yeah, it doesn't have a castle in it. It's bad. Castlevania game, no castle. That's justvania. For a hallway.

Yeah. And somebody was like, yeah, well, I like Order of Ecclesia. And I'm pretty far into the game. And it doesn't have a castle yet. And I was like, you're not as far as I am, Buster. Because I think it does in the way that Castlevania 2 wants you to explore this world and talk to people. people, it does build that anticipation for getting to the fireworks factory, you know, like it gets you to Dracula's castle that for all the, the fact that, you know, there's two forests and two waterplaces and two mountain passes, et cetera, that version of the castle, which we will be getting to later, has a lot of really unique visuals in it that don't look like previous versions of it. So the process of getting there, I have always thought, is really a fulfillment of what Castlevania 2 wanted to do, but simply was impossible at the time.

Sure, and I agree with all of that, except that Castlevania 2 is a bad game, which is not correct. It's not fun to play. But the thing is that I feel like this would have been even more immersive if they hadn't broken up the world map. Yeah. Oh, I agree. You have the warp points in there.

You don't need to go to the world map every single time you, you know, run to the edge of the stage. You could just go to the, you know, the world. war points that are very well placed throughout the game as, you know, kind of progress markers. If you have a contiguous space, it's such a bummer because I do feel like this is, you know, missing that one element of immersion that could have made it even better than it already is. And, you know, looking at the maps and just laying them out and dreaming about, oh, what could have been kind of kills me because that's what I'm here for. I, you know, I didn't talk about

how I got into Metroidvania is because I've, like, go listen to literally any other episode of Retronauts over the past 20 years. You'll hear it. But I mean, Metroid is what got me into the first NES game that I bought and just kind of made me say, like, this is how I'm calibrating my expectations of video games. It needs to be this. I want to get lost an explorer place, and I want a world that draws me in. And this has that. And then they're like, here you go. Have a little bite-sized piece. Here's your, here's your forest sample. Here's your snack-sized mountain pass. No, I want it all together.

I want the buffet. I get where you're coming from. And I think it's a completely valid complaint to have if that's what you're after. I think if they had done that, I'd still love the game. But that would be the, what, the sixth time in a row that they'd done that exact thing. And I don't blame them for doing. well it would be you know the big contiguous map is something that they'd had symphony of the night they'd had the three gba games two ds games and that's i guess you know if that's what you're here for

i mean portrait of ruin is already leaning in a way towards this with the portraits which are much bigger maps but what they're doing here i think is something like comparable to portrait of ruin which is they are doing nostalgia but they're doing it less overtly um and because of the change of the structure, while it does make it a more fragmented thing, it also gives you one of the all-time great reveals, which is the castle. Sorry for the spoilers, everyone. Because I didn't know there was a castle in this game when I played it, and I played it on import, because it took forever to come out over here. And I went through the whole thing. I was the only one playing it. And when I got to the castle, I was just like, no, you know, you've got to be kidding me. That's crazy.

Like, it's just done this long, it's not even easy. Long-ass game. It took me forever to get through. I've done like eight boss fights. I've beaten up Balo, I've beaten up Albus, and now we've got so much more game left. There's like another, I wouldn't say it's another 50%, but like a good 33. You know, a good third more game. I'm an upside-down castle, Monthe Thomas. Yeah, I mean, I think it's almost cooler than the upside-down castle in a way.

And it's also another subversion because rather than a second castle or a second-sided same castle, it's just like, no, there's a castle. That's the surprise. It's in the title. You get it. Yeah. But I think what they did here is really cool. I like the way that the levels

sort of do intersect with each other in a sense in the way that you can almost in a Mario world way, sometimes you can find secret exits from the areas that lead to other areas and when I discovered it's late game so I won't say it actually but the stuff that you can stumble

across and be like okay so this is an entrance to this area what's down here in this basement? Oh my God. Yeah. Or like the underwater stages which have the sort of wrecked ship above them that you can enter from various different angles and get to the way you need to go quicker. And I respect, like, I think, yeah, it's definitely an immersion break, but it's got a purpose as well.

And for me, it also gives you that nice home-based feeling of going back to the village to get hearts and to save. It makes that fake place feels like home because everything you need is there. But you could still have that if you warped back to the village from a war point. The thing that gets me is that the Castlevania hadn't had a contiguous world, just a castle since Castlevania 2. And that was what that's still what makes Castlevania 2 kind of a unique entry in the series is that

it feels like, you know, in that game you're Simon Quest, Simon Quest. No, you're Simon on his quest. Simon Quest is a different game. You are Simon on his quest, and you're out there, you know, no one likes you, everyone's lying to you, the world is hostile, they're telling you

to put laurels in your suit, but actually you need them to survive the swamp. It's, you know, it's challenging, and it's indifferent to your existence, basically, and then, you know, reach the castle and there's something there. But this could have been the realization of that. There is this big and different world, but people are nice to you. They give you quests and they'll sell you potions. And they're like, hey, thanks for saving my kid. Now you can have cool armor. And, you know, at the end of that, you reach the castle. And it's not just a basement where you burn Dracula. It's much, much more

than that. I just feel like, you know, it was almost there. Castlevania hadn't really committed to the bit in terms of like, hey, Transylvania is a big place in a long time. And, you know, some of the level-based games did that. Dracula X or Rondo of Blood, Super Castlevania 4, Castlevania 3. There's a lot of like buildup to get to the castle. Yeah, even in three, you had that split path. Like, do you take the forest or do you go on the ship and, you know, the difficulty really depends. ended on which direction you went and not to say it was ever easy. And I just, I want that but like as just one space that I have to figure out. And, you know, the thing that really kills me about Portrait of Ruin is that breaking up the individual paintings like that, I think really undermines the individual stages, the spaces, because there's no reason to return to them except like, oh, I have to go find a spell that will allow me to get to like the final room or whatever.

But there's no reason to go back and revisit the spaces because you just kind of clear through them your first time through. And it doesn't feel like, hey, there's real persistence and, you know, there's no real reason to learn stuff. It's cool that in the academy there's like a room where there's, you know, a toilet stall and a ghost is like sitting there and then they vanish. Like, what does that mean? That's interesting and intriguing. But it just doesn't feel like beyond those little like little breadcrumb, like, hey, here's a little bow. bonus weird thing in Porto of Ruin, that the spaces have any real substance or purpose. And I feel like when you create a large space that has interconnected criss-crossing paths, then it just makes the

place feel more real and gives it much more of a sense of presence and of like, hey, this matters. I need to learn this place. I need to figure out the ins and outs of this place because I'm not just blowing through it. I'm actually kind of soaking in it, and this is a place I'm going to be experiencing many times over. I don't know. I like that. I like places. The toilet

ghost incident reminds me it sounds like it, I don't know if I'd call it an upgrade, I don't know why I'd call it, but it sounds like it's a tribute at least to the fact that in Symphony of the Night you have that crying ghost in the confessional who's probably Alicard's mother, or so the theory goes. I just love

there's an analog to it in you said it was Portrait of Ruin, I think, and it's just a toilet ghost. It's just funny. I think that's more of like one of those Japanese, there's like five or six different Japanese Yokai that involved toilets. I think it's more of a reference to that. But, you know, it's probably a throwback to 70 the night, too. I'm of two minds about the whole map thing, because I totally see your point. And now I do wish I could see it all as one. When I looked at your map, actually, I was like, hey, did you think about, I was thinking, did you try to fit these together and maybe that should have been the map.

And now you're saying like, oh, you could do that. So I almost want to see that now. But at the same time, when I was playing this, I was like, I liked the idea of these locations, but I felt like they were each like too small. Like I like the idea. When I play Metroidvania games, I fall into this trap where I always love the very beginning. And then once it gets too complex, I start to get overwhelmed. And I was like, oh, what if this was, what if there was a game where it was like nine different like beginnings of a Metroidvania that, you know, like you gain a few different upgrades in each?

And then you complete it and go to the next one. And then maybe there's some final thing that brings them all together. I don't know what. But I feel like that is like some sort of unexpected. explored potential that somebody needs to try at some points. It's like Dragon Quest 4, but as a Metroidvania.

Yeah. I mean, I'm just thinking if Arabian Nights on the Amiga now, but don't, let's not. We don't talk about the Amiga on these podcasts. I do like the idea of more people being like, what if we just made the good parts of a game? Yeah, yeah. What have we made a Mario where he

never went in the water? I love Mario water. But there's so much Metroidvania potential when you start swimming around the water, Chris? There is. That's true. This one's full of water, this old river please here. It is. And so those are some of the best and most explorable spaces. Yeah. They are fun.

I wonder how much of the division of the world is a concession to the fact that it was a DS game and that a lot of those games were made to close your DSS and finish your bus ride or whatever. Can I interject, because I was about, you're absolutely right. I mean, I was thinking that I wonder if the reason why the sense of place becomes less kind of paramount and less interesting to move through is because with Symphony of the Night, there's so much detail in that game. Every single screen, you can, everything, there's something to look at all the time. Even when you're traveling through, you might notice some new interesting thing. You see some weird little object that they've just put in there for the love of it. and in these games they can't really do that

it's not I mean there is detail there is a rap kind of appeal but it's more a lot more rooms that I apologize for using this but a lot more copy pasting even in order of ecclesia of different rooms just become challenge rooms and

it means that the games focus a lot more on the systems because that becomes sort of all that's left when you don't have the fascination with the world and that's not me saying this sucks that's me saying this aspect of it has not been prioritized I mean portrait of ruin is like

I mean they're not good maps in that game which is why they front load look you can do this and this and get this and find this and everything this drops like six different things and oh my Christ what the hell's going on because they're distracting you from that by making it so systems led

and order of Ecclesia is even more so it's just like you're going to have to think about even your attacks are going to be alternating between two buttons to get decent damage output. And then when you're having to do that, when you're having to focus on not dying all the time, it doesn't really matter so much that the places you're in

maybe aren't as cool as they could be, because that's not what's engaging you. I just feel like there's definitely a deliberate sort of living away from that part, but also it's a restrictions thing. They just can't do it the same way they could with symphony. So they

change it. I would say that order of Ecclesia is the only post Symphony Castlevania game that actually feels like as much thought was put into the environmental spaces as in Symphony. I feel like there's always something new and interesting. And maybe you don't have something like, hey, there's a cathedral that does this like crazy, you know, sunbeams through the stained glass effect. Nothing has quite that impact. But I feel like in every area, there are multiple spaces where, you know, aside from like, hey, here is. three long screens of forest, and you're walking in a straight line and there's skeletons.

There's some of those. But other than that, I feel like there's, there, you know, there's just lots of little details like the way things are structured and laid out. You know, everything from like here is a random room that has a waterfall in it and you have to figure out how to work your way through the waterfall. There's got to be something up there that's optional, right? sure something what is that um just lots of things that kind of beckon you and say oh yes this is very curious what what's going on here i i do agree that they've put more effort into the especially

the visuals in the skin than they have the other ones in the in the ds series but you know the concession is these are small these are small levels i did the skeleton cave very recently again and i love the skeleton cave it's full of skeletons how can i not but that's like that's that's a five-minute stage, you know, and then it's broken up, of course, by the map as well, so that's not going to immerse you in the same way. It doesn't give you the sense of place, as you say. So I do feel like they're juggling it there. There's more set pieces in this game as well to, I guess, take your mind off that and make you focus on what's happening now rather than what am I walking through, what am I sort of looking at. But, I mean, you are right. It does

have the best sense of place, probably of the games, which makes it something of a shame that it loses that by having you leave the place, so yeah, go to another place so often. And again, I like that, and I wouldn't want to lose that idiosyncrasy to get the full map. I really like the idiosyncrasies it brings,

but I think everyone's right, and we should just have a big party. Oh, yeah. I actually really like the kind of world layout of dawn of sorrow a lot. with the kind of town that you have to go through and then get into the castle.

But, yeah, like, and Portrait of Ruin is a game that has, like, 16 brilliant ideas that it does the first thing you would think of with and nothing else. But I think, yeah, like, viewing Ecclesia and Bloodstained as companion pieces, because Bloodstained is Order of Ecclesia with all the Symphony of the Night's stuff put in it. Like, Jeremy, I know you've famously written about how, like, the, the thing that we all love about some three of the night is just how much stuff there is. Like, useful stuff, useless stuff, weird stuff. And Bloodstain just puts a lot of that back in. Whereas, yeah, like, there just wasn't, I don't think, like, physical room to focus on a lot

of it in the GBA and DS eras. Yeah. I will say, Ecclesia is probably my second favorite Castlevania game. Well, probably third, because it's probably Don of Sorrow. Yeah, Don of Sorrow, Simon's Quest, and then O'Clese. No, Don Osoros, I'm two a night, and then Ecclesia. I mean, I think all of the steps it takes towards adding in the stuff, like, you know, giving you this whole weird region, it's kind of like. halfway attempt at making you have to, like, go back and explore different parts of it.

I like the, I like the first time you go through the, uh, the water level, you go through the top. Yeah. And then you go through the bottom and those areas don't connect, but they are like, like the first time you go through, they don't really connect, but they are part of the same thing. I think that's really cool. Uh, I, I like the cast of huge weirdos that are all extended members. members of the same family in this one village. If it goes back far enough, it's not really the same family. Yeah, I know, but it's like they wanted to do a thing and then they forgot that there would be additional consequences to that thing. Yeah.

It's the Arkansas region of Transylvania. Listen, we are all related, but none of us, we don't do any of that stuff. I do want to say that I think Weigel Village is one of the best elements of this game, not just because, as someone mentioned before, it's like home base, but also because it has the villagers. And in addition to the fact that they're weirdos who have quirks and, you know, you're kind of like, what's with this person? They're not lying to you like they were in Simon's Quest.

and almost all of them, I think all of them, give you quests. And that's something that the series started to explore with Portrait of Ruin, where Wind basically would give you quests. But they were all pretty stupid. It was like, go kill ten of this thing. Go find me an object. Whereas the ones here, there's some of that. But it's also kind of puzzle-like.

You know, like, I needed you to go say a prayer by the sunset or something. And so you'll think, like, what is that? that mean? And then you realize, oh, yeah, there's a chapel. And it's always sunset there. So I need to go and pray at that chapel. And, you know, I will find something at this cross. And those quests give you reason to return to the spaces that you've been to in a generally more meaningful way than, then might have been the case in some of the other games. So they're kind of necessary. And you can rescue cats. Yes, cats. That's true. Just like They are kind of necessary in this game because without doing the quests, you really don't get good items or you don't get access to good items. They become a bit more sort of,

maybe not mandatory, but you're going to have a bad time if you don't do them. I think we're not talking about Portrait of Room, but making the comparison, obviously. That, to me, it just sells why Portrait Everyone is, which is just a space to do game stuff in. You know, it's a very systems base

and lacking in a lot of other areas. still love it to death. But Order of Ecclesia, they're trying to, again, make it more cohesive, making more sense. I mean, the localization of the villages is a lot more, I don't know how to describe it. They don't talk like anyone else in any Castlevania game. It feels a lot more colloquial, like a lot more jokey, a lot more kind of human, I'd say. I would say that is Tom Hewlett is the... Oh, is he the guy who made the medicine guy yell. Hey there. He localized it. So, there's the localization editor. So whatever you love about the localization you can thank him for.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like that's, again, Castlevania, too, wanted to give you NPCs with personalities, right? And unfortunately, like, you have, what, 36 characters in like a little box to get that across. And so what you get is incomprehensibility and lying. And those are the ways to get their deliberate. Yeah. And I feel like what that's actually trying to get is what you get in Ecclesio, which is you get a bunch of huge weirdos that do have personalities. And like, oh, this lady's really nervous and forgetful.

And this guy is very over the top. And this guy's worried. Like, I mean, it's it's a simple bit of characterization. but that is all you need to make something engaging. Again, it's like, it's kind of very dragon questy. The fact as well that you are physically rescuing these people in order to populate the village and then get useful resources from them means they actually have a purpose rather than just like being a menu,

which is also cool, I think. Although hiding some of them behind breakable walls was a dick move. Yeah, for sure. Very curious to know how all of these people get past The Undertaker. He's got that shovel. I can never dodge that shovel. Like, you had a hitbox. Maybe he just doesn't care about civilians.

He's just after the people with glyphs. The people who are dead bodies. More dead bodies. I have the undertaker. All right. Turn around. You got any back tattoos? All right.

We didn't know that Shinola was yakuza all this time. The dragon of Dojima. I guess the dragon. Doesn't Dracula mean dragon? A little dragon. Yeah, the dragon. Order of the dragon. Draculet.

Dracool. Oh, a single Dracule. It's a measurement in metric. So there are some other characters worth mentioning in this. Cheneau we've kind of talked about because she's the main character. She's having a rough time of things. The game begins. She thinks, oh, I'm going to be the heir to this cool organization.

I'm going to be the next one to fight Dracula. I'm going to save the world. And then she's like, everything is stolen from her, her powers, her memory, et cetera. And so she has to figure out what's going on while saving the world while not having any powers and basically being this tiny weak little infant trying to fight giant floppy skeletons and so forth. It's rough. But there are some other characters. There's Albis.

There's Barlow. someone put a plus after Barlow in the notes I know it's a plus Barlow game plus That's the answer you finish Barlow You can restart him Nice It's raising the buff

I'm sorry I mean really those are kind of the only Other two characters of note But they're important Albus is Kind of looks like Oh crap I totally blanked on his name

From Final Fantasy 12 Oh Barth I almost said Bartholomew Balthasar No, that's the... Balthier. Balthier, yes. Hings out with Fran. He ends up with Fran.

He's Hans Solo to hurt Chubaka. Yeah, I mean, he's got the same kind of look. And I guess that was confusing to me because he's Albus. And then, like, the sort of mentor over both of them is Barlow, which is kind of Balthier-esque in terms of the name. So that was a, you know, and Final Fantasy 12 was like two years before this came out. kind of working in a mode there, I guess. Albus is, he's the other playable character in this. Once you beat the game, you can do the new game plus mode or like the alternate mode.

So you can play as Albus if you want. And he has a gun and also can use glyphs. And I guess he can use like gun glyphs or something. It's a little fuzzy to me. He has a gun with a bunch of different attacks and he can teleport around the screen when you tap the bottom screen, which is fun. How do they do that in the day? Dominus Collection. You have to use, like, the mouse or the right stick and the right trigger.

It's really awful. Yeah. At least it's there, you know. Actually, how do they do the Portrait of Rune Bonus mode with the Sisters? It's not good. It's not good. It's not good. It's pretty much twin stick.

It's twin stick. It's not great. It's actually fun on the DS. Like, I enjoy that a lot. Yeah, yeah. Can I actually, I like sisters mode more than the main game. Honestly, what? That's the thing I wanted to ask you.

Like, do you guys, do you guys like those other modes? I like the sisters I'm not really big in the others but sisters is good Axe Armour Mode from Portrait yeah you're into Axe Armour mode I mean I need to be obvious

I like Julius Mode in Dawn of Sorrow because it's a whole fleshed out thing with a new story and a new final boss That's what I did like It's probably like it more than the main game which I also love

You do get like kind of more story content and do the sisters as well Not like you know a lot But you do get like a scene with wind And the twins And then I get a very sore thorn on from moving the, holding the T.S. in my hand. But the, yeah, I think that Albus mode is, I mean, it is fun,

but I think it's probably the weakest of the extra modes, given that it doesn't have any kind of, I mean, not to spoil it, but I think you just go and fight yourself in it. It's weird. And, you know, it's not that it's not fun, because the main game is great. It's just a bonus mode, but it's a little bit of a shame coming off, you know, Dawn of Saurra with a single tremendous bonus mode in Julius mode,

which is like so good. Like they could have sold that by itself and I would have loved it. And then portrait of room, which is, as mentioned, it's just them going, hey, check out all of our stuff. There's like five bonus modes.

They're like Richter and Maria, whatever. Who cares? Who gives a shit? Let's go. Yeah, like the Richter and Maria mode, who cares? But the sister's mode is really fun

just because it's so weird and so different. Yeah. And it really plays, you know, plays around with the stylus element in a way that no other Castlevania did.

And it's, It's not like, oh, we have to do stylus, draw a seal on the screen, thank you. It's actually like your characters are controlled entirely with the stylus, and each of them has different skills. And there's all kinds of weird physics effects with some of the enemies. So it's just fun to play around. Like in the opening part of Sisters mode, when you're in the village and the zombies are coming out, like if you attack them with the stylus right, you're using, I think Stella, who has the saber, the rapier like you'll cause the

demon like the zombies like their heads to fly different distances and stuff and you can just like goof around I made like a little mini game for myself out of that just like how far can I get a zombie head to fly? It wasn't hard it was just fun it was something to like kind of wind down with after going through a portrait

yeah it was just so tactile and sort of satisfying and the way they positioned it in the game as just here's a bonus mode to sort of dick around in I think enhances it more really it's just it's just fun. It's just popcorn like that game is, in general. It's fun. Yeah. But Albus, yeah, his mode, I haven't actually spent any time playing it yet, but I can't imagine that it's good because, or like, uniquely interesting, just because he's not that uniquely interesting a character. But Albus as a

character is great, because one, he's kind of got his own thing going on, and he's kind of tempestuous and hot-headed, but also kind of scheming. So there's some, there's, there's some, there's, some layers there, but also because if you steal his glyph during combat, it's basically the best attack through the back half of the game. And that's extremely good. So I will always forgive a kind of mediocre character or enemy who does something worthwhile to my loadout of abilities. So God bless Elvis and his crazy ball of light that destroys everything and helps you kick asses all throughout the rest of the game. Since you mentioned it, I really love the glyph stealing thing in this game,

because it's like the souls from Dawn of Sorbet, with none of the grinding. You just have to wait for the attack. I mean, there is still some grinding. Don't get me wrong. But the idea of it is just so much more dynamic, and I love that. Even the fact that if you were to capture the same one again, it gives you, like, attribute points. I know it's not much, but it makes it feel like everything is always worth doing.

When you, yeah, I actually find that a great, thing when you attack an enemy and you can see, oh, okay, this one's going to give me a glyph if I keep at it. It adds to like a real Pokemon jiggly ball kind of thing. Like, I'm going to get it this time. Oh, you mean the like the ghost glyphs that don't actually, can't actually interact with? Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, okay, placeholder. I need to remember this. But also, some of the, some of the glyphs show up in really, really difficult battles. And you're so caught up in the heat of the moment trying to survive, you know, a really tough boss battle in a really tough game that it doesn't occur to you until later like, oh wait, they were using a glyph

and I could have stolen that. So you really have to be on your toes during some of the boss battles to steal the glyphs. And that's great because not only does it give you something that may become a very valuable part of your arsenal, but also it interrupts their attack and prevents them from using it. And it kind of reminds me of the draw system in Final Fantasy 8, where you'd go up against enemies and the bosses especially tended to have unique skills. that you could pull from them. But it's not as grindy as Final Fantasy 8. Final Fantasy 8, you know, you're like, well, this battle with Cypher is the only time I'm going to be able to draw whatever the hell it is that Cypher has in the final encounter with Cypher.

So you're just whittling away time waiting for Cypher to, you know, for your turn to come up so you can steal magic from Cypher until everyone is topped out. And then you finally kill them. That's boring. And then you don't want to use the magic because. is you can junction it to something, and it makes your stats so good. This isn't like that. Like, it's much more practical. It's just like, hey, the enemy, they're using an attack.

If I react really quickly, I can suction that glyph away and prevent them from attacking. And also, it's mine now. It's like Mega Man, but even more dynamic. Yeah, it's really cool how it turns what is essentially. The rules of combat. It's like, it turns like you collecting things into a viable defense. as well. It's really cool. Like another cool thing to do, basically,

in the fights. Yeah, I feel like with this game, they really figured out a lot of the ideas they'd been kicking around and hadn't quite figured out, hadn't quite made, like, oh, this is good. This is super satisfying. You know, like stealing souls

in the sorrow games, I will admit that I'm a crazy weirdo who has, you know, the aforementioned sicko, who has, 100%ed the collections in both of the Sorrows games. I'm not proud of it, but I did use to ride the bus or the train back and forth to work every day. So what else are you going to do in 30 minutes each way?

But this lowers that level of grindiness and repetition significantly. And, you know, if you want to go out and you want to just steal glyphs so that you min-max your level, to ridiculous levels. That's fine. You can, but you don't have to. You can still play without doing that. Just be vigilant. Pay attention.

Glyphs show up at the least expected places. The attributes and the glyphs do also it's discouraged because you don't really need to grind because it's not really about number go up anymore. It's about having the right weapon rather than the strongest weapon, which a lot of the glyphs are also hidden in the world, usually by solving some kind of small puzzle

or clearing a little platforming challenge or something and it just makes it all more dynamic and much less walk into room, kill enemy, didn't drop it, walk out the room, walk back into the room, kill enemy,

didn't drop it, repeat literally 900 times because they got the numbers wrong when they were making the game and they don't drop them enough. On the subject of like finding glyphs in weird places, I do really like the idea in the first half of the game.

where there are glyphs that are like incorporated into something in the world like the one that shoots electric sparks and the one that's at the top of the lighthouse the lighthouse is pretty clever like i really wish they would have done more with that idea because i feel like that is a that raises a lot of questions if you think about it for a second of like okay are all light bulbs powered by magic glyphs that come just the really really strong ones that keep you from crashing into rocks. Yeah. Also, how many people died, Shanoa? Yeah. Because you wanted to cast Luminato. She killed Jason off and countless screaming Argonauts. Shanoa dooming the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Gordon Lightfoot's like grabbing his guitar saying, all right, as he runs down to the shore. It's the secret 16th verse of that song is about Shinoa. They do a good job of integrating the glyph system, not just into combat and the world, but also into the story here, which I feel like is a kind of a Final Fantasy trick. I keep going back to Final Fantasy, but I feel like Ordo Veclice is the most final fantasy of all the Castlevania's,

if we have to get down to it. You know, the Final Fantasy games, except maybe 16, I haven't bothered to play it, but they always, you know, they have these systems, Idolans or Esper's or whatever, crystals. Yeah. Yeah, and they're always integrated into the story,

but also integrated into the combat system. And the glyphs are very much about that because, you know, there are what locks away the villagers. You have to rescue the villagers from all this is glyphs. Spoilers. And that's the only way you can reach the true endgame is by rescuing all the villagers. But also, the way you actually reach the final battle is by acquiring glyphs from a certain character. And then before that, you have to get, you know, the Dominus glyph, which is kind of what they named the recent collection after. That's how important it is. So it's, you know, it's just this element where it feels like in addition to, like it's classic Metroidvania, in addition to helping you navigate the world, it's also empowering you.

And that's good. Is it Dominus because it's the DS game? That I was going to say. Oh, damn. That wasn't actually in the title, though. So I think they just called it Dominus because it's the coolest thing in the collection. That's why it's the first one on the menu when you boot it up. But all those games, like all that, those first flock of, of DS games did have that title structure.

Don of Sorrow, for instance. Dual Strike, Dragon Sword, yeah, yeah. Dream Drop Distance. I guess that was that 3D.S? 3D.S. Yeah. Oh, that's clever. I just got that.

Yeah. It's not clever. It's a Kingdom Hearts title. It's not clever. Excuse you. Excuse you. Nothing about Kingdom Heart game titles is clever. They are, they are, they are aggressive.

They are an aggressive hateful. It really sounds like you're tied up with some kind of chain of memories there, Jeremy. Like, I think maybe you need to break out of that. I mean, I could talk about this for 358 days. This is where I'm breaking to have some sea salt ice cream. I'm going to find the excuse to make you. Kingdom Hearts, Metroidvania now. I'll find a way.

To make you play it, I'll find a way to justify it as a Metroidvania. That might be the one I skip. My friends keep telling me this should be the year that I get into Kingdom Hearts. And I'll tell you, if there was a Metroidvania, that would be the way to do it. Yeah, yeah. It is a well from which there is no escape. That sounds like a threat, actually. Those games fun?

Are those games fun? There's any difficult question. How sane are you? I mean, I am a full sicko, so. But only for Metroidvania's. Okay. I mean, this is not the place for me to answer that question, really, but I'm just going to say, yeah, the most fun games in the world, Chris. Get them, get it playing.

All right. I think you should do some Kingdom Hearts podcasts, Stuart, and don't invite me onto them. Okay. I'm not going to invite you. There was no question of inviting. I'm just going to, you know, this is not going to be a voluntary thing. Yeah. Hey.

Hello, Jeremy. we're recording now. It's Mickey Time. No, Dad, no. Sorry, Mickey Time also sounds like a threat. So there's more that we could say about Order of Ecclesia. And we will in the next episode. So I think this is a good kind of natural place for us to break now that we're talking about Kingdom Hearts for some reason.

Sorry. No, no, it's fine. Like to me, that says we've kind of hit like a stopping point. And we need to have many, many sleeps and refresh our brains. and attack the topic anew with fresh vigor and excitement. So this is where I put it over to you, the listener, to catch up and then go ahead and play the rest of the game because next episode we're talking about Dracula's Castle, Castle, Castle. And we're going to talk about the other bits and pieces of the game we did not discuss.

And we are going to field your comments and feedback. as seen in Discord. So if you are a Retronauts patron, Patreon.com slash Retronauts who has access to the Discord, we will be collating responses there. I guess we'll probably launch a new channel in the Discord to coincide with the launch of this episode.

And feel free to share your thoughts there. Play the game. Spoil away. I would say it's an all-spoilers zone. No need to mark spoilers. We just assume if you are playing through this game, you're invested in it and you're there for it. So maybe skip that channel until you're done. But then once you're done or once you don't care about spoilers, leave some thoughts.

Like, what do you think about Castlevania Order of Ecclesia? Am I correct? I'm correct. In that the world map should be contiguous because that would be a much better game. Yes. But also, what do you think of Shanoa? What do you think of the glyph system? What's your favorite part of the castle?

And so on and so forth. Any thoughts? It's all open season, fair game. Go for it. Participate. If you're not a Retronauts patron, this is a good opportunity and a good excuse for you to rectify

that grievous error that you've made in judgment. So head over to patreon.com slash retronauts. In addition to being able to participate in the next episode of Metroidvania Book Club, you will also be able to do things like hear exclusive episodes and read exclusive columns and so on and so forth. It's very good. You will not regret it. It's great. We're great. We're all great. And Castlevania Order of Ecclesia is great. So hop on and tell us what you think. In the meantime, we are going to sign off. I continue to be Jeremy Paris just as I

was at the beginning of this episode. And you can find me on the internet on blue sky as J. Parrish dot blue sky social. You can find me here on Return Os. You can find me on YouTube as Jeremy Parrish. And you can find me if you buy certain limited run products such as the Castlevania Domino's Collection. If you pre-ordered that, the collector's edition, cool. You get some very, very, very time-consuming, intricate maps for all three of those games, including this one, very proud of it. Which do you guys see the castle side of the map?

It's so good. Like when you lay that castle out, chef's kiss. Beautiful. Looking forward to sharing that with everyone. Now, let's see. Kate, you've been kind of quiet for the past half hour. Hopefully we haven't driven you away or

caused you to become disinterested in the conversation. But please tell us where we can find you online. And more of your thoughts on Metroidvania. And what it means to be a Metroidvania sicko. Well, my last name's kind of difficult to spell. So if you just search for Critical Kate on Blue Sky or Google or YouTube, you will probably find some of my stuff. I am, what else should I say?

I'm working on a video still about the origin of the word Metroidvania that is relevant. And things keep getting in my way, preventing me from doing it, like some sort of Castlevania boss. But I will persevere and it will happen one of these days. Let's see, Chris, you talked to this episode. Very, very excited about that. Even though my voice is all weird and messed up from being ill this week. You get that kind of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sound to you. No? Okay. Maybe not.

Just it just sounds sick. That's a look. You just got a look. I'm not comparing you to him. That's the real sicko. But yes, I'm Chris Sims, and you can hear me on several episodes for it not as well as on my own podcasts, including War Rocket Ajax, the weekly comic book and pop culture podcast that has a Patreon associated with it. And if you are a $5 backer of that Patreon, you will get access to a series of

Metroidvania reviews that I have written that is currently 14 parts deep. I have not yet written about anything in the Dominus collection, but I have written about some of the night, Super Metroid, Axiom verge,

Toho Luna Nights, an unexpected favorite of mine. A bloodstained, vigil, and the Castlevania Advance collection, which includes the previous set of games. There are a bunch of increasingly weird

views. My favorite one is the one of Hollow Night, which I think is a very fun read. Do enjoy those and find me at my website, t-H-E-S-B-I-B-Sb.com or on Blue Sky as theisb.b.com. All right. Stuart Jip, we can't see you on the call, but we know you're here, like the holy spirit. No, I'm sorry, I have camera issues. I should really get a proper camera at some point, but then you'd all see me and it would be just exponentially worse. Um, hello, yes, You can mostly find me on Retronauts, actually. I think that if you're listening to this, you might already have known that, but it couldn't hurt to hear it again. I also wrote a book called All Games Are Good.

It's actually an excellent book. I'm biased when I say that, but I really, I think it's very good fun. I think you'd like it. And you can get it from limited run games, or you can get it from Amazon, but you should probably get it from limited run. And also, I'm pretty sure it's, I'm not sure if it still will be by the time this close out, but it's, the paperback is, I think it's half off at the moment, isn't it? It's quite cheap at the moment. Yes. Just the paperback.

This wasn't discussed with me, by the way. Yes, it was. Yes, it was discussed. But either way, the more people get a copy of this book, the better. And finally, Nadia. Hi, I'm on Retronauts a lot here, too, as well. But when I'm not retronauting, I am the co-host of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. We talk about Arpurgies old and new Eastern and Western.

Please support us at patreon.com, 4.slash Blood God Pod, where we are not. only doing a podcast. We're doing a lot of streaming, and I am doing a newsletter for the $5 tier and above. I just kind of write little essays and stuff about, like, what's going on in RPGs, and sometimes I have some retro stuff, like I actually wrote a kind of retro perspective, a quick one, about Evo, search for Eden, which is a real strange RPG, but that has some, like, just a great base in it for whatever may come in the future. And yeah, Finally, I'm blue sky at Nadi Oxford. And I think that's everything.

So we will turn it over to you. Please, everyone, go out and play Castlevania Order of Ecclesia, whether that's on DS or through the Dominus collection or however you choose to play. We won't judge. Just play it. It's good times. And hop on to the Discord. And in like a few weeks, we'll record another episode. Round it up and round up your comments and put a stake through it, as they say.

You're going to be able to be.